Klaus G. Witz is an associate professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1310 S. Sixth Street, Champaign, IL, 61820, USA . His interests include methodology in the social sciences, philosophy of education, philosophy of science, and perennial philosophy. Currently he is conducting research on motivation and interest in subject matter and teaching in undergraduate teacher education students.

JCS invites comments responding to the views in this paper. Such comments should be addressed via e-mail to westbury@uiuc.edu.

Copyright © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd. ISSN 0022-0272. Copies may be made under the normal terms of copyright law.

 

If we look at the system of schooling in the US and how it educates youth, there seem to be several major problems. First, in spite of tremendous societal emphasis on mathematics and science as components in every citizen’s education, and in spite of the fact that from kindergarten to the end of secondary school, students are occupied many hours a week with mathematics, science and English, only a small percentage of students seem to relate to these subjects in a way that promote their education in a broader sense. This problem, the ‘mathematics and science problem’, is however part of a second, larger problem, which might be loosely described as a failure of a considerable proportion of students to get meaningfully connected to ‘academic’ or subject matter knowledge to the point where the latter begins to inspire the person and play a significant role in his or her world-view and life. This we will call the academic problem.

The ‘academic problem’ is a very real one because of the role which the academic subject matters -- which, in the university, subdivide and fan out to form the major disciplines of the intellectual landscape -- play in our society. Once a person has started to have a relationship with an academic subject matter, this relationship is likely to play a role in a subsequent career, personal development, and life-fulfillment. Some individuals like science and become scientists, while others like science but become engineers or physicians, and science continues to play a role in their life while they are engineers and physicians. Behind such stereotypic scenarios stands the fact that the academic subject matters are thought to represent the most important fruits of Western culture and society and, as such, have the ability to ‘unfold’ the person (or it seems that they do) and to become the individual’s arena for a world-view and satisfaction in life. In a very real sense ‘becoming connected to academic subject matter’ tends to be a royal road, not only to college or university -- and thus to ‘education’ -- but also to larger life-fulfillment (including fulfillment on the job). What is it about mathematics, science, literature or writing, history, and (perhaps in a different way) art that enables these subjects to nourish the human being at deeper levels and in the longer run -- half a lifetime or a lifetime? If we think of mathematics and science and literature to represent the kind of ‘knowledge’ cultivated by the society par excellence, how is it that merely moving in the aura of this knowledge can bring deeper fulfillment?

But not all individuals develop a deeper orientation toward academic subject matter. A somewhat cynical view of education holds that the educational system selects those that do and takes them to advantageous positions while it is not so favourable to the others. But individuals who are not much touched by academics not infrequently find fulfillment in other ways -- in business, in human relations and service, etc. Is there a knowledge-basis which is as life-fulfilling for them as academic-type knowledge is for many college graduates? These are really questions about the aims of education, and about the ground out of which the aims of education should flow. While there seems to be not much educational theory or philosophy in the English-speaking world on the subject, the problem is well known in German Bildungstheorie.

The self-content connection: Croos (content-related opening of self)

We usually speak about the role of subject matter and disciplinary knowledge in an individual’s life in terms of motivation and affect -- John is interested in or inspired by science, or he hates it; Mary lives for creative writing, etc.; the engineer wants to use the fundamental knowledge of the physical sciences in the service of society; the pilot likes to operate the technology when he flies. But these expressions address only a limited number of aspects. Rather, the individual’s relation to disciplinary knowledge (mathematics, science, history, writing and literature) has to be discussed in terms of his or her self opening, deepening and using the attitudes and intellectual forms within the discipline, and in the discipline’s relation to the world, to see and engage in the world. When a high school student starts reading in science, or when he or she becomes interested in creative writing, for example, he or she opens his or her self to a certain depth in this direction, and starts operating with that discipline functioning as a set of glasses with which to look at the world. Science or creative writing, or even studying in general, becomes something of an intellectual home, or at least something of a environment in which the student feels at home. This does not necessarily mean the student understands the subject matter all that well or correctly. But he or she begins to accept that there is something there (in the subject matter or in the studying) that has intrinsic worth, and can agree with society that it has intrinsic worth. ‘Last year I realized that it wasn’t just for the grades. I realized I was really learning something. After I got that in my head it became much easier . . .’ says a senior in a high school.1 She realized that there was something permanent, real arising in her (she was ‘really learning something’), something that had an independent, ‘objective reality’ and value and that she could trust. She knew that it was something that led to a world of deeper being and deeper understanding of the world (socially as well as substantively in terms of mathematics, science, the disciplines). And this immediately made itself felt as a stability in her thoughts about a career (she wants to go into biology and medicine). But many students do not show such a course and typically tend to move into vocational or general education. In spite of all kinds reasons for learning mathematics and science, they tend to keep away from ‘academic’ science and mathematics.

We are painting a picture of a phenomenon -- let us call it ‘content-related opening of self’ or croos -- whose exact shape needs be to be established, but at the heart of which is attainment, through an ‘opening of the self’ in relation to subject matter, or by channeling the inner forces using subject matter, of some kind of stability, some sense of inner-assuredness and inner-direction. Croos as an independent process of the self’s unfolding through contact with subject matter (particularly science, mathematics and English) must be distinguished from merely operating comfortably (affectively and intellectually) in a sphere of subject matter because of ability and favourable background, without there being a deeper change in self that persists and unfolds further the individual’s subsequent history. At the same time such croos is interrelated with many other expressions of self and of unfoldment of self, such as ‘self-concept’, ‘career search and decision’, 2 choice of ‘lifestyle’, fixing on knowledge ideals, and development of oneself as a moral being with moral and social ideals. Perhaps for that very reason, croos must be considered as relatively unexplored, and in the absence of very detailed qualitative investigation, any more precise definition seems premature. There seems to great variability in time when croos happens (in middle school, high school, community college, college or university), in the breadth of the subject matter involved (e.g. mathematics, or mathematics and science), in the degree to which it is influenced by home life (almost all of Roe’s [1961] theoretical physicists came from families with a strong intellectual life and books), and in its detailed phenomenology.

Some hints from in-depth studies

Some glimpses regarding croos come from in-depth studies by Nicdao-Quita (1996), and Huang (1998). The authors interviewed 6th to 8th graders about their conceptions of heating water in a beaker and genetics, respectively. Of Huang’s six subjects, two, Kevin and Sam, may be said to have a science-related opening of self. Kevin for example ‘kept checking out science [books] and stuff’ already in kindergarten;

. . . that’s because I was interested, like, I went to library, I checked out books, I read it on my own. Like, most kids usually don’t go to library and check out books on genetics.

By the time of the study he was engaged in a long-term, low-level self-directed process of expanding his knowledge and understanding in science, involving reading, and projects and experiments in school and with peers.

 

Kevin: Yeah, I read books, I am always interested in genetics. I am going to be an immunologist when I grow up. [His father works in a technical capacity in the environmental area. He mentions that his father sometimes answers questions he has.] . . . I learned the rest from books and writing reports and stuff.

Interviewer: Did you talk to your friends, your teacher, someone else?

Kevin: Not my friends [smile], they are not so interested, but -- well, our teacher does not really go over [things in detail] except she talked about amino acids a little bit. One of our teachers asked us to do genetics, a little genetics project with my friends. And it like -- flip a coin a hundred times, mark down own which one, head or tail. We planted corn, there were rabbits which ate all the corn, so we kind of have to stop, it got mixed up.

Interviewer: When you did the project, you just read the book?

Kevin: Yea, pretty much, my project is the only thing which really helped me learn more about it [i. e. about genetics].

Kevin seems to have some sort of awareness that he is semi-systematically engaging in a knowledge-acquisition process. He mentions several times how from his reading that he ‘figures things out’ ‘by common sense’; at one point he gives a detailed exposition, using only non-technical words, of why personality is not inherited (which he also ‘figures out’ by ‘common sense’). His awareness of the way his knowledge is expanding and of his own relationship to this knowledge is most interesting: ‘I am always interested in genetics’; ‘I learned the rest from books and writing reports and stuff’; ‘our teacher does not really go over [things] except . . .’, ‘it got mixed up’; ‘my project is the only thing which really helped me learn more about it’. When one listens to the way he says these things, each in context and with its exact prosodic contour, one senses that he is speaking from an awareness of his past inner reactions to his own experiences. Indeed one gets the feeling that somehow, way back in his mind, he is monitoring his whole enterprise, his whole knowledge-construction process. Combine this with the fact that at the same time he seems to have some awareness of what science is when adults do it, and ‘an attitude of wanting to be like a scientist’, and one can’t help feeling that this knowledge-acquisition process involves not only interest in subject matter, but is for him also part of an effort to locate himself with respect to science as a social reality.

Kevin is to some extent actualizing himself by pursuing biology and science; the awareness with which he pursues his reading and the projects also suggests an ‘opening of self’. Clearly we are here dealing with a process continuing over a period of years of ‘opening of the self in connection with subject matter’. But at the same time the data raise many fundamental questions. Where does this self-directed and generative activity in him come from? Presumably the independence and ‘doing his own thing’ that rings in ‘I went to library, I checked out books, I read it on my own’ (three repeated ‘I’s) are part of his personality. There is also the long-standing habit of reading books on science; and there is the example of his father (unfortunately not further explored in this case). But are these sufficient to explain the ‘opening of self’? Is his awareness in his whole enterprise not only an indication of an ‘opening of self’, but also a necessary element in it? Above all, what exactly is it that powers this process? Is Kevin inspired by the subject matter? Is he trying to be like his father? Is he simply reflecting the influence of a family in which books and going to the library and an orientation to science are part of family values? Or is it that his mind happens to be by nature inclined to and turned on by the particular mix of conceptual, practical and imaginal activity involved in the subject matter area? (Do we need here something like a theory of multiple intelligences?) The basic questions regarding croos are just these: precisely how does the ‘unfoldment of self’ occur, and what it is that produces the unfoldment? -- what is it that speaks to the soul or self, what is it that happens in the soul or self so that it unfolds and blossoms and becomes more of a person?

Several recent studies which, while addressing different issues, all contain in-depth case studies of experienced and, in various ways, exemplary teachers offer another possible source of basic insight into the ‘academic problem’ (Pobre 1996, Goodwin 1999, Thomas 1998, Conway in progress). 3 All of these studies use a common methodology (Witz et al in press), they all develop retrospective life-portraits of each participant, and the amount of detail in each portrait (from 30 to 60 or more pages) enables one to get an idea of how subject matter figures in the participants’ larger lives. Because the participants were experienced teachers with excellent reputations, there are often two major ‘openings of self’ in the teacher’s life, one subject-matter related and the other at a human or social level, involving a realization of the desire to become a teacher. (The two may occur several years apart and in either order). To illustrate, let me discuss the case of Sherre and Rolland described by Thomas (1998) which is of particular importance for the ‘academic problem’.

Thomas interviewed two US community college teachers who had outstanding reputations of being able to reach ‘CCFNUs’ (i.e. community college freshmen considered non-traditional and underprepared), as well as several students from their classes. One of the teachers was Sherre, and her story is of great importance in itself.

As a child of six or seven, Sherre was fascinated by funny phonetic substitutions and word effects (‘comic pear’ instead of comise pear); she spent her summers in solitude, walking along rows of potatoes in the fields, playing games with words in her mind and using them in endless hours of hours of imagination. Whatever drove the fascination and preoccupation with the phenomena and workings of language in her early years stayed with her for the rest of her life. She graduated from college with a baccelauriate in English and a couple of years later, not content with staying at home with the baby, went to graduate school to get a master’s in English. Here she had her second ‘opening of self’ teaching basic writing to undergraduates as a teaching assistant. She put her whole self into the job and got perfect student ratings. In high school she had had a teacher, Mr. Freeman, who did everything imaginable to get his students’ attention -- artificially quaint language, dramatics, climbing in through the window. She concluded already then that teaching had to involve fun, dramatics, and showmanship. But she also realized that behind Mr. Freeman’s antics was a deep caring for the students. Both aspects blossomed in her writing class. To keep her students’ interest she used dramatics and showmanship, but at the same time she found herself doing everything to make them understand -- she found herself deeply caring for them. She realized that what she wanted was to teach. She had never given teaching much thought because she always thought that she didn’t have enough patience for it. She left graduate school and a year later started to teach at the community college where she is still teaching.

Sherre vividly presents some of the mysteries of the power of subject matter. The singular intensity and permanence of her preoccupation with the English language seem an inseparable part of her, and formed the major vehicle for unfoldment of the self until adulthood. Presumably it involved continual further opening, at different periods in her life. Given all this, the blossoming into teaching that began in her rhetoric class is equally astounding. She doesn’t feel she was a good teacher at first. But over the next 20+ years, continually inspired by her deep union with the subject matter -- continually wanting her students to learn the ins and outs of English -- she almost systematically transformed herself, always modifying her teaching, and developing ever more caring for her students. She has become very sensitive to the many debilitating experiences her students have had with other instructors. Always examining her own actions from her students’ point of view, she now anticipates their anxieties and difficulties, down to tiny details like not starting class until everyone is there so they don’t feel left out. A couple years ago, instead of marking students’ papers, she started putting her comments on tape and giving the student the tape. As her professional statement says, she has ceaselesly pursued ‘excellence in teaching’ and in 1996, she won the national community college English Teacher of the Year award. The initial motivation to help the students learn English has unfolded into a selfless caring to the point where now she ‘can’t imagine not to care’. The dedication to subject matter has lifted her to a a condition of selfless service to a section of humanity in need.

But the story of Sherre does not end here! Enter Rolland, age 24, one of four students in Sherre’s classes whom Thomas interviewed. Rolland had grown up under extremely difficult conditions at home and was ‘kicked out of high school’ in the 11th grade because he didn’t even have enough credits to have completed his 10th grade year. But from age 14 on he worked various jobs, was promoted to positions of responsibility, and developed an extraordinary clarity in analysing his own situations, and an intuitive grasp of human situations generally, which can only be described as wisdom. His family prevailed on him to go back to school, to the local community college, and he got Sherre for remedial English. The experience turned him around.

I think you walk into class and she starts talking, you think ‘Jeez, what a dorf’. And you are thinking ‘This is nuts, but this woman is just crazy’, and [then suddenly] all the guards drop. . . . And she comes in she is like full-force crazy in your face, and you are going ‘This is insane, this woman isn’t going to teach me anything. She is just deranged’, and all the guards drop, and then she’s instantly in. And, once she’s in, she stays in and you can’t get her out.

Rolland realized that Sherre’s weird and bizarre behaviour, like Mr. Freeman’s, down to the tiniest detail, was only for his and his fellow-students’ benefit -- only so that they would learn English! With a dreamlike clarity he describes for example how Sherre ‘flags’ (his term!) significant phenomena in English which she wants them to notice and remember with something weird or bizarre she sets up or says or does. For instance she showed them a tape of ‘stupid 50s or 60s TV commercials’

and then she would slowly and surely, you know, not really mention it, but refer back to it [a phrase in the commercial]. And it would always be in your mind, like ‘Oh yeah!’ And it was -- how strange it was -- that it [the passage in the commercial] kept it [the thing Sherre wanted to teach] in your mind. . . . [She would say] ‘Now see, today we are going to do this, and that goes with that flag or that weird thing I did, and or that goes worth that one over there’. And then, now she got these things stuck in your mind! Then later on, on a different date, you are thinking about something and you remember, ‘Oh yeah, Sherre said that’, because that weird thing is always going to Sherre. . . .

Rolland’s insight here and elsewhere is so profound and penetrating as to belie the image of the CCFNU population. (Thomas found amazing life- wisdom in almost all the students she interviewed.) I can only summarize: Rolland realized how Sherre completely selflessly led her life for them, behaving funny and crazy in class, changing her own personal habits to accommodate them, responsive to their every need -- and that she did this all for one purpose, that they would learn English. By the way she led her life, she was really worshipping English: The greatest thing Rolland could say about Sherre was that she was ‘above caring’ -- meaning above even deep caring of a teacher for a student. He knew this sounded contradictory and elsewhere tried to clarify.

It is not really necessary that she cares about the students. I think she cares about the course, which is more important than caring about the student. Because you can care about someone as much as you want and not really give a damn if you learn what you are telling them anyway . . . . She cares about what is being taught, whereas she is not trying to teach us. She is trying to preserve something in us or through us. It is like she is trying to take what she’s got and give it to us and we are supposed to keep it for her. And, she cares about the English [so] that she is trying to take parts of what was and put it in us to keep, so that maybe we can give little pieces out to other people and then, you know, everybody will remember just a little bit of something . . . . I think she cares enough about the people [so] that she tries to make it interesting for you. But she cares enough about the actual study to try to get you to learn it. She knows it is a weird thing to like. It’s dull . . . (Thomas 1998: 193)

Amazing, so profound and beautiful! Rolland saw that for Sherre English was greater than herself: it had a fundamental importance, value. It was the fundamental existent, the study of which Sherre tried to ‘put in’ him and his fellow-students so that they would have some of that existent, and could give it back out in little bits. And (we can generalize) it was English, and the desire to preserve the knowledge of English, that had formed Sherre into how and what she was, at all these many levels. And with this realization there came in Rolland a fundamental change: English, the study of English -- no, subject matter knowledge in general, what all the teachers at the community college were trying to do -- had an independent value, an objective worth. Seeing Sherre’s so-complete selfless devotion and subordination of her self to her subject matter, it dawned on him that English, and in fact subject matter in general, was a greater principle than individuality. And, wonder of wonders, later in the same semester, Rolland told Thomas he was thinking of becoming a mathematics teacher. He had enrolled in the community college thinking he might get some training in computers, but had been thinking about ‘the idea of the mathematics’ and had ‘really been beginning to like mathematics a lot’. And he had also been ‘kicking the teacher part around’ and was thinking that he ‘really would not mind teaching’. Rolland had changed to a ‘self-directed and subject-matter directed learner’. One could hardly hope for a more penetrating glimpse into the mysteries of subject matter croos, and the power of subject matter to bring deeper fulfillment, than this story.

Discussion in terms of Bildungstheorie

So far, by appealing to stereotypes of experience, and giving a couple of examples from research, I have developed the thesis that deeper substantive content areas can, through something like a ‘content-related opening of the self’, or croos , become a vehicle for unfolding of self and attaining a deeper level of ‘life-fulfillment in life’. Assuming it is possible to establish by qualitative research the reality of something like croos and to identify some of the more common forms which it takes, what issues would this raise for education? The only place where such issues seem to have been discussed extensively is in the German educational philosophy centring around the notion of Bildung.

Bildung is a noun meaning something like ‘being educated, educatedness’, but it also carries connotations of the verb bilden, ‘to form, shape’. So Bildung is ‘formation’ -- the forming of the higher forces of the ‘soul’ (or self or personality) into a unity, as well as the product of this forming, the particular ‘formedness’ that is represented by the person. The educational ideal represented by Bildung has evolved for at least 200 years and some of its more recent connotation may be gleaned from Litt (1963: 11):

When we refer to a person as educated [gebildet] . . . we mean at least surely this, that this person has succeeded, in the whole of his existence, in establishing a certain of order in the wide variety of gifts, possibilities, drives, and achievements which are united in him, which sets the one to the other in the appropriate relationship and guards against over-emphasis as well as against suppression of the particular. However, a person can never ever create order within himself unless he has regulated his relations to the world in an appropriate manner. If we take the two together, we may use the term Bildung (education or educatedness) for that condition (i.e. constitution, Verfassung) of a person which puts him in the position to bring himself, as well as his relations to the world, ‘into order’.

With this particular general idea of Bildung or ‘being educated’ as an ideal, the basic question around croos relates to the issue of how it is that subject matter helps make one gebildet. In the German literature this question has an illustrious history which begins with Otto Willmann. In the third edition of his celebrated Didaktik als Bildungslehre [Didaktik as theory of Bildung] (1903), in a chapter on the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’ factor in Bildung, Willmann introduces the idea of the Bildungsgehalt or ‘true substantive content of education’.

Willmann (1903: 60) first notes that

[A.] one does not do the [subject matter] contents of education (Bildungsinhalte) [i. e. languages, sciences, arts and religion] justice if one regards them as nourishments or building materials which the forming power (die Gestaltungskraft) of the subject has to work through or do something with (verarbeiten). Rather there lies in this [subject matter] content itself an organic power which, while it [the content] is being received into the mind/spirit (Geist) [of the student], actively reaches into (in . . . eingreift) the [students’] conceptions and thoughts, makes them conformable to itself, and thereby brings about the inner forming (innere Gestaltung) to begin with.

Quoting a passage from Plotinus’ Enneads (IV.9.5) which extols the unity of knowledge, he (1903: 61) then elaborates:

[B.] The content of Bildung [i.e. the material to be learned] is no raw material, but an organic whole that carries in itself its own plastic law and communicates to the receiving Geist [mind/spirit/self] within which it is actively working as the true forming element (Bildungsgehalt) of the subject matter (Gegenstand). But this receiving [of the organic whole by the receiving Geist of the child] is no mere taking in (hinnehmen), but happens through self-activity, liberates inner forces, nourishes and strengthens the Geist, and each piece of content is thereby also a nourishment, an increase in strength.

The connection with croos is clear. Generally, Geist in German has not only connotations of ‘mind, spirit’, but in talking about the Geist of an human being, it has also connotations of ‘the spirit and intelligence of that individual human being’, and therefore connotations of self -- ‘the mind and spirit and self of the individual’. Then Willman’s ‘self-activity’ in [B] is our ‘opening of self’ and his ‘inner forming’ in [A] is the knowing of the world by the student during and after croos, when it is as if the subject matter has given him or her glasses in terms of which to see in the world. The critical point in Willman’s formulation is the recognition of a ‘force toward forming of the student’s mind/spirit/self’ that is intrinsic to the subject matter, but this force is not intrinsic to sentences as they are written in the textbook, rather it is intrinsic to the ‘larger whole’ which the sentences in the textbook imply a la Plotinus. (This larger whole, it should be added, cannot be thought of as something like a ‘knowledge space’ which these sentences imply, or something like a much larger and more interconnected system of ‘expert knowledge’ of which they are a part. For for Willmann, 5 this ‘larger whole’ contains the ‘organic power’ which ‘uplifts’ and ‘ennobles’ the Geist of the child, whereas entities of cognitive psychology like knowledge spaces and subject matter structures can’t uplift and ennoble the Geist, spirit).

Amazingly Willmann (1903: 63-64) goes over these crucial ideas once more in the next subsection of his book, in the context of the conflict between the ‘material (or subject matter) imperative’, ‘teach so that the given subject matter is acquired’, and the ‘formal imperative’, ‘teach in such a way that geistige activity is increased, uplifted, ennobled’.

[C.] The material and the formal imperatives become true only in a larger whole of imperatives, of which they represent opposite extremes. The material imperative is right when it demands the acquisition, the mastery of the material [i.e. the subject matter] that is given in each case. The way to the whole leads here through the part to the totality of the educated (gebildeten) Geist, through the partial acts of incorporation of a given subject matter material (Stoff). But this [i.e. [subject matter material] 6 is connected with a larger whole, the incorporation of which only in the Geist [of the student] exerts the forming (bildenden) effect. Within the [i.e. within that] whole there is the essential and the inessential, fruit and leaves, inner stuff and outer stuff. As the learner processes the matter, differences emerge . . . The internalization of what is presented has different degrees: Some penetrates to the roots of inner growth, the other does not make it beyond a peripheral position. Within the whole of an object of instruction, we distinguish its [true] educational substance (Bildungsgehalt) and comprehend the latter as precisely those parts and moments from which emanates (ausgeht, proceeds) its taking root (Bewurzelung) and internalization (Verinnerlichung), and on whose retention the value of the learning and the practising essentially depends. . . . The motto ‘teach so that the given material gets learned’ must therefore be expanded by adding: ‘and so that its educational substance (Bildungsgehalt) can emerge.

Within an object of instruction (an instructional ‘unit’, a chunk of material to be covered), Willmann distinguishes a ‘subset of parts and moments’ as the Bildungsgehalt, as the part that is responsible for the potential which the instructional material has to contribute to the student’s Bildung. This potential is the subject matter material’s ‘educational substance’. The basic theoretical object is still the same ‘larger whole’ of which, according to Plotinus, the object of instruction is a part, but now there is a more detailed model of the ‘organic power’ ([A]), conceived of as a power of the larger whole implicit in the instructional material to contribute to the student’s formation or Bildung. To wit, from some of the ‘parts and moments’ of the instructional material there proceeds (geht aus) a taking root of something, or because of these ‘parts and moments’ something ‘reaches into’ the student’s conceptions etc. (see [A] above). But the fact that it then ‘liberates inner forces, nourishes and strengthens the Geist’ (see [B] above) suggests that this power acts at the level of the student’s self).

In the course of time Willmann’s extraordinary formulations were enriched by related terms like ‘content of education’ (as opposed to subject matter content), ‘[educationally] formative force’ (bildende Kraft, Bildungskraft), ‘[educationally] formative value’ (Bildungswert), and ‘educational asset’ (Bildungsgut), and the idea was established that the educational substance or value of a given subject matter ‘must be tracked down by "Didaktik analysis"’ (Klafki 1994: 41; Willmann’s notion of Didaktik analysis was much broader). To illustrate, Erich Weniger (1990: 243-244) explains that to talk about ‘contents’ and ‘assets of education’ implies that the student:

has gained formative (bildende) impressions in contact with a geistigen Gehalt (i.e. mind/spirit/self promoting substance) of the human world, through a component and detail of culture, with particular poetry, music, painting, constitutional doctrine, or with an historical or religious personality. He now possesses them; figuratively speaking, they now belong to him. The very fact that this is possible is the peculiarity of the human mind . . . . [Such things] can be grasped and possessed by a person and yet remain unspent and independent. But for the person who is educated by this entity (der durch dieses Gebilde Gebildete, i.e, by this cultural creation], he has experienced the values therein as educational values and possesses them. Now he learns that others have also experienced the formative force (bildende Kraft) of these contents. . .

In Weniger’s language, we might say croos relates to the ‘formative impressions’ which the student gets from cultural products, and how through those formative impressions there arises Bildung, the state of being educated. On this account, the outward activity indicating a person’s content-related opening of self, or croos, is the outward reaction of the subtle inner action in the self of the formative force (Weniger) or the Bildungsgehalt (Willmann) of the poem or personality or whatever. For then the student ‘experiences the values [in the subject matter content] as educational values and possesses them’ (Weniger, above), and then it is as if the subject matter has now given the student stability and orientedness and wings, and he or she begins to make use of it in various ways. Weniger’s comments deal more with subject matter content from the arts and the human world, but similar points could be made about mathematics and science. 7

In German Bildungstheorie, Bildungskräfte and Bildungswerte seem to have been mostly discussed from the point of view of subject matter and the larger cultural values which subject matter is thought to embody. Partly for that reason, there are often wide divergences regarding precisely in what the supposed Bildungskraft or -wert really consists. The conception of croos thus puts the discussion at the level where Bildung ultimately operates, viz. at the level of the self of the student who is to become gebildet. Further, while in the German literature Bildungswerte and Bildungskräfte associated with given subject matter are identified by educators by reflecting on their own experience with and their own understanding of that subject matter, the examples outlined above suggest that these aspects can and should be studied empirically, 8 particularly retrospectively in adults, after they have been realized and actualized in their lives.

‘Deeper life-fulfillment’ without academic subject matter: toward new paradigm of knowing

An essential ingredient in the notion of croos is ‘deeper life-fulfillment’ through, or by contact with, ‘academic subject matter’ or ‘disciplinary knowledge’’: the disciplinary knowledge, or maybe the discipline’s way of relating to the world, somehow gives the soul an impetus to unfold itself and make a home in the society and in the entire social, knowledge and technical world in which it finds itself. But ‘deeper life-fulfillment’ is a more general, more fundamental, and more universal category than croos. It refers to fulfillment (in the course of a path through life) of the individual’s ‘real nature’ -- not necessarily of what the individual believes his inmost nature to be, but of what he realizes it to be after there is deeper life-fulfillment. Now it is true that there arise in croos ‘deeper life-fulfillment’ or stages of deeper fulfillment in this sense, but the same thing happens also in ‘self-actualization’ in business, administration, or work for social causes, or in any discovering of one’s ‘real calling’. These then may likewise involve (types of) ‘openings of self’ (different from ‘content-related openings of self’), but not openings of self connected with subject matter. This seems to be the case in the cases of Joseph Kidd and Joyce Kingsley in White (1968), Greg and Matthew in Pobre (1996), and John and Beth in Goodwin (1998). But the individuals in these cases are all college- or university-educated and for that reason might be expected to be at least relatively comfortable with a range of academic subject matter, with some type of croos.

We must accept, however (it seems to me), that the diversity of human natures (in terms of inclination, ability, mental make up, conscious decision, whatever) is such that many or most will not establish a deeper fulfilling relation to academic subject matter. The task is then to envision an educational system in which croos is allowed to occur or not to occur depending on the individual, but which promotes opening of self in other directions, or promotes other kinds of opening of self, and thereby holds out the possibility of deeper life-fulfillment for all. It is true that academic subject matter is in some ways the society’s most important type of knowledge and its most important cultural gift. And there is the argument that many occupations require not only a level of technical and organizational know-how but also a sympathy for functioning at such a level which is hard to develop without establishing a deeper relationship to subject matter. Thus certain types of efforts at academic/vocational integration (Bragg in press) seem to be based on the idea that if subject matter is integrated with the realities of the vocation, the possibility of genuine academic subject matter involvement is increased. But does there have to be academic subject matter involvement of the type or depth represented by croos?

Perhaps we can take here a clue from history. In the 1920s ‘the modernists asked themselves . . . how the ideal of self-cultivation [implicit in the ideal of Bildung] might be relevant to the experience of a factory worker, or to a much enlarged system of secondary schooling, or to sources of Bildung other than those of classical antiquity’ (Ringer 1990: 18). After the second world war ‘for the first time the question arises what function Bildung can still have in a world of individual achievement and expert competence’ (Lichtenstein 1971). And in the US today we have as educational goals ‘cultural literacy’ and lists of ‘competencies’ in many occupational areas. A common characteristic of all these approaches is that an idea of Bildung, or of being educated, is brought to bear on current conditions by the theorist in an armchair manner, or from the top down. We should also look more deeply and fully at what is actually going on in individuals’ lives, at how the human spirit is already finding modes of unfoldment in society and deeper life-fulfillment. There is a need to become aware of and identify qualitatively different types and degrees of opening of self that are not subject-matter related, and which lead the individual to become a productive and more deeply fulfilled citizen. Are there for example specific types of unfoldment of self in certain work contexts, interactional contexts, community contexts, technical environments? or are there specific types of unfoldments of self associated with particular ways of knowing comparable to the fulfillment of croos? Retrospective interview studies of individuals who have found meaningfulness and become self-directed and attained a level of deeper fulfillment hold promise for illuminating these questions, at least initially.

Both croos and other types of opening of self and reaching life-fulfillment involve various kinds of knowing. ‘Knowing’ is a much more inclusive term than knowledge; knowing includes moral and other attitudes and feelings, both ones that are part of the knowing and that make the knowing and knowledge associated with the knowing possible. Does life-fulfillment tend to be correlated with knowing of a kind that is appropriate to that fulfillment? What is the relationship of life-fulfillment to Bildung and knowing? Can we articulate paradigms of knowing according to which individuals become gebildet, regardless whether they have a deeper relation to subject matter or not?

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Debra Bragg of the College of Education of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for providing the stimulus for this paper, Ian Westbury for pointing out the relevance of Bildungstheorie, Jesus Garcia, Helen Farmer, and Ralph Page for sharing their wisdom and experience with him, and Dave Goodwin, Hui-Ju Huang, and Sue Thomas for the privilege of working with them on their projects.

1. Interview by Youngcook Jun, February 1998, personal communication.

2. Super (1963) explicitly conceptualizes career development in terms of a ‘translation of self-concept into occupational terms’.

3. Existing detailed case studies on development of personality, vocational interests and lifestyle, and career choice, such as Roe (1951, 1953) are too focused on gross, external aspects to be very helpful. Even White (1968) does not give sufficient subjective perception and detail. His descriptions are carefully constructed to let objective, public or external facts speak for themselves. He avoids empathetic portrayal of feeling, and of spontaneous reactions which would give a clue to the individual’s deeper state.

4. ‘No sentence is [completely] separate from the other; i.e . . . if it is part of science [or knowledge], it contains potentially in itself the whole, and an experienced person (in Kundiger) who sets himself to it will develop out of it according to its inner logic (folgerecht) the rest . . .‘

5. For Plotinus also. But Plotinus’ passage is a mystical declaration of the unity of mind (not only knowledge), whereas Willmann uses the ‘larger whole’ basically as a theoretical construct.

6. Grammatically, the ‘this’ could also refer to the ‘way’, but this is less likely.

7. In addition his units seem to be smaller than the ones in our discussion -- poems or historical figures, as opposed to English and history and science. For smaller units, it makes sense to say that the student ‘possesses them, figuratively speaking they now belong to him’.

8. This continues the more modern tendency in philosophy of Bildung that ‘what constitutes the content of education, or wherein its substance or value lies, can, first, only be ascertained with respect to the particular children and adolescents who are to educated and, second, with a particular human historical situation in mind with its attendant past and the anticipated future’ (Klafki 1994: 39, referring to Nohl and Weniger).

Bragg, D. D. (in press) Reclaiming a lost legacy: the integration of academic and vocational education (Urbana, IL: College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

Goodwin, D. (1998) A qualitative study of the inner growth of teachers involved in educational action research projects Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Huang, H.-J. (1998) Childrens’ understanding of inheritance phenomena Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Klafki (1994) Didactic analysis as the core of the preparation for instruction (Didaktische Analyse als Kern der Unterrichtsvorbereitung). Journal of Curriculum Studies, 27 (1), 13-30 .

Lichtenstein, E. (1971) Bildung. In J. Ritter (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1. (Basel: Schwabe & Co), cols 921-937.

Litt, T. (1963) Naturwissenschaft und Menschenbildung, 3rd. ed. (Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer).

Nicdao-Quita, I. (1996) Exploratory case study of students’ main explanatory approaches to science concepts and their states of mental engagement Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Pobre, Eleanor A. (1996) Paradigm development among practicing school mathematics teachers Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ringer, F. (1990) ‘Bildung’ and its implications in the German tradition, 1890-1930. In W. Nijhof (ed.), Values in Higher Education: ‘Bildungsideale’ in Historical and Contemporay Perspective (Enschede, Netherlands: University of Twente, Department of Education), 1-22.

Thomas, S. (in preparation) Exploring nurturing of freshmen considered nontraditional and under-prepared by two exemplary community college instructors Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Roe, A. (1951a) A psychological study of eminent physical scientists. Genetic Psychology Monograph, 43, 121-239.

Roe, A. (1951b) A psychological study of eminent biologists. Psychological Monographs, 65 (14) (whole no. 331).

Super, D. (1963) Self concepts in vocational development. In D. E. Super (eds), Career Development: Self Concept Theory; Essays in Vocational Development College Entrance Examination Board, Research Monograph, No. 4 (New York: College Entrance Examination Board).

Weniger, E. (1951) Bildung und Perönlichkeit. Die Sammlung, 6, 216-229.

Weniger, E. (1990) Theorie der Bildungsinhalte and des Lehrplans (1930/1952). In E. Weniger Ausgewählte Schriften zur geisteswissenschaftlichen Pädagogik, ed. B. Schonig. (Weinheim: Beltz), 199-294.

White, R. R. (1966) Lives in Progress, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston).

Witz, K., Goodwin, D., Hart, R. S., and Thomas, S. (submitted) A methodology of seeing the essence of a phenomenon in in-depth interview projects (Urbana, IL: College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

 

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