Keeping company in controversy: education reform, spheres of argument, and ethical criticism.

• Author: Batt, Shawn

There is no shortage of debate over how to repair our educational infrastructure. National standards or more local control? Vouchers or better public schools? More parental involvement or more teacher autonomy? A greater federal presence.... or fairer local school taxes? More multicultural diversity or more emphasis on what Americans share in common? These are honest disputes. But I am convinced that the problem is simpler and more fundamental.... It stems from a dearth of democracy: an absence of democratic will and a consequent refusal to take our children, our schools, and our future seriously. -Benjamin Barber "America Skips School" (44-5) Benjamin Barber observes widespread disagreement in the United States concerning education reform. Similarly, the Sandia National Laboratories report, "Perspectives on Education in America," notes, "although the call for education reform is widespread, our review of education commentary suggests to us that there is little consensus on how the nation should accomplish such a change" (Sandia National Laboratories 306). This lack of consensus is not derived from a shortage of effort, since nearly 25% of Americans are involved in public schools as either students or staff (Tyack & Cuban 141). Many issues have surfaced and resurfaced during various stages of the ongoing national education reform debate. Multiculturalism in the curriculum, computers in the classroom, affirmative action, and economic competitiveness frequently have occupied center stage in public deliberation about schooling. Between the early 1980s and the present, rapidly proliferating education reform rhetoric has emerged in response to broader underlying cultural, political, and economic problems. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk, which likened the deteriorating quality of our schools to an "act of war" inflicted upon us by some foreign power. Since its publication, various advocates and reformers have used A Nation at Risk to justify a variety of conflicting conclusions about the status of American schools, the need for changing them, and the likely effectiveness of proposed changes (Hunt & Staton).

Plainly the domain of education is steeped in controversy. Yet, while there is little popular consensus on education reform issues, the American culture does possess a profound faith in schools. As Gerald Bracey claims, "whenever faced with a large national problem, the United States has always turned to its schools" (Final 19-39). John Dewey argued that education sustains a culture and maintains its character over time. Indeed, in the United States, education de bates play a central role in the formation of cultural identity. As Tyack and Cuban argue, "School reform is also a prime arena for debating the shape of the future of the society. Such debate is a broad civic and moral enterprise in which all citizens are stakeholders" (136). It is worthwhile to explore the prospects of public deliberation with the subject of education reform rhetoric in mind, because such rhetoric has the potential to yield useful insights into our understanding of public deliberation as a constitutive process and a moral phenomenon. Indeed, some scholars outside of communication have already made this connection. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, for example, suggest guidelines for rethinking the language of education reform and educational possibility. They argue that we should rethink the discourse of education reform and reformulate it as a crisis in citizenship and ethics. Similarly, David Purpel and Svi Shapiro write:

In spite of all the heightened concern for education, however, we believe the public is being ill served by the nature and quality of the current debate and dialogue. We believe that those who have framed the public discourse have failed to clarify the profound nature of the underlying issues and, moreover, have compounded that failure by providing a discourse that trivializes and vulgarizes those issues. (3)

This essay echoes this moral concern for the quality of public deliberation about education reform, and inquires into the difficulty of its meaningful assessment. Because education reform debates are highly divisive, complex, and intertwined with deeply rooted cultural, moral, and political issues, they evoke a need for a critical framework capable of addressing moral and political difference at an experiential and descriptive level. This study explicates one inventional framework for such an inquiry drawing upon both the "spheres of argument" approach and Wayne Booth's "ethical criticism." As I will show, the latter approach complements the former by enriching its topical framework. In order to develop this position, this paper traces the intellectual roots and function of the spheres of argument as a system of critical invention, offers a rationale for supplementing the spheres system, and describes Boothian ethical criticism, arguing that its attendant topical system can usefully complement the spheres of argument in morally charged and highly divisive contexts like education reform.

THE SPHERES OF ARGUMENT AS A SYSTEM OF CRITICAL INVENTION

Education reform not only represents a substantive policy area about which controversy continually erupts, but it also represents a constitutive force in the creation and maintenance of culture. It is obvious that education reform arguments have profound consequences for stakeholders within the system as well as the society as a whole. That the process and meaning of schooling is negotiated through public deliberation gives the quality and character of such deliberation a high degree of rhetorical significance. Critical analysis of education reform arguments is thus quite likely to tap into many of the concerns motivating research and criticism in what might be called the "spheres of argument" tradition. Most salient and compelling of these concerns is a broad ideological commitment to democracy and free and open public deliberation (Goodnight "Personal"; Doxtader "Learning"; Fabj & Sobnosky; Klumpp, Riley, & Hollihan).

This commitment to the health and status of public deliberation derives from a long tradition of democratic social theory, two of the most notable figures within which are John Dewey and Jurgen Habermas. Dewey was concerned with the nature and character of community life, its evaluation, and its relation to education and communication. In Democracy and Education, he forwards two standards for evaluating forms of community life. "How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association?" (96). The distinction between public and private, for Dewey, resides in the difference between isolated consequences of a transaction and consequences that affect others not directly engaged in the transaction (Public 12). When consequences are great enough, control is needed, but technical change and complexity make control a profound difficulty for the public. Thus, expertise is required, which carries its own set of control and representation problems. In Dewey's view, experts are shut off from awareness of the needs they serve. "The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied" (206-7).

Dewey's work is foundational for the critical framework practiced in the spheres of argument tradition. From these brief remarks, the characteristic moral concern is manifest, as is the direct use of public, personal, and technical categories as inventional resources for developing normative judgments. A similar discussion can reveal comparable concerns and conceptual categories in Habermas, whose account of the system and lifeworld ideas, as well as the colonization thesis, provides a somewhat different angle for examining public deliberation. Under Habermas' theory, society consists of two action-contexts: system and lifeworld. Each of these two contexts has its own appropriate rationality, but the development of society, both increasing complexity of systems and increasing rationalization of the lifeworld, can attain pathological effects. In his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas sets out to build upon the idea of communicative action by examining "how the lifeworld--as the horizon within which communicative actions are 'always already' moving--is in turn limited and changed by the structural transformation of society as a whole" (119). Thus,

A progressively rationalized lifeworld is both uncoupled from and made dependent upon increasingly complex, formally organized domains of action, like the economy and the state administration. This dependency, resulting from the mediatization of the lifeworld by system imperatives, assumes the socio pathological form of an internal colonization when critical disequalibria in material reproduction ... can be avoided only at the cost of disturbances in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld. (305)

While the tone of Habermas' theory is highly descriptive and neutral, the relevance of normative considerations is obvious. To take an educational example, Habermas would hold that teaching can only go on in a communicative action-context oriented toward mutual understanding, but that such an orientation is often disrupted as systemic imperatives intrude on the teaching relationship. As he writes, "the formalization of relationships in family and school means, for those concerned, an objectivization and removal from the lifeworld of (now) formally regulated social interaction in family and school. As legal subjects they encounter one another in an objectivizing, success-oriented attitude" (369). (1) Thus, both Dewey and Habermas have useful things to say about democratic theory and educational issues. Conceptual categories in both systems, if not entirely commensurable with each...