Will Brehm 0:54
Tom Popkewitz, welcome to FreshEd.

Tom Popkewitz 2:02
Will, thank you, and it’s good to be with you.

Will Brehm 2:05
So, education as a field of study has historically been about instilling in children a type of practical knowledge that would make them productive citizens in society in some distant future. And this is very commonplace, particularly, in Western thinking. Where did these ideas come from?

Tom Popkewitz 2:26
It’s a confluence of many, many things okay. Previous to the book I’m working on, is a book on cosmopolitanism. And how did I get it started in that? I was sitting in a library in Helsinki and reading a sociology journal about the new millennium. And they were talking about the cosmopolitanism of the new millennium. And in reading that, I realized that the way in which they talked about cosmopolitanism was the way in which school is framed even though they never use the word. Especially in American history and also in the European histories I’ve read. And it’s in this exploration of the cosmopolitanism that I began to understand better how this idea of a particular kind of knowledge begins to emerge that makes it possible to think but also to do things to change everyday life. So, it’s not only schools but it’s other things. And the modern school is an invention that draws upon these ideas of the Enlightenment and its notion of cosmopolitanism. So, it emerges -I say it emerges- it emerges in there, but then also you can find the whole notion of human agency in the Renaissance -the idea of humanism, and so on. And so, you begin to see this idea, you see it in Kant for example, you see it earlier in Descartes, that somehow you can have access to phenomena through the mind, and somehow change that phenomenon in some way, which allows the invention of the idea of progress, for example. And so, the question is, how does this come about? It comes about through many different things. But at the turn of the 20th century, you begin to see the development and institutionalization of social science. The social sciences become part of the educational project. It becomes part of what’s called the Modern School, whether you call it the new educational fellowship, which was not in the US or whether you call it progressive education. It’s part of this way of thinking about how you take science to develop particular kinds of people. Now, it’s also interesting that the idea of the cosmopolitanist was not an idea of democracy. It was a very elite idea, and it also was to undo the nationalism. What happens in that, though, is the Enlightenment idea of the Cosmopolitan gets brought into the modern school through and related to the idea of a certain kind of knowledge that has to do with science. Was it science? That’s a different question. But it was called science. That’s Dewey, that’s Thorndyke, that’s Hall that’s the European Decroly and that’s what was brought back into China with the people who studied with Dewey. Alright. So, you see an interesting paradox. A way of thinking about how you develop and change people which relates to the Cosmopolitan notion of universalized humanity, gets bought into the idea of the modern republic in French and the US, for example. The very early founders talked about the necessity of schools as a way of making kinds of people because when you have a republic, it’s a different kind of person than if you’re a subject of the king. And so, the Modern School becomes a way of trying to think about how do you change everyday life? Later on, the concept of practical knowledge appears but not earlier. And so, you have this very sort of uneven history, which focuses on how you try to intervene not only in social conditions, but also in people and change who they are. Now, there’s more to that, but I’ll stop for the moment.

Will Brehm 6:32
So, schools were seen as a way to improve society, to make society in a particular way?

Tom Popkewitz 6:42
It was seen as a way, yeah, of making society in a particular way. But what’s interesting about that, is that it wasn’t all of society. In the Enlightenment, these sciences were called moral sciences. And they were concerned with questions of deviancy. When you move up into the progressivism, and I’m talking about America here, but I could also talk about Europe. These sciences were also concerned with deviancy. There was something called the social question. And much of the educational thought that we have -it’s heritage too, if I can use that word- relates to what’s called the social question. The social question was, at least in Northern Europe and North America, concerned with Protestant reformers trying to think about how you undo the moral disorder of the city. The idea of urban populations, immigrants in the US from Southern Europe, from Eastern Europe, and also racial groups coming up after the end of the American Civil War, when African Americans moved to the north. So, it was yes, to improve society, but it focused on the notion of difference. People who were outside of what was, and I’m using a language of cingulum here, outside the notion of normality, that is the pathological. And so, it was to improve society for those who were considered dangerous and dangerous to the envisioned future. So, it isn’t a carte blanche notion of improvement, it was directed to very particular populations.

Will Brehm 8:25
Is that idea still prevalent today? The effort of schools to improve, quote, unquote, backwards people, do we see that today as well? Is the legacy still there?

Tom Popkewitz 8:42
A Nation at Risk.

Will Brehm 8:45
Which is what? A nation of risk is what?

Tom Popkewitz 8:48
It was in the 1980s, a report of the US government talking about how the nation is in danger and how we have to do something. So, this idea of risk, this idea of danger is very prevalent in social policy. But if you think about in the US, or think about it in Europe, this is still very much prevalent. What are the sciences? I was at a meeting at the European Educational Research Association. What was its theme? Its theme was urban education. What’s urban education? It’s the people who are outside of the normal. I mean, of course, the language is a very democratic language, a benevolent language. In the current research, I’m looking in this book, where they’re talking about core practices. They’re talking about what is the teacher to do? The teacher is supposed to be a professional who works towards the improvement of society. Who are the people who need improvement? Of course, it’s again, put into an Enlightenment language of trying to have progress, equality, justice, which is today’s language. It’s not the language of the Enlightenment. But its way of thinking about difference is usually built upon what’s not there. And so, you talk about the kids who don’t learn, you talk about the kids who come from fragile families, you talk about community, which is this symbolic way of talking about those people who somehow are out of the ordinary or different. In China today, they’re talking about the children left behind, the rural children. In the US, urban is the symbol. If you look at China, or you look at the formation of the Turkish Republic, it was rural. But the languages that are used to describe and differentiate are the languages about those who are outside of the normal. I gave you two concrete examples in Turkey, what were called the village institutes, and also in China today, which is what they call the floating children, or they call the children left behind.

But I wrote a book called Struggling for the Soul. It was a study of urban and rural schools in the US. And the program was an alternative teacher education program designed to bring teachers who had high qualifications in schools, where children didn’t have those qualified teachers and the children were not succeeding. And it was an ethnography across the country and it went to, I forgot how many different schools over a year. One of the things that began to emerge for me was, you have a geographical difference. Urban is different than rural. When I’m driving in a -when I go to Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, I take the train. If I want to go to the place where I went in Georgia, I had a road drive because there was no train. I mean they’re geographically different. But once you get into the school, you realize there’s only one language about children who are different. They lack motivation, they lack self-esteem, there’s an achievement gap. These are all languages about the recognition of difference. But in that recognition of difference is also the construction of divisions. And so, one of the things that emerges and emerge for me out of this, looking historically at the Enlightenment is to realize how a particular kind of Enlightenment thought -and I say a particular kind, because it isn’t the only version- is built into it a comparative mode of thinking. Earlier, that comparative mode was called ‘the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns’, where there was a big debate going on for over 100 years about whether what the Europeans had was superior to what went before and others. It also was a way of thinking about colonialization. About why the Europeans had a more advanced civilization. Now, what’s in that is not only this sort of describing “the other” as not the same as you. But also, a particular way you begin to historicize humanity, which is a part of the cosmopolitanism. That is, for the first time, humans had their own history. And in that own history, you can begin to differentiate. That’s what gets carried into the formation of the Republic. That kind of thought, when I say that kind of thought, there are other kinds of thought. There was a very nice book written by Stephen Toulmin called Cosmopolis and he said, look, we’ve been guided -I’m paraphrasing here- we’ve been guided all this time by Newton’s notion of mechanics. And he said look at where it got us. And he said, there are other models to think about the Enlightenment than just Newton and this idea of mechanics and machines and so on. And so, I’m saying that because my critique, my historical thinking about this is not to say the Enlightenment was bad. This interview is built upon Enlightenment principles, okay. But a particular doxa of the Enlightenment moves into the present in a way that maintains this comparativeness. And in it, the distinctions that I call double gestures that in the hope of trying to change and produce progress, you also at the same moment, and simultaneously develop a way of thinking about who’s not that advanced. That is who you fear? What are the dangers and dangerous populations that you not only exclude but you also object? Okay. So, you can see that my reading of the Enlightenment is not to say it’s an evolution to the present, but a way to understand how a particular kind of way of thinking that we use to try to correct social wrongs, in a way, begin to reinscribe those social norms and differences, and work against our social commitments. That’s the book that I’m working on, is how and why what we think is practical knowledge -back to this practical knowledge- is impractical. Because it’s built upon these assumptions of comparison. It’s built upon other kinds of things that I haven’t talked about, such as stability, as a way of thinking about change. And we need to find ways -if I use my language- to denaturalize it. To take the thing we think is so common and natural to talk about and understand it’s not natural. To understand it’s limits, to understand it’s dangers as a way of thinking about what might be alternatives to this?

Will Brehm 15:54
How would you denaturalize it? I mean, you use the term cultural theses that basically shape and define the categories and perceptions that we are able to have. How do we denaturalize this and think of alternatives?

Tom Popkewitz 16:12
The way I think about it is that we have particular kinds of rules and standards by which we organize things. When I say we, it’s not just we, it’s historically. Why is it possible I can talk to you about these things? Because there’s certain kinds of historical ways of thinking and organizing and classifying things. And what I want to do is, understand what are the conditions that make that way of thinking possible? What are the limits of it? How does it create, for example, in schools, comparative modes of thought, when we think we’re trying to include when, in fact, what’s happening is not only inclusion but also exclusion? And that requires, for me, what I call historicizing the present. That is how do you take the present? When I talked about this book Struggling for the Soul. How do you take this idea of urban and rural schools and understand what are the conditions that made it possible to think about it, and for people to think it’s intelligible and plausible to talk about urban and rural? I mean, really, again, this is playing with that term, but playing with it historically. In English or American English but I think also in British English, when you talk about urban schools, you begin to realize what is the opposite? We don’t have a term because everybody assumes we know what the school is that’s not urban. And so, you begin to understand how differences become classified in a way you just assume it. And part of the problem is how you un-assume, that is the denaturalizing. And that means understanding historically. For example, for me, I was just reading something, actually, by Foucault, I think it was talking about the early 17th century, the center of thought relayed on the urban, and they dropped the urban. But in fact, by the 18th-19th century, urban becomes back. And there are two kinds of urban, okay, and you have to guess which is the one that we talk about? There’s the urban, which is the university, its business, its culture. You go to New York, our place of almost residence, and where do you go? You go to museums, you go to shows, you listen to music. Okay, that’s urban. And that’s the cosmopolitan. The cosmopolitan was a very, very urban person. In fact, there’s a beautiful German painting, which shows the cosmopolitan sitting and looking at the pastoral of Germany and contemplating it. And so, there’s a little bit of romanticism in that cosmopolitanism, about how you reflect upon the beauty of nature, but also of men and women. Okay. So, that’s the urban. But when you talk about urban schools, that’s not the urban you’re talking about. Because it’s the urban of the other, why? it’s a category of difference. It’s a category of division. And even where we use the category against itself, that is how do you improve the achievement and so on, it is still a category of difference. And how do we understand that? Well, part of it is understanding historically, how did it get there? And then you begin to understand, what was the Chicago Sociology? They went into the ghettos, and they studied people, how people lived in tenements. They had the Settlement House. What was the Settlement House movement? It was for the elite to come, the urbane to come and look at, and see how the immigrants lived. And so, you realize that when urban is used, It’s not a geographical concept anymore. It’s a historical and cultural concept that changes but still defines what is not there. That is what’s not defined, what’s not named, because you don’t have to name it.

Will Brehm 20:22
Being in the field of comparative education, it makes me think that that field itself has to do a lot of denaturalizing, so to speak. For instance, there’s lots of people in comparative education that work in educational development, which in many ways is the same idea of trying to aim for progress in maybe not urban communities in America, but particular communities in quote unquote, developing countries.

Tom Popkewitz 21:30
I agree with you. And why do I agree with you for a number of reasons. First of all, the whole notion of comparison needs to be theorized what constitutes difference, because, and very few people do that. They assume difference. And if you look, epistemologically at much of the research done in comparative education, it assumes an epistemological universal. Those are built into the concepts of social theory. And then they apply those concepts to other people to understand difference. I’ll give you an example, I wrote an article with someone at Hong Kong University, Weili Zhao and someone from Pakistan, Ayesha Khurshid, and the problem was, how do you understand difference without inscribing sameness as the notion of difference. And one of the things, we tried to do that in terms of both looking at Chinese education, and also looking at education in Pakistan, versus historically, the social theories that were being used in comparative education. And let me give you an example. The example has to do with Pakistan. There was a rural education project. That rural education project wanted to understand how women were being liberated. But the whole notion of liberation, the whole notion of agency, the whole notion of empowerment, they were used, theoretically but those theoretical notions were very much embedded in American liberal thought about what it means to be a kind of person. They were then imposed on the analytical framework of this program, to see whether women were being empowered and so on, without ever recognizing the way in which the epistemology itself carried with it certain kinds of historical norms, that are not only norms about politics but also very much religious themes that come out of American Calvinism. I mean, that’s another element that needs to be considered. And, I mean, one of the things that a number of my students are working on now, but not only my students is, how do you understand modernization in East China, for example, or China, East Asia? By understanding the interrelationship. It’s not borrowing, but the interrelationship between Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and the movement of Western kinds of notion because when they get there, they’re no longer Western notions. They become assembled in something that’s not just aiding them. How do you develop an intellectual way of thinking about that? A theoretical way so, you’re not just thinking of difference as difference from some notion of representation and identity, in which you then superimpose a particular framework, which denies difference itself? Am I being too theoretical?

Will Brehm 24:31
I think it’s good though because this show has dealt a lot with comparative education scholars, and I don’t think the field itself steps back and really tries to critique and understand what it is to even compare. And I think the best example, when you said that the comparison we do is looking at what is normal and then finding instances where people don’t meet that normal. And I just think of PISA, this international test that does this on a global scale.

Tom Popkewitz 25:06
I mean, and it is sort of interesting because I’ve been working a lot with Europeans on PISA, it’s very prominent. And to understand PISA, you have to understand, first of all, what I call ‘the outcome of your school subjects’. That is in Western models of curriculum, and particularly, I’m talking more from the US because I’m more familiar, but I do a lot of work with Europeans so, I could see it in Portugal, I see it in France, I see it in Sweden, and so on. There’s a particular way in which curriculum is formed. It’s formed through psychological models. Those models have some image about who the child should be, and how that child develops and grows. Those models become the ways in which you interpret physics, mathematics and bring it into the school. It’s sort of a magical transformation. That magical transformation has to do with, you have to take things that people do in physics, mathematics, music, art, and somehow move it. We have buildings on my campus that somehow has to sort of travel from those buildings into my buildings, and then get translated into ways of talking to kids. Now, the alchemy has to happen in schools because kids are not mathematicians, they’re not physicists. But what’s interesting and important is how these models emerge. And when you look at them historically, you realize they didn’t emerge to teach kids physics or mathematics. They had to do with this idea of how do you make the citizen? How do you make a moral child? And so, the example I gave was music education. Music education was brought into the Boston schools in the late 1800s by Horace Mann. Horace Mann was the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and many American historians think he was instrumental in the formation of the modern school. That kind of hero worship isn’t what I’m getting at.

What was important is he went to Prussia, and he wasn’t interested in certain elements, but he was interested in music education. Brought it into the schools. Why music education? Because he was interested with, the Irish population in Boston. This was a book actually written by Ruth Gustafson, where it was her dissertation that she wrote up. Where she looked at, where did music education come from. Why music education? Well, it was thought that if the Irish girls in high school would sing and join choral groups, that would help their health. Because the breathing and the exercise was good for their health. Then later, they introduced music appreciation. Why music appreciation? It was music that you were supposed to be able to understand your sense of collective belonging, not to Irish, but as an American. It also frowned upon learning jazz. Why jazz? Jazz was the music of African Americans. It isn’t actually only that, but it was perceived that. And that was thought dangerous to the mind. And so, it was frowned upon, children learning jazz. In fact, Carl Seashore, who’s at the University of Iowa, did research where we had high school -this is in the 20s- look at and listen to classical music and then listen to jazz. And he recorded their facial expression. And you know what? The people who listened to -and these were all white men. The people who listened to classical music had a sense of joy and satisfaction. The people listened to jazz, this is his interpretation of the photographs- they tended to frown and be disoriented, and all sorts of things that would enter into and mentally make them unstable. Okay. So, why am I telling this story? Because -and I could do the same thing if you want in mathematics education. I could do the same thing in art education. I could do the same thing in science education. Because there’s a whole group of people that are working on historically where these places come from, where these disciplines come from. They are not to learn science. They’re not to learn math. They’re not to learn art. They’re to develop a particular kind of person. And usually that person is to counter what is considered moral disorders. And they’re built upon psychologies. If you look at the psychologies of education, cognitive psychology, learning psychology, and so on, these are not psychologies developed to understand what physics is, they’re psychologies to understand how you govern who the child is and who the child becomes.

So, why is that important? PISA builds itself on these models and calls it learning science, practical knowledge of science, practical knowledge of mathematics, practical knowledge of literacy. It’s not practical knowledge of any of that. It’s how you make a particular kind of person. And then when you look more carefully at the PISA, you realize that it’s not only are they talking about children learning these subject matters, that is the alchemy but they’re also talking about the social and cultural contexts that they learn. That is family background, community background. And you realize this has very little to do with learning to be a scientist, learning to be a mathematician, learning to be an artist. It has to do with a particular kind of inscription of a moral order. And then it’s given a universality through the use of numbers. There’s a wonderful work done by Ted Porter, it’s a book called Trust in Numbers. But even beyond that, and also people in France and so on, where they talk about how numbers become a way of telling the truth about people, about society because it seemed democratic. The numbers aren’t biased, the numbers seem to be the same for everyone, and so on. Yet the numbers themselves are built upon particular kind of cultural ways of thinking about people that become obscured because you begin to think of the numbers as a way of telling truth.

Will Brehm 31:35
Do you think it’s possible to get beyond Enlightenment thinking? Because I think you’ve shown very clearly that the connection between a particular Enlightenment thought and progressive education of the 20th century and the way we think about education in the 21st century share a lot of the same cultural theses. So, the question is, would we be able to ever get beyond those theses?

Tom Popkewitz 32:02
Well, there’s two different questions you just asked. Do we get beyond the Enlightenment? And you know what? I’m very much indebted to the Enlightenment. Okay? There are elements of the Enlightenment that I don’t want to give up. The idea of reason, the idea of science. I’m not giving up science. I don’t like the way in which science become provincialized. Okay? So, I’m not critiquing science, I’m critiquing a particular brand of science that tries to universalize itself and doesn’t realize its own limits. Do I think we can get beyond what we now do? Which is not necessarily beyond the Enlightenment? Because I don’t know what that means. The answer is, I hope so. That’s why I do this. Because it’s trying to say -it’s sort of like a whistleblower. Okay? I’m trying to blow the whistle on it, and say, if this is it, are there other ways of doing it? Now, that also brings into play the issue of change. What do I mean, and what is embodied in this way of thinking about change? There’s a very strong literature which I’m interested both in my work as well. And that is to understand how the way we’ve thought about change takes the elitism of the Enlightenment and poses itself as the guardian, and really is -Jacques Rancière uses the language- it really is a hatred of democracy. That notion of change is somehow that I can tell you how you can be enlightened. And then also plan how you’re going to be that kind of person who’s enlightened. I’m reading a lot of the teacher education research now and what are they talking about? They’re talking about, we need to create a professional teacher. What does that mean? Well, you have to have certain skills and knowledge. But it means more than that. We know the researcher, what the dispositions, what’s the sensitivities, what the awarenesses of the teacher should be, and we have to plan the school and plan teacher education, so the teacher can be that. That’s an arrogance that I really find very difficult. And that may be relates back to what Rancière is talking about.

And so, for me, the problem of change is to leave that model of what he talks about, a hierarchy between those who know and those who are supposed to learn what you know. And in the denaturalizing I talked about before, is a way for me at least to think about change. If you begin to understand the limits of the present. If you begin to poke holes in the sense of causality, you then create options outside of what is already there. And possibilities other than those that are present in the contemporary way of organizing things. That’s a notion of change. There is no guarantee if I use Stuart Hall’s very famous essay on that, there’s no guarantee to it. But that’s okay. We’re supposed to be living with uncertainty. So, we have to learn how to live with it but in a way that is profitable. There’s another element by the way, I didn’t mention earlier. One of the things about these models that come out of the Enlightenment, the ones that we’re talking about, not the Enlightenment for everyone but the particular ones that I’m talking about, is that you have a notion of certainty, which you put in and think of as uncertainty. What does statistics do? Statistics is a way of taming chance. Numbers are way of taming chance. That’s a notion of certainty. If you think about the models of curriculum, they’re built upon notions of certainty. Right now, one of the major movements in science and math is to have kids’ model. What does model mean? Model means you have a model that kids have to learn how to access reality. That’s the notion of certainty. And I’m trying to counter that notion of change. And it seems to me to historicize what I earlier said, to think about the present, and the conditions of it as something that’s historically there, that is produced by a whole range of different things, is a way to challenge that presence in a way that allows you to say, “Look, there are some things maybe I want to keep. But there are other things I know are not working in a way I think. How do we find other ones?” And so embedded in this is a notion of change. And to me, that’s very important to recognize.

Will Brehm 36:54
Well, Tom Popkewitz, thank you so much for joining FreshEd.

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