Content uploaded by Deborah P. Britzman
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Deborah P. Britzman on Mar 30, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
Journal of TeacherEducation, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000Journal of TeacherEducation, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000
TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE
CONFUSION OF OUR TIMES
Deborah P. Britzman
York University
There is little agreement in teacher education as to what counts as knowledge and how individuals
come to be affected by ideas, people, and events in their world. Whereas teacher education seems to
debate questions about the adequacy of its structures, it has forgotten its place in the world and its
obligations to world making. However, teacher education has not yet grappled with a theory of
knowledge that can analyze social fractures, profound social violence, decisions of disregard, and
how from such devastations, psychological significance can be made. Returning to an earlier his
-
tory and drawing upon philosophers who were also concerned with the relation between teacher
education and social reparation, this article advocates for a view of teacher education that can toler
-
ate existential and ontological difficulties, psychical complexities, and learning from history.
If it is a truism that to teach, teachers must en-
gage knowledge, it is also right to observe that
as the new century unfolds, there is still little
agreement in our field of teacher education as to
which knowledge matters or even what might
be the matter with knowledge. Nor is there
much understanding regarding how those try-
ing to teach actually learn from their practices,
their students, or their incidental anxieties
made from acquiring experience. We cannot
agree on the length of the practicum, on
whether the 19th-century apprentice model is
still relevant, or even the future of schooling it
-
self. Various learning taxonomies developed
throughout this century try to settle these
doubts; yet, however elaborated or simplified,
the measures offered never seem adequate for
the uncertainties of teaching and learning. It is
difficult, then, to even find the subject of teacher
education, so inundated is our field with the ro
-
mance of cognitive styles, the rumblings of
brain research, the idealization of information
and standards, and the parade of new diagnoses
of learning failures: attention deficit disorders,
overstimulation, understimulation, and not
enough Mozart. At the beginning of this new
century, in the confusion of our times, we seem
to have a better idea of all that we lack than we
have a notion as to what makes understanding
so difficult (Britzman, 1998), or even how we
might think about the psychological signifi-
cance of teacher education.
We do know more about what holds educa-
tion and teacher education back. There is the
force of governmental interdictions, censoring
both ideas and the personal lives of teachers and
students. Our own definitions of professional
-
ism preclude complications of selves and then
ask for compliance and conformity. We have
made great strides in emptying the curriculum
from debating itself. Symptoms of these mala
-
dies can be observed: camera surveillance
devises, weapon detectors, and corporate ID
tags for students and teachers. Behind these
symptoms is the stultifying dream of uniting the
nation through a common curriculum made
safe from any controversy. And then we are
caught in a repetitive debate over whether
schools and teacher education can or should be
able to prevent eruptions of social violence. The
old question of what schooling is for becomes
utterly entangled with what it means to think
200
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000 200-205
© 2000 by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
about school and teacher education as part and
parcel in the world. Somewhere between the
dream of education and the nightmare of its
daily grind, we lose and find teacher education.
Profound disagreement over prepara
-
tion—not just how to prepare teachers but how
schools prepare students—mirrors contempo
-
rary global themes. However, nowhere does
this question of what one should know and how
knowledge might matter take on more poign
-
ancy than when nations decide to confront and
work through their own buried pasts of human
devastations and genocide. Simply put, if we
can bear to learn from history, all that we know
about history requires reconstruction, not just of
texts and contexts, but also of intimate identity
and what might be included under the name
“potential.” From the South African Truth Com
-
mission, where victims and perpetrators face
each other, to the Israeli-Palestinian peace
accords that have set in motion revisions of edu-
cation; from the house arrest in London of Chil-
ean General Pinochet and the Chilean court’s
decision to bring to trial those previously
granted amnesty, to the recent art exhibit in
Colombia called “Art and Violence in Colombia
since 1948” that calls citizens to confront the
nation’s demise; from the spate of national
apologies, in the case of the United States for
enslaving Africans, in the case of the Pope, for
the history of anti-Semitism in Catholic liturgy,
to the problem of present responsibilities; and,
from renewed discussions on Germany’s reun
-
ion and the move of its capital city back to Ber
-
lin, to new and more devastating acknowledg
-
ments of the reach of the Holocaust in our own
times, the violence of the national repressed
returns what Caruth (1996) calls “unclaimed
experience.” These are all pedagogical projects,
not of management, but of thought. How is it
that so much of our past century remains
unclaimed in education? How can teacher edu
-
cation come to make itself relevant to such ethi
-
cal obligations? If teacher education could begin
to reclaim difficult knowledge, what would be
the work of teacher educators?
All of these events should remind us of our
present implication in world-making catastro
-
phes. Felman’s (1992) difficult question might
allow us to rethink the confusions of our times:
“In a post-traumatic century, a century that has
survived unthinkable historical catastrophes, is
there anything that we have learned or that we
should learn about education that we did not
know before?” (p. 1)
One might be tempted to dismiss Felman’s
(1992) question as just another burden, yet
another agenda. Our oldest educational com
-
plaint, after all, is that there is not enough time
to address existential, political, or even onto
-
logical breakdown. Yet, what is it that we do
with our time that we can do without these diffi
-
culties? If we take Felman seriously, it is crisis
that inaugurates the work of education, even as
education makes new forms of crisis. However,
when one looks at what counts as crisis in
teacher education, the world shrinks: Its geog
-
raphy is rather stingy, its disciplinary borrow
-
ings rather mere, its reliance upon social sci-
ences as the knowledge base shameful, its
eschewal of what is old fashionably called “the
mysteries of psychical life” or the strange and
unmastered ways that we are subject to uncon-
scious fantasies, sad. However, there is also the
question of how teacher education becomes
psychologically meaningful, allowing partici-
pants to explore a certain freedom, a certain pas-
sion. A tiny sense of teacher education speaks
volumes of our woeful disregard of the fragility
of learning and of knowledge in our present;
lost is the capacity to expand the reach and rele
-
vancy in our field, our thinking of how teacher
education can come to matter to those involved.
Undoubtedly, these are all big issues. The lit
-
tle issues matter as well and are made from
daily encounters of selves facing one another in
a classroom and the ways that all of us are as
susceptible to our perceptions as we are to what
we ignore and to that which we cannot bear to
know. Indeed, the intimate problem of how one
becomes affected by knowledge, by the experi
-
ences of strangers, and by histories that are not
our own, not in terms of its application for oth
-
ers but in terms of our own capacities to believe
and be touched by knowledge, remains one of
the grand paradoxes of our century. Usually,
our disillusion with the promise of knowledge
and progress is raised from the ruins of tremen
-
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000 201
dous social breakdown and from the difficulties
of understanding what went so terribly wrong.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno, for example,
wondered what education could be after
Auschwitz. He came to this difficult question
because of his work in teacher education: When
World War II ended, Adorno, who was in exile
in the United States, returned to Germany. His
chief means of employment upon return was in
a teachers’ college where he was assigned the
charge of examining secondary teachers on the
topic of philosophy (Hohendahl, 1995). Adorno
(1998) noticed that whereas the candidates
could give adequate answers, they also admit
-
ted that philosophy meant nothing to them.
They passed the exam by offering clichéd ac
-
counts and platitudes.
This test therefore should permit us to see whether
those candidates, who as teachers in secondary
schools are burdened with a heavy responsibility for
the spiritual and material development of Germany,
are intellectuals, or, as Ibsen said more than eighty
years ago, merely specialized technicians. (Adorno,
1998, p. 21)
Critical pedagogy in North America would also
raise such concerns about whether teacher edu-
cation might exceed the normative cloak of pro-
fessionalism and instead, inspire itself to be
unafraid to ask new kinds of questions and to
receive questions about the preconceptions of
our field.
Hannah Arendt (1954/1993) also centered
the theme of crisis in education. Just as Felman
(1992) insisted that education is crisis, writing
before her, Arendt elaborated the stakes:
Which aspects of the modern world and its crisis
have actually revealed themselves in the educa
-
tional crisis....What can we learn from this crisis for
the essence of education—not in the sense that one
can always learn from mistakes what ought not to be
done, but rather by reflecting on the role that educa
-
tion plays in every civilization, that is on the obliga
-
tion that the existence of children entails for every
human society. (pp. 184-185)
Arendt asked educators to assume a certain dig
-
nity within vulnerability, that children were be
-
coming adults but that they were already, like
adults, humans. Arendt did not mean that we
are all the same, or that there is an original inno
-
cence that adults must preserve. Instead, she
wanted us to consider something difficult: the
meeting of adults and children as an ethical obli
-
gation yet to be accomplished.
We can raise a similar question for teacher
education: What are our obligations, not in the
sense of getting work done, but in the way we
can even image our work and how our work
-
ings affect our capacity to think beyond what we
do. What inhibits our capacity to respond ethi
-
cally to others, to learn something from people
we will never meet and to be affected by histo
-
ries that we may never live? Can teacher educa
-
tion create conditions for all of us to risk the self
in an encounter with histories of bad faith? If we
can take seriously the thinking of people like
Arendt, Adorno, and Felman, we might wonder
why education has such difficulty with encoun
-
tering its own breakdowns, blind spots, and
vulnerabilities. We have yet to grapple with
what knowledge does to teachers, particularly,
the difficult knowledge of social catastrophe,
evidence of woeful disregard, experiences of
social violence, illness, and death, and most
generally, with what it means to come to terms
with various kinds of trauma, both individual
and collective. What makes trauma traumatic is
the incapacity to respond adequately, accompa-
nied by feelings of profound helplessness and
loss, and a sense that no other person or group
will intervene. What makes trauma traumatic is
the loss of self and other.
World making requires self-knowledge of
what the world might symbolize or represent
for the self. It is both our earliest and oldest tech
-
nology. This first obligation to “know thyself”
brings to the fore the little matters of teacher
education, not just because it might take us
away from the romance of technology, the rub
-
ble of the information highway, and the illu
-
sions made from the testing industry, although
this would be enough. The work of knowing the
self entails acknowledging not just what one
would like to know about the self but also what
is difficult to know about the self, including fea
-
tures we tend to project to others: aggression,
self aggrandizement, destructive wishes, and
helplessness. These are the devastating qualities
of psychical life. And yet, there is also some
-
202 Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000
thing about education that resists self-
knowledge.
What happens to the self who teaches? Gard
-
ner (1997) offers one of the more honest formu
-
lations: All we can do is try to teach, but this
effort often gets caught in the tangles of what he
calls, “the true teacher’s defining affliction:
furor to teach” (p. 3). By this, he means forget
-
ting the students or teaching in spite of them,
maybe even to spite them. He also means that
whereas we must believe in the knowledge we
offer students, there is a centripetal tendency to
freeze knowledge by undervaluing the question
and forgetting the importance of doubting the
very knowledge on offer. The furor to teach
defends against this capacity to doubt and the
interest in using knowledge as a means for
world making and self-making.
This is not the first time the manic defensive
qualities of teaching were noticed. At the begin-
ning of this century, when William James lec-
tured to Harvard’s future teachers in 1899, he
dedicated many lectures to the aggressive quali-
ties of what can only be called the “full-speed-
ahead” school of teaching. Warning teachers
against their habituated thinking, their auto-
matic associations, their unconscious wishes,
and what he called “a certain blindness in hu-
man beings,” James (1899/1983) asked his audi-
ence to ponder their own obstacles to thought
and how these obstacles structured their actions
of teaching and learning in his last lecture,
“What Makes Life Significant.”
In my previous talk, “On a Certain Blindness,” I tried
to make you feel how soaked and shot-through life is
with values and meanings which we fail to realize
because of our external and insensible point of view.
The meanings are there for the others, but they are
not there for us. There lies more than a mere interest
of curious speculation in understanding this. I wish
that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. It is
the basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and
political. The forgetting of it lies at the root of every
stupid and sanguinary mistake that rulers over
subject-people make. (p. 150)
Anna Freud’s (1930/1974) four lectures to
teachers on psychoanalysis would also offer
comparable warnings, noting a certain blind
-
ness toward and defense against exploring the
vulnerabilities of interior life. Her first lecture
begins with an observation that still holds in our
own time: “We are all aware that teachers are
still very suspicious and doubtful of psycho
-
analysis” (p. 73). Nonetheless, over the course
of her four lectures, she tries to offer very par
-
ticular frames for interpreting not so much the
dream of education, but what the dream de
-
fends against: rescue fantasies, altruistic surren
-
der, hostility toward the student, the eschewal
of the reach of sexuality, and the difficulties of
remembering one’s own childhood researches.
Her last lecture also suggests why teachers may
be suspicious of psychoanalysis: “Probably you
seek practical advice rather than extension of
theoretical knowledge....Above all, you want
to know whether we, as adults, should interfere
more or be less authoritarian than adults have
been in the past. The answer to the last question
I have to say that psychoanalysis so far has
stood for limiting the efforts of education by
emphasizing some specific dangers connected
with it” (p. 123). But she left it to the audience to
decide not only which dangers mattered, but
also what might be the matter with their own
teacher education.
James (1899/1983) and Freud (1930/1974)
both noticed a difficulty in learning from ideas
that rattle not just the learner but also the very
foundations of education. Analyst Phillips
(1998) offers an even more radical principle for
what we might encounter as education: What
would education be like if our attention was
given over to
the irregular, to the oddity, the unpredictability of
what each person makes of what he is given—the
singularity born of each person’s distinctive history.
The sense in which a passionate life is a good life be
-
cause its goodness is always in question. (pp. 40-41)
What allows for the possibility of distinct histo
-
ries is the effort in questioning one’s own narra
-
tives. How then are questions made? According
to Winnicott (1996), questions are made from
our doubts and our defenses against doubt. To
illustrate this, he analyzes the stakes of the com
-
mon question, “Yes, but is it true?”
Winnicott (1996) was struggling with how
students began to learn from their study of psy
-
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000 203
chology. He noted two stages in trying to learn
from the mysteries of psychical life, from how
one feels torn by new and old knowledge. At
first, students tended to see the knowledge of
psychology strictly in terms of how they can
apply it to others, a form of compliance with the
knowledge and with the tacit cultural value that
knowledge must be useable. This may be what
Gardner (1997) had in mind with his notion of
the furor to teach. The second stage of learning
is destructive, in the sense that all learning must
be destructive; along with trying to make psy
-
chology one’s own, the student will criticize,
raise questions, doubt it, and if the knowledge
can survive this attack, it can be turned toward
the self. This is where Phillips (1998) places our
capacity to question the goodness of our narra
-
tives and where Adorno (1998) situates a heavy
responsibility. Both Winnicott and Phillips offer
the idea that self-knowledge comes after the self
experiences. Self-knowledge is not a feature of
the experience but a residue of the self’s desire
to keep the experience as her or his own, to feel
again one’s affective ties, to remind the self that
ideas one knew before can matter.
What if teacher education began with such a
simple model of learning? Could there be a
movement from self-knowledge to world mak-
ing? We would have to think about how the
teaching techniques we offer induce compli-
ance in the form of our students quickly taking
techniques to their classrooms. This rush to
application and to what mistakenly is called
“the practical” would, of course, be compliance
to the dominant rule that knowledge use is
strictly defined by its capacity to be externalized
and applied to others. It will take time to notice
the qualities of ideas at stake, not from the van
-
tage of the triumph of application but from the
difficulties of describing what James
(1899/1983) named as “habituated knowledge”
and what Arendt (1954/1993) referred to as
“ethical obligations.” To implicate oneself in
one’s own narratives of learning and teaching
means turning habituated knowledge back on
itself, and examining its most unflattering—for
many, its most devastating—features. It also
means exploring how even this most unflatter
-
ing moment may offer insight into making
significance.
There is nothing easy about encountering his
-
tories of woeful disregard. At the end of our cen
-
tury, teacher education has yet to even acknowl
-
edge the confusion of our times. Learning from
the other’s trauma is of a different order, one
where application of knowledge is irrelevant
because knowledge of trauma is other than the
knowledge of mastery, application, and stan
-
dardization. This does not mean that traumatic
knowledge cannot be worked through. How
-
ever, it does mean that many of the arguments in
our field are irrelevant to new ways of conceptu
-
alizing our worldly obligations. If teacher edu
-
cation is to join the world, be affected by its par
-
ticipation in world making, and question the
“goodness” of its own passions, we must
rethink not only past practices and what goes on
under the name of professionalism, but also the
very imagination it will take to exceed compli-
ance, fear of controversy, and “unclaimed expe-
riences.” Then, we might ask a new question:
How does teacher education come to notice that
the world matters?
REFERENCES
Adorno, T. (1998). Critical models: Interventions and catch-
words (H. Pickford, Trans.). New York: Columbia Uni
-
versity Press.
Arendt, H. (1993). Between past and future: Eight exercises in
political thought. New York: Penguin. (Original work
published in 1954)
Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward
a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. Albany: State Univer
-
sity of New York Press.
Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative,
and history. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press.
Felman, S. (1992). Education and crisis, or the vicissitudes
of teaching. In S. Felman & D. Laub (Eds.), Testimony:
Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and his
-
tory (pp. 1-56). New York: Routledge.
Freud, A. (1974). Four lectures on psychoanalysis for teach
-
ers and parents. In The writings of Anna Freud, Volume I
1922-1935 (pp. 73-90). New York: International Univer
-
sities Press. (Original work published in 1930)
James, W. (1983). Talks to teachers on psychology and to stu
-
dents on some of life’s ideals (F. Bowers, Ed.). Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work pub
-
lished in 1899)
204 Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000
Gardner, M. R. (1997). On trying to teach: The mind in corre
-
spondence. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Hohendahl, P. (1995). Prismatic thought: Theodor W. Adorno.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Phillips, A. (1998). The beast in the nursery: On curiosity and
other appetites. New York: Pantheon.
Winnicott, D. W. (1996). Yes, but is it true? In R. Shepherd, J.
Johns, & H. Robinson (Eds.), Thinking about children (pp.
13-18). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Deborah P. Britzman is a professor of education,
social and political thought, and women’s studies at York
University in Toronto. Her interest is in the psychoana
-
lytic study of teaching and learning.
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000 205
