José María Barrio Maestre: «Let teachers teach»

The philosopher and teacher, José María Barrio Maestre. / Photo courtesy of the author

FACE TO FACE WITH

José María Barrio Maestre, philosopher and author of the book Sócrates en el aula

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David Rabadà

José María Barrio Maestre is a Spanish philosopher whose personal and professional trajectory has unfolded in close connection with educational practice and reflection. Trained in philosophy, his intellectual identity is clearly rooted in that field; as he himself remarks during our conversation, he is a philosopher, not a pedagogue—a distinction he embodies with complete naturalness throughout our exchange.

His teaching career began in secondary education. He belonged to the former corps of agregados of Bachillerato and taught Philosophy at two secondary schools in the Community of Madrid. In that context he lived through the years preceding the implementation of the LOGSE (1990), and like many of his colleagues he was able to glimpse its consequences. That classroom experience provided a decisive foundation for his later theoretical reflection on education. While still teaching at secondary level, he was appointed to the then Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid. His appointment was to the Pedagogy section rather than to Philosophy—a significant fact that characterises his academic work. From there, he developed a philosophical reflection applied to education, without ever renouncing his identity as a thinker.

Talking with him is a cultured, brilliant and thoroughly pleasurable experience, one that confirms the coherence between his work and his spoken word. His thought combines clarity and depth with a demanding defence of intellectual education. His most recent book, Sócrates en el aula, offers a synthesis of all this.

You have spent around forty years at the Complutense University of Madrid. What is striking is that you are a philosopher working among pedagogues. What interests you about pedagogy?

To be precise, I have been teaching at the Complutense for thirty-nine years. At the beginning I taught subjects such as Philosophy of Education, Ethics and Politics of Education, and Pedagogical Anthropology—subjects that have gradually disappeared or been reduced to a more or less residual presence in the curricula of what is now the Faculty of Education. Over the last twenty years I have been teaching a subject called Theory of Education to first-year students on the Primary Education degree.

“What goes under the name of ‘Pedagogy’ or ‘Educational Sciences’ strikes me as a collection of delusions expressed in a baroque jargon”

As for my interest in pedagogy, I must honestly say that it is inversely proportional to my interest in philosophy—which tends towards infinity. There is no need to clarify where the other tends. If you allow me the joke—and I shall deny having said this—since my retirement is approaching I can afford the luxury of speaking with brutal frankness. The truth is that pedagogy, judging by what I see in my own professional environment, interests me less and less. It should not be so, I admit. Some of my colleagues in pedagogy are wise people from whom I have much to learn. But the body of doctrines, theories or approaches that make up what is called ‘Pedagogy’ or ‘Educational Sciences’ strikes me as a collection of delusions expressed in a baroque jargon that never stops coining ghastly neologisms—mostly anglicisms—fashionable for a few years before being replaced by others even more delirious.

Do you think Spanish pedagogues reject philosophy to some extent?

The person who invited me to work at the university trusted that I might contribute something, above all because of my familiarity with the German academic world, which I know rather better than the Anglophone one that serves as a reference point for most Spanish pedagogues. Germans have their own problems, but within the academic field of Pädagogik there is certainly no such animosity towards philosophy as one finds here.

That professor was José A. Ibáñez-Martín, who held the Chair of Philosophy of Education. I am very grateful to him for his support in my promotion to senior lecturer. He has an excellent philosophical training, and both of us were students of Antonio Millán-Puelles, Professor of Metaphysics at the Complutense and one of the finest philosophers of recent centuries. For a few years, Professor Millán-Puelles held the first Chair of Philosophy of Education ever established in a Spanish university. José Antonio succeeded him in that post when Millán-Puelles took up the Chair of Metaphysics in the Faculty of Philosophy.

“My research and teaching focus on issues of metaphysics and epistemology which, in my view, are decisive for understanding the teaching task”

With that background, I have always had one foot in philosophy and the other in pedagogy. However, the wall that has gradually been erected between the two—described in my little book as one of the main causes of devastation—has grown higher and increasingly impassable. As a result, as the wall grew ever higher, this intellectual two-footed stance became increasingly uncomfortable. Some years ago, I decided to make the leap and devote myself to philosophy, so to speak, in exile. My research and teaching focus on metaphysics and epistemology, which nevertheless strike me as decisive for understanding the teaching task. I have developed them as simply as I could so that first-year students—the ones I teach—can grasp them, in another recent booklet entitled Epistemología para maestros, which can be downloaded online.

Philosophy lives in you as ordered logical reasoning. Do you think the same is true of some theoretical pedagogues?

The problem with some pedagogues is that they believe pedagogy to be an exact science. They long for it to attain the prestige, rigour and efficiency of technical disciplines such as engineering. Frankly, I do not think it stretches that far. This is not meant as any disparagement, but I believe pedagogy is not a science but an art: the art possessed by teachers who, through experience, have learned to handle effectively both the continuity and the necessary gap between example and exemplar. Pedagogy is the art of giving good examples—an art acquired through trial and error and tentative exploration. Pedagogical examples are images that call to be transcended; they do not absorb attention into themselves but redirect it towards the concept. A good example helps students to abstract, that is, to avoid becoming trapped in the merely iconic, in a mere ‘case of’ something. Pedagogy, then, is the art of those who have become experts in this.

And what do your pedagogical colleagues think of this?

They tend to get annoyed when I tell them that what they do is not science but a craft. Still, they are indulgent with the sort of barbarities I hurl at them, because they are good people—certainly less ill-tempered than philosophers tend to be. They do, however, get carried away with this talk of ‘educational sciences’. They tolerate me because I am a ‘teachersaurus’—a nickname a student saddled me with last year, which I found very amusing—and because my time is nearly up.

If I have any advantage, it is that what little I know about pedagogy I learned chalk in hand during my years in secondary school—an experience most of my colleagues who theorise about education without ever having grasped the chalk have not had.

“If I have any advantage, it is that what little I know about pedagogy I learned chalk in hand during my years in secondary school”

In your latest book, Sócrates en el aula, you reflect on the Spanish education system. What would Socrates say about our education if he returned today from Hades?

I think he would ask that teachers be allowed to teach what they know and be encouraged to know a great deal about what they teach. That alone would allow us to begin to recover.

Why does Socrates pervade your latest book? Was he perhaps the founder of both philosophy and pedagogy?

Socrates is the founder of the philosophical tradition. There are some very interesting pre-Socratic warm-ups, but philosophy in earnest begins with him. He taught Europeans how to think rigorously, and in his wake came Plato and Aristotle. He is also rightly regarded as the first teacher of the West—above all in a moral sense, in the way he lived and especially in the way he died, but also in an intellectual sense. From him we learn that the teacher’s task is not so much to ‘instil’ ideas—or what some call values—but rather to ‘educere’: to draw out and bring forth what is best in each person, assisting in a kind of mental childbirth. He tells his friend Theaetetus that his profession was the same as his mother’s, Phaenarete, who was a midwife. It is an image of teaching that remains deeply meaningful today.

Our education has a long Socratic tradition. What sense does pedagogy have without philosophy?

Very little, I think. I often say that pedagogy without a serious philosophical foundation becomes mere social engineering—an emulsion of the ‘human factor’ for industry, or worse still, a factory of what Nietzsche called ‘skilled beasts’, experts at preying before being preyed upon. William Deresiewicz has ironically denounced a form of ‘leadership’ that inspires much of the work done in elite Anglophone universities, promoting intellectually mediocre individuals who are experts at currying favour upwards and kicking downwards. It sounds brutal, but the danger is real, and philosophy can provide some immunity against it. Conversely, a philosophy incapable of being translated into a formative proposal for the human being lacks something essential—it is insufficiently thought through even philosophically.

“Pedagogy without a serious philosophical foundation becomes mere social engineering—an emulsion of ‘human factor’ for industry”

In your early years at the Complutense, philosophy and pedagogy were closely connected, but later the two sections were separated. What happened?

The then rector, Villapalos—badly advised, I believe—decided to split the two sections of the former Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences into two separate faculties: one of Philosophy, and another which began to be called (if I recall correctly, around 1990) the Faculty of Education – Teacher Training Centre. This new entity brought together the former Pedagogy section with the two university colleges of teacher training (Pablo Montesinos and María Díaz Jiménez). In the past, philosophers and pedagogues shared little, but they did at least share the Faculty Board, which entailed some academic contact and facilitated a dialogue that, however limited, could not fail to be of interest. With the emergence of the new entity—which was also located further away on campus—the umbilical cord linking us to a form of rationality other than the merely instrumental gradually frayed. While many welcomed the change, I deplore it.

You write that philosophy and pedagogy have suffered a deep and unfortunate divorce. When did this begin, what were its consequences, and how did it happen?

With exceptions, Anglophone schools of education have traditionally placed greater emphasis on technical aspects than on humanistic formation. Teacher ‘leadership’ is understood more in terms of mastering certain methodologies than of mastering subject matter. In American high schools, various activities—sport, volunteering, social engagement—are often academically equated with intellectually demanding subjects or even with rather trivial ones. This fits with the American obsession with measurement, rankings and operational outcomes. Britain has shown some interest in the philosophy of education, but largely focused on language analysis.

“There has been some interest in Britain in the philosophy of education, though mainly focused on language analysis”

In any case, Anglophone educational research tends to prioritise practical and technical issues—didactics, psychology, operational research, statistics—at most accompanied by elements of practical philosophy related to civic and moral education, or what they call ‘character education’.

What about Germany?

Germany presents a different picture. The tradition of academic pedagogy was never hostile to philosophy, even to philosophically ambitious debate. Pedagogy as a science—whatever that may mean—is a German invention born within the philosophical tradition of Romantic idealism. Its founders in the late nineteenth century were philosophers. Technical subjects are present in teacher training, but never in competition with philosophy. It was common for professors of pedagogy to have studied philosophy, or even to be primarily philosophy professors teaching education for a semester or two. Kant, for example, published lectures on pedagogy (Über Pädagogik) in 1803 based on his teaching in Königsberg in 1765–66. A characteristic feature of the German university lies in the flexibility of the curriculum, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and in the possibility of structuring it in a wide variety of ways according to students’ preferences.

Was there also a divorce between philosophy and pedagogy in Germany?

In the 1950s there was what they call a ‘realist turn’ (realistische Wendung), with some American influence, which gradually distanced pedagogy somewhat from philosophy, though never as radically as in contexts closer to ours. In 1978, a major academic event took place in Bonn—the Bonner Forum Mut zur Erziehung (‘Courage to Educate’)—which brought together leading philosophers such as Robert Spaemann, Hermann Lübbe, Golo Mann and Dietrich Benner. It had a significant impact on German academic debate over several years and undoubtedly helped to temper the intensity of that ‘turn’.

“In 1978 the Bonner Forum Mut zur Erziehung (‘Courage to Educate’) brought together leading philosophers”

Some argue that new pedagogies have destroyed national education by uprooting the transmission of knowledge. Is this more false than true, or more true than false?

There is a great deal of truth in it. Although the problem was brewing earlier, educational laws from the LOGSE onwards have progressively devastated the intellectual dimension of schooling by embracing a delirious constructivist ideology.

What difference do you see between the LOGSE and subsequent laws?

They follow the same path. The devastation they have left in secondary education—especially in state schools—is evident. Institutions once staffed by outstanding professionals committed to conceptual rigour and humanistic education have gradually been infantilised, turned into theme parks designed to keep young people entertained.

Some see current pedagogical hypotheses as empty of arguments. How would you describe them?

Soft and blind, to say the least. The original sin of modern pedagogy—dating not from Socrates but from Rousseau— is that much of the profession believes that the primary aim of schooling should not be for children and young people to know things, but to possess ‘values’: to learn to be tolerant, democratic and inclusive. I recall how, years ago, pedagogues positively salivated over the slogan ‘living together is living’, coined in the well-known Delors Report. Concern for the moral and civic dimensions of human development—undoubtedly important aspects of the educational enterprise—is, for a large part of the pedagogical establishment, seen as competing with, and even undermining, intellectual development

“Not a few pedagogues seem to think that in order to be tolerant, democratic and committed to ‘values’, pupils must be a bit dim”

The point is that not a few pedagogues think that, for a boy or a girl to be tolerant, democratic and committed to ‘values’, they need to be a bit dim—because if they know too much, they become arrogant swots, hostile to social coexistence and the like. Obviously, they do not put it like that, because it would sound rather brutal. But that is what they think. And without taking this assumption into account, the devastation wrought in schools by educational laws over the past—let us say—thirty years is literally incomprehensible. In short, Rousseau bears part of the responsibility for this. What never ceases to surprise me is the truly beatific devotion with which that guild venerates Émile, which is nothing but a compendium of nonsense. Rousseau was a great philosopher—but not because of that little book; rather because of other, far more interesting things he had to say.

Rousseau believed that society and formal education corrupt children, and that what truly matters are their primordial good feelings…

Driven by this passion for ensuring that people have good feelings, rather than that they study and actually know things, many pedagogues end up caring very little about academic performance. What matters to them is that pupils should be committed to all sorts of supposedly progressive and ‘social’ causes. After a period of rambling on about the importance of being ‘inclusive’ and non-discriminatory; about the decisive role of affective–sexual discourse in the classroom; about fighting the ‘heteropatriarchy’, that is, opening up closed spaces and making visible groups supposedly victimised by the heterosexual male family man—who is, of course, presumed to be an ‘abuser’ unless he himself proves otherwise—and once thoroughly sated with the refrain about ICTs in the classroom, multiple intelligences, emotional management, autonomous learning, and so on, and so forth (I am probably forgetting several other noble causes mobilised by pedagogical verbiage over recent decades), today it is gamification that has taken centre stage on the dance floor. With the sweet nonchalance with which pedagogues delight in coining anglicisms, ‘gamifying’ everything has recently become the talisman for reviving something that long seemed buried, once summed up in the old cliché of ‘learning through play’. Despite its innovative appearance, this is merely a relapse.

“I believe that the official channels for disseminating what some have called the pedagogical sect—the education ministries of almost all Western countries—are beyond redemption when it comes to recovering the state school”

And in all this, where does the state school stand?

I believe that the official channels for disseminating what some have called the pedagogical sect—the education ministries of almost all Western countries—are beyond redemption when it comes to recovering the state school. Infected by a passion for innovation that is intellectually soft, and by a complete unwillingness to have anything whatsoever to do with philosophy since the middle of the last century—both structural vices, both made in the USA—these channels have become irrecoverable for common sense. I wish I were mistaken, but I fear this is the case.

From ‘I know that I know nothing’ to knowing very little about almost nothing: have we moved from non-sophistic philosophy to pedagogical ideology?

The formulations you have just used strike me as very accurate descriptions of the current situation.

In our education system, what should matter more: learning to learn, or learning to think?

Look: I think pedagogues ought to make a small effort to explain more clearly what they mean by ‘learning to learn’. At first glance it seems intuitive, but if one pauses to reflect on the dictum, it is far from clear what it actually means. This is the problem with many pedagogues—certainly not all of them—that they have studied very little. One needs to approach this slowly, narrowing the focus and concentrating one’s attention patiently and unhurriedly. If they were to stop and reflect on what they are saying, they would probably realise that something does not quite add up. Supposedly—and this is what seems intuitive at first sight—the expression refers to the rather elementary technique of accessing sources of knowledge, fiddling around with digital gadgets and internet search engines that make possible what they call ‘autonomous learning’, along with that confidence trick so beloved by some of them: that children should ‘do research’. Modestly, I know what research is, and I do not think a child can do it by tinkering with a gadget equipped with a search engine. The techno-nonsense that has invaded schools has devastated the brains of two generations. I fully agree with Catherine L’Ecuyer when she says that the best preparation for an online world is an offline school—or whatever they call that in American. Moreover, a ‘learning to learn’ that does not culminate in learning actual things end up in an endless loop, a loop condemned never quite to finish learning… anything.

“This is the problem with many pedagogues—certainly not all of them: they have studied very little”

Some pedagogues also speak of teaching students to think for themselves.

It is no less foolish to suppose that thinking for oneself—which, incidentally, can only ever be done by oneself; there is no such thing as thinking on someone else’s behalf—or what is usually called critical thinking, can be acquired as a purely structural or functional skill, entirely independent of content: that is, independent of thoughts, of things that have been thought by someone with whom we enter into real or virtual dialogue through reading and listening. A saying is attributed to Margaret Mead to the effect that one should teach people how to think, not what to think. Well, although the phrase sounds neat, it is a complete absurdity to suppose that one can think without having something to think about, or teach people to do so without first presenting some thoughts which will then, of course, have to be subjected to critical attention and reflective analysis. The first thing is to think something. If it is true that she said this, I would reply that, while she may have known a great deal about cultural anthropology, she was somewhat lacking in philosophy. It is like trying to learn to play the guitar by reading a guitar manual. No: one learns by playing the guitar—badly at first—and gradually correcting mistakes with the help of the manual. To suppose that one could learn to think without ‘thinking something’, and then go on to ‘think about that thought’—that is, to reflect on its truth value—is akin to imagining that one could learn such a thing by taking a pill, or learn Russian in four afternoons.

And what about critical thinking, so often invoked by pedagogy?

Critical thinking is not an intellectual skill that can be achieved in a purely formal way, without reference to concrete contents of thought. Failing to grasp something so elementary betrays a naivety comparable to that required to dismiss memory as the ‘intelligence of fools’, as many pedagogues do. We are in much the same position here: it is right to argue for an education that is not merely rote-based, but to go from there to despising memory is intellectually suicidal, because we know what we remember. Knowing something is, of course, more than remembering it—but the first condition for knowing anything is, at the very least, not to have forgotten it. Something so utterly basic seems to escape those who constantly rail against the traditional school for being ‘memoristic’.

“Critical thinking is not an intellectual skill that can be achieved in a purely formal way, without reference to concrete contents of thought”

Another thing that experienced teachers know well is that it is better for students to store information in their own memory than in a digital repository, because the former is the basis of knowledge, whereas the gadget is perfectly stupid—even if it has lots of ‘gigs’. Memory alone is not enough for intellectual development, of course, but this should not lead us to overlook the fact that the only thing that cannot be critical is ignorance. All human knowledge is, at least potentially, critical—that is, susceptible to later reflection, analysis and assessment of its truth value. But the first requirement for thinking and reflecting is to think something, to have something to reflect upon.

Is today’s school hostile to knowledge?

The pedagogical establishment has succeeded in turning schools into one of the main enemies of knowledge—something many teachers deeply regret, and I modestly include myself among them—turning them into holding areas for children and young people, kept busy with lots of pleasant and useful activities, but above all with play. As Gregorio Luri aptly titled one of his books, La escuela no es un parque de atracciones  (School Is Not a Theme Park).

What would you add regarding ideologies openly hostile to lectures?

That teachers are not people who enjoy climbing onto a platform and raising their voices. When they do so, it is with the intention of teaching: that is, of pointing to things and directing students’ attention towards reality, not towards themselves. They do so out of the conviction that reality possesses a richness that overflows, enriching those capable of fixing upon it an attentive and patient gaze. Learning to listen to reality, to the ‘language of being’; understanding that things are not merely what they are for me, or what I say they are, or what I would like them to be, or what I ‘feel’ them to be, but that they have their own order and their own laws which I must first listen to and learn—all this is difficult, demanding learning, but with profound human and humanising reach. That is why school was founded in the Socratic tradition: to learn to respect truth, to respect reality; to acquire what Heraclitus called an ‘attentive ear to the being of things’.

“That is why school was founded in the Socratic tradition: to learn to respect truth, to respect reality”

In classical Greece it was pedagogues who led pupils to the philosophers’ classroom. Now it seems pedagogues lead them away from philosophy. Has the original role been inverted?

For many years now, pedagogues have been telling teachers that they have nothing to teach; that what they must do is ‘guide’ so-called autonomous learning, ‘be there’, and catalyse synergies so that people empathise, play, feel emotionally satisfied, and all those little things they are so fond of. This message—embraced by the laws governing the education system for more than thirty years—deeply discourages many genuinely vocational teachers, whose desire is to teach the subject they know and to transmit to others what moves them. These teachers are the ones who can genuinely help us turn things around, and they should not be prevented from doing their job as well as they can and know how. For that work is what a teacher can truly contribute to the growth and maturation of the people they seek to help. We must let teachers teach.

What prevents teachers who defend the transmission of knowledge from teaching?

Constructivist delirium, and the obsession the pedagogical establishment has fostered against the lecture—which, whatever they may say, constitutes the essential work of a teacher: explaining, clarifying concepts, and helping students to understand and enrich their vocabulary. Educational administrations increasingly require teachers at all levels—including universities—to devote more time to office work and IT tasks than to genuinely teaching activities, which are, in chronological order: preparing lessons, delivering them, and attending to students’ queries. More time and effort are consumed by drafting plans, schedules, teaching guides, curricular adaptations, continuous assessment procedures, coordination meetings, and all the obstacles pedagogues have devised to hinder teaching.

“My work seeks to explore the scale and humanising reach of the act of teaching—precisely what the pedagogical fraternity increasingly seeks to distance teachers from”

It cannot be denied that all this largely administrative work is connected to academic activity, but it diverts a great deal of energy away from what is central: the classroom and the library. This impulse to disrupt—indeed, to sabotage—the lecture ultimately stems, forgive my insistence, from the conviction, at least implicitly held by most of the pedagogical establishment, that teachers have nothing to teach; that their role is merely to stand there like traffic signals so that each pupil can go their own way—which is all very well, and very ‘Socratic’— but not towards where they ought to go in order to grow; rather, towards wherever the autonomous design each person fashions of their virtual world and of what seems meaningful to them happens to lead—or, in other words, wherever whim or the passing fancies of the moment dictate.

Finally, why should we read Sócrates en el aula?

I am not sure anyone should. Certainly not pedagogues with heart conditions, or those unfit for a cathartic experience—something very Socratic, by the way. It may, however, appeal to those who wish to understand a little better a fascinating experience every teacher has had at some point: watching a student’s face light up when something finally clicks. My work seeks to explore the scale and humanising reach of the act of teaching—precisely what the pedagogical fraternity increasingly seeks to draw teachers away from.

… In any case, one can never go wrong by reading Dostoevsky.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons