Maxine Greene: The Dialectic of Freedom

Who is this person?

Maxine Green (1917-2014) was a 20th century american educational leader, closely associated with Columbia teachers college. According to her Wiki, she was an advocate of education for the purpose of self actualization and civic engagement.

Why am I reading this book?

Maxine Greene is a name that kept coming up as I read other Education Philosophers and she was recommended as a great resource on a podcast I watched with Randall Alsup. As someone who is interested in learning more I decided to purchase 3 of her books and read them. This is the first one I am reading and I’m Digging it so far.

Writing in 1984 these chapters hold a resonance for our current day. Almost 40 years on I am finding myself thinking: “its like that now just more”. One wonders how many times we have to relearn the same lessons.

Chapter 1: Freedom, education, and Public Space

In this first chapter Greene outlines the ideas of Freedom in American life and how they intersect with society as a whole, education as a specific concern and public spaces both metaphorical and literal.

After reading this chapter I resonate with her ideas of negative freedom, interior retreat, confrontational freedom and passivity. I also love the idea of freedom as an enacted life goal. 

Greene Begins by laying out the foundations of contemporary American freedom. The culture itself conflates freedom with economic agency, power and control. There is a certain pecuniary flavor to our capitalist freedoms. She asserts that our freedom is largely framed as  “freedom from” a freedom from others, from regulation, from responsibility, from painful growth, from thought. 

Our freedoms come at a cost though.  Greene points out that freedom to make a different world, even among those who are searching to do so lacks a common grounding in shared values and norms.  Our freedom has been so thoroughly framed as independence that Greene points out that a common civic order or community is conspicuously absent. 

“ More often than not, the solutions (to what is wrong)lack a grounding in significantly shared values and norms.  We have only to think of what is proposed to solve the problems presented by homelessness, the aids epidemic, teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, suicide. Some people look for comfort in the fundamentalist promises and pieties others seek it among those who think and talk and entertain themselves as they do. There's almost no serious talk of reconstituting a civic order, a community. There is no clearly post proposals for creating what John Dewey called and "articulate public ". There's a general withdrawal from what ought to be public concerns. Messages and announcements filled the air; but there is because of the withdrawal, a widespread speechlessness, a silence where there might be end up to be an impassioned and significant dialogue.” (P2.)

 Green also brings this forward into a dim view of the American public’s interior mental life, which I think is pretty accurate-if elitist. She doesn’t think that the average American is interested in serious consideration of what is happening or what their own actions are.

She quotes Foucalt : 

“ Thought”, Wrote Michel Foucault, “ is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object , and reflects upon it as a problem,”

I hear Langer’s symbolic function of thought and Gadamer’s understanding of play and understanding here. If we are able to symbolically treat our worlds, actions and beings we can then enter into a kind of hermeneutic horizon by entertaining other ideas of worlds, actions, and beings.

Greene later talks about how external factors (limitations and barriers) force this kind of thinking. When confronted with a barrier to our expression it causes us to think about our action/intent against the barrier in terms of possibility, impossibility, freedom and justice, society and individuality etc. 

Greene asks : does not one have to claim was are called human rights to incarnate them? 

I think you do, one does have to claim ones rights to have them. As ideas they are ephemera and easily transmuted or dissolved. Claiming them draws them into the light and creates them as a corporeal force rather than an ideal one. Greene then hits on something Fricker would later talk about more elegantly

“ Stunned by hollow formulas, media-fabricated sentiments, and cost benefit terminologies, young and old alike find it hard to shape authentic expressions of hope and ideals” 

This is a deterministic and hermeneutic injustice. Bound by their cultural frames folks can’t even conceive of freedoms or hopes greater than their station. (A new serfdom!) 

One common theme in this chapter is freedom not as a birthright that has been given or bestowed but rather freedom as a process of action, change, and transmutative possibility. 

Quoting dewey: 

“ We are free not because of what we statistically are, but in so far as we are becoming different from what we have been” to become different of course is not simply to will oneself change. There is the question of being ABLE to accomplish what one chooses to” (p3)

This ability isn’t equal and so a society doesn’t have true freedom because your relative ability is hampered by your class position. Your ability to conceptualize the possible is hampered by your cultural contexts and political organization. The countering of this power is a critical frame for liberation:

“questions arise as how we are to counter what Foucault called "power," that which in hears in prevailing discourse, and knowledge itself. Nevertheless there is a general agreement that the search for some kind of critical understanding is an important con commitment of the search for freedom. There is also an agreement that freedom had to be conceived of as an achievement within the concreteness of lived social experiences rather than as a priorial or original possession. We might, for the moment think of it as a distinctive way of orienting the self to the possible, of overcoming the determinate of transcending or moving beyond in full awareness that such overcoming can never be complete.” (P5)

Greene also continuously points to Sartre and his idea that freedom is overcoming a constraint or a lack in your own reality. It’s by becoming aware of these lacks that one can become aware of the possibilities beyond that obstacle . As a cow, If you live all your life in the center of the pasture you may never encounter the fence. Your experience is one of freedom because you never desired more than was allowed to you. If you desire to go to greener pastures its the fence that limits you and forces you to act your freedom in jumping it. You may not even have a concept of what lays outside the fence, but by identifying the limit you force a conception of what is on the other side of it. 

“ Sartre, They do not reach out for fulfillment if they do not feel impeded somehow, and if they are not enabled to name the obstacles that stand in their way” 

 This kind of hemmed in thinking, where the inability to conceive of wider worlds is a product of the context of society, is called out in education. Greene rightly points to the capitalist motive for education as opposed to teaching for freedom and for collective identity.   

“ The language of contemporary schooling and, indeed, of proposed reforms emphasizes something quite different from such interpretive thinking. Rather than being challenged to attend to the actualities of their lived lives , students are urged to attend to what is “given” in the outside world”  … there is in consequence , an impotent encouragement of the tendency to acted to the given, to view what exists around us as an objective “reality”, impervious to individual interpretation. Finding it difficult to stand forth from what is officially(or by means of media) defined as real, unable to perceive  themselves in relation to it  the young are all too likely to remain immersed in the taken-for-granted and the everyday. For many this means an unreflective consumerism; for others is means a preoccupation with having more rather than being more. If freedom comes to mind it is ordinarily associated with an individualist stance: it signifies an self dependence rather than relationship; self recording and self regulated behavior rather than involvement with others” (p.7)

“ When oppression or exploitation or segregation or neglect is perceived as “natural” or a “given” there is little stirring in the name of freedom, at least as freedom will be explored in this text when people cannot name alternatives ,imagine a better state of things, share with others a project of change, they are likely to remain anchored or submerged, even as they proudly assert their autonomy. The same paradoxically or note, is true when people uproot themselves, when they abandon families, take to the road, become strange in desperate efforts to break loose from pre-established orders and controls.” (P9)

 The above passage echoes langer in its concern with names and ideas. 

Another idea that resonated with me in this chapter was the idea of American “kitsch”.  A kind of cultural shorthand, American thinking already done for you! 

“the vocabulary of American kitsch is made up of phrases like “our traditional values” “ the barbarity of Communism” and so on….. Kitsch is integral to the human condition. Its  true function is to serve as a folding screen set up to curtain off death, or to mystify by putting a smiling face on things. Its is not enough however to recognize it as an illusion of the lie, if the achievement of freedom is our concern. It might lose its authoritarian power, but we might be left in the “lightness of being” with our figurative ashes blowing in the wind”

 An outright rejection of these values and thinking without engagement in an effort to change them results in the freedom of an untethered kite. You carry no connection but as a result your impact and fellowship is fleeting. 

As I think more about the idea of American Kitsch it comes to mean the character of the country. In a way this kitsch is the popular imagining of what it is to be a citizen. I am reminded here of the second chapter in Artistic Citizenship. “Art and Citizenship: the history of a divorce” where David Wiles outlines a historical event that took the arts from being an integral part of a kind of Grecian Kitsch to being divorced from that central notion of what it means to be an arcadian. 

Quoting Polybius of megalopolis  Wiles says:
“ The first arcadians had sense in bringing music so comprehensively not the constitution, making it a compulsory part of the upbringing not just of boys but of young men until the age of thirty, a counter to the austerity of the general lifestyle.” 

This is the explicit folding in of an artistic idea into the background of what it means to be a citizen in a nation or society. We have the same thing here in America where you see in car ads the music that plays in order to appeal to the American spirit is often country western or rock and roll. These archetypical symbols for independence which forms the bedrock of the myth of America, and gives rise to the Kitsch which is the unthinking absorption and suffusing of the cultural milieu without second thought.

When these foundational myths and their effects align with your life they do not even present themselves which is something of a theme I am finding not only in Greene but also in Neibuhr’s Moral Man and Moral Society and In Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key and Dewey’s Experience and Education. You only confront new ideas and growth through confrontation and friction. If you accept, unquestioning, the ideas as they are presented to you, you do not perceive this friction and you do not see the horizons that exploration might give you access to. 

“there is no consciousness of obstruction, no resentment or restraint, when a person experiences no desire to change or to question, like (we almost suppose) so many people now living under dictatorships. If there's nothing a person particularly wants to say, he/she will not suffer from censorship or controls on freedom of speech. The individual simply feels free: it is no different than breathing; the condition simply is.”

 One wonders if you are someone whose life falls outside that realm of American kitsch whether you can ever feel free. There is another essay that talks about this bell hooks quotes from a poem called “ the burning of paper instead of children” 

“ It is the oppressors language but I need it to speak to you”

 This American kitsch is the oppressors symbolic language that you are defined against and as the reference is the background of Americanism it is a definition that not only reads you out but also gives you no other grounding.

This makes me think of Nina Simone’s “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free”

“I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

I wish I could break all the chains holding me

I wish I could say all the things that I should say

Say 'em loud, say 'em clear

For the whole round world to hear

I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart

Remove all the bars that keep us apart

I wish you could know what it means to be me

Then you'd see and agree

That every man should be free”

One could read this song in direct juxtaposition to these ideas: Here Simone expresses a desire to know what it would feel like to be free, the American version of freedom  as part of the background of American kitsch has completely eliminated the idea of freedom outside the context of white American male freedom. The concept of freedom itself is removed, the feeling is distanced. The experience of freedom is denied because Simone has been read out of the American experience and isn’t able to access the feeling. “ I wish I would know how it feels”  becomes a examination of the sectioning off of full experience of humanity through this American  foundation and its sublimation through culture.

What is the effect in education, in society?  There is an idea that education is a way to foster growth encourage examination of these limits. Is that so? Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society takes a dim view:

“While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant others what they claim for themselves. Though educators ever since the 18th century have given them selves to the fond illusion that justice through voluntary corporation waited only upon  a more universal a more adequate educational enterprise, there is good reason to believe that the sentiments of benevolence and social goodwill will never be so pure or powerful, and that the rational capacity to consider the rights and needs of others in fair competition with our own will never be so developed as to create the possibility for the anarchistic millennium which is the social utopia either explicit or implicit aim of all intellectual or religious moralism”

Greene Takes this on and I am going to use an extended excerpt to answer that question: 

“it is through and by means of education, many of us believe, that individuals can be provoked to reach beyond themselves in their intersubjective space. It is through and by means of education they may be coming powered to think about what they are doing, to become mindful, to share meanings, to conceptualize, to make varied sense of lived worlds. It is through education that preferences may be released, language is learned, intelligence is developed, perspectives opened, possibilities disclosed. I do not need to say again how seldom this occurs today in our technicized, privatized, consumerist time” (p.12)

Greene seems here at the beginning of her investigation of this question to address the same idea that Neibuhr is talking about: The role of education to overcome the essential selfishness of mankind, although Greene doesn’t think it is mankind it is society- the spirit of the country, the foundations filtered through the kitsch.  That Kitsch provides the filters through which we experience and design education. Writing in 1984 Greene points out : 

 The dominant watch words remain “ effectiveness,” “efficiency,”and an undefined, one dimensional “Excellence”. Reforms or no, teachers are asked to teach to the end of “Economic Competitiveness” for the nation. They are expected to process the young (seen as human resources) to perform acceptably on some level of an increasingly systematized world. 

Greene doesn’t seem to shut the door on the idea that education could be a way to societal growth. She does seem to be saying that the prevailing narrative and capitalist philosophical structure creates a system that is expressly devoted to something else. The tool being applied through education is the wrong tool for Greene. Unlike Neibuhr she is existing more at a person to person level rather than a person to society level. Greene believes in education as a balm to the hollowing out of American character into American kitsch. Neibuhr doesn’t. 

“ ..Of course exceptions are made for the privileged and talented, for whom multiple and diverse literacies are made available; but, except in cases of hopeless neglect, the major focus is and will be on technical or “coin” skills. Whether the students are rich or poor, privileged or deprived, the orientation been to accommodation, to fitting into existing social and economic structures, to what is given and to what is inescapably there.”

 Greene is pointing to a central tension that I still feel in education, the education isn’t for the student, their own thinking, their own actualization and acquisition of the skills needed to be a person it is in molding them to accept and fit into the established systems. It is a disempowerment in the guise of education. Its a “do your job” mentality that encourages a toxic individualism- we see this in the classroom everywhere from curriculum design to grading and assessment paradigms. 

“ little if anything is done to render problematic a reality that includes homelessness, hunger, pollution, crime, censorship, arms build ups, threats of war, even as it includes the amassing of fortunes, consumer goods of unprecedented appeal, world travel opportunities, and the flickering faces of the “rich and famous” on all sides. 

Greene is asserting that this molding to culture perpetuates the ills of culture as natural and immutable rather then engaging in troubling those perceptions and pushing for change, This is something I think about as the laziness of citizenship. It takes too long/too hard/ hasn’t worked in the past/ I do my job-this someone else responsibility/ abstraction of concrete ill into faceless horror I can ignore.  The intra-cultural dialogue makes up the ideas and kitsch of american experience. Education forms a large part of that: 

Little is done to counter media manipulation of the young into credulous and ardent consumers- of sensation, violence, criminality, things. They are instructed daily, and with few exceptions , that human worth depends on the possession of commodities, community status, a flippant way of talking, good looks. What they are made to believe to be “news” is half entertainment, half pretenses at being windows on the world. They witness political realities played out in semi-theatrical or cinematic terms. They watch candidates being marketed and withdrawn. In the midst of the marketing and the sounds of sitcom shotguns, there are opportunities to become voyuers of starvation, massacres, torture. And the beat of MTV goes on and on. 

While at the end here Greene comes off as a bit of a fuddy-duddy I do agree with a lot of her points: We do not teach students to engage in culture in a way that puts them into a dialogue with it, we encourage passivity not exchange. Consumption without consideration of consequence not only of goods but of human misery. This passivity offers that voyeurist role of suffering because we are disempowered and accept it. Its only real if it happens to us, anything else is entertainment. Cruelty to the enemy is victory because they aren’t real, cruelty to us is unconscionable because we are the protagonists of reality. 

The unthinking propagation of these ideas is the function of that american Kitsch that Greene is taking as a metaphor:

“ At once, teachers and administrators are helped still to see themselves as functionaries in an instrumental system geared to turning out products, some of which will meet standards of quality control. They still find schools infused with a management orientation, acceding to market measures; and they are won’t to narrow and technician the area of their concerns.

The person who might indeed find relevant to his/her sense of vocation the dehumanizing forces in the society is not asked to notice them and perceive them as obstacles to becoming. Nor is much done to empower students to create spaces of dialogue in their classrooms, space where they can take initiatives and uncover humanizing possibilities.  The crisis implicit in what Dewey called the erosion or the eclipse of the public is generally ignored. Explrations in the domains of the arts are seldom allowed to disrupt or defamiliarize what is taken for granted as “natural” and “normal” instead the arts are either linked entirely to the life of the senses or the emotions, or they are subsumed under rubrics like “literacy”. 

This, to me is a foundational sin of American education and American culture. Education is not about the student, its for the grown ups. The cultural answer to why we have schools was very clearly articulated when the president said we need to open schools so that parents can go back to work. The cultural understanding of schooling and its aims are directly opposed to the wellbeing of the students in favor of propping up the prevailing value systems of the country and generating workers for exploitation.

So what happens to teachers that do perceive these problems, systemic and institutional, and experience the tension that they bring into their teaching? What about their students?

“ We do not know how many educators see present demands and prescriptions as obstacles to their own development, or how many find it difficult to breathe. There may be thousands who, in the absence of support systems have elected to be silent. Thousands of others (sometimes without explaination) are leaving the schools. Surpassing, transcendence, freedom: Such notions are not being articulated in the conversations now going on. And yet a teacher in search of their own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own.. Children who have been provoked to reach beyond themselves to wonder, to imagine, to pose their own questions are the ones most likely to learn”

In 2022 almost 40 years later, I see in the great teacher shortage this playing out. We have continued down the corporatization and quantification of education and outcomes to a point where the best teachers teach inspite of the system, not because the system promotes it. In many cases excellent teaching is opposed to the standards and practices of schools and communities. 

Why are we allowing these things to happen? Where are the disruptors?  

“It is not a question of freedom being neglected as an official value in America, a kind of icon. For all the absence of dialogue about what it signifies to educate free men and women in these times there is a constant emphasis on free choice and self reliance, on people overcoming dependency and taking responsibility for themselves. The Official rendering derives from the late 18th and early 19th centuries from the early days of capitalism. The themes derive from an early liberalism associated with Laissez-faire approaches to consumption, to merit, to material gain.”,

With this framing of freedom people seeking to trouble education have to first trouble the bedrock of society. That is a heavy lift. It is starting to happen now- in the collapse and disempowerment of the millennial, generation z and next generations by the capitalist consolidation of the baby boomers and billionaires but only because they are starting to overplay their hand and have concrete and traceable effects on everyday folks which causes them to confront the limitations of their freedom.

The individualization of freedom in the american mythos means that in order to have a communitarian and student focused education you are essentially asking for a rejection of americanness. The very americanness that you may be seeking to change keeps you from being able to access the means to change it. How do you build communities in a system that prioritizes individuals and positions everyone as in competition? The answer it seems is that, largely, you don’t.  

“In ‘Habits of the Heart’ Robert Bellah and his associates say that freedom is the most deeply held value in this country, yet it “turns out to mean being left alone by others, not having other people values, ideas, or styles of life forced upon one, being free of arbitrary authority to work, family and political life.  What they suggest, however, is that Americans find it very difficult to define what they might do with their freedom. It leaves them with a stubborn fear of acknowledging structures of power and interdependence in a technologically complex society dominated by giant corporations and an increasingly powerful state…. They find it difficult to name the obstacles in their way. If they are afraid of acknowledging structures , they can scarcely think of breaking through them to create others, to transform”

Does it fall to education to try to break this cycle?  Greene seems to think so. She points at a notion of self as a function of commitments to projects of action that people recognize as their own. Our identity is in our actions. Our perceptions guide those actions. Our available contexts define our perception. Our kitsch allows for those contexts without consideration. 

“it seems evident that all this holds relevance for a conception of education- if education is conceived as a process of suturing, of releasing persons to become different, of provoking persons to repair lacks and to take action to create themselves. Action signifies beginnings or the taking of initiatives; and, in education, beginnings must be thought possible in authentic learning is expected to occur. “

This perspective on education as the work of a community in fostering the student to actualization is a very prevalent one among good educators but I think it misses out on the broader conceptions of the goal of education in its sureness. (I agree with it BTW)

What is education? To the society? To the economy/businesses? To the Community? To the parent? To the student?

Its this conflicted tangle of ideas for the nature of education that lead us to our present hot mess. Alignment of these ideas is indeed informed by other foundational ideas.  Greene’s starting place with the American icon of Freedom is a good way to interrogate the effect of these central ideas and kitschy representations on the interaction and formulations of the contextual goals of education that stakeholders have. 

Chapter reflection: 

In this chapter Green outlines the central idea of freedom and its intersections with american identity, myth, and self. She then expands to how those impact education and what she sees as the role of education in american society. I wonder though if she is conscious of the leveling of value that is present in America around education. Education as a symbol, As a tool, as an End I am excited to read more.