Joseph Tussman Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Education

You're pointing in the direction of where your intellectual life went, which was the importance of education. That is the second theme that you've grappled with. So what is the relationship between politics and education? I think one of the things you're saying in your work is that training for these political roles is an important aspect of education.

Yes. I would have to admit to a kind of deep concern for the political life, and I regard certain aspects of education as an initiation into political life. I don't think it's the only thing; I think all professional education, whether it's initiation into the life of the law or medicine or science or engineering--

I regard all education as essentially initiation into some ongoing social activity. I've always been concerned that the political role, which is thrust on every citizen in a democracy by virtue of his being somebody who enjoys political suffrage, is a role which needs education, like engineering, like medicine. It's extremely important to initiate a citizen into the political arts, and that means making them aware of the fundamental covenants, the basic law, the institutions, the obligations, and that political education and initiation.

Now I happen to think, for complicated reasons, that what we mean by liberal education is essentially initiation into the great political role in which the individual is somehow educated to the burden of sovereignty: how would you run your life, how would you run the life of a community? So that I regard, first, all education as initiation. And I regard liberal education, although this I get attacked for a lot, as education for the overriding political role. Because some people like to think of education as preparing a human being for humanity and things of this sort. I don't regard those as very useful, although they're popular notions. There's such a revulsion in academic communities against politics that to state that liberal education is initiation into the great political vocation would be regarded as very cranky.

But there's a two-fold aspect to education, as I read your work, in the sense that it's both development of the mind of the student and also the initiation.

Yes.

You write, "Liberal education is the education for the life of action and decision" -- back to that notion of deliberation.

There are all sorts of things you're touching on.

There are the two great questions that you grapple with: what is the case? And the other is, what should I do, or what is to be done? I regard political and liberal education as concerned primarily with an answer to the question of what are we to do, rather than what is the case. That is to say, with ethics rather than science. Something like that; it's a crude division.

Traditional political science, for example, focuses on describing behavior and predicting the future.

Yes.

And therefore does not answer the question that you see as central.

That's right, which is my quarrel, my objection to a good deal of political science. If it does as you say, is that it's concerned with describing and predicting, whereas I think the perspective of the agent is the normative perspective, and its fundamental question is not "what is the case" but "what should we do?" That's a difficult question or range of questions. But that's what I think the focus ought to be for a liberal education.

As a result of this education responsibility, you see the "teaching power," as you call it, as extremely important. You even write, "the teaching power is a peer to the legislative, the executive, and the judicial powers if it is not indeed the first among them."

We don't very often think about the theoretical basis of education, and it seems to me quite clear that the tutelary power, or what in our constitutional jargon resides in the states, is somehow subsumed under the police power, and I think, or try to assert, that every polity has an inherent tutelary power, the right to shape the next generation. There are all sorts of limits, but fundamentally the power to take hold of the children and to shape them in ways required by the culture and other things is an inherent power of the state. I have some arguments about whether it's an exclusive power or shared by others, but the teaching power, the tutelary power, seems to me one of the great inherent powers of government and, in a sense, prior to and underlies these other powers -- the legislative, executive, and judicial powers.

You make these arguments, we should say, in your book Government and the Mind. Let's go further. Help us understand what's wrong with the way we educate our children today. These thoughts led you to develop an experimental program which we'll talk about in a minute. You say, "College is that last formal or official chance to deal with two important questions: what am I supposed to do? --" which is what you were just referring to, "-- and, what is going on? What is it all about?" Clearly you believe that we're failing in those two areas.

Yes. I think we leave those essentially to religion, but we have this arrangement with religion which treats it as purely optional and private. Political institutions or public education finds it very difficult to deal with those questions.

So what have our students lost in a curriculum where the course drives everything, and the courses are run by people who are really training people for professions?

Especially when you get to the higher reaches of education, which is all I know anything about.

Yes, these are cognitive enterprises primarily in which the model is scientific, or initiation into one of the great professions. We know how to initiate people for professional life. We know how to train engineers or chemists or physicists ...

Or doctors or lawyers.

We know how to do that, we do that very well. And it's essentially initiating them into an ongoing art. We grab them as early as we can and do that.

When we're not initiating people into one of these familiar arts, we don't know what to do. We have some ideas: "Well, they ought to be able to read, ought to develop their mind in one way or another." But we don't have any conception of what to do when we're not training for those professions.

So my contribution, if it is one, is to assert that politics is another profession, and in a democracy, central, because you don't have to be a lawyer or a butcher or an engineer, but you do have to be, by virtue of the democratic ethos, a citizen and a political agent. In my judgment, great education is focused on preparing people for that role. It's astonishing even how much of literature deals with that. I'm impressed by the fact that something like Paradise Lost is essentially a political treatise. So the conception of politics I have is a rather broad one. It's the ultimate discipline. It's a profession, it's an art, and needs initiation into it. And if you don't [initiate them], people pick up rather foolish ideas, like "It's just a chance to get what I want," which is, I think, a complete betrayal of the significance of politics.

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