Stud Philos Educ (2016) 35:181–193

DOI 10.1007/s11217-015-9490-3

Against Educational Humanism: Rethinking

Spectatorship in Dewey and Freire

Charles Bingham1

Published online: 18 September 2015

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract In this essay, I investigate the human act of spectatorship as found in the work
of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. I will show that each is thoroughly anti-watching when it
comes to educational practices. I then problematize their positions by looking at their
spectatorial commitments in the realm of aesthetics. Both Dewey and Freire have a dif-
ferent opinion about spectatorship when it is a matter of watching art. I claim that this
different in opinion derives from the practice of ‘educational humanism’. By educational
humanism, I mean the tendency to posit stock human traits that derive from pedagogical
practices. Ultimately, I will take a stand against educational humanism, against the process
of back-forming, from educational circumstances, the desirability, or the undesirability, of
human traits.

Keywords Philosophy
Education
Freire
Dewey
Spectatorship
Educational

humanism
Pedagogy

Socrates: Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things
because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For
example: A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he
knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or
simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and
they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter (Plato 2008, Book X).
It is commonplace for philosophers to acknowledge Plato as consummate anti-artist
while acknowledging Aristotle as champion of mimesis and the ars poetica. And along
with this schism about the benefits of art go parallel presumptions about what it means to

& Charles Bingham

cwb@sfu.ca
1
Faculty of Education, Simon Frasier University, 1371 Borthwick Road, North Vancouver,
BC V7K1X9, Canada

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do versus what it means to watch, about who should do the doing and who should do the
watching. For Plato, listening and seeing is not equal to doing something for oneself.
Listening and seeing are, for Plato, derivative activities whose results end up duping the
spectator, putting him or her out of touch with the real world of what one actually does.
The Platonic condemnation of the spectator role is typified in this often-evoked passage
from the Republic:
Socrates: …and the spectator fancies that there can be no disgrace to himself in
praising and pitying any one who comes telling him what a good man he is, and
making a fuss about his troubles; he thinks that the pleasure is a gain, and why should
he be supercilious and lose this and the poem too? Few persons ever reflect, as I
should imagine, that from the evil of other men something of evil is communicated to
themselves. And so the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the sight of
misfortunes of others is with difficulty repressed in our own (Plato 2008, Book X).
For Aristotle on the other hand, watching and seeing provide—at least in the best of
aesthetic circumstances—space for reflection and catharsis, both of which can lead to
human flourishing. Aristotle’s Poetics, an extended users guide for spectatorship of poetry,
is most famous for its account of catharsis, whose effects are described by Hans-Georg
Gadamer in the following way…
What is experienced in such an excess of tragic suffering is something truly common.
The spectator recognizes himself and his finiteness in the face of the power of fate.
What happens to the great ones of the earth has exemplary significance…To see that
‘‘this is how it is’’ is a kind of self-knowledge for the spectator, who emerges with
new insight from the illusions in which he, like everyone else, lives (1975, 128).
While the spectatorial divide between Plato and Aristotle is a ripe theme for com-
mentary among scholars in philosopher, literary theory, and the Classics, in the following
article, I am interested in a different way of situating this long-standing schism. I am rather
interested in the ways that modern educational thought has inherited the Platonic/Aris-
totelian divide on spectatorship. While Plato long ago rejected spectatorship because of its
potential danger to the onlooker, it can be said that much twentieth century educational
thought has similarly condemned the spectator. Indeed, both progressive and critical
strands in educational thought—as manifested most clearly in the thought of John Dewey
and Paulo Freire—can be seen as Platonic inheritors. Progressivism and criticalism are
consistently at pains to condemn pedagogical practices that posit the student as a spectator.
And on the other side of the spectatorial divide, progressivism and criticalism confront
their own version of Aristotelianism in the form of ‘‘traditional’’ education. The twentieth
century advent of progressive and critical education, together with its repeated harangue
against the passivity instilled in the traditional classroom, has definite resonances with the
Greek arguments about the role of art, and the role of the onlooker, in the polis. In the
realm of education, Dewey and Freire are inheritors of the Platonic mantle. In their edu-
cational writings, they are against the spectatorship that typifies traditional, or ‘‘banking,’’
education.
In this essay, I will begin by outlining the Platonic orientation toward spectatorship to
be found in the work of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. I will show that each is thoroughly
anti-watching when it comes to educational practices. I will then problematize their
positions by looking at their spectatorial commitments in another realm, that of aesthetics.
It is notable that both Dewey and Freire have a different opinion about spectatorship when
it is a matter of watching art, as opposed to watching the teacher. In aesthetic situations,

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each of these thinkers is able to embrace the aesthetic experience of observation in a way
that they could not embrace ‘‘mere’’ observation in the classroom. This difference between
decrying spectatorship in one circumstance, and commending it in another, begs for
analysis. What is particular to education, as each of these thinkers understands it, that cries
for such anti-spectatorship? Answering this question, I will suggest that inconsistencies
about spectatorship in education derive from the practice of educational humanism. By
educational humanism, I mean the tendency to posit stock human traits that derive from
pedagogical practices. Ultimately, I will take a stand against educational humanism,
against the process of back-forming, from educational circumstances, the desirability, or
the undesirability, of human traits.

John Dewey on the Educational Spectator

In Democracy and Education, Dewey denounces spectatorship on a number of occasions.

For example, in Chapter 8, ‘‘Aims of Education,’’ he describes a specific classroom
practice: the setting of goals by the teacher. He elucidates the way that such goals should
be pursued by the well-educated student of a progressive classroom. The object of study is
a body of water:
If we know that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes and that they are likely to carry
disease, we can, disliking that anticipated result, take steps to avert it. Since we do
not anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons concerned in the
outcome, we are partakers in the process which produces the result. We intervene to
bring about this result or that (Dewey 2008).
In the classroom, the teacher must have goals, yes. But the student is not to be a mere
spectator of the teacher achieving those goals. The student must instead be encouraged to
pursue aim after aim, experience after experience, on his or her own in order to avoid the
passive role of watching and listening. To borrow the metaphor from the epigraph that
began this article, the student in a progressive classroom will not fancy that he or she is
looking at a carpenter. The student will be the carpenter.
While he advocates a classroom avoidance of the spectator role, Dewey reminds us that
traditional educators have too often been unconcerned with the detriments of spectatorship.
Their classrooms are full of watching and listening:
In schools, those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as acquiring
knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct
energy of intellect. The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is
engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly.
Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs
of activity (Dewey 2008, Ch. 11).
Following Dewey, then, traditional educators are more Aristotelian than they are Pla-
tonic in their treatment of students. In such a situation, students simply watch and listen as
knowledge is conveyed to them, this, rather than participating actively. There may be
catharsis, but it will only be in the ‘‘mind or consciousness,’’ not in the ‘‘organs of
activity.’’ The traditional student watches and listens to the carpenter but does not hammer
a nail.

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Dewey’s critique of spectatorship in education can be linked to his understanding of

epistemology. His anti-spectatorship in education is situated within his Darwinian
understanding of the human being as a well-developed, thinking animal. That is to say,
Dewey understands the human being as an animal who has developed the habit of thinking
over the millennia. This habit of thinking is not a passive habit, like watching. It is an
active habit, one that enables the human being to plan what he or she will do in the future.
Dewey explains his Darwinian response to spectator knowing in chapter 26, ‘‘Theory of
Morals’’:
The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its discovery of evolution….
As activity becomes more complex, coordinating a greater number of factors in space
and time, intelligence plays a more and more marked role, for it has a larger span of
the future to forecast and plan for. The effect upon the theory of knowing is to
displace the notion that it is the activity of a mere onlooker or spectator of the world,
the notion which goes with the idea of knowing as something complete in itself
(Dewey 2008).
This passage shows Dewey’s confidence that the human being is not meant to be a
spectator when he or she comes to know something. Why does Dewey not equivocate
about the error of spectator epistemology? Because evolution itself calls for a theory of
knowing that is active rather than onlooking. An onlooker view of knowledge-as-con-
templative-end-in-itself is not only wrong because it is passive; it is wrong because that is
not how the human animal is hard-wired to deal with knowledge. On this epistemological
register of anti-spectatorship, we find that becoming fully human entails working with
knowledge rather than observing it. Knowing is what humans do, not what they observe,
just as foraging and roaming is what animals do, not what they observe.

Paulo Freire and the Ideology of Spectatorship

Paulo Freire’s work radicalizes the anti-spectator project of progressive education. Dewey
offers a passive account of spectatorship in the sense that he locates spectatorship not in a
site of oppression and political contestation, but as an educational practice that goes against
nature. To this innocuous rendering, Freire responds: Spectator and participant roles do not
just happen. They are not simply the result of a misunderstanding, a wrong theory of
knowledge. These roles are rather products of an oppressive society where oppressors foist
spectator status on the oppressed. Schools aid and abet this foisting, and there will not be
freedom until schools can upset this dynamic so that all people are actors rather than
watchers.
Freire’s critique of spectatorship parallels Dewey’s in many ways, but Freire’s is always
concerned with the ideology behind educational passivity. Like Dewey, Freire bemoans the
predominant modes of teaching and learning in which the student is generally treated as a
spectator. For Freire, a critique of spectatorship is not a comment on traditional education,
but rather a way to expose the ‘‘banking system’’:
The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything) distinguishes two
stages in the action of the educator. During the first, he cognizes a cognizable object
while he prepares his lessons in his study or his laboratory; during the second, he
expounds to his students about that object. The students are not called upon to know,
but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher (2005, 80).

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The banking system thus treats the student as a spectator in an event that is prepared for
in advance by the teacher. First the teacher prepares his or her lesson. Then, the teacher
delivers the lesson while the student watches.
Freire also identifies the intentional slight-of-hand that is carried out by such a teacher.
The banking educator keeps to him or herself the thinking that goes on in the preparation of
the lesson. The effort he or she has expended in preparations for a lesson is his or hers
alone. The students do not ‘‘practice any act of cognition, since the object towards which
that act should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the
critical reflection of both teacher and students’’ (2005, 80). So in Freire’s analysis, spec-
tatorship is not simply the result of bad teaching technique. It results rather from a willful
distortion of what it means to think about an object of thought. The banking instructor, by
dichotomizing the activity the teacher, making him or herself first ‘‘cognitive’’ and then
‘‘narrative,’’ makes cognition into a possession. One steals cognition from students in the
process of promoting spectatorship.
Freire goes on to link human agency in general to the ability to act rather than watch.
…the banking approach masks the effort to turn men into automatons - the very
negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.
Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are
innumerable well- intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are
serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain
contradictions about reality. But sooner or later, these contradictions may lead for-
merly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to
domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their
present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human
(2005, 74–75).
The above passage speaks for itself. When students are turned into spectators, they are
dehumanized. This happens whether or not the banking instructor realizes what he or she is
doing. Once again, there is a marked difference from Dewey. While Dewey argues that
spectatorship is marked by an unhealthy passivity, Freire argues more strongly that
spectatorship dehumanizes people.
Certainly Freire is concerned, as is Dewey, with the epistemological follies of specta-
torship. Freire takes a hard line about what knowledge is, and what it is not. Knowledge,
for Freire—and this is clearly the Marxist aspect of Freire rather than his Hegelian aspect
or his psychoanalytic aspect—is knowledge in use. It is praxis. But when one is a spectator,
one never partakes in knowledge. ‘‘Knowledge,’’ writes Freire,
…emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient,
continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each
other.
In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who
consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know noth-
ing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of
oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry (2005, 72).
It is not just that the spectator will encounter barriers to knowing deeply. Even more
profoundly, knowledge does not exist when people are spectators. Knowledge only exists
in the midst of participants, when people are in each others’ company.

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Deweyan Ambivalence About Spectatorship: The Aesthetic Spectator

For all their criticisms spectatorship in education, something altogether different happens
when Dewey and Freire turn to the artistic image. With regard to art, each does an about-
face against Plato. Here I detail the role of the artistic onlooker in Dewey and Freire’s
work in order to answer the following question: What do their differing attitudes toward
spectatorship reveal?
Dewey’s analysis of aesthetic experience in Art as Experience reads like a hermeneutic
championing of the spectatorship that he so staunchly opposes in Democracy and Edu-
cation. In Art as Experience, he goes to great lengths to demonstrate the interconnected-
ness between the person who experiences art, and the work of art itself. He also
demonstrates the interconnectedness between the one who experiences art, and the pro-
duction of a work of art. In the book’s pivotal chapter, ‘‘Having an Experience,’’ Dewey
develops a symbiotic description of the doer of art and the onlooker of art, whose roles he
calls ‘‘artistic’’ and ‘‘esthetic,’’ respectively. ‘‘The word ‘esthetic,’’’ writes Dewey,
refers, as we have already noted, to experience as appreciative, perceiving, and
enjoying. It denotes the consumer’s rather than the producer’s standpoint. It is Gusto,
taste; and, as with cooking, overt skillful action is on the side of the cook who
prepares, while taste is on the side of the consumer…
These very illustrations, however, as well as the relation that exists in having an
experience between doing and undergoing, indicate that the distinction between
esthetic and artistic cannot be pressed so far as to become a separation (Dewey 1980,
47).
So the act perceiving a work of art and the act of producing a work of art cannot be
disentangled. On the one hand, one has the aesthetic experience of perceiving which, as
Dewey points out, is an unusually clear, penetrating experience. It is an experience that is
well-rounded and emphatic. It is memorable and organic. On the other hand, one has the
artistic experience of accomplishing a work, of creating a piece that instills in the per-
ceiver this depth of experience. From the perspective of the perceiver, aesthetic experi-
ence includes an intimation of the artistic process of production and intention. The
onlooker of a work of art must have a sense of the production and intent of the work of art
itself. This is not to say that the onlooker knows the specific circumstances of its pro-
duction and intent, but rather that the onlooker takes into account what such circumstance
might have been:
For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must
include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent. They
are not the same in any literal sense. But with the perceiver, as with the artist, there
must be an ordering of the elements of the whole that is in form, although not in
details, the same as the process of organization the creator of the work consciously
experienced (Dewey 1980, 54).
The onlooker must take the side of the artist at the same time that he or she remains an
onlooker.
From the perspective of the one who produces a work of art, there is also a double
consciousness, an understanding of what it means to receive the work:
To be truly artistic, a work must also be esthetic—that is, framed from enjoyed
receptive perception. Constant observation is, of course, necessary for the maker

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while he is producing. But if his perception is not also esthetic in nature, it is a

colorless and cold recognition of what has been done…(Dewey 1980, 48).
Just at the observer must partake in the role of the artist, so, too, must the artist take part
in the role of the observer.
With Dewey’s Hegelian observations in mind, it remains to be seen how, in the realm of
art, spectatorship is staunchly supported by Dewey, while at the same time, in the realm of
education (as well as in the realm of human agency in general and in the genesis of human
epistemology), spectatorship is constantly criticized. One explanation might be that Dewey
considers art to be a unique pre-occupation, a special case. It might be explained that
Dewey considers art sacred enough that all actions taken in response to the artist are
automatically beneficial. This would seem to make sense. However, this answer makes no
sense when it is set in the context of Dewey’s own theory of art. For, the very stated aim of
his book, Art As Experience, is to show how art should be theorized within the confines of
everyday experience rather than in the hallways of ‘high art.’ No, Dewey’s ambivalence
about spectatorship does not derive from some special capacity of art to empower the
spectator. On the contrary, it seems in the work of Dewey there is something in education
that makes spectatorship particularly loathsome. Dewey is not opposed to spectatorship in
art because, through art, the activity of the onlooker is initiated. However, in education,
spectatorship inspires passivity rather than activity. Education, but not art, has the ability to
turn spectatorship into a practice detrimental to the human being.

Paulo Freire on Aesthetic Specatorship

If John Dewey has different stances toward spectatorship in his theory of education vis-à-
vis his treatment of aesthetics, he is accompanied by Paulo Freire in this regard. To look at
the role of aesthetic spectatorship in Freire, it is helpful to look at his own teaching
practices, the ones documented especially in Education for Critical Consciousness (2013).
Significantly, Freire’s method of teaching indeed includes the spectatorship of art on the
part of his students even while he criticizes the spectatorship of banking pedagogy. Freire’s
teaching methods entails, for example, the use of the artistic works of Fransisco Brenand.
He uses Brenand’s sketches to engage culture circles, and to help students articulate the
practical circumstances of oppression. The point here is this: Freire is critical of educa-
tional spectatorship; nevertheless, he asks his own students to be onlookers of artwork.
Freire uses art in order to stir the critical consciousness of his adult students. The teacher in
Freirean pedagogy puts students in front of Brenand’s sketches. The students are asked to
dialogue with the teacher until the sketches are fully decoded, until the students discuss the
sketches in such a way that their own world is successfully explored and articulated. The
students are asked to transform themselves through the act of spectatorship.
To my knowledge, Freire does not develop a full-blown theory of art as Dewey has
done. So it must suffice to look at Freire’s teaching method, in juxtaposition to his specific
critique of educational spectatorship, and extrapolate some general observations. These
observations are as follows: First, Freire is critical of the spectatorship he observes in
banking education. He is critical especially of the sort of teaching which separates teaching
into the two separate spheres of cognition and narration. He is critical of spectatorship
because it dehumanizes people. He is critical of spectatorship because it does not produce
any true knowledge. Secondly, Freire is not critical of spectatorship when it occurs in the

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context of problem-posing education. He in fact advocates spectatorship when it takes the

particular form of decoding images in order to transform the world of the student.
How might we explain this ambivalence toward spectatorship in Freire’s work? As in
Dewey’s case, it could be argued that art is exceptional. It could be argued that art has the
special attribute of bringing student and teacher together in dialogic engagement. Tyson
Lewis has done a fine job of arguing for this aesthetic exceptionality in Freire’s practice
(Lewis 2011). He has shown that Freire’s relation to aesthetic spectatorship is akin to
Berthold Brecht’s dramatic involvement of audience onlookers, or to Boal’s ‘‘Theatre of
the Oppressed.’’ Following Lewis, this dramatic involvement with students would mean
that while Freire does advocate spectatorship in education, it is an active, communal
version of onlooking that he advocates. That is, passive spectatorship quickly disappears in
Freire’s teaching practices because spectatorship is infused with dialogue about that which
is being watched. Lewis notes that Freire thus demonstrates a ‘‘correspondence theory
between intention, codification, decodification, and action’’ (2011, 39). Following Freire’s
method, there is no hierarchy between production, interpretation, and activity guided by a
work of art. All are one in the pedagogy of the oppressed.
I believe that Lewis is correct in making the claim that the aesthetic reception of art has
an exceptional status in Freire’s teaching practice. However, it also follows, as it follows in
the case of Dewey, that when we focus on the issue of spectatorship itself, there is an
educational aspect of spectatorship that seems to be particularly important as well. On the
one hand, being a spectator of art can be empowering. On the other, being a spectator per
se in the classroom is denounced.
This educational aspect of spectatorship defies the coherence of Freire’s otherwise tidy
logic. If we follow Freire’s pedagogical logic, we find that the problem-posing teacher can
change the ill-effects of spectatorship into benefits. The problem-posing situation creates
actors out of spectators. Thus, spectatorship is at once posited as an unwanted attribute of
banking education, and it is also posed as an attribute that can be summarily transformed
by the intentions of the problem-posing educator. But if problem-posing education can
create a form of active spectatorship, then the spectatorship in banking education should
not be such a concern. If spectatorship, a practice central to the aims of the banking system,
a practice that is fundamentally dehumanizing, can suddenly be transformed by problem-
posing, this would logically mean that this fundamentally hurtful part of the banking
system is excusable if it is transformed into dialogue. If this is so, then the banking system
that Freire describes so well, and in such great detail, actually has fundamental attributes
that are not so inherently detrimental. That is, the banking system would seem to have
major traits that, while harmful, are easily converted for the good. This leaves one to
wonder whether the banking system has any specific attributes that can’t be converted for
the good. It leaves one to wonder whether the banking system’s close links to spectatorship
deserve such vehement critique in the first place.

Spectatorial Ambivalence: Jacques Rancière’s Contribution

One can accurately say, and the ambivalences enumerated above attest to the fact, that
spectatorship is a troublesome notion. In this regard, it is useful to take heed of Jacques
Rancière’s work in his essay, The Emancipated Spectator (2007). Therein, he has argues
that spectatorship can never be pinned down as strictly beneficial or strictly detrimental. He
reminds us that the watcher and the watched are often subject to competing constituencies.

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For example, the person who watches is often the person who is not the least, but rather the
most, empowered. The boss, the master, the teacher, the leader—these people watch as
others do the work for them. In this sense, watching is hardly disempowering, and it is
hardly inactive. Yes, one could say, along with Hegel, that the master who watches is
simultaneously alienated from his or her work. Nonetheless, there is great activity and
power even as the master is alienated. There is something amiss when spectatorship is
described simply as a lack.
Writing of the multiple roles that can be attributed to the spectator, Rancière notes:
For instance, you can exchange the positions of the superior and the inferior. The
spectator is usually disparaged because he does nothing, while the performers on the
stage–or the workers outside–do something with their bodies. But it is easy to turn
matters around by stating that those who act, those who work with their bodies, are
obviously inferior to those who are able to look– that is, those who can contemplate
ideas, foresee the future, or take a global view of our world. The positions can be
switched, but the structure remains the same. What counts, in fact, is only the
statement of opposition between two categories: There is one population that cannot
do what the other population does. There is capacity on one side and incapacity on
the other (2007, 277)
Most critiques of spectatorship, Rancière notes, are based on a logic of inequality.
They are based on the same logic of inequality that is too often used to describe the
pedagogical relation. Following this logic, it is too often assumed that one person has
knowledge and the other does not have knowledge, that one person knows how to dis-
tribute knowledge and the other does not know how to obtain knowledge on his or her
own. In such a relation, the one who has knowledge is said to act while the one who
needs to obtain knowledge is said to watch the knowledgeable actor. In this situation, the
teacher assumes that there is distance to be bridged. The teacher needs to bring the
student closer to a set of prescribed outcomes because the student is still distant from the
teacher’s knowledge.
So there are two salient aspects of Rancière’s work on spectatorship. One repeats the
message Rancière delivered in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) and The Philosopher and
His Poor (2004). Namely, that critiques of spectatorship establish the very distance that
they seek to abolish. The second aspect reminds us that the logic of spectatorship is a
vacillating logic since the looker is sometimes the one who is not in power, but is also,
sometimes, the one who is in power. Sometimes looking de-authorizes, but sometimes
looking authorizes. In what follows, I would like to investigate this second aspect of
spectatorship. For while it is possible to join Rancière’s general condemnation of those
who critique spectatorship—and while Rancière’s general condemnation might apply to
both Dewey and Freire since they are critical of spectatorship in education; nevertheless,
and as I have shown, there is too much ambivalence toward spectatorship in Dewey and
Freire to situate them squarely as objects of this general condemnation. Yet Rancière’s
second observation is quite apropos to the ambivalent positions on spectatorship taken by
both Dewey and Freire. In the work of Dewey and Freire, spectatorship certainly vacillates.
However, I would like to add some insights that do not necessarily follow from Rancière’s
account of spectatorship. I do not believe that spectatorship is simply vacillatory. I do not
believe that education picks up spectatorship by any handle it wants. I believe, rather, that
the treatment of spectatorship in education is one example of the general trend in education
that I am calling educational humanism.

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General Humanism Versus Educational Humanism

At this point, I want to claim, perhaps a bit counterintuitively, that the inconsistencies
about spectatorship evidenced in the work of Dewey and Freire are instructive. I will use
the notion of humanism, in general, to make this claim. Dewey and Freire can certainly be
called general humanists. By general humanism, I mean the practice of identifying a
certain telos in what it means to be human. For Dewey, it can be said that the human being
is an adaptive, living organism. And for Freire, the telos of being truly human resides in
praxis.1 Now for the purposes of this study it is not necessary to denounce humanism per se
even if I am personally no fan of teleological humanism. What I am rather concerned with
is the wrongness of educational humanism. And, I think that Dewey and Freire’s incon-
sistencies about spectatorship show that educational humanism does not necessarily follow
from general humanism, although the former can be mistakenly advocated as if general
humanism necessitates educational humanism.
Let me explain how the above-mentioned inconsistencies are instructive. John Dewey
and Paulo Freire are general humanists. As such, they advocate Darwinian and Marxist
understandings of the human being respectively. Indeed, their humanisms are steadfast
throughout their respective works. Humanism in general presents a telos, not a prescription
for minute-by-minute activity. For example, one might say that humans should be generous
rather than selfish. Yet even with the best of humanistic intentions, one has selfish thoughts
from time to time. However, when these authors address the matter of spectatorship in
education, they seek out a straw man—or one might say a straw practice—in traditional
and banking education, a practice they claim has to do with the telos of the human being.
Their inconsistencies regarding spectatorship are instructive precisely because they show
that educational humanism has no teleological or developmental justification. That is to
say, the general humanisms of Dewey and Freire aren’t at odds with spectatorship. Only
when spectatorship gets inflected by education does it become a detrimental way of being.
Thus in both thinkers, educational humanism is not the same as humanism. It is rather a
quasi-humanist rhetorical strategy to discredit a particular form of pedagogy.

Educational Humanism and the Spectator

To reiterate, educational humanism occurs when educators create stock human traits out of
practices that have become common in classrooms. Take Dewey’s spectator as an example.
He identifies the qualities of traditional education that make spectatorship into an unde-
sirable state of the being within traditional education. This last phrase—within traditional
education—is key. It is key because it is something that can easily be overlooked, indeed
has been sometimes overlooked by Dewey himself, when one considers the role of
spectatorship in education. Dewey has identified the ways in which traditional education
turns students into spectators in a disempowering way, but he unfortunately does not keep
the horse in the stable. In his zeal to point out the detriments of spectatorship in traditional
education, he makes the quality of spectatorship into a general aspect of human experience.
In his critique of traditional education, Dewey rightly identifies the fact that traditional
educators turn students into spectators, and, in the process, treat them wrongly. But this last
aspect—in the process, treat them wrongly—is paramount. Not all spectators are treated

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I am grateful to Gert Biesta his thoughts on the relation general humanism and educational humanism.

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wrongly, and not all spectators are disempowered. In his educational writing, he treats
spectatorship as if it is an undesirable human practice tout court.
The same thing can be said of Freire. Freire criticizes the role of the spectator within the
banking system. He claims that being a spectator in such a system prevents students from
becoming fully human. His message is clear. One cannot become fully human when one is
a spectator. Freire describes human attributes in his pedagogical writings, capacities that
take on the sacrosanct quality of describing what it means to be human in all cases. His
work implies, over and over, that he is offering a pedagogical method based upon what it
means to ‘‘become fully human’’ (2005, 75). Freire is thus an unabashed practitioner of
educational humanism. Indeed straightforwardness about the educational necessity of
humanism is certainly part of what makes Freire’s work compelling. When Friere writes
things such as ‘‘In the banking system, students become mere spectators,’’ there is a
compelling tone. ‘‘That’s right,’’ one is tempted to say, ‘‘no human being should be forced
to be a mere spectator.’’ Educational humanism has the faults of a ‘Hitler’s mustache’
argument. That is to say, one might make the specious argument that if Hitler has a
mustache, then it wrong for people to have mustaches. Similarly it might be said that since
oppressive pedagogy operates through the use of spectatorship, then spectatorship is
wrong. But this is an eroneous way of proving that spectatorship is an undesirable human
trait, or even that spectatorship is wrong in education.

Rethinking Spectatorship, Rethinking Educational Humanism

To conclude, I want to stress that it is important to be cautious about summarily linking

educational practices to specific human traits. It is important not to think that educational
situations give us a key to ascertaining normative judgments on how human beings should
be. I have taken the figure of the spectator as one example: A number of things could be
said about the figure of the spectator in John Dewey and Paulo Freire. It could be said that
each is thoroughly platonic in their critique of spectatorship; that each is contradictory with
regard to spectatorship; and, that each says one thing here and another thing there about the
spectator. It could also be said that both Dewey and Freire base their critiques of the
spectator on the presumption that some people are not as capable as others. Or, it could be
said that they are simply ambivalent about a theme—spectatorship—that has left thinkers
ambivalent for centuries. In this essay, I have offered a different analysis.
I maintain instead that there is a tempting tendency among educators to link pedagogy
to the one best way to be human. This tendency is ultimately what I am speaking against.
We should try to avoid making certain human qualities the aim of education. For, the only
thing that such a tendency leads to is paternalism toward those who do not already exhibit
such qualities or, what’s worse, endless research on behalf of those who are slower than
others to attain these qualities. Even such great educators as Dewey and Freire are tempted,
as are many of us, to put a human face on everything that goes on in classrooms. What has
proven to me to be hopeful, in the analysis I have offered above, is not precisely the
ambivalence of spectatorship, but it is the space that such ambivalence is witness to. As
spectatorship is taken and mis-taken, one finds even more space for being more ‘‘fully
human,’’ by which it is best to mean being human without specific definition.
Today, as western-style education takes up more and more of the lifecourse, one can
witness educational humanism at work in many instances. As one example, take the notion
of learning, and the figure of the student as learner. It is a fact that one of the things schools

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do is to promote learning. However, over the course of the last two centuries, the figure of
the learner has been awarded the status of being an unequivocally ennobling human
activity.2 We now have learning centers in our schools and universities. We have the goal
of life-long learning. And on the contrary, we have the category of ‘‘learning disability’’
and the supposed undesirable consequences associated with such a lack. Learning, as a
distinctly ennobling human activity, seems almost unquestionable in present times.
Moreover, the act of learning seems to be taking over the ways most people think of what
educational institutions should be doing. Current popular discourse on schools and uni-
versities has effectively insinuated the activity of learning into the major aim of these
institutions. From ‘learning outcomes’ to ‘learning environments,’ to ‘institutions of higher
learning,’ educational humanism has created a fixation on the human ability to learn.
However, learning is just one of many things that happen in educational institutions. And it
is not necessarily the best, or even the primary, occurrence in schools. My point is this:
When educational humanism takes hold, it tends to limit, rather than foster, the myriad
ways that people might act in the world.
By offering the previous example, I mean to clarify the type of educational humanism
against which I am speaking in this article. Spectatorship and learning—these are human
traits that are massively visible and subject to loads of discourse in our era of universal
compulsory schooling. These discursively saturated traits are the types of educational
humanisms that I am most critical of. Of course, educational humanism happens in small
doses as well. In any particular classroom, one finds many traits of the human being
encouraged and discouraged. One will find traits that are more generally encouraged (or
discouraged) across many classrooms, and many traits that are more idiosyncratic,
encouraged (or discouraged) on a one-off basis. And of course, as an educator it may
indeed be difficult to operate, to teach, to organize a classroom, without some figure of the
human being in mind.3 Thus, as a matter of practicality, I do not advocate that educators
attempt to clear the slate of human images and teach as if people were not people. I rather
advocate, first, a general awareness of educational humanism, that it exists and operates in
ways that can be limiting to various ways of human flourishing. And second, that one be
vocal and critical when the cart of school gets put before the horse of the human.

References
Biesta, G. 2006. Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Bingham, C., and G. Biesta. 2010. Jacques rancière: Education, emancipation, truth. New York:
Continuum.
Dewey, J. 1980. Art and experience. New York: Perigee.
Dewey, J. 2008. Democracy and education. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm.
Freire, P. 2005. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Gadamer, H.-G. 1975. Truth and method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York:
Continuum.
Lewis, T. 2011. The future of the image in critical pedagogy. Studies in Philosophy and Education 30:
37–51.
Plato. 2008. The Republic. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm.

2
On the learning explosion and its drawbacks, see Biesta (2006). Also see the ‘‘Student, Learner, Speaker’’
chapter in Bingham and Biesta (2010).
3
On the common practice of characterizing students as needing to be a particular version of human being,
see ‘‘The Figure of the Child’’ chapter in Bingham and Biesta (2010).

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Rancière, J. 1991. The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford:
University of Stanford Press.
Rancière, J. 2004. The philosopher and his poor. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rancière, J. 2007. ‘‘The emancipated spectator,’’ Art Forum, March, 271–280.

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