They had spelled out to me with brutal clarity and in every possible way that I was a worthless human being. You don't accept it, but it is literally unacceptable. Those who have accepted it are all, without exception, dead.

- James Baldwin, "My Childhood," a short story.

Truth be told, and no one else seeks to tell it more mightily than Toni Morrison, the notion that higher education involves value-free inquiry and the constant pursuit of objective reasoning is patently invalid. All we need do is think about these matters and we must reach the same conclusion as Professor Morrison. But as the man said, aye, there's the rub, for it is in the very act of thinking, or more precisely, of self-reflective thinking, that we begin to see not only the multiple truths of higher education, the multiple stories of our role as teacher and guide, but the degree to which our thinking creates the contexts, constructs, and ultimately the values of higher education. We begin to see as well that human beings have the power to teach wisdom.

Not always the easiest of enterprises, the troublesome nature of self-reflection was recognized by John Dewey, who saw that it involves a "willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance."1 Self-reflection obliges us to concentrate not only on present action but on the antecedents and consequences of action. It causes us to focus on what Edward Shils called "the control imposed by [one's] own moral self-scrutiny and self-discipline."2 To be self-reflective is to explore the various external influences affecting consciousness, as, for example, the culture's values, conventions, belief systems, and morality.

Just as self-reflection is employed in the solving of problems, like the teaching of values and the appreciation of the contexts or frames of knowledge in which problems and experiences arise and come to be resolved and publicized, so, too, does it move us away from (unthinking) routines and habit, while opening us to surprise and novelty, possibility, and growth. According to Dewey, the self-reflective person eventually assesses his or her own action, although not immediately. There was, for Dewey, a period of time in which judgment must be suspended, during which a person assesses his or her action or behavior. In many respects, it is precisely this extended moment, of suspended judgment that Professor Morrison instructs us to consider, the better to appreciate the manner in which higher education is both value-laden and value-seeking.

To believe, for example, that any school can exist outside political or ideological realms with their attendant value structures, is to fail to recognize that schools are themselves the embodiment of the existing democratic organism; it is to imagine that schools exist outside the clearly demarcated boundaries of justice. Said simply, it is a failure to judge thought or action. Such a belief represents a (mindless) protection against obvious truths, obvious realities. Self-reflection of the sort in which Professor Morrison begs us to engage, necessarily becomes part and parcel of the act of our questioning of higher education, our conduct, our conversations with others as well as with ourselves, and ultimately our taking responsibility for our thoughts and actions.3

Through constant self-reflection, we assume the role of (public) actor and (private) critic alike, for inevitably each of us is both teacher and student. Conversely, through what Dewey warned was the appeal of appetite, sense, caprice, and a focus purely on momentary circumstance, we may be fated to remain forever in the role of audience member, genuinely believing that ideology, caprice, taste, and subjectivity never enter the realms of our inquiry or pedagogy.

Granted, self-reflection takes time and practice. Carried to the extreme, it may even provoke the sensation that one is going mad. According to Dewey, introspect puts people in a constant "state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt, sensations" hardly nourishing in the living classroom, if, in fact, a classroom is valued as a safe container of inquiry and character. Thoughtfulness, not caprice; reflection, not "gut response"; character, not personality; deliberation, not impulse; depth of thought, not reaction time; ethics, not merely "values clarifications," become the words of the day. The world hangs on our assumptions and conclusions, just as it ought to hang on our character, for character undergirds the unbroken wholeness of life, and, hence, its formation must become one of the habits of education itself. As Dewey put it, "Sometimes slowness and depth of response are intimately connected. . . . 'Brightness' may be but a flash in the pan."4

Over the years I have observed young people in high schools and colleges undertaking the process of thinking about thinking, what psychologists refer to as metacognition, or more simply, "going meta." I observe them bearing witness to their own actions and thoughts, their values and their often-shifting sense of justice and injustice. Whatever they say, I suspect that they are frequently conducting their more complicated conversations with themselves, conversations ultimately about whether they are good, and just what it is that makes someone, or certain circumstances, good, right, moral. It may be the first time in their lives that they have undertaken such disciplined (and undisciplined) "study." They are watching themselves watching themselves, often using one another as mirrors. They seek proof of what they are doing and what they are, or at least justifiable rationales for their actions and being. All too often, they feel obliged to generate an answer to that frightful question: What do you do to justify your existence?

Adolescents may act or think because someone told them to, or act in a particular manner merely because it has become thoughtless habit. In great measure because of their teachers, or more precisely the character of their teachers, they are able to become mindful, thoughtful, critical, self-examining, self-reflective, moral. As Rollo May noted, "Man is the particular being who has to be aware of himself, be responsible for himself, if he is to become himself."5 Through self-reflection, and with it the establishment of character, which itself assumes an ongoing series of deliberations about morality, ethical behavior, and the nature of justice--or at very least the ability to recognize the face of justice--these students begin to reveal an occasionally irritating but utterly essential capacity for self-awareness as well as a capacity for acting responsibly, not only for themselves, but for others. And herein the critical point from Dewey that for a moment marries him in thought to Professor Morrison:

Education has accordingly not only to safeguard an individual against the besetting erroneous tendencies of his own mind--its rashness, presumption, and preferences of what chimes with self--interest to objective evidence-but also to undermine and destroy the accumulated and self-perpetuating prejudices of long ages.6

Of course we teach values. The proposition is as axiomatic as saying that genuine democracies allow us to make decisions about ourselves. Values not only seep into our classrooms, they flood classrooms, eventually aiding a student's capacity to discern the good from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the beautiful from the ugly. The mere admonition, "Please, children, only one person can speak at a time," teaches values and, in not a small manner, character. "Please don't take Johnny's sandwich" not only maintains a miniature civil order in the kindergarten, it lays a foundation for the concept and reality of virtue, and hence virtuous conduct. Respect for the child tends to prepare for the responsible adult, in part by containing impulses toward violence.

Surely we appreciate these truisms. But do we recognize and, even more, honor Professor Morrison's remarks about injustice and mistreatment that live all too regularly outside the academy's walls? Dare we, at this hour, find ourselves willing to address Nietzsche's similarly haunting question: "What has become of that reflection on moral problems which has always been the deep concern of every noble society?"7 Do we concern ourselves with the recipe of American pie to which she alludes, or is it possible that too many of us, albeit well intentioned in our book-lined offices, would appear to Professor Morrison as evidencing the traits of John Locke's third wrong-thinking man, who while ostensibly following the dictates of reason, nonetheless was unable to determine what he needed to know in order to render his reasoning worthwhile.8 (None of us as teachers would ever admit to falling into the category of Locke's first two wrong-thinking men: the one who rarely reasoned anything at all but instead depended on others in whom he had faith to make judgments for him, and the one who eschewed reason, arguing eternally for passion and feeling. None of us, moreover, as teachers, would ever fall into the intellectual abyss recently sketched by Alan Ryan: namely, the dangerous tendency "to believe anything that makes us feel good, or that we need only to believe something firmly enough for it to be as good as true.")9

Self-reflective thinking, in contrast, is thinking gone right. It results from the constant exercise of thoughtfulness, logic, careful reasoning, or the positive habits of the mind which ideally are taught and nourished in schools, that is to say, by teachers. Which brings me to one last admonition regarding reflective thinking from Dewey, one last intellectual marriage bond with Morrison that seems worth dwelling upon in a discussion of teaching values in classrooms:

If a man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, then they are guided by inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appetite, caprice or the circumstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered, unreflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the person at the mercy of appetite, sense and circumstance.10

I cite Dewey regarding reflection precisely because of my concern for the child in grammar school, high school, or college, who, because of our pedagogical inaction or ill-founded action, lives his or her life with an enslaved mind, one that derives not merely from the injustice of our culture, but the injustice of our actions, or our failure to act, as teachers. These are the minds of James Baldwin's dead. What else can the enslaved mind do but accept through whim, impulse, sense, and appetite the stimuli hitting it from an often insidious marketplace of products, slogans, and even ideas? No one is more vulnerable than the young student just beginning to appreciate the power of the mind to navigate through (go meta), and, even more exciting, to influence external as well as internal stimuli, social constructs as well as utopian avenues and fields.

Professor Morrison asks something else of us. She asks us to render initial judgments and then further judgments on the judgments already made. For in the end, mere reflection is not sufficient; at some point, a time for judgment suddenly is upon us. Judgment means imputing value, not only distinguishing the good from the bad, the just from the unjust. It implies defining goodness and justice, or at least offering our very best and most diligent deliberations about these concepts. (Dewey insisted, we may recall, that citizens create communities of deliberation.) No longer are we merely falling back on memorized rules of behavior, what psychologists call pre-conventional reasoning. Now we are reacting to the inherently contradictory, the controversial, the sticky, hard stuff. Now is the time we require good teachers, or at least the confidence to depend on what good teachers have left in us to call up (literally "re-cognize"), as engines of enlightened moral action.

Our thinking, like our seat in the classroom, is enshrouded in ideology which gives purpose to our lives, creates templates for investigating both the personal and social world, while allowing us to recognize grievances derived from circumstances of unjust communities. Predicated on values, the perspective offered by ideology acts as a guardian of singular identities. Democracy lives in the mind, along with society, just as it lives in the streets, the tenements and office buildings, the antiquated school houses lacking books, and the modern arenas advertising condominium seating for that certain crust of sports fan. It goes without saying that thinking and action go hand in hand; my conversations with my teacher, and my self, ultimately lead to behavior and conduct, personal character or the lack of it, that others will witness and assess.

Stephen Kemmis makes these same points when he postulates that reflection is not purely an internal process but a social one and that a culture's ideology ultimately shapes our tudents' (seemingly personal) reflections in the same way that these same reflections sculpt ideology.11 (Hopefully, more than a few of us are aware of how history has affected us and how we, in turn, affect our reading of it. For without history our worlds are rendered merely skin deep, depthless.) For reflection, Kemmis notes, isn't something that goes on only in one's head. In reflection we look beyond our minds, outward beyond the academic walls at the social order, just or unjust, that ultimately determines the products of reflection and, hence, the actions taken by all of us as a result of our (ostensibly personal) deliberations.

Most intriguing, Kemmis further notes, is that as the individual undertakes purposeful self-reflection in both thought and action, all three of Aristotle's fundamental modes of reasoning begin to reveal themselves. Every thought and action must contain what Aristotle called the technical or instrumental form of reasoning; always there are means and ends of deliberations, and both must be considered and appraised. Technical reasoning represents as well the foundation of a person's insistence on controlling natural powers, the way one imagines what one is doing bv endlessly listening to scientific predictions, or engaging in what Jerome Bruner calls paradigmatic thinking.12

Second, there is what Aristotle called the practical aspect: how, ultimately, will we judge thinking and acting? Will we, for example, act rightly or wrongly given the nature of historical events or prevailing social circumstances? Will we reflect on the moral way to conduct ourselves? Without practical deliberation, after all, without teachers who demand that we make these deliberations, there will never be anything resembling an authentic conscience.

Finally, there is theoretical reasoning or what Aristotle labeled speculation, the pursuit of truth for its own sake. And here just before the end, we must pause, for we have come to a critical juncture in our discussion.

In reflecting on Professor Morrison's message and on the act of reflection itself, we ask, Why even address these matters of value or character instruction or the pursuit of truth for its own sake? Why even wonder aloud about Nietzsche's stinging comment: "How inadequate to the task of making a human being human are the highest institutes of learning, the universities, the leaders and the institutions with which we are content."13 We may wonder too about the reasons for attending school, any school, in the first place. Is it possibly because, in Kemmis's words, we hope to understand how, through the consideration of value instruction, we may "achieve emancipation from irrationality, injustice and social fragmentation?"14 Can Toni Morrison, in other words, create a template for every one of us, not merely our students, that allows to attack the free floating, thoughtless, and amoral definitions of self and society, and thereby free our minds from the enslavement Dewey described? Equally important, might we contemplate the s ocietal regimes, real and imagined, that push us all toward unjust values, immorality, and irrational if not openly self-deceptive behavior which, in turn, causes us to feel isolated, fragmented, alienated, lonely, dissatisfied, and, alas, distracted?15 Indeed, some of the regimes to which Morrison alludes are already upon us, gloating in the power they maintain. It is already happening, as Benjamin Barber writes, that our "identities are compromised and lost and our sense of concrete temporality and fixed place, hence our essential security--social, familial and personal--is put permanently at risk."16

How, then, do we answer the child's question: Why do I have to go to school? Do we respond: In order to get a better job? Improve one's lot? Do we utter, and not facetiously, the words of my own father: "Those who don't keep up with the times don't deserve to live in the times?" Do we contend that education, ideally, represents not only inquiry and disciplined study, but the bedrock of moral character and enduring virtue? Is education truly what Nietzsche called "a radiation of light and warmth, a loving, whispering fall of night rain."17 Or, might we allege that one reason for our being in this classroom at this precise moment is so that we may begin to discern the outlines of a reformed, if not utopian, community of engaged citizens?

Might it be that education helps us to behold and properly judge with mindfulness the good man, the good woman, the good life, as well as the features of the mind and culture that make this goodness a reality, along with the features of the mind and culture that establish and perpetuate injustice and the metaphorical and all too palpable components of enslavement? Are we here to know just a mite of the temporal and spatial circumstances that define those parts of our destinies not altered by sheer luck? Are our studies meant to help us decipher how precisely it is that we arrived here, and why it might be that some of us seem to remain still, in one place, while others move on?

Are we, in the words of Mark Taylor, ever to know the tension between individual integrity and communal destiny?18 Are we meant to learn that selfhood, self-realization, and freedom are callings defined in great measure by learned values and just societies? Are we destined to squander the good that God has given us? And if this is the case, should we not commence our lesson, our reflections really, with the concluding words of Toni Morrison:

If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.

NOTES:

1John Dewey, How We Think, (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1991).
2Edward Shils, The Calling of Education: The Academic Ethic and Other Essays on Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 104.
3See Thomas Lickona, Educating for Character and Responsibility (New York: Bantam, 1991). See also Israel Sheffler, Philosophy and Education (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1966).
4Dewey, 37.
5Rollo May, The Discovery of Being (New York: Norton, 1983), 98.
6Dewey, 25.
7Friederica Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, translated by James W. Hillesheim and Malcolm R. Simpson (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1965) 11.
8John Locke, cited in Dewey.
9Alan Ryan, review of The Revival of Pragmatism, edited by Morris Dickstein. The New York Times Book Review, April 4, 1999: 10.
10Dewey, 67.
11See his "Action Research and the Politics of Reflection" in D. Boyd, R. Keogh, D. Walker, eds., Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning (London: Kogan Page, 1985), 139-164. I am grateful to Arthur Beane for calling my attention to this volume.
12Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
13Nietzsche, 9-10.
14Kemmis, 142.
15Thomas J. Cottle, At Peril: Stories of Injustice (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
16Benjamin Barber, "Brave New World," review of three volumes by Manuel Castells. The Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1999: A23.
17Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, xviii.
18Mark Taylor, Hiding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.