COMMUNICATIVE VIRTUES AND
EDUCATIONAL RELATIONS
Suzanne Rice
Nicholas C. Burbules
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Various strains of postmodern thought have come to dominate the critical literature on education. This literature tends to assume a pervasive system of power relations that encompass and distort all educational activities; within a regime of domination, repressive institutions — including educational institutions — serve to maintain and legitimate the order of things. Power is systematized, to the point where no one controls it, no one can escape it, and we can conceive of progressive practice only in terms of self-conscious struggle within and against that system.1 This literature has often rejected such values as “dialogue” and “community,” not in the belief that we need more equitable conceptions of “dialogue,” or that efforts to establish community need to be made more inclusive; rather, these values have been rejected out-right on grounds that they are themselves undesirable. Having conceived all educational endeavors in terms of relations of power, writers in this tradition conclude that attempts to engage in dialogue or to foster community, for instance, inevitably exclude and suppress marginalized groups’ histories, perspectives, and concerns, while sustaining those of groups already occupying the “center.” Thus, Mustafa Ü. Kiziltan and his coauthors argue, for example, that education ought to operate “according to a logic which defies and defers ‘consensus’…guided by the search for dissention, which destabilizes and disturbs closures generated by closed economies of meaning, dialogue, and self-regulative systems.”2
Yet we find that these authors inadvertently reveal just how difficult it is to sustain practically the position they advocate theoretically; indeed, having argued that aims such as dialogue or community are undesirable, these authors often implicitly invoke just such values as a basis for their own positions.3 This tendency toward self-contradiction suggests that an exclusive focus on dissention, destabilization, and disturbance cannot sustain a positive conception of education. Education is, at least in part, the means by which social groups reproduce themselves; it entails availing the young of certain dispositions, values, and knowledge possessed by the adult members of the group into which they are born.4 Such reproduction is achieved largely through various communicative practices. Education should not be conceived as merely reproductive, of course, but these reproductive aspects cannot be eliminated from a conception recognizable as educational, as those promoting continual dissention and destabilization recommend.
We do live in a world of terrible and destructive abuses of power, and by often neglecting the histories, perspectives, and needs of marginalized groups, formal education can be implicated in such wrongs. Strictly reproductive and monolithic conceptions of education threaten to be repressive, and from this standpoint it is understandable why one reaction has been to reject any attempt to define a normative conception of education as inevitably “imperialistic.” In our view, however, it is possible to respond to this criticism, not by rejecting the formulation of educational aims, but by seeking to identify more inclusive and flexible ones. With all respect for pluralism, we believe that humans continually affirm by their social activities that certain broad ways of living, speaking, and interacting with one another are better than others, and it is only in the haze of hypertheory that one can imagine otherwise. To us, it seems more honest to articulate and defend these values as carefully as we can, than it is to assert that we can dispense with them. Education, broadly speaking, is our attempt to foster these qualities in ourselves and in others.
In our view, a conception of education that is sensitive to the concerns raised in the postmodern literature, while resisting some of its excesses, will not be derived from transcendent principles or conclusive rational arguments, but from a process of persuasion and involvement that is sustainable over time. “Education” is a uniquely bootstrapped cluster of ideals and practices, in which it is only by means of its own efforts that its merits can be established. In other words, we can establish the credibility of any particular set of educational aims only through educational efforts. That this view of education is not simply another coercive and constraining regime can only be shown in practice — a practice that is persuasive and inclusive, not dominating, and one that can be sustained across different groups and points of view, over time. This quality of sustainability, within a voluntaristic and pluralistic social frame, is education’s chief demonstration of its commitment to human freedom and its superiority to alternative forms of influence. If persons have chosen not to be part of this social frame, we only have two alternatives: one is to strive to engage them, consistent with the ideals and practices we espouse, in a way of living, speaking, and interacting with one another that they may come to see as desirable; the other is to respect their separateness and way of life, however incomplete or inadequate it may appear to us, as a creditable alterative — especially when it has been chosen thoughtfully and in full awareness of other possibilities.
In the model of education we are sketching here, communication obviously plays a central role, and at its core are certain communicative virtues, including patience, tolerance for alternative points of view, respect for differences, the willingness and ability to listen thoughtfully and attentively, an openness to giving and receiving criticism, and honest and sincere self-expression. These virtues comprise the affective and intellectual capacities that enable us to seek understanding across differences of belief, value, or experience, and as such are both the means and the ends of a progressive conception of education. Without them, it is impossible to pursue new knowledge or to embody a moral character that is sensitive to the needs and desires of disparate others. Indeed, it appears to us that these capacities for conversation are the fundamental virtues of an educated person. Here we want to discuss these virtues, show why they are essential for inclusive communication, and consider how they help to ground a defensible normative conception of education.
In both the neo-Aristotelian and pragmatic traditions, the quality of our conversational and dialogical relations is thought to have profound implications for our well-being as humans. This is not to posit an essentialist view of “human nature,” but merely to recognize that some ways of being in the world tend, generally, to be more conducive to sustaining and nurturing human life than are others. Our ability to resolve conflicts peacefully and to coordinate action, our sense of personal identity, and, if John Dewey is correct, our very ability to think, are all dependent upon our communicative relations.5 The communicative virtues are dispositions that enable communication, especially between partners who differ in terms of their linguistic styles, experiences, or beliefs. If one positively values patience, for example, one is more likely to persist when conversation becomes difficult. One who is tolerant and willing to listen thoughtfully and carefully will be better prepared to understand those whose speech or opinions differ markedly from one’s own. Lacking these virtues, one is likely to resort to whatever tactics available to promote one’s own perspective over others’, or to refuse conversational engagement altogether.
Communication fails not only because persons lack communicative virtues. Feminist authors have identified features of contemporary life that limit both access to and participation in communicative relations: first, the experience of being silenced, of not being encouraged or allowed to speak, or of not being listened to when one does; second, the tendencies of communication to be distorted in contexts of power, privilege, and political manipulation, where what is said is not what is meant, where symbols or slogans substitute for careful expression, or where outright lies serve non-communicative purposes; and third, where the very nature of the communicative relation is unequal and domineering, so that differences in communicative style are labelled as deficiencies, and where the tendency of participants to misunderstand one another is taken as evidence of the futility of pursuing conversation further.6
We find, for example, that in this scholarship the practical disenfranchisement of the poor, people of color, and women is often expressed in terms of “silence.” Historically, these groups have been excluded from “public” discussion and debate, and they have often been told who they are and what their needs should be. Actual exclusion from conversations is not the only means by which these groups and individuals are effectively silenced, however. The provision of “open” forums where all are free to speak is of little positive consequence if more privileged participants refuse to take seriously the perspectives of others, or if a history of imposed silence and domination leads those who are less privileged to withdraw from conversation. The problem, in terms of human flourishing, is described well by Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman:
Having the opportunity to talk about one’s life, to give an account of it, to interpret it, is integral to leading that life rather than being led through it…. Part of human life, human living, is talking about it, and we can be sure that being silenced in one’s account of one’s life is a kind of amputation that signals oppression. Another reason for not divorcing life from the telling of it is that as humans our experiences are deeply influenced by what is said about them, by ourselves or powerful (as opposed to significant) others…. We can’t separate our lives from the accounts given of them; the articulation of our experience is part of our experience.7From the perspective of virtue ethics, the fact that certain groups have been intentionally or inadvertently silenced should call attention to the numerous factors that contribute to this outcome, and make us more committed to the creation of forums where all feel themselves to be, and actually are, free to speak and to be heard. As Richard Bernstein has argued, while it would be naive to attempt a reconceptualization of the entire political realm on a model of dialogue or conversation, such a reconceptualization can serve as a regulative ideal:
If the quintessence of what we are is to be dialogical — and this is not just the privilege of the few — then whatever the limitations of the practical realization of this ideal, it nevertheless can and should give practical orientation to our lives. We must ask, what is it that blocks and distorts such dialogue, and what is to be done, “what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now” to make such dialogue a living reality?8We believe that the communicative virtues respond to Bernstein’s inquiry by relating the formation of character to the development of social relations and political institutions. In this view, the public and the private realms are not dichotomized, since such values as learning, participation, equality, and freedom rely upon the maintenance of communicative relations that cut across both. The possession of these virtues may not be sufficient to the task of overcoming the numerous obstacles that block and distort communication; yet lacking the communicative virtues, one will be excluded from, and may exclude others from, numerous communicative contexts.
The communicative virtues are not abstract universals; these virtues are encountered in actual efforts to make ourselves understood, and to understand others. We discover our capacity for “patience,” for example, when trying to understand the question of a young, inarticulate child, the new and difficult idea of a peer, or the request of a stranger whose speech we comprehend only partially. Nor are these virtues synonymous with technical competence or culturally particular styles of self-presentation; patience, tolerance, and the other virtues are expressed differently within different linguistic communities. Thus, the presence (or absence) of these virtues cannot be determined easily on the basis of outward appearances. Such a determination hinges centrally on whether self-presentation is expressive of a genuine concern for partners in conversation, or whether it is a perfunctory convention of social interaction.9 Here our view is fundamentally different from the conventional conception of virtues as inculcated “good manners,” usually of a middle class, establishment character.
While certain of the communicative virtues relate more to receptivity, and others to self-expression, it is important to think of these virtues as constituting a cluster of intellectual and affective dispositions that together promote open, inclusive, and undistorted communication. First, considering the communicative virtues as a constellation of dispositions helps thwart the tendency to regard certain virtues as appropriate only to some groups, and thus works against the sort of moral prescriptivism that excludes difference or unilaterally dictates to persons what they should be and do. In our culture, for example, women are generally rewarded for manifesting the virtues associated with receptivity, and may be discouraged from expressing themselves honestly and forthrightly; men, conversely, are more often praised for aggressive self-expression. Yet the human practice of open and equitable communication — especially when it entails gender- or culture-related differences — requires that participants be animated by this whole range of virtues. When any of the virtues are lacking, there is a danger that certain partners will dominate, and that others will be silenced or acquiesce.
The second reason for viewing communicative virtues as a constellation, rather than discretely, is that this retains the “context specificity” of Aristotle’s original formulation. We participate in many diverse communicative situations throughout life, each of which presents unique demands. These situations themselves are partially determinative of what counts as a virtuous response; one cannot know in advance of actual communicative interactions precisely what it would mean to be patient, tolerant, and so on. When such assessments, and actual responses, are appropriate, they will be motivated by a communicatively virtuous character; but which virtues are manifested, and how they are nuanced, depends upon the requirements of the particular situation at hand. Generally speaking, for example, patience and careful listening are nuanced differently in adult-child relations, than in communication between peers. Clearly, such judgments have both intellectual and affective aspects: for example, the decision to exercise patience with a child assumes, intellectually, the knowledge that children have many needs they cannot satisfy by themselves, and, affectively, the desire to meet those needs.
We have stressed the importance of communicative virtues for open and equitable conversation in situations where partners differ significantly; and it is likely that we are often most aware of our capacities for patience, tolerance, and so on, when conversation becomes difficult. Yet the value of the communicative virtues does not lie solely in facilitating conversation under relatively trying circumstances. The quality of all our communicative relations has strong ramifications for our well-being in general; and other things being equal, relations that are expressive of these virtues will be more supportive of the numerous and varied goods we can achieve communicatively.
One tends, for example, to think of honest and sincere self-expression in basically political terms, as, for instance, the means by which particular individuals and groups make their policy preferences known, or by which politicians express their actual intentions to a constituency. These are undeniably important aspects of the communicative virtues. Yet in addition to the clearly political implications of honesty and sincerity, there are important intellectual and affective implications as well. Dewey, for one, stresses that communicating one’s experience to others is fundamental to the process of education itself:
We are beginning to learn that learning which develops intelligence and character does not come about when only the textbook and the teacher have a say; that every individual becomes educated only as he [sic] has an opportunity to contribute something from his [sic] own experience, no matter how meager or slender that background of experience may be at a given time; and finally that enlightenment comes from the give and take, from the exchange of experiences and ideas.10Dewey helps us to see that honest and sincere self-expression is valuable not merely because its lack has terrible political consequences, which it does, but also because such expression is indispensable to personal growth.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl develops this point in her recent critique of the monistic tradition in Western philosophy. In that essay, Young-Bruehl argues that we have inherited a highly individualistic conception of thought: “When we think of ourselves as thinkers, we tend to think of ourselves as selves…as first person singulars, solitaries, interiorities, mental machines.” As an alternative to this monistic conception, Young-Bruehl proposes the idea that our mental processes are conversational; that we are full of voices when we think:
The value of the idea that our mental life with others and with ourselves is conversational — that it is a constant interconnecting of all sorts of representations of our experience and also potentially an extension of our experience as we hear ourselves and others and reflexively interpret ourselves in and through novel conjunctions and conversational moments — the value of this idea is that, if we take this idea seriously, live this idea richly, we cannot become…mental monists.11Young-Bruehl’s point is, of course, that our lives are fuller, richer, and livelier the more we are able to entertain a wide range of perspectives and experiences. But she also helps us to see an important aspect of the communicative virtues: while enabling breadth of thought and feeling, the communicative virtues simultaneously guard against taking one’s own initial perspective as the most accurate and legitimate.
Thus far we have suggested ways in which virtue ethics can give practical guidance to our communicative interactions. The virtues approach begins with the conviction that our communicative relations have important implications for human flourishing in general, and seeks to identify the virtues that enable and enhance those relations. If we are correct in arguing that patience, tolerance, respect for differences, the willingness and ability to listen thoughtfully and attentively, an openness to giving and receiving criticism, and honest and sincere self-expression are the virtues that animate open and inclusive communication, then the question naturally follows: How are these virtues acquired and how can their consistent practice be nurtured?
In contrast to didactic or “dilemma” approaches, the virtues tradition conceives moral education as a developmental process entailing participation in virtuous activities; we learn to be courageous, temperate, and kind by performing courageous, temperate, and kind acts.12 In general, then, this process is pragmatic and relational. It is pragmatic in the sense that the virtues are learned not as principles or imperatives, but as modes of conduct: we become honest, considerate, or courageous. These qualities are constitutive of who we are as persons, and we enact them not primarily through the application of rules or from a sense of duty, but as expressions of our very character. The cultivation of such qualities can only be partly an intentional process; we are influenced by a variety of experiences, some entirely tacit. The pragmatic quality of this process can be seen in the way that we practice at certain efforts or modes of conduct: we try, we fail, we succeed inadvertently, we do things and only later appreciate that we have done them, and why. Here good character is not merely stamped upon children. Character is actively taken up, and the exercise of full virtue requires that one’s choices are motivated by a conscious desire to act well.
This process is relational, in the sense that it is only through participation in actual social practices that one is able to develop virtues. These traits of character are acquired as we are drawn into certain ways of living; and hence, are influenced strongly by the conduct of those around us, how they treat us, as well as how we observe them treat others. These very immediate personal relations, as media of cultivation, can be generalized as well to the communities and traditions that comprise us. In a strict sense, virtues are not simply personal characteristics, but features of a form of life that we participate in, and carry with us even when we step outside it.
Where the communicative virtues are concerned, this implies that children acquire patience, tolerance, and other conversational dispositions in their relations with others who already possess them.13 The child who attends to how her mother and father respond to an older sibling or cousin as he struggles to explain a new idea or an exciting event at school, to how friends manage their differences of opinion, to how teachers balance competing claims in the classroom, is in the process of learning more or less appropriate ways of being in conversation. In the Aristotelian view, the child who is surrounded by parents and other teachers who manage such communicative situations well, that is, with patience, tolerance, and open-mindedness, will be more likely to form these facilitative dispositions himself or herself.
This process is encouraged, in part, by the various pleasures of being in conversation with others — enlisting help in time of need, acquiring new knowledge about the world, making one’s self known and coming to know others, and so on. When talk threatens to break down, the child who wishes to continue the conversation learns by drawing on his or her knowledge of how others manage such problems, prior experience, and, in novel circumstances, a sort of trial and error. Not all of these conversational engagements are pleasant; feelings of deep frustration can result when we are unable to communicate in a way that makes our thoughts accessible to another or when, despite our best efforts to understand another, we realize that we have failed. While unpleasant, such experiences can still be educative, and learning from them can be satisfying even when the failure itself is not. The aim, of course, is not for children unreflectively to pattern certain modes of communicative conduct; it is rather that, over time, they are enabled self-consciously to choose to be patient, tolerant, and sincere persons. A mechanical conception of the acquisition of virtue is simply incompatible with this active dimension of character.
As we have stressed, exercising the communicative virtues requires sensitivity to context: “Kindness towards the wrong persons can be harmful, just as uncontrolled fear can stand in the way of facing the challenges and risks necessary for pursuing desired ends…. Cultivating the dispositional capacities to feel [goodwill or courage] appropriately will be bound up with learning how to discern the circumstances that warrant these responses.”14 Similarly, part of acquiring the communicative virtues entails learning when their expression is warranted, and when it is not; whether, for example, a situation calls for patience or quick reaction, tolerance or indignation. The learning that enables one to make such decisions takes place over time and across a range of communicative encounters. It is partly for this reason, therefore, that participation in a diversity of communicative situations is, as Dewey is famous for pointing out, itself a fundamental educational (as well as democratic) ideal.15
BOTH INSTITUTIONAL AND INFORMAL
A virtues approach to communicative ethics offers significant implications for educational practice in institutional contexts. If our communicative relations in schools (and elsewhere) are going to be inclusive of a broad range of values, beliefs, and perspectives, then they need to be entered into with a sense of patience, tolerance, respect, sincerity, and honesty. Indeed, the very effort to create such relations implies the presence of these virtues. That the communicative virtues are acquired by participating in dialogical relations recommends, first of all, a greater emphasis on conversation and dialogue in the classroom.
More classroom conversation alone, however, is not sufficient to encourage the acquisition of the communicative virtues where they may be lacking, or to nurture their consistent exercise among students who already possess them. Such conversation must be attentive to factors that impede certain students’ participation, and must be animated by a spirit of patience and good will. For teachers, beyond implying the need to “model” the communicative virtues, this also implies the need to be attentive to the sorts of topics that are deemed appropriate for classroom discussion, and those that may be excluded; to the styles of students’ self-presentation that are legitimated, and those that are discouraged; to the voices, the teacher’s own or students’, that may dominate conversations and force others to remain silent. Students who come to the classroom uncertain of their ability to cope with others whom they perceive as being (and who may actually be) threatening, may be best served by having opportunities to meet separately in self-identified sub-groups.16 In other cases, where students all meet together, teachers may need to privilege certain voices over others in a compensatory manner. Reticent students sometimes need an invitation to express their experiences and perspectives, while, for the sake of developing an ongoing communicative relation in the classroom, aggressive participants may need to be discouraged from speaking so readily.
Virtue ethics does not merely offer the bland reminder that certain dispositions are better than others, and that with enough effort institutional contexts, such as schools, can foster these dispositions. While concrete human practices do enable us to identify virtues, virtues represent more than a summary of traits or dispositions that enable those practices; virtues are also ideals, and as such, provide a standard for judging and challenging, rather than merely reproducing current practices.17 When this aspect of the virtues is kept in mind, we are urged to think not only about how schools, as they are presently arranged, might foster the communicative virtues, but also about how this arrangement works against their cultivation. It seems fairly clear that public education is not now, and has not been historically, designed for the purpose of cultivating communicative virtues among students generally. From the elementary “ability grouped” reading class through the undergraduate lecture hall, formal education is, generally speaking, competitive and impersonal. This approach urges us to examine critically the limitations of schools as we have created them, and prompts us to ask how they might be made more conducive to the communicative virtues. But it also calls on us to consider the educational implications of other contexts as well. In doing so, this ethical approach provides a vantage point from which a broader conception of education may come into view.
As we have emphasized, virtue ethics has tended to focus more on early childhood experiences that occur in informal contexts than it has on formal institutional settings. It has done so largely in order to articulate the theory of moral development implicit in Aristotle’s writings. Yet the consistent exercise of the virtues throughout life requires participation in contexts where others also exercise them. When this aspect of the virtues, communicative and otherwise, is kept in mind, we are urged to inquire into what these contexts are, and to recognize their educational significance. Friendships, for example, help draw out and reinforce our capacities for patience, tolerance, and the other virtues. Our relations with friends are complex, and often problematic in certain regards, yet the feelings of genuine affection we have for friends encourage us exercise the communicative virtues in order to keep such relations intact. Friendships, therefore, provide practice in ways of interacting communicatively that helps to sustain our exercise of the virtues, even when we find ourselves in circumstances that are less congenial.
Parental and other adult-child relations can also help sustain the virtues. It is not that parents and other adults unilaterally impart virtues to children, but rather that in the process of interacting with one another, children may be enabled to acquire the virtues, while adults’ capacities for them may be sustained and strengthened.18 A fuller development of this insight, we believe, can provide a response to Jane Roland Martin’s call for a broader conception of education that comprises “private” and “reproductive” (and largely feminized) contexts as just as significant, if not more so, as public, formal educational institutions19 — indeed, even more broadly, it forces us to challenge this dichotomous characterization of educational practices.
AS EDUCATIONAL AIMS
We share the concern voiced in much of the postmodern scholarship that our relations are infused with power and that this often entails dominant groups’ suppression of alternative perspectives, in educational contexts and elsewhere. Balanced against our awareness of plurality and difference, however, is a simultaneous awareness of similarities and continuities across this variety. We might emphasize one perspective or the other for different reasons. But, as we have argued elsewhere, the stronger the plea for tolerance and non-domination across cultural, racial, or gender diversity, the greater the need for some normative conception of how we ought to maintain such relations — especially communicative relations.20
Unfortunately, most postmodern writing assumes that it is impossible to identify any such standards that are not “mere constructions,” and we agree with this critique in the sense that all human practices and beliefs are constructions, not given to us by a beneficent deity or by self-evident reason. But “constructions” need not be “mere constructions”: and a pragmatic, constructivist, and contextual account of how we create our world linguistically does not necessarily entail relativism or arbitrariness. Indeed, as Aristotle argued, and as has been developed and updated by the arguments of Alasdair MacIntyre, the nature of human practice is such that it itself entails certain kinds of continuities — particularly where communicative practices are concerned. It is the nature of any enduring human practice that it be in some way ordered, more or less internally consistent, and sustainable over time. As Wittgenstein and Dewey emphasize, norms do not preclude spontaneity; on the contrary, spontaneity requires norms. We believe that the notion of virtue generally, and specifically the notion of communicative virtue, provides a way of explaining both the necessary regularities of human practice and the possibilities of diversity in judgment and action consistent within those regularities.
A virtues approach to communication suggests a set of educational aims that are both intrinsically worth working toward and facilitative of further development and growth. Here we have tried to identify and justify these virtues as nonfoundational aims: not as transcendent or universal values, but as practical preconditions for establishing and maintaining educative (and other social) relations over time. Indeed, without something like these virtues, it is not clear that any form of social organization can exist, least of all one that could be judged equitable. We also believe that this approach has the advantage of showing how the acquisition and development of certain virtues, and the maintenance of a pattern of personal conduct, relates to a network of personal relationships, and through them to a network of communities and traditions that both sustain and are sustained by them. Finally, and most important in our view, is that this educational conception allows us to describe and evaluate both schooling and nonschooling contexts as educationally significant, relating the formal and intentional processes of instruction to informal and organic processes of development; and in this to begin to break down the dichotomy between “public” and “private” spheres of educational endeavor.
For a response to
this essay, see Arcilla.
1 Jennifer Gore, “What Can ‘We’ Do for You! What Can We Do for ‘You’?” Educational Foundations 4, 3 (1990): 3-26.
2 “Postmodern Conditions: Rethinking Public Education,” Educational Theory 40, 3 (1991): 367. See also Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, 3 (1989): 297-324; Patti Lather, “Postmodernism and the Politics of Enlightenment,” Educational Foundations 3, 3 (1989): 7-28; Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 300-323.
3 We argue this claim in “Dialogue Across Differences: Continuing the Conversation,” Harvard Educational Review 61, 4 (1991): 393-416.
4 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 1-9. For a contemporary statement on the reproductive aspects of education, see Walter Feinberg, Understanding Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 149-173.
5 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), 170.
6 Ellsworth, “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?”, 301-302.
7 Maria C. Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Have We got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for ‘the Women’s Voice’,” Women’s Studies International Forum 6, 6 (1983): 573.
8 Richard J. Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 114.
9 Betty A. Sichel, Moral Education: Character, Community, and Ideas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 32-33.
10 John Dewey, The Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 36.
11 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “The Education of Women as Philosophers,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, 2 (1987): 216.
12 See, for example, M. F. Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to be Good,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); and Betty A. Sichel, Moral Education.
13 Of course, there are many points of contact here with the work of L.S. Vygotsky. See Mind and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978) and Thought and Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962).
14 Sherman, Character, 166.
15 John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 81-99.
16 Gail Pheterson, “Alliances between Women: Overcoming Internalized Oppression and Internalized Domination,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, 11 (1986): 146-160.
17 See, for example, Lawrence Becker, Reciprocity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 163-164.
18 This process is discussed by Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989).
19 Jane R. Martin, “The Ideal of the Educated Person,” Philosophy of Education 1981 (Normal, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1981), 3-20.
20 “Dialogue Across Differences”; see also, Burbules and Rice, “Can We be Heard?” Harvard Educational Review, (forthcoming).