Abstract

This dissertation takes as its starting point a set of paradoxical attitudes that the American public holds about schooling. Schooling simultaneously evokes marked despair and inspires fervent hope. Even if our local schools are thriving we are convinced that public education as a whole is in decay. We recognize the historic stubbornness of schooling in the face of reform and yet we blithely assert the promise of the next improvement program. We acknowledge that schools cannot be easily controlled, but we devise reforms that seek increasingly to subjugate them to the instrumental rationality of standardized testing, whole-school reform, etc. ;Using Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms to examine these conflicting hopes and anxieties, and to build a comprehensive view of schooling, I portray schooling as a cultural form. ;As a cultural form, schooling has the "vitality" that this project ascribes to all cultural forms. Among other features, vitality highlights the productive co-presence of affect and intellect, myth and reason, life and spirit, tradition and innovation in the forms. ;The focus on vitality helps us to understand the presence of ambiguity, conflict and irrationality in schooling, thereby encouraging a postlapsarian attitude. Vitality also grounds the possibility of fixity and plasticity in schooling. Inertia is inevitable but not pathological; it reflects the health of the form. Fixity complements the possibility of resistance and change. ;Cassirer thereby helps us to see that schooling is a site for not only the reproduction of but also the resistance to existing schooling and culture. Resistance is possible. But only possible. The hope of democratic education remains always a task, a task in which consciousness plays a particularly important role. Philosophy of education---part of schooling---can play a vital role in its realization. ;The focus on reproduction and freedom in schooling marks the contemporary relevance of Cassirer, who stands with the New Structuralists in offering insights into the formative but not determining relationship between the individual and society. The vitality of schooling reveals the viability of Cassirer's philosophy