The Very Thought of Education

My dear friend, Deborah Britzman, Distinguished Research Professor at York University, has written a new book, The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions. It was just published this June by SUNY-Press.

Britzman's work over these many years of engagement with the practice of teaching and learning has sought to uncover what she thinks of as the "unconscious of education." This is the place where we (teachers, teacher educators, professors) don't gently want to go. Instead, we resist knowing what we feel and think to be true. For example, our own bigotries and prejudices; our own injuries; our desires for repair; our hatreds; our loves.

What is unconscious in education, however, permeates the classroom just as unspoken and unacknowledged emotions will permeate an intimate relationship. We can know what we feel both in the classroom and in our relationships -- indeed teaching is a relational process -- but only if we are open to engaging with what we do not know, not just with what we do know. Teachers and professors teach what we know, but Britzman asks what would happen if we began with what we do not know? What could education be then? Can we even think about, have a thought about, education as an emotional place of not knowing? What would be at stake for teachers and professors to admit that we do not know? And begin the lesson plan, the curriculum, the time of learning there instead of beginning with all we know.

I have taught a course called, Hate Crimes, but I do not know why Dwight DeLee murdered Lateisha Green. Do you? What happens within us when we hate? When we love? How can education answer these questions? James Baldwin has written that hate crimes arise out of what is normal in society; they are not aberrations but manifestations of what society feels to be true. Hate crimes, while carried out violently by individuals, are also the brutal actions of the unconscious hatreds that are imbedded in the social psyche. We are all implicated in these hatreds and in these murders even if we refuse to know it.

In an interview published in YFile: York's Daily Bulletin, Britzman explains that “The desire to become a teacher is also grounded in one’s experience of growing up in education, and teachers and professors tend to unconsciously repeat or even try to repair their childhood experience," she says. And this plays out in the classroom, in the lesson plan, in the syllabus, in the office hours and so on."

“The shadowy world of education is what I’m interested in exploring,” says Britzman. “The things we can’t see. The unconscious and the shadow it casts."

For full interview and further description of the new book, click here.