SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

According to Frankl, the final step in this downward existential spiral is fanaticism. Hopefully,
colleges of education (and society in general for that matter) are not at this point yet. But the
atmosphere seems ominous. There are certainly any number of current fanatical groups who
are making considerable inroads with our disaffected youth. Censorship in America’s schools is
alive and prospering. The often fanatical quasi-religious/political right’s agenda has increasing
influence on teachers and students. The 1990 Children’s Defense fund tells us that every day in
America 27 children die from poverty, 30 children are wounded by guns, and 135,000 children
bring a gun to school. Such statistics go on and on and do not bode well for our attempt to
avoid an uncivilized vacuum. The attempt by colleges of education to right these fanatical
leanings by developing methods courses on classroom management seems somewhat
shortsighted and even frivolous and ignores Whitehead’s (1929) admonition that many
catastrophes of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of people with a good
methodology.
The existential vacuum apparent in colleges of education has seemingly followed Frankl’s steps
precisely; each step following the other as night follows day. First the “planlessness” that leads
to fatalism, which leads to conformism, which ends in fanaticism. Unfortunately many boards of
regents and state legislatures look on this vacuous chaos and see only the final stages of the
problem and attempt to impose order on this chaos through “ducal fiats” such as required
measurable accountability programs and required empirically based minimum competency
exams for both teachers and students (which will of course result in minimum competencies
exhibited by both teachers and students alike). Such simplistic notions designed to impose
order on fanaticism are not possible and should not be desirable even if they were possible.
Sagan (1991) noted that in a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson stated that “a society
that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither” (p. 13).
THE PLAN
It seems likely that another approach could be more successful. According to Frankl, fanaticism
(the point where modern education reformers seem to want to begin) could not be possible
without first passing through the stages of conformism, fatalism, and planlessness. Therefore, it
seems possible that colleges of education could avoid all these steps leading to an uncivilized
existential vacuum if they would avoid the plan-less first step. In other words they/we/ me
should develop a plan that provided meaning and purpose for future teachers who could then
pass that sense of purpose along to their own students. This plan should be simple, consistent,
and to the point. This brings us full circle back to the simplicity of little Francesco Bernadone,
and to an educational plan where the aim of education is wisdom and goodness (Hutchins,
1943). Next, the plan would attempt to implement Samuel Johnson’s conviction that “the
supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things—the power to tell the good from
the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad
and the counterfeit” (Peter, 1979, p.165). These two points constitute the entirety of the plan.
They are points that can, to a large degree, only be addressed by specifically creating the
necessary dialogue between future teachers and the fine arts and humanities. They are the
exact points that colleges of education miss, just as Francesco’s “followers” missed the point of
his life.
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