活動手冊 - 開南大學

Pedagogical Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism
Jonathan Butler, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Applied English
Kainan University
Abstract
This paper, incorporating a very explicit allusion to Max Weber’s celebrated
treatise, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, seeks to use Weber’s
well-known thesis as a starting point, a springboard of sorts, with the key difference
being the subject of inquiry—pedagogical ethics instead of the protestant ethic—in
relation to capitalism. Furthermore, the focus of this paper narrows the scope of
capitalism to a field of terrain comprised solely of the material, imaginative projections
that contemporary undergraduate students engage in as they consider their future lives
after graduation. In short, what dreams of wealth inhabit the minds of our students and
how does our teaching affect these dreams?
Like Weber over one hundred years before me, I would like to suggest that an
ostensible opposition is counterfactual. For Weber, the protestant work ethic,
long-considered to be the nemesis of capitalist ideology—eschewing as it seemed to do
the trappings of wealth, decadence and grandiosity—is actually a contributing factor to
capitalist development. Similarly, it has long been assumed that academic teaching
inhabits a realm far from capitalist concerns, that the “true” teacher, hermetically sealed
in his lofty “ivory tower,” oblivious to the crass goings-on of materialist culture,
instills in his or her students a love of learning for its own sake which is independent of
the instrumental uses of knowledge comprising the capitalist world. Nothing, I would
like to suggest, could be further from the truth.
Widely-acclaimed American critic and novelist John Fowles once observed the
remarkable irony that professors of literature spend their entire lives instilling in their
students a hatred of bourgeois culture—the very culture in which these students will
have to make a livelihood for themselves. Granted, most of modernist literature does
indeed embody a conscious distaste for consumer culture, for the sorry life of the
masses in general, elevating, instead, the life of the artist above the mundane concerns
of the capitalist world. One need only think of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or Joyce’s A
-12-