Willinsky, John. (1998). Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End. Reviewed by Tom Barone, Arizona State University

Willinsky, John. (1998). Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 304 pp. $22.95 (Cloth)       ISBN# 0816630771 Reviewed by Tom Barone* Arizona State University November 20, 2001           Blurbs on the back covers of books tend to be a tad gratuitous, and what I want to say first about John Willinsky's book may indeed resemble a back-cover blurb. But I mean every word of it.           Learning to Divide the World is a book of enormous importance. It is a work of impeccable scholarship, astonishing in its breadth, enlightening in its often harsh but telling detail, and addressing a topic of great significance. The book is written at a level of abstraction that invites not just university scholars, but also teachers and lay people to partake of the wisdom it contains, an important consideration if the social divisions that are its subject are to be healed.           Willinsky's work offers new understandings about our colonialist past and new hopes for beginning to repair the personal and social damage that continues as part of our imperialist legacy. And Willinsky locates a significant part of his own hopefulness in the public schools. Specifically, he writes of potential progress though proposed alterations in the school curriculum, and these provide the ultimate focus of my review.           What makes Willinsky's critique so appealing is the fact that it is at once radical and ameliorative. Radical, of course, in the sense of rooting out basic misconceptions that are part of the colonialist mentality and embedded within (among other places) the school curriculum. But wise in its understanding that we have no choice but to work from within that heritage—and that curriculum—in order to change it. The following passage addresses this point: The specific differences that we learn to attend to with acuity—such as those grouped under the heading "race"—and the extremely consequential burden of meaning that we learn to assign to those differences are the result of a historical process that each of us is educated within. To change the significance of those differences will take an educational effort at least equal to the one required to put those meanings in place to begin with. My modest proposal is to supplement our education with a consideration of imperialism's influence on the teaching of history, geography, science, language, and literature in the hope that it will change the way this legacy works on us. (p. 247)           The second half of Willinsky's book is itself divided into six chapters, five of which are dedicated to descriptions and analysis of the educational mischief of the colonialists within each of those disciplines he mentions, as well as some suggestions for redressing that mischief (p. 158). But the last chapter addresses curricular issues most directly, and seems aimed squarely at teachers. The chapter expresses the author's hopes that the book will serve to inspire teachers to reflect upon its contents and to collaborate on the production of materials supplementary to offensive existing curriculum materials. The chapter also includes what Willinsky calls a "postcolonial supplementary project grid," designed as a kind of heuristic, or as he puts it, "a starting point in helping educators imagine, in a crudely schematic sense what in the world might be taught to the young as a result of this book" (p. 255).           The grid is used by stringing together three components of classroom activities — first, the disciplines; second, identity concepts such as race, gender, nation, culture, and empire; and finally domains of inquiry such as students, families, schoolbooks, and popular culture. One example provided by Willinsky is this: In the discipline of geography, "students interview members of the community (domain of inquiry) about their understanding of the changing meaning of culture." Another, in history, suggests that "students look as how the concept of nationality is presented in an informal education setting such as a museum exhibition on the American Revolution." And so on.           I should quickly add that there are significant exceptions to the pigeonholing of school subjects, especially in Chapter 7, as Willinsky struggles against the stale notion of science as an ahistorical enterprise. Specifically, he states that "My aim is to give students an account of how science has worked in consort with other social forces in bringing us to our present inadequate understandings about race." Science teachers, to this end, should share history with students by "visiting the school's book room where old biology textbooks can reveal science's changing regard for race" (p.187).           Overall, however, discrete school subjects serve as curricular starting points, and I admit to a degree of ambivalence about this approach. On the one hand, there is something refreshingly pragmatic in an implicit recognition of the limits of teacher control over the curriculum. Willinsky seems to recognize the various frame factors in which teachers operate that serve to reduce their professional autonomy. He is aware that teachers are often required to use textbooks and other curriculum materials that retain elements of a colonialist mindset, and so he wonders less about how those textbooks might be discarded and replaced than how they might be critiqued and supplemented.           His pragmatic tendencies are also obvious in his assumptions that a re-education in schools about the intellectual legacy of imperialism—the ways in which it has divided the world—is best tackled within a curriculum that is itself divided into discrete disciplines and subject matter areas. This pragmatism does indeed seem to understand the power nexus within which the school curriculum is played out.           Proponents of a more integrated approach to curriculum have identified various constituencies invested in a subject matter curriculum (Beane, 1995). They include many academicians and teacher educators in universities, test publishers and text publishers, subject area associations, state and district level subject supervisors, supervisors of teachers and teachers themselves whose professional identities are built along subject matter lines, and parents and other adults who wistfully recall the subject-based organizational patterns in their old schools. The subject centered approach is so strongly rooted in the deep structures and folklore of schooling that reforming it may represent an even more herculean task than redressing the legacies of colonialism embedded within each individual subject of the school curriculum (Beane, 1995). And therefore a project that may be best left to another occasion.           Willinsky's approach, which prudently avoids large-scale curricular miscegenation, may indeed represent the wisest course of action. But another part of me wants to attend to the common historical roots of the divisions of the world according to race and culture, and the divisions of all human knowledge into subject matter areas. Historians of curriculum such as David Hamilton (1990) and Ivor Goodson (1984) have located the origins of discrete school subjects in the age of Enlightenment, as a result of intellectuals' (for example, Linnaeus) fondness for taxonomies. As knowledge soon became fragmented, systematic and bureaucratized school subjects were born.           I also wonder whether failing to attend to these divisions simultaneously might not ultimately cut against any postcolonial educational project. Let me explain. Sensible curricular holists, taking their cues from the likes of John Dewey and progressivists, do not recommend ignoring the disciplines. Instead they see them, as does John Willinsky, as potentially important educational tools for prying open secrets of our cultural/intellectual heritage, so that we may build upon it and move beyond it. Or to paraphrase Willinsky: "the human perception of difference (here, the differences between the subject areas) is natural enough. We cannot live but by making distinctions. But the significance invested in any given difference forms an order of work, history, and discourse, that then passes as 'only natural.'"           The discrete school subjects, having been reified, essentialized, institutionalized, are themselves currently seen as "only natural." They now easily serve the interests of a network of professional elites who have built their identities around them, rather than the interests of youngsters who have yet to be initiated into them (Beane, 1995). It can be argued that by taking these subject areas as a set of discrete starting points for school activities our colonialist legacy may never be surmounted.           The rationale for an integrated, holistic curriculum assumes that, for an educational activity to be considered successful, knowledge must be internalized by students. For this to occur students must be able to view that content within the context of personally and socially significant concerns. This can provide a kind of intrinsic motivation for students to become seriously engaged in the project. Most of these concerns arise out of real-life issues that transcend artificial divisions of knowledge.           The deconstruction of certain elements of the colonialist curriculum within a discrete subject area may therefore be perceived as simply another kind of official knowledge to be acquired and banked away for future withdrawal (to mix metaphors from Michael Apple and Paulo Freire). The knowledge may remain remote, at a distance from the space where real identity formation occurs, failing to prompt a personal re-description of who the learner is in relation to others in the world.           So within this line of thinking a post-colonialist curriculum would arise not out of subject matter areas, but within projects and activities that are the result of collaborations between teachers and students. Or we may see all real learning as arising out of one central project, a project that is related to the kind of quest about which Maxine Greene (1995) writes so eloquently. This is a search for personal meaning that provides sustenance to ones' life, a sense of identity, of one's position in relation to others in the world—precisely the kind of search that includes what Willinsky locates in the words of many of the students interviewed for the book: The reader can hear how students seek a place within the reality of categories, in expressions of bewilderment over how one is to be identified and where one feels one belongs, in a variation of that question "Where is Here"?           Holists would agree that the disciplines are central to this sort of quest. Indeed the disciplines must serve at its behest, as students are enticed into them by teachers who are sensitive to their need for locating themselves in the world. But what kind of activities might serve as vehicles for the central project in which fragments of educational content may come together in a powerful and meaningful whole, while helping students to move beyond colonialist- tainted identities? There are, no doubt, many possible answers to that question. But I will locate one possibility, one with a potential for integrating several of the disciplines emphasized by Willinsky—science, history, literature, language, and geography. This is the possibility that lives in students' ongoing compositions of critical autoethographies.           Autoethnography is writing that defines one's "subjective ethnicity as mediated through language, history, and ethnographical analysis" (Lionnet, 1989, p. 99). Autoethnography is composed from within a simultaneously personal and social space, a blending of autobiography and ethnography (Ellis, 1999). It involves a hermeneutical dialectical process in which the disciplines are employed to enhance understanding of one's identity. The process arises out of a students' reflections upon personal experiences, and then, writes Ellis (1999), moves to an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of those experiences, and then looks inward again, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations.           Moreover, the process of writing an autoethnography never really ends, as long as life continues, and we wonder about how we have been defined by the world, and about how to redefine ourselves and our relationships to others who seem alien to us. And writing autoethnography is indeed also about learning to understand the other.           Enticing students into the researching and writing of their autoethnographies may therefore be their introduction to a lifelong quest that is never satisfied. It may also serve as a kind of wedge into the many of the educational activities suggested by Willinsky, a center around which the insights gained within his subject-specific curriculum might coalesce and adhere to a core of personal meaning.           I believe that autoethnographic writing for students can provide for them something close to what Willinsky has imagined in the final, typically insightful, paragraph of Learning to Divide the World. I end with an excerpt from that paragraph: We are not anything so much as what we have learned to call ourselves. Learning to read ourselves within and against how we have been written, too, seems part of the educational project ahead. But learning to read oneself is also about learning to read the other, as we consider how to rewrite the learned and learn-ed perceptions of difference. But how are we to overcome the foreignness that we have so often made of the other, if not by first finding it within ourselves. ... "The foreigner is within me," Kristeva insists, "hence we are all foreigners." We can better understand the shaping of that shared foreignness by studying the cultivation and manufacture, the cataloguing and display of the categories that have done so much for nation and empire. In this way we see how we are pierced by the persistent past. Lessons on this legacy will bring us back, it is true, to an educational project that was originally intended to profit and delight some at the expense of others, but it needn't continue that way. (p.264) References Beane, J. (1995). Curriculum integration and the disciplines of knowledge. Phi Delta Kappan 76, 612-622. Ellis, C. (1999). Heartfelt autoethnography. Qualitative Health Research, 9(5), 15p. Goodson, I. (1988). The making of curriculum: Collected essays. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. New York: Jossey-Bass. Hamilton, D. (1990). Curriculum history. Geelong, Victoria, Australia: Deakin University press. Lionnet, E. (1989). Autobiographical voices: race, gender, and self-portraiture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. About the Reviewer           Tom Barone received his doctorate from Stanford University in 1978 and is currently Professor of Education in the College of Education at Arizona State University. He teaches courses in curriculum studies and qualitative research methods. His writing explores, conceptually and through examples, the possibilities of a variety of narrative and arts-based approaches to contextualizing and theorizing about significant educational issues. He is the author of Aesthetics, Politics, and Educational Inquiry (Peter Lang 2000) and Touching Eternity: Life Narratives and the Enduring Consequences of Teaching (Teachers College Press 2000).