Abstract
Human nature is the fundamental problem for institutions. The problem that has united political, economic, and cultural institutions since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (1830s), if not long before, is the need to understand and control variation in human nature (choice, chance, randomness, freedom, reason). For the expanding social institution (SI), human nature is a center of cost and must be dealt with on the strictest terms by central planners. It possesses variation in expressions of individuality: thoughts, beliefs, values, attitudes, feelings, actions, choices and decisions, gifts and talents, the strivings for who we want to become and how we want to proceed in the complex dimensions of life. Early scholars of the social sciences came up with two practical solutions to control the cost of human nature: the invention of normalcy and, correspondingly, the idea of making up people by inventing categories (Hacking 1990: 1–6, 160–169). “‘Normal’ bears the stamp of the nineteenth century and its conception of progress, just as ‘human nature’ is engraved with the hallmark of the Enlightenment. we no longer ask, in all seriousness, what is human nature? Instead we talk about normal people. We ask, is this behaviour normal?… We have almost forgotten how to take human nature seriously.”
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Notes
Michael Loux, Substance and Attribute (London: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1978).
By naturalism, we roughly mean the view that the physical (spatiotemporal) universe of entities advanced by ideal theories in the physical sciences is all there is. As Lewis implies, naturalism consists of physical properties and fields of force that operate on their own; it is the “the whole [physical] show.” Lewis, Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 2001b), pp. 5–9.
W. Quine. 1992. “Structure and Nature,” Journal of Philosophy, 89, pp. 5–9.
William Craig and J.P. Moreland, eds., Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 73.
Friedrich Hayek makes a similar “discarded image” point, though without the theological backdrop. “Against all this [Middle Ages’ anthropomorphism] the persistent effort of modern Science has been to get down to ‘objective facts’, to cease studying what men thought about nature or regarding the given concepts as true images of the real world, and, above all, to discard all theories which pretended to explain phenomena by imputing to them a directing mind like our own. Instead, its main task became to revise and reconstruct the concepts formed from ordinary experience on the basis of a systematic testing of the phenomena, so as to be better able to recognize the particular as an instance of a general rule. In the course of this process not only the provisional classification which the commonly used concepts provided, but also the first distinctions between the different perceptions which our senses convey to us, had to give way to a completely new and different way in which we learned to order or classify the events of the external world.” Hayek, The Counter-revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 18.
As Jacques Barzun sardonically notes concerning the tested pupil, “But the tests continue to rain down: they measure the depth of information pumped into him, they try to predict medical, legal, engineering aptitude, they delve into emotions, characterize social and other background, classify political ‘temperament’, in short, attempt to decant personality into small bottles.” Barzun, Teacher in America (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), p. 297.
John Dewey, Human Nature in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, The Later Works 1925–1953, Vol. 6: 1931–1932, Essays (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 29–39.
See Ellen Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The TroublingHistory of Education Research (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. pp. 58–60.
Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1993), p. 10.
Ethnic minorities in the United States and other countries are often confined by economic circumstances to large-scale urban school districts that often under-realize students’ abilities and talents. As one example, see Richard Fry, “The High Schools Hispanics Attend: Size and Other Key Characteristics” (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Research Center, November 2005).
Ethics has no place in the activity of growth. Rothschild notes that the “’ scientification’ of economics... has led to a separation of economics from its ethical roots. The ‘mainstream economics’ of the 20th century fully accepts this separation. Economic theory is seen as a positive science which has to analyse and to explain the mechanisms of economic processes.... Important as ethical valuation (‘ought’-statements) maybe, they should not form [any] part of the economist’s research programme.” K.W. Rothschild, Ethics and Economic Theory (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993), p. 16.
Rodriguez, Loomis, and Weeres,. The Cost ofInstitutions: Information and Freedom in Expanding Economies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 162.
“Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction. They consist of both formal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). Throughout history, institutions have been devised by human beings to create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange. Together with the standard constraints of economics they define the choice set and therefore determine transaction and production costs and hence the profitability and feasibility of exchanging in economic [and other human activities].” North, Douglass. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 97.
See James Carter, Corporation as a Legal Entity (Baltimore: M. Curlander, 1919).
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© 2009 Steven R. Loomis and Jacob P. Rodriguez
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Loomis, S.R., Rodriguez, J.P. (2009). The Ontology of Education as an Institution. In: C.S. Lewis. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100589_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100589_3
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