Positive education is a wonderful idea. That is why many parents have believed they have found in it the foundations of an emancipatory educational approach for their children. However, it presents pitfalls that, if one is not careful, may prevent any genuine educational work from taking place. Hegel’s “great Shadow,” as Alain refers to it in his Reflections on Education, can “speak” to us very powerfully on this subject. Let us listen to it.
The hope of parents who embrace the model of positive parenting is to foster the development of free-spirited children, much like the “The Free Children of Summerhill”, who had their heyday in the 1960s. It is clear that it is difficult to argue against the guiding principles of positive education, whose watchwords are listening, respect, and support: promoting an education based on empathy; fostering cooperation between parents and children, adults and young people; supporting the child by being attentive to their needs; and fostering learning by building on individual strengths and personal motivation. Who could possibly object to that?
But positive parenting quickly runs up against the problem of educational boundaries. For we must not misunderstand the concept of freedom. Is what is often described as “educational violence”—in the sense of coercion, the rejection of certain behaviors, and, conversely, the imposition of ways of being and acting that conform to norms or a moral code—in principle, and always, a violation of the individual’s freedom?
Hegel reminds us that freedom cannot be reduced to the rejection of all external content, which is then viewed as merely an unacceptable “restriction.” This “negative freedom” is nothing more than a “freedom of emptiness, ” which exists only in the destruction of whatever opposes it. We must not allow children—in the belief that we are respecting them—to be swept up in a “fury of destruction,” rejecting “any existing social order” and aiming for “the annihilation of any organization seeking to emerge.”
Admittedly, on the one hand, “Children are, in and of themselves, free beings, and their lives are the immediate manifestation of that freedom alone.” Children belong to no one—neither to their parents nor to their educators. But, on the other hand, they need an education to “raise them from the immediate natural state in which they originally find themselves to independence and a free personality.” What immediately appears to be negative—restrictive and channeling educational intervention—has an irreplaceable positive dimension. This positivity is sought out and felt by the children themselves.
“The need to be educated exists in children just as much as their own sense of dissatisfaction with who they are.” Any educational approach that “treats the childish element as something valuable in itself (and) presents it to children as such… demeans for them what is serious—and the approach itself—to a childish form that children hold in low regard. By presenting them as complete in the state of incompleteness in which they find themselves,” it can only lead to “the vanity… of children filled with a sense of their own distinctiveness.”
The fulfillment of the person who has become free in and of themselves will require transcending who we are at the “moment” of childhood, when we exercise what may be nothing more than a freedom of emptiness.
This requirement was clearly highlighted by Hegel through the concept of “aufheben,” which conveys the necessity and positivity of a fruitful confrontation with the negative. The negativity that an encounter with otherness represents for a being (the other—the parent, the teacher—restricts my scope for “free” development and imposes its own ways of being and acting upon me), has the effect of leading the learner outside and beyond themselves, so that they may become fully themselves—which they were not (yet) in their state of incompleteness.
Thus, what is experienced as repression serves the process of transcendence necessary for the free individual to emerge as an educated consciousness. Confronting the negative is fruitful because it allows for an enriching transcendence beyond the immediate particularity of what is being transcended: “To abolish has a dual meaning: that of preserving, maintaining (in German, ‘aufheben’ means to lift up, raise, and abolish), and that of bringing to an end, putting a stop to. To preserve or maintain also implies a negative connotation, namely that, in order to preserve something, one strips it of its immediacy… Thus, what is abolished is at the same time what is preserved, but it has merely lost its immediacy, without thereby being annihilated.”
A child’s immediate will and freedom are preserved—and reach their full potential—only if they are overcome through the process of transcending them, thanks to an encounter with an adult whose positive character (firmness grounded in rational principles) may initially be perceived as reprehensible negativity. But the fact is that there is no education “when seriousness, pain, patience, and the work of the negative are lacking.”
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Such is “the prodigious power of the negative.” What is seen as negation is in fact nothing more than “mediation,” which enables the “becoming-other” through which one escapes immediacy to attain the fullness and truth of what one was merely in potential in one’s “empty beginning.” Development is negative in relation to the beginning, in that there is something one-sided about the latter: in this sense, it is a refutation. But it is also effective realization and fulfillment. According to a metaphor proposed by Hegel, the truth of the acorn lies in the future oak: “When we wish to see an oak—with the sturdiness of its trunk, the spread of its branches, and the mass of its foliage—we are not satisfied if, instead, we are shown an acorn.”
The oak refutes the acorn, just as, generally speaking, the flower refutes the bud. “The bud disappears in the bursting forth of the flower, and one might say that the bud is refuted by the flower. With the appearance of the fruit, too, the flower is exposed as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit takes the flower’s place as its truth.” Giving in to a child’s whims, by idolizing the child in all its fantasies and fancies, amounts to condemning it to remain forever an unfinished being.
To help a child realize his or her potential as an educated person who is as fully free as possible, we must therefore know how to impose educational constraints judiciously. All educational efforts necessarily involve some degree of constraint. But what can we legitimately impose, and how can we be sure that we are not simply pitting one adult’s whim against the child’s?
Hegel helps us understand that this necessary constraint involves two dimensions. We cannot avoid imposing both content and a framework. Content is, generally speaking, defined by what constitutes culture at a given moment. For “culture is liberation, and the work of higher liberation.” Certainly—and this should come as no surprise to us— liberation involves arduous work. “This liberation is, within the subject, the arduous labor against the subjectivity of behavior, against immediate needs, and also against the subjective vanity of sensory impression and against the arbitrariness of preference.” But this arduousness is merely the price to pay to experience “the infinite value of culture as an immanent moment of the infinite.”
This imposition of content goes hand in hand with the imposition of a framework, which first and foremost takes the form of discipline. Discipline is the set of rules without which communal life—whether within a family, a classroom, or a community—is impossible. How could one reproach a teenager for coming home too late if one has not first set (together with them!) a curfew? In his educational writings, Hegel distinguishes between “discipline proper” and “the cultivation of morals,” both of which belong first and foremost to the family and constitute “a task and a duty of parents.”
The purpose of discipline is to “curb rudeness, curb the pursuit of distractions, and instill in children a sense of respect and obedience” toward both parents and teachers, explains Hegel in his Educational Texts : “For attendance at our schools, we require calm behavior, the ability to sustain attention, a sense of respect and obedience toward teachers, and a proper, modest attitude toward both teachers and classmates.”
However, while its purpose is to offer individuals a fruitful engagement with the negative, “discipline per se cannot be the goal of educational institutions.” It is merely a means. “Obedience… is necessary for the goal of education to be achieved.” But there can be no question of “demanding empty obedience for the sake of obedience itself.” One should not seek “to obtain, through harshness, what simply requires a sense of love, respect, and seriousness toward the Matter.”
But love cannot do everything, because, ultimately, “It is easier to love children than to raise them,” and raising them is indeed the point! While the desire to educate one’s children and students in a positive way is a noble intention, it must not make us forget that love alone—however essential—is not enough; that constraints are part of the necessary means; that the goal is to help overcome initial limitations and the immediate; and that freedom is never reduced to the freedom of emptiness.
