Education for Constructive Development

Howard Richards

Professor, Earlham College, Peace and Global Justice Studies

The Nehru Lectures
Education for Constructive Development

A series of lectures given by Howard Richards at the University of Baroda, Gujarat State, India, in August and September of 1995

Lecture 4

In my first lecture I began by saying that my only desire was to relieve the unnecessary suffering of the poor. But if you observed my actions for several days you would deduce from them that I have more than one desire. If I were to be psychoanalyzed, it might well be discovered that my desire to relieve suffering is a sublimation of some more primitive and less praiseworthy desire, such as the desire to replace my father in my mother's affections. I do not doubt that whatever my present desires may be, they derive in some way from instinctual tendencies which I share, for the most part, with humanity's primate ancestors who survived for hundreds of thousands of years because they were internally driven to eat, drink, breathe, and procreate. Nevertheless, I do not believe that I lied to you when I told you what my only desire was. What I meant was, "This is the declaration I feel driven, with all my heart and soul, to make to you now, and it announces my reason for taking the trouble to give these lectures." My statement of desire was a commitment to an ideal; it was not a report on the causes of my feelings.

I do not believe I am the only one who attributes to himself altruistic motives, which declare loyalty to ideals imperfectly followed. I'm glad. We would be worse if we didn't. Life requires formality; it is necessary to live according to conventions, and one of the conventions we need to live by is that it is rude to look too closely at people's motives. We need to allow each other to be generous in interpreting our own motives; as Nel Noddings says, in intimate relationships we need to be able to nurture the other's conception of self as "one-caring." We need to allow each other to subscribe to norms for behavior that we do not always live up to. If we manage to behave well according to the formal norms we say we believe in, then the fact that we did so from fear or from habit, and not from some better motive, should be forgiven.

One reason I begin this lecture on motivation with some remarks praising conventional manners, and with a defense of one's right to declare allegiance to ideals higher than the ideals one really follows, is that I am going to talk about sex and other primal urges. I do not want to be understood as advocating that raw unconscious passions should be forced to the surface and discussed in every classroom. We need to continue to live according to common sense, and part of common sense is to protect our illusions from realities that would upset them. Nevertheless, we can improve common sense - we can improve our culture - if every now and then we inquire into the hidden sources of energy that do not appear in polite society, but do animate our bodies. And we need to improve common sense. The constructive development I have been advocating requires reconstructing norms at the intersection where culture and biology meet; as Thomas Berry says, we must recode culture for the ecological age; and that in turn requires finding and redirecting energy - and that, in turn, means we need to ask what is going on down among the cells when the hormones enter the bloodstream.

Furthermore, I need to discuss the deep springs of human motivation because a good argument can be made - and has been made - that none of what I have been advocating is possible. I have been advocating building a better world by reconstructing the norms that guide human conduct. I will take Sigmund Freud as the spokesperson for the skeptics, who hold that the recoding of culture to build a more cooperative and sustainable future cannot be done, because the instincts that govern human behavior are just not capable of being molded in a way that would turn homo sapiens sapiens into a creature capable of peace and justice. Hence the problem of motivation for constructive development has two related facets:

1. Is it possible? In other words, does biology condemn culture to remain forever at a low moral level ?

2. How can it be done? In other words, if in principle humans can be motivated to love peace and justice, just exactly how can educators go about nurturing positive motives so that constructive development leading to bringing out the best in human nature can be accomplished?

I will begin with a quotation from Sigmund Freud, which expresses a viewpoint that I find to be very influential and very misleading. Freud asserts that if the erotic were given free expression, it, "...would break down every dam and wash away the laboriously erected work of civilization. Nor is the task of taming it ever an easy one; its success is sometimes too small, sometimes too great. The motive of human society is in the last resort an economic one; since it does not possess enough provisions to keep its members alive unless they work, it must restrict the number of its members and divert their energies from sexual activity to work."

Freud was a pessimist. He did not believe that education could mold human character to make our species one whose members cooperate with each other in mutual support. I focus on him as a spokesperson for all who for similar reasons draw similar conclusions. He asserted that the mass of humanity will not ever be swayed by reason. The masses will always follow their feelings. Following their feelings, they will be sensual and lazy, unless society compels them to divert their energies from sex to work.

For the first step in my argument criticizing Freud I need to establish the premise that love - as it appears when parents love their children, and in other human relationships that are not, or not entirely, sexual in a narrow sense - derives energy from the same little understood primal erotic urges that fuel sexual desire in a narrow sense itself. Freud himself could hardly disagree with this premise. However, people who think Freud sees sex everywhere and therefore can't see anything else, might still agree with my premise. I hold that there is no sharp boundary between what we identify as sex in a narrow sense and many other feelings - such as, to cite, completely arbitrarily, just one example: a happy feeling a parent might get standing arm and arm with her or his child, both enjoying the caress of the wind on their faces, as they stand on a hilltop overlooking the sea after a climb just hard enough to give the legs and heart a good workout. And I hold that both sex (narrowly defined) and the other feelings draw on initially relatively undifferentiated physical sources of erotic pleasure that lend themselves to being developed and interpreted in myriad ways.

With the premise I just explained I can criticize Freud's account of the relationship of sex to work. I can point out that millions of people go to work every day, and work hard, and sometimes at jobs they hate, because they love their families. Nothing is more common than a man who works because he loves his wife, or a woman who works because she loves her children, or children who study hard in school because they love their parents. It is just as accurate to say that work is eroticized by loving relationships as it is to say that society has repressed sex to force people to work. (My premise allows me to accept the ordinary uses of the terms "love" and "loving" which I employ here, as not mistaken, since in fact the human body's erotic potentials are quite capable of being developed and interpreted so that it assumes the forms such common uses of words like "love" ascribe to it.)

Having given a reason why Freud's viewpoint is mistaken, I can also provide what Kant would call a paralog: that is to say, an explanation of why, even though Freud's account of the relationship of sex to work is wrong, it seemed right to him. A paralog explains why a conclusion appears to be reasonable - even logically compelling and inevitable - although it is in fact false.

The paralog is this: There is a bias running throughout Freud's work, especially his early work, which leads both to his failure to appreciate how much the erotic contributes to motivating work and to his pessimism. For Freud as a young scientist it was very important to prove the existence of the unconscious mind, against the opposition of a medical profession that insisted on finding a physical aetiology for every symptom, and against the philosophers who identified the mental with the conscious. Freud seized upon the neurotic symptom as proof of the existence of the unconscious mind. From the unconscious the repressed childhood trauma re-emerges to ruin adult life, after having lain there in the unconscious festering and swelling in isolated silence.

Consequently there is no room in Freud's system for a benevolent unconscious. The unconscious cannot be for him (as it can be for Gregory Bateson, for Carl Jung, or for Joseph Campbell) a great spirit that buoys us up and guides us and cares for us better than we could care for ourselves with our puny conscious minds. Freud must be a pessimist. Everyone agrees (except perhaps Jurgen Habermas) that there could never be a culture motivated and governed by conscious, rational motives, and if the only alternative to the government of human conduct by Habermasian critical rationality, is to be governed by unconscious motives coming out of that place - the place where the neurotic symptoms come from - then the only possible conclusion is that humans will remain fundamentally hostile to one another. And that is what Freud concluded.

If, however, Freud is mistaken, and our instincts do not unalterably oppose educational efforts to build a culture of solidarity; if our instincts lend themselves to cultivating benign attitudes and peaceful practices suitable for the social species of mammal that homo sapiens sapiens is; if love is the law of our species, as Gandhi said it was; if the unconscious mind mainly guides us aright, freeing the conscious mind to concentrate on a small number of tasks it can handle, as Gregory Bateson maintained; then we need to explain how unconscious drives, and in particular the erotic as it has been socially interpreted and developed in contemporary mainstream culture, have turned out to be as non-functional as they are. There must be something wrong with the prevailing cultural structures if the erotic has become a perennial source of destruction, self-destruction, and despair. If it is true that in principle the unconscious mind in general, and eros in particular, is capable of making life beautiful, then there must be something about our culture that fails to develop the constructive potential found in our genes, and instead makes the erotic destructive. Several feminist writers have shown that yes, there is something about our culture that makes the erotic destructive, and it is patriarchy.

I will sketch, briefly and inadequately, the analysis of what she calls "the negative erotic" given by one of those writers, Nancy Hartsock. Hartsock recognizes that the prevailing economic system is in conflict with community-building. As she puts it, a community based on exchange is necessarily flawed, fragile, and false. But she points out that the preceding forms of society in the West - she says nothing about the East - were even worse. They were agonistic societies, whose basic structure was established by combat, and whose ideal of honor was the warrior. Still today - on this point Hartsock coincides with Paulo Freire - beneath the surface of a society whose principle is free consent in forming personal relationships and free consent in making contracts in the marketplace, there persists an older and more fundamental level at which the social order is preserved by violence.

Sexual desire, says Hartsock, is known to be socially constructed by the interpretations and directions that culture gives to physical arousal states, and into which it socializes its young. It does not differ in this respect from the other emotions. In a society still fundamentally agonistic, whose ideal of manhood is still violent, sex too is agonistic. Tough is sexy. Bad is exciting. Further evidence that in contemporary western society sexual excitement is tied to hostility and abuse comes from studies of pornography. Pornography would not portray women as it does, and it would not be the multi-billion dollar industry it is, if the social construction of sexuality were positive and healthy.

Hartsock's analysis is supported by the interpretation of archaeological evidence from cultures without patriarchy, which were often characterized by goddess worship. Riane Eisler, for one, finds that in ancient Crete, before it was conquered by warriors, men and women lived in equal partnership; the affective tone of the culture was easy-going, graceful, life-loving, and charming.

If Hartsock, Eisler, and others are right, then education should be able to reconstruct the erotic so that people will find even more pleasure in loving relationships than they do now, and will take little or no erotic pleasure in violence and abuse. A change in the sign of the erotic, from negative to positive, could not be accomplished by schools alone, but if John Dewey is right - and I have been arguing that he is right - the school can be one of the places to start, and I will start with some suggestions regarding schools. The school can be a place where children learn cooperation, love, and respect, by working on projects together, each contributing to a common task, and the school's moral influence can spread to the rest of society.

Whether schooling and other educational influences can produce generations of human beings who live in harmony with each other and the environment, or whether the human species and the planet will suffer the devastating consequences of human beings being moral midgets equipped with increasingly advanced scientific technologies remains to be seen. I do not believe there is any third alternative.

I do believe that everything we do to guide children to find joy in constructive activities contributes to the reconstruction of the erotic. Sex in a narrow sense is not walled off from its sublimations and affine pleasures, and it will not continue to be abusive in a culture otherwise joyful and cooperative. Today we are fortunate in knowing more than previous generations knew about how to guide children and adults to find joy in constructive work. For this reason cultural action, in and out of schools, has more potential than it had when, for example, two centuries ago the Parliament after the French Revolution attempted in several respects to remake cultural structures by decree. I will briefly sketch references to some of the scientific knowledge now available that can be used in eliciting motivation for constructive development under four headings: Developmental Psychology, Moral Education, Sociology, and Theology.

1. Developmental Psychology.

Lawrence Kohlberg and Rochelle Mayer, in an article in Harvard Educational Review, point out that when John Dewey first conceived the idea of the school as the laboratory and training ground for democracy, there was as yet no large body of psychological knowledge that could be used in putting his philosophy into practice. But today, due to Jean Piaget and many others who have created the field called "developmental psychology" there are known methods for implementing Dewey's principles.

Piaget was a biologist who conceived of the growth of the human mind as a process analogous to those by which other living beings mature and adapt to their environments. He adopted the findings of Karl von Groos, a German zoologist and student of animal behavior, who studied the play of animals. Van Groos coined the German term Funktionslust, function-pleasure, to describe the joy that young animals find in acquiring and extending their natural powers. We now know that this same joy can be the motivation for classroom activities. The joy of kittens play-fighting, of puppies chasing balls, of colts learning to run, of young birds learning to fly, is generically the same as that of human children who learn through play. Following Van Groos and Piaget, and Maria Montessori and many others, many schools throughout the world now seek to teach through joy instead of through fear, and in doing so they are contributing to the social reconstruction of the erotic. Children whose natural thirst for fun is habitually satisfied through healthy educational activities are likely to find pleasure in contributing to society as adults.

Although Piaget and others have recently supplied a wealth of observational and experimental detail, the concept that in bringing up children educators can extend and enrich their natural desires so that they take ever-greater pleasure in socially constructive activities is at least as old as Aristotle, who defined a well-educated person as a person who finds pleasure in doing good, and defined a badly-educated person as a person who finds pleasure in vice.

2. Moral Education.

I will divide my notes from the field of moral education into four subparts, as follows: The moral discussion method, The feminine voice, Early child care and the growth of love, The moral atmosphere of institutions.

The moral discussion method.
Numerous studies have shown that when people discuss moral dilemmas, with the guidance of a suitable teacher or facilitator, their levels of moral reasoning slowly and steadily rise. I would relate these findings to three aspects of cultural action to transform the basic structure as follows:

(i) The reconstruction of the erotic. Educational activities seeking to change the sign of the erotic from negative to positive involve especially the evolutionarily older levels of the brain and the body. Hence art and music are likely to accomplish more than earnest moral discussions, which tend mainly toward improving the guidance of relatively cold deliberate action, under the governance of the evolutionarily newer language centers of the brain. But discussion should not be counted out: mental activity has a Funktionslust of its own like any other activity; the force acquired by the will through words spoken and heard in discussions with peers is a real force, and acting to carry out what one consciously wills is a real motive.

(ii) Conventional norms. The moral discussion method has been shown to socialize the participants into the conventional norms of the culture in which the discussions take place. One student of moral education, John Gibbs of Ohio State, has concluded that what moral education research has effectively shown is that there are just three levels of moral reasoning: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. The post-conventional cannot be appropriately hierarchized into higher and lower developmental stages; the differing post-conventional moral judgments that adults make should be conceived rather as differing worldviews and differing philosophies.

(iii) Criticism of conventional norms. The discussion of moral problems can lead beyond moral socialization to the critique of the norms currently prevailing in society. A clear example would be using information from ecological biology to stimulate a critical discussion of an existing norm of having large families. An example germane to the reconstruction of the erotic would be a moral dilemma discussion reflecting on the existing codes of masculine honor.

The feminine voice.
The moral discussion method reliably socializes children to have at least an intellectual grasp of conventional social norms. Carol Gilligan pointed out that the early research using the moral discussion method carried out by Lawrence Kohlberg, studying exclusively male subjects, led to defining stages of moral development in a way which systematically undervalued a care ethic. She defined a care ethic as attending to and responding to need. Caring tends to be an aspect of ethics which is undervalued and under-articulated. But we can encourage caring - and thereby improve society - by making a special effort to seek out and listen to the caring voices.

Child care and the growth of love.
Mary Ainsworth and other researchers have shown that infants who are emotionally starved are more likely than others to become sociopathic and dysfunctional adults. Lawrence Kohlberg held a similar opinion: that people who are not loved as babies resist the transition from pre-conventional to conventional morality. These findings suggest what might be called a "virtuous circle:" If infants develop basic trust (to adopt a phrase from Erik Erikson, a third researcher whose views also converge toward the same conclusion) because they are well-loved, then they are likely to become conventional adults with positive emotional responses in social relationships. If, in addition, rational discussion as practiced, for example, with the moral dilemma discussion method, leads them to question conventional morality, then, as adults, they can come to an understanding of the need to reform and improve society. As good citizens, and as good parents, they will contribute to building a better society in which the unconscious feeling that she or he is loved, which is possessed by the infant who has basic trust, and which provides a foundation for healthy emotional life as an adult, will have more objective validity than it has now. In a better society the feeling of being secure in a loving relationship will have more objective validity because society itself will be better organized to care for its members, and because society itself will in turn assume the responsibilities of a good citizen of the larger planetary community which includes also the other nations, the earth itself, the air, the water, the sunlight, and the plant and animal living forms who share the planet with us.

Thus in the reconstruction of the erotic there is a virtuous circle from child to adult, and from adults to children; and there is a virtuous circle from emotions to ideas, and from ideas to emotions. In the traditional language of Saint Thomas Aquinas: beauty prepares the soul for the entrance of right reason; right reason prepares the soul for the entrance of beauty.

The moral atmosphere of institutions.
Late in his career Lawrence Kohlberg realized that he had made another mistake, besides not initially paying enough attention to feminine voices; the other mistake consisted of studying only the moral development of individuals. He came to this realization after accepting invitations to advise schools attempting to cope with ungovernable students. His practical experience, which took the form of helping to form "just community schools," led him to appreciate the wisdom of Emile Durkheim's sociological theory of moral education set forth in Durkheim's L'Education Morale. For Durkheim morality started with attachment to social groups, and progressed by ever-widening and ever-deepening attachments. Kohlberg then set out to create an instrument for assessing the moral development not of the student, but of the school. Although he died before he finished carrying out his intention, I think we can say that his and Durkheim's findings are sufficient to support this conclusion: individuals develop constructive ideals and sentiments best in settings provided by institutions which demonstrate the norms they teach.

3. Sociology.

You may remember that I said I would mention a few samples of the research-based knowledge now available to help us to bring out the best in human motivation, under four headings: developmental psychology, moral education, sociology, and theology. I have drawn a few lessons from developmental psychology and from research on moral development, and now I am ready to mention a contribution from sociology. I want to mention just one social project, which can be called a project in applied sociology. I will say almost nothing about sociological theory, although I have already mentioned Durkheim's moral development theory, and although Manuel Bastias, the Chilean sociologist who was one of the leaders of the practical project I will tell about, has made theoretical contributions as important as his practical work.

The project I want to tell about concerns the same agency in Chile whose programs with peasants I previously mentioned, but now I want to talk about an urban project in the densely populated city of Santiago. Before beginning the project I want to talk about, the people in the agency had for many years noticed that in their parent education and community organizing programs it was hard to get the men to participate. Mainly women came. When the women analyzed the issues in their lives, one of the persistent social problems they named was machismo, a social problem which, by definition, it is hard to solve without male participation. Another problem frequently identified was alcoholism, which afflicted both sexes, but which was more common among men. Some people - and at least half the time I was one of them - formed the opinion that not much progress could be made on anything else without addressing the problem of alcoholism.

The agency started a project with a new approach to men, which I later participated in evaluating, together with my wife and some of our students. The new approach was that people enrolled in the program as couples, not as individuals but as pairs. They enrolled for the purpose of exploring the problems of couples in a group composed of other couples. The approach was invented by Rosa Saavedra, a Chilean psychologist, and her husband, Manuel Bastias, the sociologist I mentioned a minute ago. With the new approach the men came. Attendance was always exactly equal, the same number of men as women. Manuel, who had himself grown up in the slums of Santiago, told me that I had been mistaken to focus on alcoholism: alcoholism was the symptom, sex was the problem.

As part of our evaluative study, my wife Caroline and I enrolled together as program participants. We went once a week to a room in a church, which was one of the several hundred sites where the program was conducted. There we played interactive games with eight other couples. For example, we played a game where we went through a stack of cards and divided them into two stacks, one for the woman and one for the man. The cards had questions on them like "Who is expected to change the diapers ?" "Who decides what groceries to buy?" If the answer is "the woman" then the card goes in the woman's stack.

What made the project sociological is that we discussed social roles, not the persons who fill the roles. We did not talk about Carlos or Jaime, or Carmen or Teresa, but about the role of the husband and the role of the wife. For example, all nine couples in our group reached consensus that - regardless of what might be the case in their particular relationship - the norm is that the woman changes the diapers. The result was that our private problems became politely socialized in a small, supportive group. People were not upset by this indirect invasion of their privacy; on the contrary, they seemed relieved to find that their most intimate and pressing problems were not only their own, but were part of a pattern of being a couple trying to raise a family under conditions of poverty. The discussions led directly from the problems of daily life to analyzing the social conditions that produce frustrations so often manifested as marital discord. The couples groups became sources of strength for families, but not just for families; they couples groups also strengthened churches and community organizations.

I offer the experience of this program, which is called, "We Got Together, And?" as an illustration of a method for tapping energy locked up in personal frustrations, and channeling it into good work. The erotic passions were redirected, and the new directions were constructive.

4. Theology.

In most societies religious beliefs and practices have provided the context in which people have transformed their emotions, committed themselves to norms, and understood their place in the cosmos. This fact about cultural history prompted the cultural historian and ecological theologian Thomas Berry says that fundamental change is always change "at the religious level, because no other level is deep enough."

Berry's proposition holds true in a sense even of social change movements that are nominally anti-religious, such as the French Revolution, and the October Revolution which founded the Soviet Union. These revolutions were "at the religious level" because they sought to perform the functions that religion usually performs, even though in the first case they sought to replace an established Roman Catholic church with the worship of reason, and in the second case they sought to replace an established Russian Orthodox church with humanistic atheism.

I understand Berry's phrase, "no other level is deep enough" literally. Religion engages the levels of the brain which are literally deeper than, below, under, the neo-cortex, at the places low in our bodies where the primal passions come from. Religion is able to show its power in its pathologies, such as the communal riots, because its energy comes from deep and powerful human needs.

I want to suggest that the study of religion has advanced in ways which make it easier than it once was to appreciate and to utilize religion's potential contributions to the reconstruction of human motivation. There was a time when the very idea of social science implied hostility to religion. Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, declared that sociology was necessary precisely because a secular source of legitimate social authority - to be founded on reason and empirical research - was needed to replace the no longer credible church. I believe that now we can say that the systematic study of the subject matter of social science, namely human culture in its ecological context, has led to the abandonment of some of the preconceptions of its founders.

One of the things I think we know now, which the early social scientists perceived only dimly, is that the cohesion of human groups depends on sharing meanings, and sharing meanings depends on sharing stories. Without a common story, there is no community. Without the great myths that have inspired communities, human language would not have developed as it did, and we would not be the kind of creatures that we are. The infinite foolishness and infinite cruelty that have been and are part and parcel of people's religious practices can now be seen as so many reasons to do religion better; they can't be reasons for ceasing to do religion, because the human is not the kind of animal for whom life without spirit is a healthy option.

Berry suggests that today we have a common Earth Story, and that it is a cultural cosmology capable of uniting the species. The Earth Story is the story of our human origins, and of the evolution of the planet earth, which is told by the natural sciences, and it is taught in every school in the world. As I understand his approach, it is not meant to replace the existing religions, but to put them in context as a larger story, which would include "the story of storytelling."

I will not say more about religion. I agree with Gandhi that "God" is the richest word in our language, and a lifetime does not suffice to plumb its meaning. The end of a lecture series is no time to begin a topic even larger than Constructive Development. I have outlined a theory of Constructive Development under the headings of Education, Evaluation, Planning, and Motivation. I need to mention religion because I do not want to let you believe that I believe that it is possible to ignore it. I bring it up particularly in the context of motivation because, as I have said many times in many ways, people are motivated to act not just by their physical urges, but by how they interpret their physical urges. Social reality is built of meanings, meanings are built on interpretations. I want to try to make this point a little clearer by stressing how very fundamental the interpretation of reality is by mentioning a concept from Martin Heidegger. As Heidegger put it, all simple seeing - like looking out the window and seeing a tree - is already a process of interpretation, already a way of reading reality. (The German word for interpretation is auslegen, and for reading legen, thus to interpret is to "read out.") We must make deep changes in socially constructed realities in order to overcome the obstacles the basic structure of the global economy opposes to our efforts to mobilize resources to meet needs. I hope that at this point you will not find it overwhelmingly obscure and incomprehensible if I say that deep changes in social reality require deep changes in the way we human beings interpret our feelings.

Consequently, to reconstruct social reality without taking into account the great interpretive systems through which most humans understand themselves and their place in the universe is not feasible, and if it were feasible it would not be desirable. Let us then count the theologians among us as people whose expertise is indispensable - along with the developmental psychologists, the specialists in moral education, the sociologists, and workers in many other fields I have not mentioned.

Notes and References

The quotation from Freud about sex needing to be restrained from breaking down every dam and washing away the laboriously erected work of civilization is from "The General Theory of the Neuroses, in his Collected Works (edited by James Strachey). London: The Hogarth Press, 1951. Volume 16, p. 312. In connection with my use of the premise that there is no sharp boundary between sexual feelings and many other feelings, it should be noted that Freud, in spite of his early insistence that anything but a vita sexualis normalis was likely to lead to neurosis, recognized that, "...the sexual instinctual impulses in particular are extraordinarily plastic, if I may so express it. One of them can take the place of another, one of them can take over another's intensity; if the satisfaction of one of them is frustrated by reality, the satisfaction of another can afford complete compensation. They are related to one another like a network of intercommunicating channels filled with a liquid; and this is so in spite of their being subject to the primacy of the genitals - a state of affairs that is not at all easily combined into a single picture. Further, the component instincts of sexuality, as well as the sexual current which is compounded from them, exhibit a large capacity for changing their object, for taking another in its place...." Id. at page 345.

Mary Ainsworth's research on the consequences of emotional starvation in infancy is documented in several places, including the World Health Organization (WHO)'s Deprivation of Maternal Care: a reassessment of its effects. Geneva, 1962; Ainsworth, Mary, Infancy in Uganda: infant care and the growth of love. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967.

The references to Thomas Berry are to views he has frequently expressed in annual seminars held each July at the Holy Cross Center for Ecological Spirituality at Port Burwell, Ontario, Canada. They are similar to the views he has expressed in his published works. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco, Calif.: Sierra Club Books, 1988; Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Auguste Comte's views on the need for scientific authority to replace failing religious authority are in the early lectures of his Cours de Philosophie Positive. Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1864. They can be found in English in Gertrud Lezner (ed.), Auguste Comte, Positivism: The Essential Writings. New York: Harper & Rowe, 1975. pp. 393-99.

John Dewey's view that the school can be one of the places to start reforming society to make it more democratic and more cooperative is stated, for example, in his Moral Principles in Education. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1909. p. 2.

Emile Durkheim's L'Education Morale is published in English as Moral Education. New York: The Free Press, 1961. See pp. 47-94.

Riane Eisler's findings showing the possibility of a life-loving culture without patriarchy are developed in her Sacred Pleasure - Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. Harper: San Francisco, 1995; and earlier in her The Chalice and the Blade. Cambridge, Mass.: Harper & Row, 1987.

Erik Erikson's concept of "basic trust" is presented in several of his works, including Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1958. pp. 247-253.

For Freud's pessimism see Freud, Sigmund, The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. Volume XXII, pages 203-215. For recent documentation of scientific grounds for a more optimistic view of human nature, prepared by an international group of scholars, see David Adams (ed.), The Seville Statement: Preparing the Ground for the Constructing of Peace. Paris: UNESCO, 1991. The psychological evidence that human motives are such that if a just society could be achieved humans would support it and abide by its norms is discussed by John Rawls in a chapter called "The Stability of Justice" in his A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Gandhi commented on the word "God" in M. K. Gandhi, Truth is God. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1955. pp. 6 -12.

For Carol Gilligan's criticisms of Kohlberg's methods see C. Gilligan and J. Murphy, "Development from Adolescence to Adulthood: the philosopher and the dilemma of the fact," in D. Kuhn (ed.), New Directions in Child Development: Intellectual Development Beyond Childhood. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1979. pp. 85-99.

The German zoologist Karl von Groos compared human and animal play in The Play of Man. New York: D. Appleton and Co.: 1901. The term Funktionslust occurs at p. 379.

My suspicion that Jurgen Habermas may believe that there could be a culture guided by conscious, rational motives stems from reading Habermas, Jurgen, Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. (translation by Thomas McCarthy). See, e.g. pp. 69-95.

The reference to Nancy Hartsock is to her Money, Sex, and Power. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983. The "negative erotic" is introduced at p. 157. A community based on exchange is flawed, fragile, and false - p. 96. The agonistic society, e.g. p. 164, 166. The social construction of sexuality - p. 156.

Martin Heidegger's seminal idea that even the simplest seeing is "seeing as," and thus an interpretation, is developed in his early classic work Sein und Zeit, of which the standard English translation is Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time. (J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, translators). London: SCM Press, 1962.

Lawrence Kohlberg and Rochelle Mayer express the view that Piaget's psychology provides an empirical knowledge-base for implementing Dewey's philosophy in their article, "Development as the Aim of Education," Harvard Educational Review. v. 42 (1972), pp. 449-496.

Kohlberg's general views on the psychology of moral development are stated in his The Psychology of Moral Development: the nature and validity of moral stages. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984, see especially pp. 198-203. However, the particular point cited here, that people who are not loved as babies resist the transition from pre-conventional to conventional morality, is one Kohlberg made in conversation with the author.

The reference to Nel Noddings is to her Caring. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, chapter 2, "One-Caring," pages 30-58.