A Study of Perfectionist Education through Emerson, Dewey and Cavell: Reconstructing the ethics of education

Naoko Saito

In an attempt to resist contemporary nihilistic tendencies in culture and education and the erosion of the public realm -- in the U. S., the U. K., and Japan, for example -- the present project sets out to articulate a conception of education whose guiding thought is the strain of perfectionism that runs through Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, and Stanley Cavell. Based upon their democratic philosophies, this research aims to present an account of perfectionist education -- an education that can inspire students and teachers towards self-reliance and care, to revitalize democracy from within the classroom. It points to a language of education and of civic life in which the private and the public are more richly and more subtly related than is the case in dominant forms of education, geared as these are towards performativity, efficiency, and quantification. I attempt to explore the implications of these lines of perfectionist thought for the pervasive reconstruction of the ethics of education – including moral education, intercultural understanding, and liberal learning, and in ways that have a clear bearing on such issues as standards and assessment. The research method combines the examination of philosophical texts (with special emphasis on Emersonian Moral Perfectionism), the analysis of educational policies and practices, and the cross-cultural exchange of live voices in the U. S., the U. K, and Japan.

About Naoko Saito

I am a female Japanese philosopher of education, who was born and grew up in Tokyo. Having graduated in American Studies and Philosophy, I worked for a number of years for the automobile company, Subaru, both in Tokyo and later in Lafayette, Indiana. I resumed my academic work at Harvard University, majoring in philosophy of education. I then returned to Japan to enroll at the University of Tokyo, but subsequently went back to the US to pursue my studies again at Harvard University and then at Columbia University. Traveling between east and west during those years, I cultivated my skill as a translator of cross-cultural dialogue. I now work full-time as a research associate at the University of Tokyo, while teaching part-time at two other universities. My most recent publications include: “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense: Deweyan Growth in an Age of Nihilism” (Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2002, in press), “Education for the Gleam of Light: Emerson’s Transcendentalism and its Implications for Contemporary Moral Education” (Philosophy of Education, 2001); and “Reconstructing Deweyan Pragmatism in Dialogue with Emerson and Cavell” (Transactions of Charles S. Peirce Society, 2001).