Study and the Question of Formative Justice

• In Event: Fulfillment of Self Through Adherence to Law: Formative Justice and Educational Politics

Abstract

What is study? An initial thought is that it is a practical means to the end of learning something. “You should study hard if you want to do well on the math test”: this is how we typically use the term in everyday speech. It refers to a standard set of actions, a practice, in which someone may engage for the purpose of acquiring a measure of knowledge and associated rewards.
What kind of actions exactly? The fact that this question is perfectly reasonable indicates that no one is born knowing how to study. Some things we do may have little effect on our learning. Not only are halfhearted, distracted perusals of the material unlikely to cause good grades but even determined cramming can be beside the point when it comes to mastering genuinely a body of mathematical skills. All of which is to say that study itself is a skill, an object of learning, that may call in turn for comparatively rudimentary efforts at study.
With this in mind, when we read the title of Robbie McClintock’s groundbreaking essay, “Toward a Place of Study in a World of Instruction,” we may surmise that its central question is something like the following: given our desire to instruct pupils more successfully, how can we draw from them more committed and effective practices of study that support our teaching? Such an inquiry would examine how teachers may instruct students in effective study techniques for the sake of the students’ learning.
What an intriguing surprise, then, when we discover that this supposition is completely off! McClintock rather wants us to rethink this whole understanding of study. Instead of assuming that it is a means in the service of instruction and ultimately learning, he encourages us to cultivate it as an end in itself. He wants to liberate it radically from the realm of instruction.
My presentation will reconstruct McClintock’s reasons for separating, even opposing, study and instruction. Furthermore, it will link this argument to McClintock’s later writing on “formative justice.” By this term, as he explains in Homeless in the House of Intellect, he is interested in drawing attention to an alternative concept of justice that is not primarily concerned with the distribution of goods and responsibilities. The vital importance of study to the formation of a citizenry capable of even entering into a fair conversation about the distributive principles of their society illuminates why we should try to articulate in more detail the distinctive concerns of formative justice.
Along these lines, the presentation will also chart out some possible departures from McClintock’s work. I shall try to explicate why I believe the concept of study can and should be made even more rigorously non-instrumental. Doing this, I shall argue, brings out more clearly the existential significance of the practice. And this in turn, I shall suggest, discloses how formative justice grows out of the revelation that, as Walt Whitman puts it, “I contain multitudes.” Study is devotion to this communion.

Author

• Rene V. Arcilla, New York University