ABSTRACT
My review of the eighteenth and nineteenth century idea of “progress” revealed that this idea was highly influenced by the natural history method of Charles Darwin’s biosocial theory. This had wide reaching implications for the growth of psychology, economics, and sociology as disciplined human sciences. It also influenced how teachers were researched throughout the twentieth century because this research was based on the theoretical methods and frameworks of those disciplines. Since these theories tend to be teleological, they can mimic story-forms that resemble heroic sagas. For Darwin as well as for Marx and Freud, some mysterious force is playing in the background, which moves the story forward. For Darwin, it was natural selection, the process by which some genes and gene-combinations are reproduced more than others when a population is exposed to environmental distress. For Freud, it was the pleasure principle, the way in which sexuality is expressed reproductively at various periods in one’s life. For Marx, it was the economic base of all social and economic relations and structures. In that vast superstructure of relations that we call “society,” competing forces wrestle and ultimately undermine and mutate the existing system. In all cases, however, motion, movement, mutation, adaptation, and reformation are common elements. There are basic reasons for the presence of these common elements, which I examine in Chapter 6. In this chapter, I show how this narrative of development takes on psychosocial aspects of personality development. These aspects greatly influenced the composition of research on teachers’ lives and careers. In Erikson’s version, the main character undergoes stages of trial and suffering. Each stage opens to the next thanks to a type of “healing crisis” that forsakes the previous stage. Erikson’s theory resembles an archetypal hero’s journey, a pattern that is universal in many native cultures. A tragic hero encounters “departures,” sometimes leaving the tribe or village altogether on a confusing journey and then returns to the community with a new message of truth and emancipation. The journey of the departure, passage, and return results in a new subconscious awareness. One of the earliest recorded narratives of this sort is the Epic of Gilgamesh and it is also present in Homer’s Ulysses, in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in the Republic (Book VII. 514A -521B), and even in the “wilderness journey” of Jesus (Mark 1: 12-13).
