Sociology's Education Foundations: Facing the Challenge of Ambivalence

Abstract

I began working on this paper during the Christmas holidays (1991), and for relaxation I was reading Mixed Emotions, by Andrew Weigert, when the following sentence leaped out at me: Ambivalence is at the heart of modern life (1991, p. 64). Weigert had defined ambivalence as referring to contradictory emotions; that is, contradictory defined feelings. As contradictory defined feelings, ambivalence is constructed in historically available cultural categories such as love/hate, attraction/repulsion, awe/disdain, joy/sadness, etc. While Weigert devoted most of his attention to the nature of ambivalence in the context of the self, he did refer also to the ways our social institutions helped create or allay ambivalence. For example, he referred to the Boyer study (1989) that showed how college students were pulled on the one hand by careerist job interests and on the other hand by the desire for general education. Faculty were also ambivalent about their teaching, both as regards the courses they preferred to teach versus the courses they believed they ought to teach, and as regards the quality of their courses. They criticized students for their laziness, but also admitted that all too often they did not make strong intellectual demands, retreating instead to multiple choice and true-false tests and a stand-offish attitude toward the students. And, as Reece McGee made clear in his presidential address [see the preceding article in this issue ? editor], the faculty struggled with themselves and administration over the t^ching/research conundrum. The more I pondered Weigert's essay, the more I became attracted to the idea of trying to apply the concept of ambivalence to the situation of sociology's educational foundations. Thus, in this paper I argue that one of the keys to understanding sociology's problems in modern society is the way that ambivalence has permeated our educational foundations from the very beginning. With apologies to Weigert for taking his essay well beyond his concerns, here I go. Let me say a word first about sociology's educational foundations, so you can know how I am using terms. By foundations I refer to the origins, genesis or seeds of sociology as disciplined or ordered ways of thinking about the world. By adding the word