Two books converged for me today: Edmund Morris’ Beethoven: The Universal Composer and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann’s An Elusive Science: The Troubling History Of Education Research.

Langemann writes movingly of the “early educationists” whose motivations were both “human” and “within the context of their era, comprehensible.” At the same time, she judges that their work bequeathed to the field of education “a sadly narrow problematics.” This is a much more precise way of saying what I often struggle to articulate: that much of the thinking I encounter surrounding schooling (with all that includes) simply reduces or denies the complexities of the questions at the heart of the endeavor. The “sadly narrow problematics” of the essentially behaviorist approach persists in many quarters, despite the famed and vital “cognitive turn” thinkers like Jerome Bruner encouraged and developed in the 1960s.

The haunting question for me, however, is why a sadly narrow problematics would emerge and be adopted in the first place, especially in the case of something as obviously delicate, complex, and relational as teaching and learning. Part of me remains genuinely puzzled by this question. Part of me is more sadly knowing. If one adopts a narrow problematics, one becomes more certain of the possibilities of useful action, more confident of the directions one should go in, more systematic and much less anxious about the daily work that advances the profession. Who wouldn’t want certainty, confidence, and clarity?

I do understand that desire. There are famous examples of what can happen when the problematics become so broad that the entire world is taken in as a problem. Apparently nutty and obsessive questions emerge: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Or a disingenuous career-enhancing “high theory” epistemological panic can enable one to write the same essay over and over, “deconstructing” (in the casual sense) everything, each argument spinning down into a self-consuming artifact, except for the artifact of the writer him or herself, magically exempt.

And in the meantime, there’s a kind of despair that settles in, as if one can’t know or do anything.

So yes, I understand the pragmatic realities, and I understand the need for operational integrity and managerial attentiveness (well, I am sometimes dubious of the way the latter is practiced, but I digress). But reading those words in Lagemann’s fascinating analysis, I wonder: if we’re encountering something as complex as the conceptual structures instantiated in neural connections and the capacity to stimulate and shape one’s own future neuroplasticity, and we narrow the problematics, isn’t that about the worst thing we could do? If all the targets of analysis and investigation are moving targets, we won’t get good answers or even good questions by pretending that many of them are stationary–or that we can demonstrate the success of our analysis by the way we triumphantly prove what we already knew going in.

Which brings me to the Beethoven, and the heroism of broad problematics. Last Sunday I was privileged to hear the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra in rehearsal with a massive choir as they prepared to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony the following day. (Full disclosure: my sister-in-law sings in the chorus, but I don’t think that biases my response.) I know the Ninth pretty well. The second movement was the theme to The NBC Nightly News when I was growing up, and I always loved its wild, almost phantasmagorical mixture of echoing percussiveness and triumphant melody. Later, as I got to know the whole symphony, I was amazed by the confident depth of that haunting first movement, the beginning of which is almost nothing but a hint, followed by music of breathless insistence, a harbinger of the challenge we must rise to for the rest of the piece. Then there was the third movement, endlessly spinning out of itself with a melodic line that it seems to me leads directly to some of Shostakovich’s most heartbreaking themes.

But the finale is beyond even the abundance of what precedes it. The task Beethoven set himself was nothing compared to the task he set for us. We stand with the cherubim before God. We are all brothers and sisters. Our guide offers a kiss for the whole world. It would be ridiculous if it weren’t for the heroism of Beethoven’s joyously broad problematics, and the fact that he did it.

I suppose the approach to joyously broad problematics is the work of a lifetime: oblique, often disappointed, yet persistent, a unified and multiple embrace of complexity. To describe the project would be to dismiss it out of hand. Yet Beethoven accomplished it, and it cannot be undone. This kiss for the whole world.

I’ve sung that choral movement. I recall the first run-through with the orchestra. Our conductor, the late Paul Hill, smiled at us after he’d dropped his arms to his side. He’d seen this before, how inhabiting such a complex and urgent expressiveness would forever change our imagination of what could be experienced, what could be accomplished. Some work of noble note ere the end.

A broad problematics invites demagoguery, mystification, mental and spiritual exhaustion. Yet without it, no Ninth, no troth to plight under the wings of joy. No deep understanding. No deeply shared smiles.

Can the study of education, a technology to help us learn faster and more effectively, be guided by a joyful, heroically broad problematics?

How can it not be?