2500 essay for philosophy reflection on education with film
CHAPTER 2
MORAL EDUCATION, LIBERAL EDUCATION AND THE VOICE OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Paul Standish
‘I want to break free.’ – Freddie Mercury
The words above, from Freddie Mercury’s hit song, Free, have, so it seems, a guaran- teed appeal to young (and older) people today. In fact, there are many songs in which one finds expressions of, or cries of, or demands for freedom. We live in a world that, in so many respects, offers freedom to people as never before. But the word seems to have an unstoppable emotive force. Don’t we all at times utter it or think it – whether we are thinking ‘Now at last I feel free’, or ‘If only I could be free’, or ‘Once I get away from here I shall be free’? Where does the emotive power of the idea of freedom come from and why does it seem so important to us?
For all the apparent impetus towards new possibilities of life, however, there is in some of these expressions more than a suggestion of the ressentiment that Nietzsche saw as a manifestation of nihilism. Nihilism of such kinds involves a negativity towards the way things are, in a never-ending, perhaps compulsive longing for some other world. If only things could be different, these thoughts seem to say; they are the opposite of the yea-saying, the intense absorption in experience, that might otherwise be associated with freedom. But, this is an essay about neither Nietzsche nor nihilism. What I propose to do is to consider the ways in which concerns with freedom have been played out in the philosophy of the curriculum. I shall do this by tracing a story that leads from the rise of progressivism to the reactions against it.
Although there is, in a sense, something timeless about questions concerning free- dom, they acquire new dimensions in circumstances of globalization. Whereas one might, on a standard analysis, ask questions about what it can mean for the individual to be free when he or she is at the same time conditioned by social, cultural, political and religious circumstances within the nation-state, the very terms of this question are now challenged by globalization. It is not just that the nation-state finds itself com- promised by the power of multinationals or by the invasive forms of new communi- cations or by larger political forms of organization; it is that the very space of the political, the terms of the public and the private, is reconfigured in new and sometimes frenetic, sometimes tranquilized forms. Education systems now routinely acknowl- edge questions of globalization, but these rarely go beyond gestures towards the knowledge economy or the somewhat haphazard adoption of web-based learning. From country to country, however, the picture varies. A dimension of the demise of
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K. Roth and I. Gur-Ze’ev (eds.), Education in the Era of Globalization, 33–50 © 2007 Springer.
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the nation-state for many citizens in European countries, for example, is precisely that they now think of themselves as citizens of Europe. The ways in which individual identities are developed, and hence that the possibilities of freedom are conceived, are deeply conditioned by these changing political terms. In countries, such as the UK or Japan, however a relative isolation is maintained, with correspondingly more intro- spective conceptions of citizenship and its education. There are obvious debates to be had about how far public education should foster loyalty to the nation-state and how far cosmopolitan values, and about how far these are incompatible. In other political regimes, to be sure – say, in theocracies, in countries devastated by poverty or in newly formed democracies – the stakes of freedom are plainly very different.
When one looks across this range of difference, and against the in some respects common background of global change, what is clear is that Enlightenment ideals of freedom are themselves challenged. While I do not propose to foreground the Nietzschean themes alluded to here, it is in the restoring of such an inflection at the end of the chapter that an alternative, richer conception of freedom in relation to the curriculum is sought.
It is in this context that concerns about freedom and schooling have developed in various ways and in diverse circumstances. In Japan, there is concern about drop-out rates from education, about the rebellious behaviour of young people, about classroom disruption, and lack of respect for tradition, about hair dyed blond . . . And, in this context, some argue that what is needed is education of the heart (kokoro no kyoiku). In the UK within recent decades, debates about moral education and citizenship have gained a new prominence. What is needed, the argument has been, is to get ‘back to basics’. What we need to do is to teach children the difference between right and wrong. In these and other countries, it has become a common wisdom that it is progressive (or child-centred) ideas and methods, that have given children too much freedom and so deprived them of the standards of behaviour and the discipline that is necessary in their upbringing. John Major went so far, in the early 1990s, as to say: ‘The progressives have had their say and they have had their day’. In fact, in the UK, during the past 20 years, no leading politician (of any of the parties) has been willing to speak in favour of progressivism because in the eyes of the public it has become so much associated with the image of self-indulgent teachers, who want to be ‘friends’ with the children rather than to teach them, to let children do whatever they want, and because the one thing that the general public wants from education is for it to make sure that their children come out of school with the necessary skills to find decent jobs.
I want shortly to give a brief account of that development in the UK and of reac- tions against it. But, first, it is appropriate to say more about the value of freedom that is so close to its heart. For brevity, I shall not say anything here about the prominence of the idea in the world of Ancient Greece but shall confine myself to some remarks about the rise of the idea of freedom, principally in Europe, over the past 300 or so years. What does a consideration of that period show?
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The development of the idea of freedom in the modern Western world
When people speak in history or philosophy of ‘the modern world’, they typically have in mind a period of time extending back to René Descartes and the individual- ism of disengaged rationality and to the political individualism of John Locke. But probably the most striking changes come with the political upheavals of the late 18th century and, in the UK especially, the massive social change brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps equally important during these centuries is the rise of science, which came with a new confidence in man’s reasoning and a faith in progress. (It was indeed thought of as ‘man’s’ reasoning at the time!) Words such as ‘progress’ and ‘development’ have now become so commonplace in our thinking that we suppose them to be perfectly natural, almost as if progress were built into the universe, but really this is very much the result of these massive changes in thought. With this new confidence in human abilities, there was an unprecedented questioning of estab- lished religious and moral horizons, and also the growing belief that, just as science had brought about spectacular changes in technology, so too rationality could be applied to the organization of society.
The gradual move from a conception of the universe as God’s creation towards a placing of man at the centre of things (that is, the rise of humanism) gave new promi- nence to the idea of freedom. Immanuel Kant advanced the key principle that, because human beings were capable of free will, they should always be treated as ends, never simply as means. (In other words, they should never be treated simply as slaves, but should be recognized as beings with interests of their own, and with the capacity ratio- nally to reflect on those interests.) This has become a guiding principle for the modern world. Perhaps the most important figure in the change we are considering, however, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His radical ideas pointed to the ways in which the contem- porary world caused people to lead lives that were shaped by mere convention and that were unnatural. One can perhaps picture the extraordinary costumes that were worn by the aristocracy of that time – the long wigs, the make-up, the brightly coloured fancy clothing for women and men! – and think of these as symbols of the falseness of people’s values and behaviour. In fact, however, the very ideas of what is natural and of falseness here are themselves familiar to us very much because of Rousseau’s own work. For, in his rejection of the values of convention, he argued that human beings had lost touch with nature and with their true selves. The way that today we cherish the natural world – our delight in a beautiful mountain range as well as our current environmentalism – would probably have made little sense in the Western world before Rousseau’s time. And, when today we read in a popular magazine such as Cosmopolitan of the need to get in touch with your ‘real self’ (Are you in touch with the real you?), this idea, which apparently comes so naturally to us, is surely partly attributable to Rousseau. The idea of what is real or true to ourselves, which connects with our notions of honesty, sincerity, integrity and being ‘together’ as a per- son, is sometimes spoken of as authenticity. In his book The Ethics of Authenticity
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(1991), Charles Taylor speaks of the massive inward turn that is brought about by Rousseau’s thinking: Rousseau gives us a sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths, for whom the morally good life must be one where we feel in tune with our own deepest commitments and feelings (as opposed to one where we simply follow what our religious or political leaders, or our parents, say). The source of morality is a voice within.
What Rousseau also offers, of course, in his conception of nature is a new idea of childhood – hence his enormous influence on thinking about education. Against the Christian idea that human beings are born in a state of ‘original sin’, he enables us to think of children as innocent (and pure and good, perhaps) because they are closer to nature. In contrast to the idea that the role of education was to mould children into a shape that would fit society, Rousseau’s view was that the perverted forms that soci- ety had come to assume must themselves change in accordance with what was natural. His description of Emile’s upbringing does indeed have an important bearing on edu- cation, but the book needs to be seen as part of his larger political philosophy: his vision of the good society and of citizenship. In the light of Emile (Rousseau, 1911, originally published 1762) and his other more obviously political writings, there is a clear connection between his thought and an event that was profoundly to shape the history of modern Europe and its understanding of itself – the French Revolution (1789). Its slogan of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ underlines the point.
In the 19th century, the thinker who stands out for his importance in the political thinking of the English-speaking world is, of course, John Stuart Mill. In Mill’s On Liberty, originally published in 1859, he advances what has become taken by people in general to be a fundamental principle. He writes:
The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and con- trol, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are war- ranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exer- cised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to oth- ers. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant (Mill, 1978, p. 9).
In other words, you should not prevent someone from doing what they want to do unless they are harming someone else. You should not interfere with them because they are harming themselves or because you think you know what is best for them. This principle encounters many problem cases, some of which Mill and his critics have addressed, but it remains an immensely powerful guiding principle and a natural reference point.
Although the ways of thinking sketched here have become naturalized in the Western world, they have undoubtedly brought problems, problems that could not easily have been anticipated. When the individual becomes the ultimate reference point, there is a loss of horizons of meaning that in the past had given sense to much of what he did; community ties are weakened, and the individual feels rootless and purposeless; there is a kind of ‘disenchantment’ of the world. Within the democracies that have
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developed, especially where the masses are not well educated, there is some tendency for values and policies to be determined by the ‘lowest common denominator’, so that societies are flattened and narrowed. And in these circumstances morality can degen- erate into crude utilitarianism, governed by a technical rationality.
Of course, the history of the 20th century is marked by two world wars. Amongst the social consequences of these in the UK were a weakening of the British class system, which had been such a pronounced feature of the period of the Empire, and a change in the role of women (as they too became directly involved in the war effort or took over civilian jobs normally held by men). In the 15 or so years immediately following the Second World War, the UK faced a period of austerity and at the same time saw the closing decades of its empire, as colonized countries moved towards independence. But, in the 1960s, there was a new period of economic prosperity and suddenly the feeling that things could change. New universities were built to meet the needs of the children of the post-war baby boom who were now passing through adolescence, sex scandals in the government changed people’s attitudes towards those in power and authority, the Beatles made their first records and ‘flower-power’ (the hippies) arrived! This was a new sense that one could question the way things had been done in the past, that one could, and one should, live one’s life as one chose. One must above all be authentic. It was in this context that progressivism came to be intro- duced in schools.
Progressive schooling and its introduction in the UK
While the advent of progressivism in state education in the UK was later than it had been in Germany and Scandinavia, for example, or for that matter in the United States, its development was perhaps more dramatic.1 The Primary Memorandum in Scotland (1965) and the Plowden Report (1967), two major government reports, advocated a radical change in the education of children in elementary school. The following para- graph from the Primary Memorandum is indicative:
It is now generally accepted that the primary school is much more than a preparation for secondary school: it is a stage of development in its own right . . . [Schooling must] meet the child’s needs and interests . . . [The teacher must] provide the environment, experi- ences and guidance which will stimulate growth along natural lines . . . [The child is] not an adult in miniature . . . [N]atural endowment of children is not uniform . . . [G]rowth and development . . . are continuous . . . The artificial nature of school organisation [needs to be compensated for] (SED, 1965, pp. 3–4).
To anyone familiar with the texts of progressive educators, these ideas will be famil- iar enough. It would be easy to match the phrases here to ideas of John Dewey, espe- cially in Democracy and Education (Dewey, 1925, originally published in 1916). It is undoubtedly the case that the ideas that were promoted in the teacher education
1 There had been a number of influential experiments in private education before this time. For a full discussion of the development of progressivism, see Darling and Nordenbo (2003).
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colleges at this time were a watered-down, if not a distorted, version of the thinking of the philosophers whom they quoted (Rousseau and Dewey above all). And even if the new approaches that they advocated did not affect all schools, there was neverthe- less a sudden wave of interest in these innovations. Visitors came from many coun- tries to see the new ‘Plowden schools’.
It is worth pausing for a moment to think what one might have seen in a visit to a progressive elementary school classroom in England at that time. In contrast to the plain, rather forbidding room with high windows (so that the children would look up towards God) and straight rows of desks (so that would work silently and attend only to the teacher) that had been the experience of the previous generation, the new class- room would be a colourful and comfortable place: there would be large windows, let- ting the light in and encouraging children to look out at the garden outside; tables would be arranged in ‘family’ groups, encouraging children to work with one another; the walls would be decorated with the brightly coloured art work of the children; there would be a ‘quiet corner’ with a carpet and cushions, and picture-books for children to browse; there would be pet animals (such as guinea pigs) for the children to care for, and plants for them to tend; and there would be a variety of activity, with children writing, drawing, making things, playing, talking and laughing excitedly; the teacher would not generally have spoken to the class as a whole, but would move around the room, attending to one child then another as the need arose. The children would up to a point be free to pursue the activities in whatever order they chose – in other words, to follow their interests. The principles and values governing this scene can be summed up in the following set of precepts:
• children learn best through doing, through experience; • learning takes place in a process of discovery; • creativity should be developed; • imagination should be developed; • children learn through play; • they learn best when they are happy; • learning should begin with the interests of the child; • children must not become bored; • children must learn things in meaningful contexts (not just isolated facts or
mindless drills); • learning should be organized on the basis of themes or topics, not according to
abstract academic subjects; • education is a process of growth from within; • the role of the teacher is to provide conditions that will assist that growth; • all children are different and they have their individual needs and rates of
growth; • the teacher must respond to the child’s needs, not present them with what she
wants to teach; • the emphasis should be on encouragement and praise, not punishment; • the teacher should not be an authoritarian figure but more like a friend to the
children.
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These then were the values promoted by many of those training teachers at the time and to some extent they became a kind of ideology. It is not the case that all schools adopted them entirely, but the general climate in the primary school undoubtedly went through a period of major change.
Economic change and conservative reactions
In the 1970s, however, events outside the school came to have an important bearing on the country’s development and on how education and teachers were seen. In 1972, a world crisis was occasioned when some of the main oil-producing countries in the Middle East made the decision to act collectively to raise prices. In the UK, one effect was a doubling in the cost of petrol overnight. Inevitably, this put severe pressure on the economy. This occurred following a time of prosperity when the major trade unions had succeeded, through collective bargaining, in gaining wage increases for their members. Now, with higher prices in the shops, they understandably pressed for more. Through the 1970s, there was a series of strikes against a background of rising inflation (to over 20%). Social problems appeared to be on the increase, with crime rising, and there was a general air of unrest. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher came to power, with a radical agenda for reform, one that involved high levels of unemploy- ment, new kinds of poverty and a squeeze on the funding of public services, welfare and education. Inevitably, progressive education was blamed for much that was wrong in society. Her first Minister of Education, Keith Joseph, even went so far as to say that it was teacher educators who were to blame because they had introduced teach- ers to Dewey!
In or around the 1970s, a number of publications had been produced under the ominous title of ‘Black Papers in Education’2 (see Boyson, 1975; Cox, 1992; Cox and Boyson, 1975, 1977; Cox and Dyson, 1969). At the time these reactionary texts struck many teachers as the ranting of conservative extremists, and they were assumed simply to be wildly out of touch. It was striking, however, that a decade later, with the reforms that Margaret Thatcher was to introduce, they had come closer to the mainstream. What Thatcher picked up on and skilfully exploited was suspi- cions amongst ordinary people that all was not well with education. For many peo- ple, the challenge to conventional notions of discipline and authority that had come with progressivism had seemed threatening, and the emphasis on creativity, play, and happiness in the elementary classroom appeared to involve a neglect of the knowl- edge and values that children needed. Not surprisingly, this laid the way for the idea that we needed to ‘get back to basics’ and that children must learn the difference between right and wrong.
2 The term ‘Black Paper’ borrows from the normal use of the phrase ‘White Paper’ for a government policy document.
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This widespread reaction to progressivism may have been justified in some ways, but it was generally based on very crude and limited ideas about education. It needs to be contrasted with the serious and careful work of a number of critics who, from the 1960s onwards, raised questions of a predominantly philosophical kind about some of the assumptions of progressivism. These criticisms were advanced in the name of liberal education, and it is to this that I now turn.
The idea of a liberal education
The views in Question are particularly interesting because, unlike those of the reactionary critics above, they also were committed to the idea that education was fundamentally con- nected with freedom. But they disagreed about what this freedom consisted in. The lead- ing figure in this in the UK was R. S. Peters, although in many respects his work related to ideas being developed around the same time by Israel Scheffler in the United States. In collaboration with his colleagues, Paul Hirst and Robert Dearden, Peters attempted to restate the idea of a liberal education. The importance of this idea and its influence on Anglophone philosophy of education can scarcely be questioned. It is a conception of education with ancient roots that presents us with cogent criticisms of progressivism.
Criticism of progressivism from liberal education
Like the reactionary critics mentioned above, these thinkers were concerned about vari- ous aspects of the wave of progressivism that was changing education. Within the child- centred preoccupations with play, happiness, creativity, learning by discovery (or experiential learning) and growth, they detected a somewhat sentimental view of the child. They identified also a failure to think through what these terms really implied. To take an example, progressive educators tended to think that children must above all be happy and that only the happy child would learn well, and this came to mean that a class- room in which children were smiling and laughing was a good classroom. But, as Dearden in particular pointed out, happiness is a much more elusive notion than this sug- gests. Sometimes we can be laughing but not be happy or only happy in a superficial way. Sometimes a greater degree of happiness comes because of struggling and then feeling that one has really achieved something. Some kinds of happiness bring satisfactions that are more profound. If smiling and laughing were the ultimate satisfaction, we should put scientists to work on a drug that would produce this state reliably and without difficulty. But surely we want more from our lives than this. At least, surely we should!
This connects very much with what is perhaps the most pervasive criticism of pro- gressive education that these philosophers made. This was, in R. S. Peters’ words, that child-centred education was concerned too much with the manner and insufficiently with the matter of education. In other words, it was too concerned with questions about the methods of learning and insufficiently concerned with what was learned. From the point of view of liberal education, the question of what is to be learned is the fundamental ques- tion of education. Let us consider how they set about answering that question.
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What is worthwhile?
There are obviously some things that we learn to do that we need more or less for our survival and some that are really a matter of training for the jobs that we take up in society. For example, in the comparatively recent past, many young women were trained in typing skills. With the development of voice-recognition, these skills will perhaps eventually become obsolete, and it is not obvious why anyone would then what to acquire them. So they are useful skills but nothing more. On the contrary, there are some things we learn that are not obsolescent in this way. It is noticeable that these are things that, unlike typing, have often been pursued by people who have not had to find jobs to support themselves (the aristocracy, for example). They seem to be things that, whether or not they are useful, are intrinsically worthwhile. The idea of what is worthwhile in itself is at the heart of this account of education. So we must ask what it is that people find worthwhile. What do they find most satisfaction in?
In addressing this question in his book Ethics and Education, Peters considers the things that people enjoy in a series of ascending stages. In the first place, they enjoy physical pleasures such as eating and drinking, sex, and lying in the sun. These are genuine sources of satisfaction for human beings, and they are activities that allow scope for care, refinement and sophistication. (Think for a moment of the remarkable difference between the way in which even the higher animals eat and a simple meal shared amongst friends or family.) But these activities also have their limitations. They depend on cyclical appetites – for example, there is only so much that one can eat at one time. And each time you eat, even where this is a gourmet meal, you do, as it were, start again from the beginning.
The second kind of enjoyment that Peters considers includes games and sports. People take great satisfaction in these. The advantage they have over the pleasures of the senses above is that they offer extraordinary possibilities for the development of ability or skill. If you play chess or tennis and you practise regularly, you may be able to press your achievement to higher and higher levels. Activities of this kind do not depend on cyclical appetites, and indeed, they may strengthen your capacity the more you do them. When you resume such activities, you do not have to start from the beginning, as it were, but build on the skill level that you have reached. They offer the possibility for extending human capacities in remarkable ways. But these activities also have limitations. Sports and games tend to be limited parts of our lives. Taking part in such activities does not, in general, cast light on the world as a whole or help you in other aspects of your life.
The third type of activity that Peters considers is what he calls ‘theoretical activi- ties’. He has in mind such academic pursuits as the study of history or mathematics or literature. Unlike the pleasures of eating and drinking, these do not depend on cycli- cal appetites but, on the contrary, are intensified the more you do them. Of course, you have to take a break for a rest sometimes! But the chances are that the more you know about, say, history, the more satisfying further study will be. They do not depend upon competition over resources that are scarce, because in intellectual activities the
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possibilities extend the more they are pursued, nor do they depend upon competition, where, as in sports and games, the winner takes the prize, because these activities depend upon and are enhanced by the shared pursuit of their goals. Moreover, they are not confined in terms of their influence on our lives. The way we live in the world is transformed and improved if we know something about how it has developed (in terms of social and political history, geography, geology and so on) and something about the science and technology upon which it depends. More strongly, this knowledge, and perhaps the understanding of human nature that we can gain from such disciplines as history and literature, makes us better able to address the practical problems that we will face, in all their ethical diversity. Furthermore, in view of the fact that reason is the most obvious feature that distinguishes us from other forms of life and that these activities are supreme developments of human reason, it is this that we should develop. In sum, theoretical activities offer unparalleled opportunities for satisfaction.
Cultural initiation and the development of mind
If we think a little about reason and the nature of mind, we should come to realize that the development of the mind is quite unlike the development of, say, a muscle in the body. Of course, there are physical parts of the body upon which the mind depends, but the mind is not an organ of the body; the brain is not the mind. To recognize this is to realize the immense importance that initiation into a culture has for the mind’s development. To speak of initiation into a culture here is not to refer to something highbrow but rather to think of the range of complex practices that make up any soci- ety and into which children are gradually introduced. Coming to participate in these practices is the development of mind. This may seem a surprising statement, but it can be supported by reference to the well-known case of the so-called wild child of Aveyron.
In France in the 18th Century, a child was discovered in the forest. The child was probably about 10 years old but was behaving like no ordinary child. He moved about on his hands and feet, and, obviously terrified of people, made animal-like noises when he was approached. Eventually, he was surrounded and caught, and then taken to an asylum in Paris. Asylums in Europe at that time, quite unlike modern hospitals, were places where mentally ill or abnormal people were confined. The public could pay an entrance fee to come and look (and probably laugh) at the people inside. An enlightened doctor heard about the child and became interested. The evidence was that this was a child who had been abandoned at birth and who had been left in the woods to die. The amazing thing was that it seemed that he had been found by wolves and protected by them, and so had spent several years amongst them. The doctor was inter- ested to see how far this child had become different from a normal child because of being so dramatically cut off from society, and also whether he could be civilized. The doctor took the child into his home and cared for him, and tried to do just this.
What is immediately striking about this story is that, although the child is not radically different physiologically from other children (his brain has developed
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organically, just as his muscles have), his mental state is barely recognizable as that of a human being at all. This should draw our attention to what it is we mean when we speak of the mind of a human being. In short, the mind is nothing without the cultural practices into which the child is introduced. Most important among those practices is language itself, as virtually all distinctively human activity seems to follow in some way from this. This child has been cutoff from language users, and so, the limited and strange ways of thinking that he has developed are scarcely recognizable to us. Indeed, it relates more to a wolf’s behaviour than to anything we could call mind.
If this is right, it seems to follow that a child’s upbringing cannot simply be a natural process of growth, or of unfolding from within, or even of unaided discovery learning. In any culture, the child must be introduced into the practices of that culture. Thinking of the way we treat infants and very young children – over such practices as sitting, walking, eating, talking, dressing, laughing – can help to show that this is the case.
A further comparison with animals helps to make this point. The societies that we live in are extremely complex, and our practices are the result of thousands of years of development. To see quite how far this is true, it is worth thinking for a moment of animals living in a natural environment – say, lions living in the African savannah. It is probably the case that the way that lions live today – their patterns of hunting, eating and mating – are no different from the way they were 5000 years ago. If we think, on the contrary, of the way in which people live in any ordinary city today in contrast to the lives of people there 5000 years ago, the difference is truly remarkable. It should leave us with no doubt, first, of the importance of educational practices through which these ways of thinking and understanding are passed on and advanced from one generation to the next, and, second, of the dependence of what we mean by ‘mind’ upon these practices.
It seems to follow from the above that education ought to initiate people into the forms of knowledge and understanding that have come down to us. For, if education is to be more than mere training for a job, it should free the mind to function in as rich a way as is possible; it is in this sense particularly that it is liberal. Not to introduce learners to the ways of understanding that have come down to us would amount to leaving them confined within limited ways of thinking – ones that they had acquired perhaps only from their immediate community or perhaps from a diet of cartoon programmes on television.
The ‘conversation of mankind’
One of the most influential articles by Paul Hirst concludes with words from an essay by Michael Oakeshott entitled ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’ (in Oakeshott, 1962):
As civilised human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there
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is argument and enquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages . . . Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure . . . Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human utterance (Hirst, 1965, pp. 52–53).
Oakeshott’s moving words here underline the connection between the ways in which an education of this kind is properly described as liberal. It is liberal in the same sense of the term as is used in the liberal arts colleges of the United States. The initiation into the ‘conversation of mankind’ then involves something like an initiation into ‘the best that has been thought and said’, in Matthew Arnold’s famous (if contentious) phrase. And, in this respect, these words not only value the past but connect with val- ues that shaped the thinking of the world of Ancient Greece. The past is not valuable because it is the past. It is valuable because it offers us the developing history of attempts to get at the truth of things and to understand what matters in human lives.
In the Republic, Plato gives us a wonderful image of education with the myth of the Cave. He describes the human condition as being like that of people living in the darkness of a cave and watching the flickering images projected onto the back of the cave by the light from its mouth. What they see is not real but the distorted images (the shadows) of real objects at the mouth of the cave, objects illuminated by the bright light of the sun. (The relevance of the fact that the idea of reality that many people have today is given by the distorted images of the world on television scarcely needs spelling out.) Education involves the process of helping these people to turn their heads away from these images in order that they should come to see the real objects at the mouth of the cave and eventually look at the sun itself, the source of truth and goodness. But, just as we find it difficult to look at bright lights when we have been in the dark and are inclined to be dazzled and to turn back to the darkness, so too people would prefer to look at these images (and to remain in ignorance) rather than to face up to the truth. Crucial to Plato’s account then is coming to see things truly (the contemplation of truth and goodness); it is freeing the mind from illusion.
Rational autonomy and political liberalism
A commitment to truth is close to the heart of the idea of a liberal education that is developed by Peters and his colleagues. But their position is also complicated by a fur- ther dimension of freedom, and this connects with the modern political liberalism associated especially with J. S. Mill. Here, the emphasis is not so much on freedom from illusion as on freedom to choose what to do: in the absence of any indisputable substantive conception of the good, the individual should decide for herself how she is going to live her life. Far from being a licence for irresponsibility, however, this was developed in terms of what came to be called ‘rational autonomy’. Although there is now a huge literature on autonomy, especially in relation to education but also more
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generally in political philosophy, perhaps the most succinct expression of rational autonomy is to be found in Dearden’s essay ‘Autonomy and Education’. As Dearden explains: ‘A man is autonomous, on Kant’s view, if in his actions he has bound himself by moral laws legislated by his own reason, as opposed to being governed by his own inclinations’ (Dearden, 1972, p. 58). What should be noticed here is the emphasis on reasoning through one’s principles for oneself. On this view, you should not do some- thing simply because the priest or the government or your parents or the media tell you to, or because you do not have the strength of character to do anything different, or because you are under the influence of drugs or obsessions or neurotic fears, and so on. You should reflect on your desires and reason through what to do. Of course, the principles you adopt, the reasons for your actions, may be ones that are likely to be current in your culture in one way or another, but what is crucial is that you decide to adopt these as your own.
In the decades since this restatement of the idea of a liberal education was made, there has been a tendency for the connection with political liberalism (and hence with autonomy) to come to the fore, to the growing neglect of the more classical connec- tion with the contemplation of truth. The term ‘liberal education’ is sometimes now used solely with such political principles in mind, in such a way that the robust account of the curriculum that was produced has been largely lost. In my own view this is very much to be regretted. Questions about what is to be learned and why should be recognized as unavoidable by any policy maker or practising teacher, and philosophy of education must find ways of addressing them.
In what follows, and to confront such questions myself, I shall say something about problems with the vision of a liberal education that I have sketched and shall point to ways in which its limitations may be overcome. I shall also attempt to show how what I have to say connects with the account of contemporary individualism with which the present discussion began.
Addressing the difficulties with the idea of a liberal education
Peters and his colleagues had great influence throughout the English-speaking world. But the idea of a liberal education that they advanced was not without its critics. A common response was that it provided nothing new: it was simply a rationalization for what was in fact going on at the time in grammar schools, with children at other schools – that is, the majority – given a watered-down version, and thus, it shored up the power relationships and class distinctions that were responsible for some of the injustice in society. Its conception of the curriculum itself was dull and outmoded – a matter of passing on the knowledge that happened to be preferred by a section of soci- ety rather than anything that was likely to be truly meaningful to the lives of people in general. That knowledge was highbrow and academic, the critics said, and so, not surprisingly, many children were alienated and did badly at school. Not only did it reflect the interests of particular social classes; it was also inherently sexist, being
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based on the work or the deeds of ‘dead white males’. And, far from developing crit- ical thinking, it encouraged the repetition of received ideas. Moreover, because of its emphasis on this outmoded content, it failed to appreciate the importance of the insights of progressivism – in particular, the need for education to acknowledge the differences between people and to develop from the individual herself.
If liberal education is practised in the way described in the preceding paragraph, it should indeed be criticised. Many students, including some of the most intelligent, are not moved by ‘the best that has been thought and said’. Such an education will, more- over, be a limitation of the individual rather than something that might engage her more deeply and foster her development. And it must be admitted that over-attention to the subject matter can inhibit opportunities for students to respond authentically and to find their own voices.
To be fair to Peters and his colleagues, however, it was never their intention that the curriculum should be a mere passing on of received ideas: they advocated cur- riculum content that incorporated traditions of criticism, and they saw the initiation of the learner into such forms of knowledge as a means of her engagement. The criticism of their views considered here then depends upon a distortion of the ideas that they advanced. I do, nevertheless, want to draw attention to two main concerns.
In the first place, the emphasis on rational autonomy as a central aim of education is based on a narrow view of human life and morality. It encourages us to think of the good life as one that is carefully planned out in (perhaps) most respects. In conse- quence, it loses sight of the value of spontaneity. This might be found, for example, in acts of unreflective generosity or courage and in the everyday kindness that good peo- ple show to others. Indeed, sometimes to reflect before you act – say, when an acci- dent occurs – could be a sign of moral failing. Spontaneity is also apparent in a kind of joie de vivre, a delight in living or even just a sense of fun, as it is in a certain receptiveness to others. The emphasis on rational autonomy makes it sound also as though being morally good is likely to coincide with being intelligent and so hides the goodness that can exist in simple unreflective lives. As such, it may suppress the vari- ety of human life and thereby have a limiting effect on the kinds of community that we can develop. To exaggerate (just a little unfairly!), it sometimes seems that the ideal rationally autonomous person would be someone like Mr Spock on the Starship Enterprise, someone who always meticulously plans everything he does and for whom a spontaneous emotion is something to be quickly mastered and overcome.
A second criticism concerns its emphasis on intellectual pursuits and the elitist connotations this has. While there is a good case for saying that everyone should be given the chance to pursue such activities, it is likely that these will appeal most to more intelligent people, and perhaps, as has been noted, not to all of them: many will find that an academic curriculum of this kind does not speak to them and stifles their voices. The point of studying history or physics may be lost on many people, espe- cially while they are children. The fact that people who write theoretical articles about education almost by definition enjoy such things makes them bad at seeing how this may not be so for everyone!
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Three questions arise from this. First, what response should there be to the problem of the demanding and potentially alienating nature of intellectual pursuits? Second, does this justify different curricula for those who do not progress well with such activ- ities? And third, is there anything in the account of the value of theoretical activities – anything liberal, that is – that can be extended to other less intellectual pursuits?
Intellectual activities are demanding, and their appeal is often difficult to under- stand from the outside. It is usually the case that, before one can participate in them with any great satisfaction, one has to undergo periods of hard work and perhaps bore- dom: one has to acquire the ‘vocabulary’ to take part in the conversation, as it were – whether this is in literary criticism, physics or history, or in more creative activities such as music and art. Hence, the teacher must tread a careful path that enables the child to acquire the vocabulary appropriate to the subject – the skills, knowledge and understanding – while avoiding the alienating effects that the demands of the subject may have. It must be her aim in the course of this for the subject to speak to the child in such a manner that the child can come to find her voice in it: that she sees how it may (come to) matter to her. And this does not mean that she finds that it may match something that already exists in herself, but rather that it offers a new possibility for the development of her voice – that is, for the expansion of herself. Without this, the sub- ject is in danger of going dead on the child, and schooling is likely to be an alienating experience, even if it equips the child with high grades. Bearing these factors in mind, then, it does seem that a degree of coercion is justified in taking the child through those difficult stages of learning that lead to this more rewarding understanding.
My own view regarding the second question is that the demands of a liberal edu- cation, thus conceived, are likely to be too great for some children and so that it is appropriate to provide different curricula, probably at some stage during high school. Of course, this need not be done on an all-or-nothing basis. And there should be opportunities for children to move from one route to another.
A further factor is important here – in terms of social justice but also for purely educational reasons. It is sometimes said that education is wasted on the young. Certainly there is evidence that mature students make much better use of educational opportunities. Hence, there is every reason to encourage people to take up such study throughout their lives, and so this is a powerful argument for meaningful lifelong learning. I do not necessarily suggest that full-time education should be available to adults at public expense because the costs of this may well be prohibitive. But there is a strong case for state subsidy of part-time education for adults. Even part-time study in evening classes can transform people’s lives, and sometimes the combination of study and working can be peculiarly enriching.
With regard to the third question, it should be recognized that there are aspects of a liberal education that cannot easily be extended or replicated. The ideal product of such an education is someone who has a breadth of understanding across the different forms of knowledge that are our inheritance, in sciences, the humanities and the arts. But such a person will also have a deep love for at least one of these pursuits, such that it is an absorbing interest that brings to her life the sense of participating in an
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‘unrehearsed intellectual adventure’, in Oakeshott’s words, an adventure that becomes all the more intense and absorbing the more it is pursued. And, surprising though this may at first seem, it is in the idea of intense absorption that a Nietzschean inflection is found once again. It is perhaps this more dynamic aspect that we should look to if we hope to extend something of this experience to those who are not intellectually up to the full demands of a liberal education.
I suggest that there are other less intellectual activities that can offer such kinds of intense absorption. For examples, we should perhaps turn attention in the direction of craft activities. Of course, we can think of the kinds of satisfactions that people gain from activities such as carpentry or pottery, but there is obviously a danger of anachro- nism or nostalgia here. These things play a less prominent part in people’s lives, whether at work or in their leisure time, than they used to. So, we need to be prepared to consider activities of quite different and perhaps surprising kinds. I am struck by the kind of enthusiasm and delight that people can take in practical work with things – in making them and shaping them – in more contemporary, everyday circumstances. I am thinking of the pride of the engineer in the smooth-running machine, of the hair- dresser in cutting and styling, or of the bricklayer in the clean lines of a wall, or of the chef in preparing fine food. Take car mechanics as an example. Such activity does indeed offer scope for further understanding and enquiry, and for the refinement of skill with the accumulation of experience. Those involved in it often seem to take a delight in the work that incorporates aesthetic and ethical values – say, in the good timing of the engine, the pleasure to be found in its efficiently moving parts, its func- tional capability and improvement, and so on. This is a very ordinary example but one worthy of attention. When people take pleasure in their work in this way, this can spill over into other areas of life, generating a kind of curiosity about things and bringing them into intense involvement with others. Such involvement is often not confined to the activities concerned but becomes a broader social commitment and identification.
The idea of a liberal education has tended to reinforce certain dichotomies in our thinking – between theory and practice, between the academic and the vocational, between the mind and the body – in each case favouring the former term. It has also, and perhaps in consequence of these dichotomies, been excessively preoccupied with propositional knowledge. Of course, it would be absurd to deny the massive impor- tance of propositional knowledge – not as the expression of inert facts but as the sub- stance and vocabulary of the forms of knowledge of which Peters and Hirst speak. The alternative advocated here is not the skill-based curriculum that has become fashion- able, important though skills obviously also are. What is missing from the picture, and what the craft examples above may suggest, is the importance of knowledge by direct acquaintance. Amongst more intellectual pursuits, art appreciation plainly involves an acquaintance with particular works of art, where one’s encounter with them exceeds anything that could be rendered in propositional terms, however rich propositional language may be as an approach to these works. This kind of acquaintance is also, I suggest, to be found somewhere in the mechanic’s relation to the engine or the hair- stylist’s relation to hair – including their relation to the kinds of resistance that the
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materials they work with present. It is there too, I also want to say, in the historian’s familiarity with a particular period, or in the physicist’s or the philosopher’s familiar- ity with particular sets of problems, and the characteristic kinds of resistance that they present. Indeed, this familiarity is very much a part of knowing one’s way around a subject and the satisfactions that this offers.
Finally, it is important to draw attention to the fact that there is a kind of moral edu- cation that is inherent in the demands that learning can make on us, but these are demands that sometimes elude progressive education. These include, first, the intellec- tual virtues celebrated in the academic life, but the thought here is that what is most important extends across more practical domains. Without the understanding devel- oped through knowledge by acquaintance, through patient attention to the way things are, these intellectual virtues may cut loose from the substance that gives them their sense. These are moral matters also in the way that such forms of learning draw the learner into practices that are sustained by communities. Although this may not be explicit, such communities uphold standards to which the learner must constantly aspire to be worthy – whether this is to the standards of truth and critical argument found in an academic discipline or to those inherent in the creation and maintenance of the fabric of the world we live in. When one applies oneself to such activities, there is a real sense in which one’s attention is turned beyond oneself. What is learned – whether this is the functioning of the machine, the stresses that metal will take, and the explosiveness of a gas in an engine, or the substance of an academic subject – can lead to a kind of attention-to-the-way-things-are that has its intrinsic virtues but that also can disturb us from the self-preoccupied tendencies to which we can otherwise succumb. Far from a direct concentration on the development of the self, it is in such endeavours that the individual can flourish most, and through this engagement that she may find not only her own voice but that she has something meaningful to say.3
References
Boyson, R. (1975) The Crisis in Education (London, The Woburn Press). Cox, C.B. (1992) The Great Betrayal (London, Chapmans Publishing Ltd.). Cox, C.B. and Boyson, R. (eds) (1975) The Fight for Education: Black Paper 1975 (London, Dent). Cox, C.B. and Boyson, R. (eds) (1977) Black Paper 1977 (London, Maurice Temple Smith). Cox, C.B. and Dyson, C.B. (1969) The Crisis in Education (London, Critical Quarterly Society). Darling, J. and Nordenbo, S.E. (2003) “Progressivism”, In: Blake, N. et al. (eds) The Blackwell Guide to
Philosophy of Education (Oxford, Blackwell), pp. 288–308. Dearden, R.F. (1972) “Autonomy and Education”, In: Dearden, R.F., Hirst, P.H. and Peters, R.S. (eds)
Education and Reason (London, RKP), pp. 390–397. Dewey, J. (1925) Democracy and Education (New York, MacMillan). Hirst,P.H. (1965) “Liberal Educationand the Nature of Knowledge”, In: Archambault, R.D. (ed.) (1965)
Philosophical Analysis and Education (London, RKP); also in Hirst, P.H. (1974), Knowledge and the
3 An earlier version of this chapter was presented as the Ogata Lecture at the University of Tohoku, Japan. I am grateful to those present on that occasion, and to Morinichi Kato and Naoko Saito especially, for their comments and response.
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Curriculum (London, RKP); also in Dearden, R.F., Hirst, P.H., and Peters, R.S. (eds) (1972) Education and Reason (London, RKP).
Mill, J.S. (1978) On Liberty (Indianapolis, IN, Hackett Publishing Company). Oakeshott, M. (1962) Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, edited by Fuller, T. (London, Methuen). Rousseau, J-J. (1911) Emile (London, J.M. Dent). SED (1965) The Primary Memorandum (Edinburgh, Scottish Education Department). Taylor, C. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity (London, Harvard University Press).