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LIBERAL EDUCATION: THE UNITED STATES EXAMPLE

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 02 January 2020

Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg

Print publication date: 2003 Print ISBN-13: 9780199253661 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2005 DOI: 10.1093/0199253668.001.0001

LIBERAL EDUCATION: THE UNITED STATES EXAMPLE K. Anthony Appiah

DOI:10.1093/0199253668.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords Anthony Appiah’s essay on liberal education in the United States begins by identifying a distinctive feature of classical liberalism – namely, that the state must respect substantial limits with respect to its authority to impose restrictions on individuals, even for their own good. Nevertheless, Appiah points out, the primary aim of liberal education is to ‘maximize autonomy not to minimize government involvement’. Most of the essays in this volume, including Appiah’s, are attempts to address the question of what the liberal commitment to maximize personal autonomy means when it comes to the teaching of what Appiah refers to as ‘identity-related claims’. The aim of this chapter is to suggest how one might begin to think about some questions in the philosophy of education, guided by the liberal thought that education is a preparation for autonomy, and to show that this tradition is both powerful enough to help with this difficult question and rich enough to allow answers of some complexity.

Keywords: education, liberal education, liberalism, personal autonomy, personal identity, philosophy of education, United States

Liberalism starts with views that are both modern and radical. We are all equal and we all have the dignity that was once the privilege of an elite. When John Locke speaks of “dignity” (in e.g. his draft of the constitution of Carolina) he means the title and privileges of hereditary land owners; it is something associated with a particular station in life. For him, dignity is as much something

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that the ordinary person does not have as something that belongs to “persons of standing”: for modern liberalism, in striking contrast, dignity is something that is to be respected in every human being. Dignity is still, then, as it was for Locke, an entitlement to respect. But now everyone shares that entitlement. Dignity is now human dignity: you get it just by showing up. That is what makes liberalism radical.

But liberals also believe that recognizing individual human dignity entails—in language we owe to Kant—respecting every person's autonomy. The distinctive thought of liberal political philosophy is that individual autonomy is at the heart of political morality. That is what makes it modern.

Kant first articulated autonomy as a philosophical principle, and romanticism lived a peculiarly intense version of this vision.1 But the central notion is the special province neither of philosophers nor of poets: the claim, put simply, is that what the good is for each of us is shaped by choices we ourselves have made.

This general moral conviction has profound consequences for thinking about the state. Simply put, liberalism values political liberty—freedom from government intervention in our lives—because it holds (p.57) that each person has the right to construct a life of her own. That right is not unlimited; it must be pursued within moral boundaries shaped, among other things, by the rights of others. But it is fundamental; and every limitation of it is, for liberalism, to be conceded only in the face of a powerful argument.

This picture grew up with Protestantism; which is what accounts for the sense that it is a creature of the West (and, more particularly, of Germany—Kant—and England—Locke). For Protestantism taught, as Locke put it in his “Essay Concerning Toleration,” that worship was a “thing wholly between God and me and of an eternal concernment.”2 This notion that the most consequential questions were to be decided individually by each person, searching in his own heart (so that conformity to outer forms was less crucial than inner conviction) placed what mattered most in human life decisively beyond the reach of the government. Locke's major argument in the essay is that state regulation of religious belief is wrong because it is impossible, “[T]he way to salvation not being any forced exterior performance, but the voluntary and secret choice of the mind. …”3 Locke wants religious toleration because the only things the government can regulate—the outward and visible signs—are simply not what matters; like Kant he thought that virtue lies in why you do things not (or not so much) in what you do. This makes him an ancestor of modern liberalism; but our concerns are, I think, somewhat different.

For the modern liberal objection to regulation of religion argues that the choices I make and the understandings I come to in my own search for religious truth

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are important in part because I chose them in the course of my own search. The modern point is not Locke's—which is that goodness (piety, in this case) is a matter of motive and intention more than behavior; it is that what is good for me to do depends, in part, on my reflective appropriation of the beliefs and values by which I guide my life. Merely adopting views “in gross”, as Locke put it, assuming religious “opinions … all at once in a bundle,“4 is not enough.

It is a crucial point that this moral conviction is not only modern but also, on a world scale, decidedly controversial. It is not the view of the Ayatollahs in Teheran or the Party leaders in Beijing; it is not even the view, to come somewhat closer to home, of His Holiness and the various eminences of the Vatican. For all of these people hold that what is morally required of people is given in advance—by an eternal order for the Ayatollahs and the Curia, by the truths of Marx for the heirs of Mao Tse Tung. All of these positions recognize (p. 58) that one can have obligations that arise out of choice: they recognize promises as binding and duties particular to vocation; and they recog-nize that roles bring obligations. But none of them agrees with the liberal that sometimes the right thing for me to do is right because I have decided that doing it fits with my chosen sense of the meaning of my own life: none of them therefore accepts the political consequence that in forcing me to do what is best for me according to someone else's conception, you may do me not good but harm.

Notice that far from being relativist or indifferent to moral truth, the claim of autonomy, as made by the liberal, is a universal moral claim: it is something we believe the Pope and the others are wrong about. There is no general answer to the question how one should live one's life: not everyone should be a priest or a poet or a pipe fitter; there are lives worth living that focus on family, and others that center on work. Liberals are pluralists about human flourishing, holding that there are many ways for human beings to live good lives and many projects worth pursuing.5

But sensible antiliberals are pluralists too. What is distinctive in the liberal vision is that it holds that there may be an internal connection between what is good for you and the choices you have made: in particular, that your good may depend on the identities you have reflectively appropriated and the values embedded within them. Liberals do not deny that there are some values that are essential components of any good life: honesty, loyalty, and kindness are virtues; and cruelty, thoughtlessness, and unwarranted hatred are vices, no matter what choices you have made. But this essential moral core does not fix everything that matters; nor does it determine how these virtues and vices should weigh against each other in every situation.

Liberalism is a political morality which flows, like all substantial political ideals, from an underlying vision of human life. But, as a political creed, it does not claim to answer every ethical question, every shallow puzzle or deep mystery

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about how one should live. It stakes out a position about the ethics of relations between the state and the individual, a position that flows from a vision of human life; and that vision proposes that living up to the many values is best when it flows, in two respects, from the “voluntary and secret choices” of your own mind. First, it is best if people do what is right because they recognize that it is right (but this is a point on which the Curia concurs); second, what is best for people depends, in part (but only in part) on what they have chosen. That is why the liberal state has its most distinctive feature: a regime of individual rights, limiting what the state may require of us, even for our own good.

(p.59) Liberals are not relativists, then. Nor need we be skeptics. We need not argue that each should be allowed by the state to make her own choices because there is no knowing who is right. I may, as a liberal, regard it as proper for the state to allow you to do what is, in my judgment, plainly wrong, provided that, in doing so, you interfere with no one's rights and have freely chosen to do it in pursuit of your aims and in the light of your own knowledge, your best understanding.

This is a separate point from the one about the dependence of the good for you on your choices. Sometimes what is good for me—committing myself to the nationalist struggle against imperial domination—is good because I have reflectively appropriated a nationalist identity; and that identity now gives meaning to much of my life. (Perhaps if I had not developed that identification, a life in the struggle would be worthless, a sham.) But the point I am making now is that sometimes the government should let me do what I have decided to do in the light of my own best understanding, even though what I have decided is wrong. Letting people do something does not, for the liberal, reflect agreement with them. Even when someone is wrong, the state has to have a compelling reason to intervene. And if someone asks why, I would say because it is her life.

It is sometimes said that liberalism is not perfectionist, in the sense that it does not aim to shape the citizen to a vision of human good. I think this is somewhat misleading. Autonomy is a vision of human good; and the liberal state will aim to help the citizen exercise her autonomy, by, for example, providing information and encouraging rational public deliberation. What a liberal will not do is use the coercive power of the state against anyone, except to protect the rights of others.6 The liberal surgeon-general tells you that cigarettes kill and requires tobacco companies not to sell their products to those, like minors, who are not fully capable of autonomous decision. But if an adult person chooses cigarettes, knowing the harm they do, the most the liberal state may do is limit her access to health care for those harms, if the state does not have the resources to provide it.7

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Modern American liberalism, as an approach to the realities of politics, goes back to the New Deal, when to the classical liberalism of rights was added a new set of economic commitments: the federal government accepted clearly, for the first time, a national responsibility to guarantee a basic minimum level of welfare to every citizen. This undertaking occurred, of course, in response to the Depression: a massive failure on the part of the private economy to deliver the jobs and the income that were now recognized as a precondition for enjoying the fundamental civil rights—democratic representation, liberty of (p.60) religion, expression, and association, security of property, equality before the law.

This pious simplification of history ignores a great deal. The New Deal welfare state, for example, did not spring full-fashioned from the brow of the Roosevelt administration. There were already provisions for the poor and the destitute in colonial Massachusetts; there were federal Civil War pensions for veterans and war widows; there were hundreds of charitable institutions, supported by churches and by secular philanthropy, often with tax-exemption from the government, aiming to help people in a thousand kinds of trouble. Still, it was clear to everybody that the New Deal took government provision for the worst off to a new level.

It is natural to see this concern with basic welfare as simply a new addition to the liberal register, not as something growing out of the basic liberal vision. But I think that is wrong. Basic welfare provision flows from the same fundamental concern with dignity. In a world where land has all been parceled out (so that no one can simply acquire land to work by moving into uncharted territory); a world where money is essential for adequate nutrition and proper shelter; where a job (or so much money you do not need one) is increasingly a condition for minimal social respect; guaranteeing that everybody has access to a place to live, food to eat, and a form of work, is simply making sure that everyone has access to the possibility of a dignified existence. It is increasingly clear, I think, that a guarantee of access to health care should be underwritten by the state as well. And, because everybody is equally entitled to dignity, whatever minimum conditions the state must guarantee, it must guarantee to everyone.

More than this, autonomy requires, as we have seen, that people be able to shape a life for themselves, to make choices among options. And this requires, naturally, that there be such options—real choices to make; and that the person has some sense of the way the world actually is.

Each of these conditions is hugely important. The existence of real options is something that argues for multiculturalism within states and cosmopolitanism across them.8 And the importance of the truth entails that the government has a role in propagating knowledge. To do my will, to act freely, I need not only to have goals but a sense of how I can achieve them. You can undermine my autonomy not only by resisting what I will, but also by depriving me of

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information—truths—that might allow me to achieve what you desire. Respect for autonomy goes with truth telling, therefore; respect for autonomy entails a concern with knowledge.

(p.61) There are hard questions here, questions that, as we shall see, matter enormously for the politics of education. Respect for your autonomy means that, where your aims are morally permissible, it is best if you are able to do what you choose. But you choose to do things for reasons, and those reasons are dependent not only on your aims but also on how you believe they can be achieved. Characteristically, in reasoning out what I want to do, I consider what my aims are and what means are available to achieve them. Suppose, then, you know what my aims are, and you know that in pursuing them I am relying on an erroneous belief. Suppose, for example, that I am seeking to abate my fever, and I take the herbs the traditional doctor in my village concocts; and suppose you know that the herbs are mortally toxic in the long run and that I can be cured with the erythromycin in your pocket. If you secretly substitute your authentic medicine for my (as you think) bogus “medicine,” are you respecting my autonomy—helping me to the health you know I am after—or failing to do so—by ignoring my clear (but, as you think, fatally misguided) desire to take this stuff that the medicine man provided?

The answer, I believe, is that what respect for your autonomy requires is neither of these things; what it requires is that you tell me what you believe is true (thus putting me in a position to realize my fundamental aim by engaging my goals with the way the world really is). You can urge on me the medicine that will cure me, offering me reasons to believe that it will cure me; but if, in the end, I reject your reasons, if I do not trust you, respect for my autonomy requires that you let me take the worthless portion I believe in. Just as respect for autonomy requires me to recognize your reasons for your choices in matters that affect you, so it requires me to address your beliefs with evidence and reasons; I may not manipulate you into believing what is in fact the truth by offering you phony “proofs” and faked “evidence.”

Now I hasten to add that respecting my autonomy is not the only thing that is at stake when I am sick and considering what treatments to undertake. There is also the matter of my physical well-being, which is something that I require for most of my projects and which makes more likely the satisfactory achievement of almost all of them. In dealing with me in these circumstances, you may rank my survival over my autonomy, hoping, perhaps, that once the crisis is over you can persuade me that you have done the right thing. This may be an especially plausible choice if you have a special responsibility for my health—the responsibility, say, of my doctor—or a special concern for my well-being—the concern, say, of my friend or my parent. But even if you make this choice, it should be clear that you have done (p.62) so against the weight of an important

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consideration: respect for me, treating me with dignity, surely entails respect for the reflective choices I make, even when they are mistaken.

I have considered this case as if it were one in which your choice was an essential private (i.e. non-state) matter. But if your relationship to me were that of an official to a citizen, then, I think, autonomy would have to loom larger. Governments may not force citizens to do what is good for them, once they have explained why it is good for them and offered them the choice. Provided I am capable of exercising autonomy— provided, that is, I am not mentally incapable at the time that I must think the issue through—my government should let me die, if I choose.

Liberals are not libertarians—our aim is to maximize autonomy not to minimize government involvement. Liberals will normally allow you to take whatever chances you like, once you know the risks; but not if the risk is to your autonomy. Thus, they may regulate access to drugs that threaten—through addiction—the autonomy of every user. In becoming an addict you would give up your autonomy; if you did so willingly, you would be making a mistake from which the liberal state might attempt to save you. This would not be a perfectionist policy: it is not a matter of the state choosing to make you a better person than you would make yourself. Rather, it is the state guaranteeing that you can continue to make the choices that are the substance of your freedom.

I have tried to exemplify what respect for the dignity and auto-nomy of each person means for a liberal politics. But when we turn to education, we are faced with an immediate problem. We are not born as autonomous adults. We are born, in the Bard of Avon's happy phrase, “mewling and puking”, incapable of an even moderately independent existence. Liberalism speaks of respecting the self- chosen projects of others, and of allowing them to pursue them in the light of their own knowledge and their values. But we are born neither with projects nor with knowledge. The fundamental idea of a liberal philosophy of education must be that we need to guide each child from hopeless dependency into an autonomous maturity. Preparing someone to be autonomous requires that we give them access both to values (and the capacity to form projects) and to knowledge (and the ability to learn more). But now there are so many hard questions: who is the “we” here? And which projects should “we” help the child to grow into? And who is to decide, in cases of controversy, what is knowledge and what false opinion?

Many people will say that the “we” that has primary responsibility for our development into autonomy is our parents. It certainly (p.63) seems right to see this as one of the duties (and pleasures) of parents. There is every reason to think that a loving family is the best place to grow into an autonomous adult. No

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government has found a way to do better that parents generally do: prudence suggests that states interfere only when they must.

But, as hardly needs saying, my parents can be an obstacle to the development of my autonomy. And when they are, so it seems to me, the state has a duty to intervene.

Just as the New Deal recognized an extensive system of welfare provision as a condition (p.64) for a dignified adult life in the modern world, so the development of public education reflects the need for a wide range of skills, knowledge, and values, as a condition for an autonomous modern life. These essential prerequisites of autonomy—the elements of a basic education—require time and expertise to teach properly; and in a world where most adults must work for a living, parents cannot be expected to provide them on their own. Further, the elements of a basic education are necessary for all who are not severely mentally disabled: every person, every child, therefore is entitled to a guarantee of at least this minimum. This is why, despite the liberal's general hostility to state intervention in what we ordinarily call private life, the very widespread development of state-funded, state-controlled education, with its intrusion into the relations between children and families, is something liberals are bound to welcome.

Public schools do many things that not every parent agrees with. This seems to me just right: for these liberal reasons. If parents had the right to determine what their children should learn, it would be indefensible that we require parents to chose between public education and publicly licensed private education. That we do require it is a reflection of the fact that we believe children have a right to an education that prepares them for autonomy as adults; and we recognize that this is something many parents cannot, and some parents will not, provide. To the extent that states in the United States license private schools that explicitly aim to limit the child's preparation for an autonomous adulthood, this is a breach of the liberal understanding of the state's obligations to the young.

I do not know whether the framework I am suggesting is likely to seem too radical or too conservative. I suspect that it will seem to many too conservative, in this abstract formulation. I should like to end with a consideration of what it might mean in practice; and here, I suspect, many will find it too radical. But I should like to say that it seems to me that in working out how to proceed in educating our children for adulthood, the notion that we should prepare them for a dignified and autonomous maturity is one that ought to gather support from a very wide range of Americans. This basic idea is, as I have suggested, philosophically liberal: but it is not a liberal idea in the sense in which liberal and conservative are now contrasted in our politics. If contemporary conservatives are skeptical because I have spoken so much of rights, I should

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remind them that respect for autonomy also entails holding people responsible for their acts and that the existence of rights entails forms of constraint as well as kinds of freedom.

The basic liberal picture lies at the root of democratic thinking: we are each allowed an equal share in shaping the destiny of our nation, subject to the constraint that we acknowledge what flows from the dignity and autonomy of others. This means that the liberal democracy constrains what majorities can do, by the familiar mechanism of a system of legal rights, enforced by a judiciary that is relatively independent of the contemporary majority will. But it also means that the liberal democracy's values are not mere majoritarianism, but public deliberation in which each of us is addressed as a reasoning creature and invited to think through, in the light of his or her own projects and understandings, the choices facing our politics. The exercise of autonomy, as Kant formulated it, was the exercise of reason: I have been developing a picture of autonomy that is not Kant's; but I want it to share this feature of Kant's theory (albeit with a more indulgent understanding of reason).

It follows (unsurprisingly) that liberal democracy is one of the notions that belongs to the core of the liberal conception of political morality, and that teaching it is, therefore, a matter of giving to each child a proper understanding of politics. But we need to give each child not only a grasp of these general notions but an understanding of the particular form through which our political institutions instantiates, in a rough and ready way, these general abstractions; and we need to give her, too, the tools with which to explore the ways in which the current political institutions of our society fail to meet the basic constraints, so that she can, if she chooses, contribute to the citizen's work of improving them.

The key to a liberal education is the development of an autonomous self. But there is a regular misunderstanding of what this means, one to which liberals themselves have contributed: a concern for autonomy is often wrongly seen as inconsistent with valuing sociality and relationship. This is a mistake that should be immediately rejected. An autonomous self is a human self, and we are, as Aristotle long ago insisted, creatures of the polis, social beings. (p.65) We are social in many ways and for many reasons. We are social, first, because we are incapable of developing on our own, because we need human nurture, moral and intellectual education, practice with language, if we are to develop into full persons. This is a sociality of mutual dependence. We are social, second, because we humans naturally9 desire relationship with others: friends, lovers, parents, children, the wider family, colleagues, and neighbors. This is sociality as an end. And we are social, third, because many other things we value—literature, the arts, and the whole world of culture; education; money; and, in the modern

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world, food and housing—depend essentially on society for their production. This is instrumental sociality.

To have dignity and autonomy as values is not, therefore, to refuse to acknowledge the dependence of the good for each of us on relationships with others. Indeed our selves are, in Charles Taylor's fine phrase, “dialogically” constituted: beginning in infancy, it is in dialogue with other people's understandings of who I am that I develop a conception of my own identity. Furthermore, my identity is crucially constituted through concepts (and practices) made available to me by religion, society, school, and state, and mediated to varying degrees by the family. Dialogue shapes the identity I develop as I grow up: but the very material out of which I form it is provided, in part, by my society, by what Taylor has called its language in “a broad sense.”10

It follows that the self whose autonomous desires liberalism celebrates is not a presocial thing—not some inner essence independent of the human world into which we have grown—but rather the product of our interaction from our earliest years with others.11

As a result, educating children for autonomy requires preparing them for relationship, not just preparing them to respect, as liberalism requires, the autonomy of others.

Let me exemplify what an education guided by these ideas might be like in the most practical terms, by describing two classroom practices with elementary school children that would, I think, embody the ideals I have been discussing.12

The first practice is this: we establish a rule that no discussion is complete until everyone has spoken. The idea, of course, is that everyone is of equal worth, and is, therefore, equally entitled to express her opinion and receive respectful attention. This does not mean that what everyone says is of equal merit: and it is perfectly consistent to ask everyone to play her role in the discussion and, at the same time, to recognize that some contributions move the discussion forward better than others. In practice, living by such a stand-ard requires small discussion groups or long discussions. No doubt (p.66) in the over-sized classrooms of many schools this will not be possible. But learning that such practical limitations shape real political life is important, too. So saying that a discussion cannot be completed properly because there has not been enough time to let everyone speak or insisting that a discussion be continued later for the same reason might be the best we can practically do.

In the second practice, the teacher makes a habit of asking children to explain what other children have said. This, too, teaches that a dialogue of equals requires listening as well as speaking.

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These practices are ways of communicating equality of respect and the place of discourse and reason in the relations of people who respect one another. I am sure that many teachers do both of these things (and many more just like them) already. And they are important because they introduce children to practices of respect, rather than simply announcing to them principles of respect. A child who has learned spontaneously to attend to what other children say and who expects a discussion of a question to be one that requires everyone's voice is learning about dignity and respect and learning to live with them. Such a child is in a better position to understand what the principles I have been talking about mean, when it becomes appropriate, as she grows older, for us to articulate explicitly what she has already implicitly learned through such classroom practices and at home.

What I have just said is, I suspect, likely to seem uncontroversial to many. But it already raises problems in our multicultural society. Not every social group in this country believes that children should be encouraged to speak up: some Chinese–American families teach children that the proper behavior for them is attentive silence in the presence of adults—and the teacher is an adult. Children know nothing, after all; or, at least, nothing of importance. They are in class to learn. From the perspective of certain ways of socializing children, the practices I have just described look guaranteed to produce children who chatter and expect to be listened to; children, in short, who are ill-mannered.13

Our liberal principles help us here, too. The raising of children is something in which parents plainly have the central role. I have insisted that the state rightly intervenes to protect the child's growth to autonomy; if the sorts of practices I have described are necessary for that purpose, they may be warranted by that fact. But the parents do not lose their role because the state's experts have a good-faith disagreement with them about what is best for their children. And because they are entitled to the treatment owed to persons with equal dignity, the proper approach, if such procedures are necessary, (p.67) is to discuss with the parents the ideas they represent and the theories that guide them.

We should go carefully in such encounters. I have already pointed out that the centrality to liberalism of the idea of choices among options (and its correlative, the reflective appropriation of identities) means that we have a strong reason for encouraging the development of many richly socially embedded forms of identity both within nations—multiculturalism—and across them—cosmopolitanism. If a social group takes the attentive silence of its children as the proper and necessary preparation for them to have well-mannered adult lives, then, if they are right, that kind of childhood may be a condition for developing the adult identity embodied in that social group. Because we value the maintenance of a variety of such reflectively appropriated identities, we have a special reason to be careful that we are right in thinking that practices in schools that appear to threaten those identities are either not genuinely threatening, on the one hand,

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or, on the other, important enough that they warrant the reshaping of the identities they will bring. We need, in particular, to be careful that we are not simply being ethnocentric when we suppose, in our talkative modern Euro- American way, that children's talk really develops autonomy and respect for autonomy, because it is how we have come to want to treat our children.

I do not think that my attraction to the practices I have described is mere ethnocentrism: facility with language and its use in social life requires a lot of practice; children who are talked to and reasoned with do better, on average, at cognitive tasks that are broadly useful in modern life. But Chinese–Americans have not been having a hard time preparing their children to perform well at the cognitive tasks by which our schools measure their success and failure; and it is not an unreasonable hypothesis that the capacity for careful attention and for sustained intellectual work are connected with being able to sit quietly in the presence of adults. I think it is important, therefore, that the practices I have described place value on listening as well as on speaking: and that both of them are consistent with, for example, insisting that children also learn to work quietly together and alone.

At the other extreme from these very practice-based ideas, which have to do with the form of our pedagogical practices, are concerns about the content of the curriculum. How should a liberal state decide curricular controversy?

There are two major kinds of problems here. First, there are topics in which the controversy is about what the truth is. Religious education is the obvious case here; as is moral teaching on questions, (p.68) like abortion and homosexuality, about which there is substantial (often religiously based) controversy. To these issues I shall return.

But there are also questions about what weight to place in education on different topics or different approaches. How much American history should children in America know? Within that history, should the focus be on individuals or on social processes; on America's failures or her successes.

Such questions are extremely concrete. We can agree that Frederick Douglass was a slave who brilliantly articulated an ideal of freedom: but we must also accept that that ideal was expressed in terms that made masculinity—and the freedom of men—more central than the freedom of women. Frederick Douglass was by the standards of his day progressive on “the woman question.” But by our standards there is something unacceptably masculinist in the central opposition of his narrative between slavery and manhood—with its emblematic moment in Douglass's physical resistance to the slave-breaker Covey: “You have seen how a man was made a slave,” Douglass writes; “you shall see how a slave was made a man.” The question is, at what stage (if ever) do we teach the

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problem with Douglass. The issue is not what the facts are, but which ones to focus on, which ones to play up.

My example here focuses on a figure who is much taught these days within the framework of multicultural education; but this sort of question has often been raised recently in resistance to multicultural education. Lynn Cheney objects to a history curriculum that has too much of Harriet Tubman and not enough of Thomas Jefferson. But she also objects to a curriculum whose discussion of Thomas Jefferson focusses more on his betrayal of liberty—in his persistent failure to emancipate his slaves—than on his place, as the author of the Declaration of Independence, as liberty's champion. No doubt a focus too lop- sided shades off into simple untruth: but the real debates here are not about what happened but about what narratives we will embed them in; they are about which of the many true stories we will tell.

From the point of view of liberal political principle, these questions are relatively easy. We need to prepare children with the truth and the capacity to acquire more of it. Because they cannot absorb the whole truth, in all its complexity, all at once, we must begin with simplified stories; sometimes, even, with what is literally untrue. The obvious model where untruth prepares the way for truth is physics: the easiest way, we think, to prepare children for Einstein and Schrödinger is to teach them Newton and Maxwell first. But (p.69) Newton and Maxwell did not know about relativity or about the indeterminacy of the fundamental physical laws: and so their physics, which assumes absolute space and the infinite divisibility of matter, is just not true. The teaching of history is full of cases in which we can delve deeper as we grow older into stories we first heard, in simplified versions, in first grade. It is because it is on the way to the truth, or because it is the closest thing to the truth that, at a certain age, they can understand, that these forms of what is, after all, strictly speaking, misinformation, can be seen as aimed at helping children develop toward an autonomy rooted in the best available understanding of the world. To say that these questions of principle are easy to lay out is not to say that the decisions about what to teach (let alone how and when to teach it) are easy to resolve in practice: it is just to say that the disputes about which truths to teach are to be settled by appeal to the notion of a preparation for an autonomous adulthood.

The hard cases for liberal principle, I think—with which I want to deal in closing —are the ones in which the controversy is about what the truth is.

The greatest contemporary controversies about what truths should be taught arise about claims that are, in one way or another, connected with powerful collective identities. At the moment, for example, there is controversy about what shall be taught about evolution, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality; and, if the first amendment did not prohibit the teaching of particular religions in public schools, there would certainly be controversy about

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that too. It is clear enough that the controversy about evolution flows from the fact that neo- Darwinian accounts of the development of species in general—and of the human species in particular—are at least prima facie inconsistent with the account of human origins proposed in the Old Testament. Some people do not want their children taught that “we are descended from apes” at least in part because they want their children to be, for example, good Baptists; and being a good Baptist requires, in their view, assent to the biblical account. But it seems to me that the controversies about sex and sexuality also have the intensity they do in part because American religious traditions have well-developed moral ideas about the proper use of sex and the proper form of sexuality; and conformity to these prescriptions is also seen as essential to being, say, a good Catholic. And those, on the other side, who are themselves homosexual and have come to celebrate a gay identity, are particularly outraged if it is proposed that children should be taught that their sexuality makes them morally depraved.

(p.70) So far as the teaching of morality is concerned, all of us plainly have a reason to want children to be taught what we take to be morally true, whether or not we associate conformity to those norms and assent to those moral claims as central to an identity we share. Kant's stress on universalizability as the key mark of the moral reflects the way that treating an assertion as a moral claim entails believing that everyone should conform to it.14 We want our fellow citizens to know what is morally required and what is morally forbidden because we want them to do what they should and abstain from doing what they should not. But it is noticeable that the greatest controversies surrounding what moral ideas should be taught occur when people feel that their own children are being taught things that are inconsistent with claims that are crucial marks of their own collective identities; or when other people's children are taught things that challenge their own identities. I shall call a claim—whether moral or not—that is, in this sort of way, implicated with a certain collective identity, an identity- related claim.

The currency of controversy about the teaching of identity-related claims is not particularly surprising in this age of what Charles Taylor has dubbed the “politics of recognition.” The development, which I have already insisted on, of the liberal idea of an identity, has meant that a great deal of politics—especially nationalist and ethnic politics, but also, for example, a lesbian and gay politics that is somewhat modeled on ethno-national politics—turns on the state's acknowledging a person's identity and protecting each person's ability to flourish while publicly expressing that identity. Each of these state acts recognizes an identity, conferring upon it a certain social respect. Martin Luther King day expresses the state's recognition of African-American identity; antidiscrimination law allows people to express their religion, their ethnicity, and their sexuality in public without the threat of loss of employment or access to housing or assault. As Taylor insists, there is a widespread conviction (which comes, as he also says) from the ethics of authenticity, that, other things being

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equal, we have the right to be acknowledged publicly as what we already really are. Much debate about what shall be taught in the schools on the teaching of identity-related claims is thus centrally concerned with insisting on the state's recognition of some identities (Christian, say) or its non-recognition of others (lesbian and gay).

Now it will be immediately clear why the notion of raising children to autonomy —with its corollary that we should equip them with the truths they need—does not help much in deciding what should be taught about these particular questions. It does not help (p.71) because there is substantial social disagreement as to what the truth is; and such disagreements, we can predict, will not be settled by the appointment of commissions of experts to resolve them, in the cases where the claims in dispute are identity related. In the case of moral claims, this is because most modern people do not recognize the exist-ence of experts—perhaps because moral autonomy requires that each of us makes up her own mind about these questions. In the case of the dispute about evolution, it is claimed by some that they are simply operating by different epistemic standards: the authority of the Bible is not, for them, something that could be overridden by other (scientific) sources of evidence.

The constraints of truth do some work, however. Some of the theses of “creation science” (those, in particular, that are not themselves directly biblically derived) might be shown to be false by standards everyone agrees on; and some of the claims made about homosexuality by its enemies—claims about the “recruitment” of children to homosexuality—are completely without serious evidential foundation.

Nevertheless, this does not get us very far. And the question arises: how we can develop, on the sorts of liberal principles I have been articulating, a policy for public education in the cases where the dispute about the facts remains unresolved?

You might think the answer should be to stress the democracy in liberal democracy. Let us have public debate among equals and then vote for what should be taught. This seems to me how we must decide these questions, in one sense. But among the options in that public debate will be one that says that on some topics we may require the state to step back and leave the matter to the parents. It is not the case that the only option is to teach what the majority believes to be true. I should like to defend that option in cases where identity- related beliefs are in dispute.

We must begin by recognizing that the role parents play in the raising of children gives them rights in respect of the shaping of their children's identities that are a necessary corollary of parental obligations. We do not believe that social reproduction should be carried out as it is in Brave New World. We believe

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that children should be raised primarily in families and that those families should be able to shape their children into the culture, identity, and traditions that the adult members of the family take as their own. One liberal reason for believing this is that this is one way to guarantee the rich plurality of identities whose availability is, as I have said, one of the resources for self-construction.

There are imaginable other ways. If the state took over the raising of children and did not aim to raise them all to a singular identity, (p.72) it would have to assign children, effectively arbitrarily, to one of a range of identities. Once the state had taken over this role, respect for autonomy would require it to teach only such truths as it could decide on; teaching children falsehoods in order to give them “interesting” identities would be a paradigm of treating them as means (to the maintenance of a rich range of identities) rather than as ends. The resources for self-construction available would depend solely on the imagination and the will of the state and its servants, along with whatever “spontaneous” inventions would occur among the adults in such a society. Skepticism about this alternative, however, is surely in order. The intimacy of family life; the love of children for parents (and other relatives) and parents (and other relatives) for children; the sense of a family identity, family traditions: all these would be lost. More than this, the state would be invested with quite an enorm-ous power in the shaping of the citizenry; a power whose potential for abuse is obvious enough.

But once we have left the raising of children to families, we are bound to acknowledge that parental love includes the desire to shape children into identities one cares about, and to teach them identity-related values, in particular, along with the other ethical truths that the child will need to live her life well. A state that actively undermined parental choices in this regard in the name of the child's future autonomy would be a state constantly at odds with the parents: and that would be unlikely to be good for the children. A compromise is therefore necessary: where identity-related propositions are at stake, parents are permitted to insist that their children not be taught what is contrary to their beliefs; and, in return, the state will be able to insist that the children be told what other citizens believe, in the name of a desire for the sort of mutual knowledge across identities that is a condition for living productively together.

Thus, it seems reasonable to teach children about the range of religious traditions in the communities within which they live (indeed, in the world), without requiring them to assent to any of them, so that, to begin with, at least, they will assent only to the religion they have learned at home. This allows the children the knowledge to make identity choices as they themselves grow to autonomy; but it gives parents a special, primary place in shaping those choices. Only when a parent's choice seems to compromise the possibility of an

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autonomous adulthood—as would be the case with a refusal, on religious grounds, to allow one's children to learn to read—must the liberal state step in.

I have tried to suggest how one might begin to think about some questions in the philosophy of education, guided by the liberal (p.73) thought that education is a preparation for autonomy. My aim has been to show that this tradition is both powerful enough to help us with this difficult question and rich enough to allow us answers of some complexity. But these are only beginning ideas: and a liberal, who respects his fellow citizens, will offer them into the public debate expecting to learn from others where he is wrong.

Notes:

(1.) For better or worse, however, Kant's understanding of autonomy was more universalizing and rationalist than the understanding most people now have of it; it will not be a Kantian view that I sketch here.

(2.) David Wootton (ed.), Essay Concerning Toleration in Political Writings of John Locke (New York: NAL/Dutton, 1993), 188.

(3.) Ibid., 189.

(4.) Ibid., 197.

(5.) One reason for this is that what makes sense for me depends, very often, on the choices of others: if everyone ceased to care about film, the movie-making career I have set my heart on is going to cease to make sense.

(6.) I mean here to include, of course, the right to basic welfare and the child's right to an education to autonomy, which I discuss below.

(7.) There are issues here that are quite complex. My thought is that, if a state cannot afford to provide the most extensive health care provision that is currently technologically possible, then, in rationing access to health care (or in charging for health care beyond what is available free to all), it may take into account whether the sufferers knowingly accepted the risk of the disease.

(8.) See my “Cosmopolitan Patriotism,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997) pp. 617–39.

(9.) I mean it is natural to us only in the sense that a normal human upbringing produces creatures with such desires.

(10.) The broad sense “cover[s] not only the words we speak, but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the ‘languages’ of art, of gesture, of love, and the like.” in Multiculturalism: Examining “The Politics of Recognition.” An essay by Charles Taylor, with commentary by Amy Gutmann (ed.), K. Anthony Appiah, Jürgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller,

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Access brought to you by:

Michael Walzer, Susan Wolf (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 32.

(11.) See my “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction” in Multiculturalism: Ibid., 149–64.

(12.) I am conscious of having come to these ideas in conversation with school and college teachers over the last few years, and in reading about education, without being clear as to where exactly they came from. So, either I made them up (which strikes me as unlikely) or I got them from someone, though I have forgotten when and from whom. If the latter is the right hypothesis, I apologize to my source: come forward and I will be happy to acknowledge you.

(13.) I am especially conscious of the dependence of what I say here on a discussion with the “Pentimento” group.

(14.) In recent years, Bernard Williams has argued that there are ethical norms, central to the ways in which we construct our lives that do not belong to the universalizing institution of morality; see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). So, if he is right, not every important ethical conviction will share this universalizing logic of moral belief.