University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados
My selective reading of the literature suggests that supporters of a broadly liberal political position have gone a long way to accommodate the demands of various groups for distinctive educational treatment. Walzer (1994), for instance, used his distinction between liberalisms 1 and 2 to argue that Quebec measures to protect French could be regarded as acceptable to a liberal. Other writers have argued in support of muslim dress or a general right to lead an unexamined life.
This paper argues that
(1) this degree of tolerance in educational matters reflects a very weak conception of education, as little more than socialization.
(2) More full-blooded conceptions of education that stress reflection, critical thinking, and such like are much less hospitable to multicultural particularism.
(3) An argument can be given, from the conditions necessary for the sustainability of liberalism, that liberalism should endorse this more critical conception of education.
(4) Another argument to the same end can be based on considerations Nagel once offered in explication of liberalism's way of conceiving conflicts.
The paper concludes by noticing some possible difficulties in the resulting view.
A crude characterization of the liberal spirit might be "Live, and let live". Galston reminds us that it would be illiberal to insist on everyone following Socratic injunctions to examine and reflect on what is valuable. Liberals must let people live unexamined lives; their concern arises only when such people try to stop others getting on with their own preferred life-style.
If liberals should let people get on with their lives, always excepting infringements on the equal liberty of others, it might seem that liberals should let people get on with bringing up their children, pretty much how they like. Unexamined modes of life can be reproduced. Let people get on with it.
From such a perspective, a multicultural context creates practical problems for organized school systems and taxpayers, but hardly a problem of principle. Consenting adults reproduce their social relations minute by minute. If that is acceptable, so presumably is the activity they undertake to initiate newcomers into such social relations.
That way of putting it is intended to suggest two serious doubts about this line of thought. The first, that the people should indeed consent, I want in general to leave aside in this paper. The second is more directly relevant to education, and is the simple fact that the people involved are typically not adult. Liberalism takes people as adults, as they are, and does not enquire how they came to be that way. It attributes respect and responsibility to them: you want to do this, fine, go ahead. It doesn't confront them with counterfactual possibilities: if you were to reflect on things, you might prefer something else, or (closer perhaps to educational concerns, though yet more difficult to substantiate) if you had attended to those issues at school, you would now prefer.... Now, however appropriate it may be to treat adults as adults, it is not at all clear that we can get away with putting children in the same slot. What is acceptable for adults to do with adults may not be acceptable for adults to do with kids. If a child were properly thought of as an adult's property, then possibly a liberal's concern would only extend to the constraints on what those adults might do. But however much a child may be assigned to one or more adults as the person or persons "responsible for" him or her, we must recognize some perhaps expanding centre of interests that the child has or is intrinsically, and which themselves put constraints on what the rest of us may properly do. It is not just that a child will most likely survive to become at some future time another adult, but the fact that the child already has in some form or other the distinguishing marks of responsible personhood (see my 1995 for some brief remarks on the logical complexity we can expect in this context). The difficulty for theoretical liberalism is to find grounds to permit any interference with a child's own inclinations rather than to circumscribe parental authority, although this latter is by far the more pressing practical problem.
It is a truism that the educational literature is replete with conceptions of education that tell us that in this context of bringing children into the human fold we have some special obligations to them that we do not have towards adults. Even when education is viewed as little different from any other mode of socialisation, educators are not likely to advocate exposure to prostitution or child abuse as part of their offerings. What schools offer is coloured by normative conceptions on everyone's view. But the important point is that within this range of conceptions of education are some which stress intellectual detachment from the socially given and promote intellectual independence and autonomy. Far from being seamlessly part of everyday life, education, on such views, is a matter of doing different things, of being exposed to different things, of expanding horizons, and also of equal significance, of not revealing some of what goes on, and, in the manifestations I am particularly concerned with, of promoting critical reflection on these possibilities.
While education conceived of as critique cannot require that those exposed to it eventually endorse the critical spirit (relapsing into the unexamined life must remain a possibility), such an approach to education can hardly be seen as merely social reproduction. As John Anderson recognized (see, for instance, his paper on classicism in the 1962 collection), to the extent that it impinges on learners, it is instead subversive of many modes of social life. It is likely to cut people somewhat adrift from their social moorings. Nor is it a particularly congenial site for toleration. We want learners to get things right, not just do any old thing that occurs to them or is customary in their social milieu.
So far it would seem that we have a choice for a liberal. Choose education as reproduction and endorse multicultural particularisms; choose education as critical reflection and face hostility from many groups whose way of life seems threatened by critical reflection or exposure to alternatives.
We may remark here in passing that notable liberal theorists can be found making both types of choice, though perhaps with little direct help from their theoretical positions. Tom Nagel, at one point, endorses what sounds like my preferred conception: he wants a "maximal" approach to educational provision. "The tendency toward equality and distrust of the exceptional found in the public educational systems of some modern liberal societies is a great mistake. Equality of opportunity is fine, but if a school system also tries to iron out distinctions, the waste from failure to exploit talent to the fullest is inexcusable.... A society should try to foster the creation and preservation of what is best, or as good as it possibly can be, and this is just as important as the widespread dissemination of what is merely good enough" (1991, p. 135). On the other hand, Rawls takes education as an example of the difference between the consequences of a comprehensive liberalism, which promotes autonomy and individuality, and his own political liberalism, which "requires far less. It will ask that children's education include such things as knowledge of their constitutional and civic rights so that, for example, they know that liberty of conscience exists in their society and that apostasy is not a legal crime, all this to insure that their continued membership when they come of age is not based simply on ignorance of their basic rights or fear of punishment for offenses that do not exist. Moreover, their education should also prepare them to be fully cooperating members of society and enable them to be self-supporting; it should also encourage the political virtues so that they want to honor the fair terms of social cooperation in their relations with the rest of society....The unavoidable consequences of reasonable requirements for children's education may have to be accepted, often with regret" (1993, pp. 199-200). One hesitates to comment briefly on Rawls, but a question does seem to arise of the "units of political liberalism": is each individual to sign up to the contract, understanding presumably its bases, or will some simply be spoken for by their guardians, heads of household, or whatever? If each individual is to grasp the rationale for political liberalism, one may reasonably doubt Rawls' denial, omitted from the quotation above, that minimal political education need not confront the issues endorsed by comprehensive liberalisms. (I am endebted to Ruth Ann Putnam's contribution to the conference for a reference to Gutmann, 1995, which indeed argues that the demands of a reasonable conception of civic education in effect close the gap Rawls supposes to exist between the consequences of comprehensive and political liberalism here.)
To be fair to Nagel, he too insists that his liberal education policy would not have schools endorse individualistic values and oppose religion by encouraging critical thought (p. 165), another instance perhaps of his tendency to want his cake and eat it too, or of a peculiar and self-excluding view of the best we have yet arrived at by way of thought on political matters.
To return to the main line of this paper, illiberal groups of consenting adults can only maintain a liberal polity by accident. If liberalism is to be non-accidentally sustained, some people at least must come to endorse it. As Gutmann (1987) has done for democracy, we can then try to motivate one of the educational choices rather than the other by reference to what is necessary for the continuing reproduction among new members of a liberal polity. And that is pretty clearly the critical conception; it is only reproduction in the special case where the social group is already thoroughly liberal in its views. (There are, of course, practical questions about how many people must play the right game for it to survive; we can get by with some free-riders, fascists and other fanatics, or, as Gutmann 1995 stresses, with the possibility of "partial" citizens, groups like the Amish which deliberately cut themselves off from the larger polity. But political argument can reasonably concentrate on ideals here. We would like a society as liberal as possible to persist, so let everyone be educ ated for it.)
To connect the discussion again with Rawls, there is a distinction between what has to be done to defend liberal society against illiberal groups within it (where expediency may well suggest an unwilling tolerance of undesirable practices that would, ideally, be proscribed) and the minimal requirements for allowing liberal or non-liberal groups that do not endorse individualistic values to live together across generations (the issue we have already glanced at). My difficulty is to think through the demands of this logical but perhaps unactualised possibility. One could be forgiven for seeing his overriding concern to preserve peace among probably unwilling neighbours as in effect giving up on the conditions necessary for those neighbour's children to receive an adequate grounding in the principles that guide the larger polity.
Another route to the same educational conclusion is provided by considerations Nagel (1987) once used to articulate liberalism's way of identifying conflicts. He contended that it was recognition of the lack of common ground for resolution of differences of opinion that distinguishes those cases where liberalism insists on tolerance. (Nagel suggested that we should not appeal to truth in politics, but this view appeals at least to meta-truths, which on his view are surely a kind of truth.) Now a curriculum designed to sustain liberalism is going to have to look at the contrast between decidable and undecidable issues, and the epistemological status of items on both sides of the divide. If Nagel were right, this would be the fundamental justification for liberalism's position, and so something its adherents ought to know about. But again it is clear that a sober assessment of the epistemological status of religious, economic, cultural, etc. beliefs is a feature of the kind of education we have allocated to the critical side. It is not the sort of thing promoted by closed societies, as for instance the Mozert parents saw. (They objected to school text books that treated different religions in an even-handed way.)
Nagel has changed the basis of his views on tolerance, and refers us to a paper by Raz (1990) in partial explanation. I am afraid I am not sure what Nagel now thinks is wrong with his earlier position (it is not, I think, the point I made about meta-truths being truths). He still spends some time on epistemological issues - that there is a substantial middle ground between what it is unreasonable to believe and what it is unreasonable not to believe; that one may reasonably believe something while admitting that others may equally reasonably not accept it, despite shared evidence and reasoning. Rawls too seeks to limit public reason to principles "independent of the opposing and conflicting philosophical and religious doctrines that citizens affirm" (p. 9) and says that a "shared basis of justification that applies to comprehensive doctrines is lacking in the public culture of a democratic society. But such a basis is needed to mark the difference, in ways acceptable to a reasonable public, between comprehensive beliefs as such and true comprehensive beliefs" (p. 61).
Nagel wants everyone to be able to say, in some cases, "I accept P (Christianity, say) but I think you are not unreasonable not to accept it", but in others "I accept Q (the germ theory of disease, say [cf. Nagel p. 161]) and I think you are unreasonable not to accept it." As I understand Raz' objection to Nagel's earlier stance, the difficulty is to spell out a coherent sense in which you are reasonable to withhold assent while I am reasonable to accept a belief, when we are both confronted by the same reasons and evidence. Surely the only reasonable thing to do is to withhold assent until something good enough to determine acceptance (or rejection) becomes available for both of us. (Leaving aside the exceptional cases where circumstances force us to come to a decision at some point, like driving on one side of the road, or adopting some form of national defence.) But while that may be true when playing by the logic of ordinary everyday belief, the problem with moral, religious and ideological views in general is that we typically don't play by those rules (cf. Gellner on ideology ). Politeness, if nothing else, encourages us to suppose mutual reasonableness in these matters, but it is arguable that what we typically have is a wilful refusal to take a comprehensive view - we tinker with inherited beliefs at a few edges but don't in general ask whether the whole lot has anything going for it. But as Nagel notes (p. 157), it is not only self-defeating to defend tolerance by arguing for the falsity of religious or other views that might reject it, it fails to capture an important element in the liberal defence: we tolerate for reasons you can endorse too, not for reasons you have to reject.
For this, perhaps Rawls' characterization is sufficient. Members of different religions might be able to agree that a shared basis for adjudication among them does not exist, while it does for, say, questions about the etiology of many diseases. Do they need to move from this recognition of difference to any normative epistemological judgment of reasonableness? As Ingram suggests, there are other normative judgments they could use to bridge the gap to tolerance - a notion of moral integrity perhaps or of the significance of reason for morality (1996, p. 157) - though she perhaps too easily supposes that we can pick out and exclude doctrines that are "mad, irrational, or simply blind to everyday needs and interests" (p. 154). (The suggested way out probably imports a crude political element into the issue, since individuals are not going to be counted as representing a view unless they can point to enough fellow-believers.)
I have tried to undermine a benign multicultural tolerance in the educational context by exploiting the difference between "consenting adults" and the children we send to school. Adults can be left with their misrecognitions, to use Bourdieu's term; children must be offered weapons against cultural domination. But if misrecognition is deplorable in one case, surely it is in the other. Gutmann (1987) has asked how a democratic community can avoid imposing life-long education on its citizens; I wonder how the position sketched above can avoid attacking the false assumptions of the adults, as well as alerting the children. Liberalism plus education for critical rationalism then emerges as a universal enemy of cultural particularism, rather than a framework within which different groups might find space enough to survive. We have moved, in effect, from Rawls' procedural basis for liberalism to a metaphysical one, by appeal to the epistemological considerations both Rawls and Nagel have offered in defence of a liberal polity.
Anderson, J., Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Angus and Robertson, 1962.
Brandon, E.P., Inus conditions and justification: a case study of the logic of Gutmann's argument for compulsory schooling, in van Eemeren, F., Grootendorst, R., Blair, J.A., and Willard, C.A. (eds.) Special Fields and Cases, Proceedings of the Third ISSA Conference on Argumentation, Volume IV, Sicsat, 1995.
Gutmann, A., Democratic Education, Princeton University Press, 1987.
Gutmann, A., Civic Education and Social Diversity, Ethics, 105, 557-579, 1995.
Ingram, A., Rawlsians, Pluralists, and Cosmopolitans, in Archard, D. (ed.), Philosophy and Pluralism, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Nagel, T., Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16, 215-240, 1987.
Nagel, T., Equality and Partiality, Oxford University Press, 1991.
Rawls, J., Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1993.
Raz, J., Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 19, 3-47, 1990.
Walzer, M., Comment, in Gutmann, A. (ed.) Multiculturalism, Princeton University Press, 1994.
This paper is a revised version (28/12/97) of one presented to the Philosophy, Education and Culture conference in Edinburgh in September, 1997. Revisions will continue and so the author particularly invites comments, either by email, fax (246 424 0722), or post: Office of the Board for NCC/DE, UWI, Cave Hill, Barbados.
Return to publications list; return to Office Home page. Press back if you got here from somewhere else.
URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/edinb2.html