Caribbean Journal of Education, 19, 227-238 (1997). Comments welcome.
We all like to think we can make a difference. In an anniversary year, if we cannot point to an impact in the past then it is reassuring and inspiring to offer the promise of important results in the future for our particular speciality, a pathway to some new excellence for our region as it prepares to face a new millennium.(1) Philosophers, however, have a couple of thousand years of history to suggest that such hopes are futile: a well-argued, comprehensively researched position is not likely to persuade anyone, not even its author for very long. But hope springs eternal, so I offer the following quixotic argument for one important consequence of our taking seriously some fairly widely accepted positions in philosophy and philosophy of education. Its conclusion is not one that is put forward in CARICOM declarations, but that perhaps indicates how great is the gap between what CARICOM understands by human resource development and what a dispassionate commitment to education would yield.
The bare bones of the argument are these: (i) educational activity, as against perversions or distortions of education, must leave space for whatever good reasons there are for what it presents for acceptance by a learner; (ii) religious views cannot be acquired without a "leap of faith" - i.e. accepting something for which there is no good reason; so (iii) if we restricted ourselves to educational activity in bringing up the young we would soon find ourselves in a purely secular world.
The paper will attempt to put a little flesh on each of these bones in the hope of deflecting some obvious criticisms and will conclude with some brief reflections on why, despite the soundness of the reasoning, we should not expect the conclusion to prove true in the foreseeable future. It is perhaps worth noting explicitly that the argument, though simple, brings together claims from some very different fields (philosophy and sociology of education, philosophy of religion) in a way that is still somewhat unusual, despite our frequent endorsements of multi- or inter-disciplinary activity. The sections that follow, being devoted to these very different issues, will then appear perhaps to lack a common focus, except that the argument is itself that focus, the structure that holds them together.
I
With respect to the argument's first claim, one might say that it is intended to capture the lowest common factor shared by various views of the nature of education and praiseworthy teaching that have been put forward by influential theorists - Scheffler (1973), Passmore (1980), Peters (1966), McClellan (1976), among others in recent analytic philosophy of education. Philosophers of education have regularly contrasted teaching with indoctrination, for instance, or education with training, and have equally regularly found that the more worthy activity or process has intrinsic links with notions of understanding the reasons for something, while the less admirable process or activity dispenses with such grounding, or perhaps in its reprehensible forms actually obstructs it. Thus, Kleinig, in his typically comprehensive and judicious discussion of indoctrination, identifies it with "teaching in which the beliefs, attitudes, values, etc. taught are held in such a way that they are no longer open to full rational assessment" (1982, 62). Here we see the common thought that education provides access to rational appraisal of what it transmits or provokes, that its content is either something with reason on its side or something that can be presented without falsifying its lack of reasonableness.
I have said this is a common thought, but it might certainly not seem so, thus convolutedly expressed. The difficulty arises from the fact that not all educational content is strictly a matter of propositional knowledge - the context in which reason and reasonableness are perhaps most at home. Mathematics and biology, history and economics are subject-matters where we may hope to find truth, or at least recognise our previous errors. We can in these fields hope to present our preferred views together with the evidence and other reasons that persuade us of their superiority. But education is more than the transmission of such bodies of tentative conjectural knowledge. To take one of the least contentious examples, education would normally be thought to comprise also acquaintance with and some degree of appreciation of some works of music, whether Bach, Bob Marley, or the Spice Girls - or two of these three, as I would prefer. Whatever might be said about these artists' conformity or otherwise to stylistic conventions, it is exceedingly difficult to see how the works themselves can be assessed as more or less true or reasonable. This dimension of value is simply not in question in this area. Whence the awkwardness of my expression above - music is a proper part of education while lacking the usual dimension of assessment for reasonable acceptance. The point is that it can be included in educational activity without supposing falsely that it has it. We can teach it like it is.
The point here is not the reasonableness of including certain things in the curriculum and not others. Reasons can be given for these decisions in all cases, but equally they need not be the same reasons as are in question in distinguishing education from its warped analogues. We need, and can find, reasons for preferring in general to teach Caribbean history in the Caribbean instead of Armenian - its greater salience and connection to our present situation, for instance. Equally we need, and I hope can find, reasons for including Bach and Bob Marley but not the Spice Girls - here aesthetic excellence and originality might play a part. But none of these reasons need have a bearing on the independent claims upon learners of what we then present by way of history or music (although, as I have presented them, in the music case there should be some overlap). It is those claims that are at issue.
So, where there are reasons, education and acceptable teaching make room for them. This is not to say that education always involves the giving of these reasons. That would be asking much too much. Even when reason-giving stops with claims for which no further reason can be given, the chain can go on a long way - much further than anyone would normally wish to explore - so we may well only go a short way along the path of reasons when explaining or defending some claims. And pedagogically it is by no means obvious that everything is best learnt from the reasons up - rote learning of multiplication tables may well be much superior to the arduous discovery of the same equations, and the learning of chemistry does not usually start with the quantum mechanics of the atoms with which it deals. The point is that, looked at in the longer term, education does not close off these reasons. It lives in awareness of them and of the fact that anyone may ask at any time for them to be given and that this would be perfectly in order, perfectly an expression of the ideals that education embodies. (2)
II
The second step of the argument claims that religion, religious beliefs as we find them, cannot be imparted while respecting reasonableness. This is somewhat more contentious than what I have attempted to offer as a consensus about reason and education. I can only sketch the basic supporting argument.
A first point is that it is a claim about religion as we find it. A presupposed preliminary point, which is of crucial importance, is that we must look and see what is going on in the case of religion, rather than thinking from within the confines of a particular tradition.(3) When we look we find several different religions being practised and advocated. It is not clear that they are all intellectually compatible,(4) and certainly as a social fact different religions and different sects within them are often hostile and mutually dismissive. I shall restrict my discussion to the various scriptural religions and thereby ignore the host of belief systems that are more usually studied by anthropologists than by students of comparative religion. I think the same logical problems arise in all cases, so with luck this will not affect my argument.
The religions we find all involve an appeal to authority, to someone or something which has a more than usual epistemological standing: a book, a church, a pontiff, a prophet, or some combination of these or other special sources. But in no case is there an independent argument for preferring this authority to the others that are touted. What we do not find is the sort of "crucial experiment" reported in the Old Testament between the prophets of Baal and Yahweh - whose god would set fire to the offering? What we do not find is the sort of direct revelation of the nature of supernatural agency that Hanson fantasizes in his last paper (1967). As he suggests, occasional CNN reports from a Muslim paradise or a Dantean inferno would have a probative force far in excess of anything we do find. What we do find is a continual begging of the question. Claims about the divine are to be accepted because they are to be found in a particular source. Why is that source special? Because the divine appointed it to be so.
Of course, once the unargued presupposition is accepted, what we find can be rationalised away. Faith is preferable to the probative force given by CNN to its reports of famine or war. We can water down the apparent differences between different religions and tell a story that tries to keep much of all of them, as John Hick (1989) has tried to do. But the crucial initial step has been taken, and it is that which needs justification in the context of education.
Here one might reply that in addition to the varieties of revealed religion there is what has been termed "natural religion," the core of theistic belief that can be established by reason alone. An adequate response to this suggestion might well require an exhaustive book on the philosophy of religion. I shall content myself with three observations. The first is a necessarily personal judgment of where the discipline has got to. It certainly hasn't reached consensus on the fundamental issue of theism versus atheism, but perhaps one can say that there are no arguments for theism that seem to have significant power and that there are no arguments against which cannot somehow be circumvented. If there is a consensus it is that there are no knock-down arguments on either side. One is then left with balancing the considerations for and against, and also, if one is inclined to the theistic side, with characterizing the kind of deity that would be left after such argument.
A second observation flows from this last point. It needs a lot more argument than we are usually offered for equating what might be left positively after natural theology has done its work with the object of any of the religions we actually find. Natural theology can be seen as changing the subject as much as providing a rational basis for belief in any existing religion. At least the eighteenth-century deists seem to have recognised something like this in not pretending to be just another sect of Christians. As the set of beliefs changes under pressure of rational argument, so trust in the authority of their standard source ought to wane. There is this much to say for "fundamentalists" that if one gives up one claim in a revealed or authoritative source as wrong (or as only metaphorically true rather than literally) then the way is open for the rejection or reinterpretation of all of them. And these reinterpretations must necessarily appeal to something other than the revelation itself. If rational reflection leads us to recognise that one claim cannot be literally true, what reason have we left for even entertaining it as metaphorically true? (There is not much to say for fundamentalists here in fact since their own starting point is an interpretation, not a given, and so not itself deriving from the supposed revelation, but let us not get too immersed in hermeneutical argument - for pertinent comments see van Fraassen, 1997.)
The third observation is that we need a reason to get into this whole question in the first place (Brandon, 1998). Philosophy of religion yields, if I am right, a choice between pro and con, because there are no overwhelming arguments on either side. But equally, a philosophy of flying saucers might yield the same choice for the same reason, or indeed the philosophy of any absurdity you care to think of. It is only in logic and mathematics that we can definitely rule out the existence of something, a greatest prime number, say. As Hanson insisted, in other fields the best argument for non-existence is the lack of good reasons for existence. We need to add that we have better things to do with our time than refute groundless suppositions; we need a reason for taking a claim seriously in the first place. The point of my original claim that religion as we find it persistently begs the question is that we never are given any such reason. There are of course socially significant groups promoting different religious claims; there are none promoting the vast number of other absurdities one could concoct. But social significance is not a reason of the requisite sort.
One response might be to ask "Are there not many things that must be taken on trust, at least initially?" Young children seem universally to dislike hot pepper, but we know that many will come to acquire a taste for it. The same is said, though with less evidential support, for beer. Ignoring the crudity of these examples, do they not provide a justification for the sort of suspension of disbelief by which Pascal claimed one could move from doubt or disbelief to faith? The impressiveness of a believer's charisma certainly often does play a causal role in inducing participation in the rituals of his or her religion. And as many have stressed, a personal relationship such as is promised by many religions is not an appropriate place for the constant appeal to reasoned justification. But as Kleinig reminds us (1982, 264), responsible trust is something we grow into; there is the initial step to be justified and it is not in general wise to take this blindly. And this leads us back to the preliminary point that while individuals are faced with groups of people upholding particular traditions, and not always a multiplicity of such traditions, we qua reflective humanity are faced with a wide range of apparently competing claims, including also the wholesale rejection of any religion. We cannot suspend disbelief and entertain all of the religious options; but then the initial choice among them seems as unmotivated as ever.
It is obvious but needs acknowledgement that I am giving central place in this discussion of religion to the propositional element. But just as the demonstrable non-existence of a greatest prime number is neither here nor there to the man or woman measuring a field or selling yam, so one might think the propositional presuppositions of religious activity are of no great moment. Religion is a way of life, a set of commitments to particular ways of human flourishing, rather than a theory of the universe. Here I can only say that I disagree. For what it is worth, I have St Paul on my side - "if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain" (1 Corinthians 15,14). Charity may exceed faith and hope, but the point is that unless the propositional claims that express that faith are actually true - that Jesus was resurrected or that Mohammed recorded God's message or whatever - a lot of what makes the ways of life distinctive is sheer foolishness. As St Paul recognized but as is apparently lost on some contemporary atheistic Anglican bishops, the values appropriate to a secular world are not entirely the same as those that make sense sub specie aeternitatis of the Christian, Muslim, Hindu or other variety.
III
The third step in the argument concerns what we do in those situations where we invoke education (either in institutional or non-formal settings - my argument applies as much to countries with supposedly secular school systems such as the USA as to those that embrace some religious orientation, since it applies also to all the other educational activity that goes on at home or elsewhere). The demanding view I am adopting says that we could restrict ourselves to educational activity of the sort licensed in section I. We can teach everything with an openness to the relevant reasons or an acknowledgement of the lack of reasons. This is the sort of claim that people initially accept, because they have bought into the conception of education I have offered, and which they then retreat from (consciously or unconsciously) when forced to reflect on the vast amount of indoctrination and unreasoned insistence on the unreasonable that actually goes on in the bringing up of children.
But cultivation of a chauvinist patriotism or insistence on school uniforms are not inevitable components of upbringing; we could do things sensibly if we would. There are things which have no reasons of the requisite sort - the noise associated with book just is what English speakers currently use for books, as is that associated with iwe what Yoruba speakers use. We can teach people to speak and write without making them suppose anything less conventional is at stake here (though the propaganda of some language teachers suggests that some people think French or Latin have a profounder connection with the nature of things than Chinook). We could even insist on many conventions of polite society and the arrangements internal to particular schools by reference to their impartiality and ability to let us get on with other things, while noting our determination as social creatures to use collective violence against conspicuous infringement of these conventions. We don't have to pretend that social morality or conventional mores are inscribed on tablets of stone or discoverable by profound introspection.
We manage to teach a lot, such as games, without falsifying frills (though I recall a teacher who insisted that cricket has laws while other games simply had rules - but we all knew he was crazy). In an otherwise laudable effort to teach what is best, we can be tempted to reject such sensible efforts in the areas of morality or aesthetics because we suppose that here too teaching can actually achieve what we would like. We can teach the best that is thought about gravitation and expect it to be learnt or appropriated by our students, but in that way we cannot hope to teach what we might regard as the most admirable morality, or tragic drama. We can of course present these things for inspection and discussion, but their nature as evaluative commitments is such that we cannot routinely expect their internalisation in the context of schooling in the same way we can legitimately expect such appropriation of physical theory or mathematical algorithms (though, as we sadly recognise, a great deal of regular subject teaching is merely compartmentalised retention for purposes of regurgitation rather than appropriation as part of a self-endorsed conception of things).(5) The resulting danger is the suggestion of a "big stick", a factitious objective backing for what we prefer. "Whether you like or not, this is what you should do, should admire!" And so our teaching distorts the objective reality of the content it transmits. In this context at any rate it might be salutary to aim not at excellence but at what is merely satisfactory, as Gutmann (1987) suggests with respect to moral education. (No more than in the previous section is my position here a reflection of a consensus, though the nature of the supposed objectivity of moral or aesthetic value is certainly not widely agreed.)
The claim that we can educate rather than indoctrinate children in morality (and other values) can hardly be defended by pointing to exemplifications, since I must concede there aren't any conspicuously available. But it seems to me that even so the onus is on those who would deny the possibility to show why it is in principle impossible (cf. McClellan, 1976, ch. 5).
IV
I have offered some elucidation and defence of the three claims needed to reach the final conclusion that if we kept only to educational activity in bringing up the young we would soon find ourselves in a purely secular world, a world in which we would think of Jesus, Abraham or Mohammed and their attendant deities in the way we now do of Zeus, Athena, the Pythian oracle and Thor. No more than the framers of CARICOM declarations do I expect this to happen. The argument may be no good; its crucial claims may be false; but I would suggest that what its failure shows is neither of these but simply our reluctance to stick to education, our determination to preserve the unreasonable, to socialise rather than educate.
Contrasting education and socialisation is perhaps as misleading as the frequent partial identification of the two. Some education is socialisation - that education in particular traditions of critical inquiry and rational reflection on the nature of things that is equally socialisation into these traditions - but what is crucial is for everyone involved in these matters to see quite clearly that much education is not socialisation, much socialisation is not educational. Education here deracinates, it cuts people adrift from their cultural groups. It broadens horizons and combats the parochialism of everyday life. It is not a matter simply of learning how to behave in the locally accepted ways. On the other side, socialisation that obstructs rational reflection is anti-educational. We may permit socially significant groups to get away with it, but that is a matter of political expediency rather than an expression of a defensible educational or political ideal (Brandon, 1997).
To conclude with a brief comment on the implication of the argument for what goes on in some school systems under the heading of religious education. There was once a common contrast in the analytic literature on this topic between teaching religion and teaching about religion. But it was a contrast that was hardly ever grasped for what it is. It is a contrast that can be equally well made for any putative subject. We can, for instance, contrast teaching mathematics and teaching about mathematics as a human cultural construct. I am pleased to see that Winch (1998) has recently argued for the unhelpfulness of the contrast for people concerned with our question, since it really says you can either teach religion or teach the anthropology (sociology, economics, or whatever) of religion. And that tells no one what they should do when they are stuck with a timetable slot that says 'religious education'. If they are moved by the considerations I have offered, they will seek to replace that slot with something else.
What might that something else involve? On the one hand, people ought to know something of the traditions they might wish to share; considerable detail is necessary to appreciate other things of value, such as works of art referring to different religious views. So there is certainly room for descriptive accounts of historically significant religious beliefs and practices. One might also think that Trinitarian theology or Islamic law represents a worthwhile achievement of human intellectual ingenuity and so should be studied for its intrinsic value as thought. On the other hand, there are the situations in human life for which religions offer coping strategies and solace of a kind that a dispassionate understanding of the universe does not endorse. I suspect that when, if ever, secularised thought achieves predominance it will have found something to address these aspects of our life in a responsible way. I do not know what they will look like. But at least we can present, through works of art as well as reflection on history and the world around us, the extreme situations, the incidence of death and brute misfortune that provoke an appeal to religious consolation. We can begin to think through their significance for us as humans. We can reflect also on what we have come to know about the world in which we live and on how far we can hope to go in answering questions that naturally arise in that study. In these ways we might hope to provide new generations with a more adequate grasp of their place in the scheme of things and in particular of their interrelatedness and interdependence, without falling back on the mystifications of religion.
1. As a contributor from philosophy of education, I might note that for our 40th anniversary I attempted to promote interdisciplinary collaboration around logical reasoning and critical thinking (Brandon and Sirbratthie, 1996) as a way of applying philosophical expertise to real problems in Caribbean education. The problems are still there and the solution is still, I believe, feasible. But my own withdrawal to policy-making means that I cannot argue for a programme needing extensive action; this paper requires only the reader's assent to begin to yield fruit. It is, I should add, not a defence of the relevance of the whole of the philosophy of education. But if taking seriously just this one central item may have such surprising consequences, perhaps we should look more benignly on the rest. Return to text.
2. There is hardly any claim in philosophy that is not contested by someone, and disputing the correctness of the classic Peters line on education is almost de rigueur for anyone aspiring to a distinctive voice in the philosophy of education. But while one can find claims that the insistence on reason and understanding may fail to make adequate provision for other aspects of mature human life (a criticism Peters himself endorsed in his later writings, e.g. Peters, 1981, ch. 3), one does not find philosophers of education rejecting the value of more profound rather than superficial understanding or lauding unthinking automatism in preference to reflective practice. Return to text.
3. Cf. the interesting confession of John Hick that it was not until he met and worked with a Caribbean diaspora population in Birmingham, a good number of years after he had begun academic life as a philosopher of religion, that it occurred to him that his speciality was the philosophy of religion and not just the philosophy of the Judaeo-Christian tradition (Hick, 1993, ch. 8). Return to text.
4. This may seem an understatement, since for one used to the theological wrangling of Christian sects and the disputes between Jews, Christians and Muslims it might seem obvious that different religions are incompatible. But when one casts a wider net, embracing views with little or no theological superstructure, it is not so clear that what one side says necessarily excludes the others - cf. Christian, 1972. The Greeks and Romans seem to have been particularly hospitable to the gods and mysteries of other peoples. Return to text.
5. This is a complex matter that can hardly be adequately dealt with here. But my point is that in some sense we have only one compatible set of ways of arriving at truth and knowledge. You may not care to have true beliefs, but if you do, you have to play the game the way the rest of us do. Ethical and aesthetic commitments are somewhat more variegated. Musically, say, you might want to be a strict and austere classicist or alternatively wallow in lush romanticism. There may be some minimal core that anyone interested in musical appreciation has to accept, but after that the field is open. Similarly in morality, there is a basic core of socially useful conventions which fall far short of heroism or sanctity, but which we might be able to inculcate fairly successfully in appropriate institutional contexts while we can only hope that others will endorse our particular vision of the ideal. There is also, I think, a disanalogy for those rejecting the enterprise: if you don't care about scientific knowledge, you can still live a life, since the end of science is not how to live but what the world is like, although you will only believe truths that go beyond your version of common sense by accident; whereas if you don't care about any way of being moral, you can still live a life too, although the alleged end of morality is how to live. Return to text.
Brandon, E.P. (1997). Liberalism and Education in a Multicultural Context. Paper read at the Philosophy, Education and Culture Conference at the University of Edinburgh, September 11-14th.
Brandon, E.P. (1998). What's Wrong with God? Paper delivered to the Fourth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, University of Amsterdam, June. To appear in its Proceedings.
Brandon, E.P. and Sirbratthie, N. (1996). Logical reasoning as a curriculum area in schools. In Craig, D.R. (ed.), Education in the West Indies: Developments and perspectives, 1948-1988. Mona: ISER.
Christian, W. (1972). Oppositions of religious doctrines: a study in the logic of dialogue among religions. New York: Herder and Herder.
Gutmann, A. (1987). Democratic Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hanson, N.R. (1967). What I Don't Believe. In Cohen, R.S. and Wartofsky, M.W (eds.), In Memory of Norwood Russell Hanson - Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, 1964/1966, Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Hick, J. (1989). An Interpretation of Religion : Human Responses to the Transcendent. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hick, J. (1993). Disputed questions in theology and the philosophy of religion. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kleinig, J. (1982). Philosophical Issues in Education. London: Croom Helm.
McClellan, J.E. (1976). Philosophy of education. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Passmore, J. (1980). The Philosophy of teaching. London: Duckworth.
Peters, R.S. (1966). Ethics and education. London: Allen & Unwin.
Peters, R.S. (1981). Essays on educators. London: Allen & Unwin.
Scheffler, I. (1973). Reason and teaching. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
van Fraassen, B. (1997). Sola experientia? - Feyerabend's refutation of classical empiricism. Philosophy of Science 64 (Proceedings): S385-S395.
Winch, C. (1998). The Philosophy of Human Learning. London: Routledge.
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