Education and Values: the Richard Peters Lectures
GRAHAM HAYDON (ed.), Institute of Education, University of London (1987), pp. ix+65. £4.50. ISBN 0-85473-272-1.
This volume is another in a valuable series of publications from the London Institute of Education, devoted on this occasion to the 1986 Richard Peters lectures. The lecturers were Alasdair Maclntyre, Anthony Quinton, and Bernard Williams; Graham Haydon provides an introduction, while Paul Hirst offers a brief tribute to Professor Peters.
It is pleasing to find 'mainline' philosophers addressing themselves to an audience of educators, and even, in at least two of the lectures, to questions of particular interest to such an audience. But as one may have come to expect, their remarks remain far removed from practical issues, able perhaps to give a colouring to one's perspective on schooling and its problems but unlikely to swing any decisions. In Maclntyre's case, the probable contribution is largely negative and pessimistic, while Quinton's practical advice is restricted to a kind of teaching that is sadly rather rare, even in the tutorial context where it would seem feasible. Williams operates at such a level of abstraction and allusiveness that it is difficult to see any immediate implications, though he himself tells us in his last paragraph that the view he endorses has 'important practical consequences'.
By far the most provocative of the contributions is MacIntyre's diagnosis of the 'forlorn hope' of modern Western culture, its teachers' dual concern to fit pupils into existing social roles and to encourage them to think for themselves. MacIntyre is by no means the first to notice these two different aims, nor to see that, at least in some social contexts, they may be incompatible. His sombre vision arises from an argument to the effect that thinking for oneself, beyond the confines of a narrow and debilitating specialization, is not possible. Maclntyre formulates this probably self-refuting conclusion in the slightly less extravagant claim that the modern western world rules out an educated public.
Thinking for oneself, MacIntyre claims, requires a social context: shared standards of acceptable thinking and shared subjects for thought. One of the two main aims of teaching will be to initiate pupils into such a general culture. Its initiates will be conscious of themselves as members of an educated public, and protagonists in debate will appeal to it for adjudication. The intellectual content needed for such a public requires shared canonical texts and construals thereof. MacIntyre uses eighteenth century Scotland as an example of what such an educated public could look like - a socially diverse group of landowners, lawyers, clerics, schoolmasters and merchants who shared a philosophical education in Reid and Stewart's 'philosophy of common sense', a logical grounding in books one to six of Euclid, and a tradition of argument from first principles. Opposed to this educated public were on the one hand the dogmatic evangelicals, who eventually won out in the public arena, and on the other the sceptical Hume, whose ideas have perhaps won in the academic.
Certainly MacIntyre's picture of the modern intellectual world is of splintered groups unable to agree on the standards of rational argument and lacking a synoptic perspective on their myriad specializations. Literate without a literature, a passive spectator of the fundamentally irrelevant posturings of social commentators, modern western man has lost the social preconditions for enlightened thought. Maclntyre concludes his lecture by supposing that teachers might wish to reinvent an educated public, or rather a kind of society in which it might flourish, but his only hint on how to achieve this modest goal is to echo Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun's recommendation for a return to the Greeks.
Maclntyre, unlike most philosophers, is aware of sociology, of the social matrix in which educational or other issues arise. But while much of his sketch of our predicament rings true, it is odd for him to suppose that a traditional but intellectually honest salvation can yet be found. Hume's scepticism, or rather the industrial world built with a related epistemological stance, has established that disenchantment of the human world which Maclntyre wishes still to oppose. Warning of apocalypses approaching, or indeed already upon us, is an intoxicating business, but one might hope that in thinking through the options open to us Maclntyre would not so easily surrender his sociological insights.
The question of what kind of self-understanding remains possible for us also comes up in Williams' reflections on ethics and ethical thought. He wants to dispel mystery, and recognizes that such an aim may undermine a way of life rather than leave everything where it was. (It is strange that Haydon repeatedly asks questions in his introduction which suppose different forms of social life can interact in critical dialogue on an equal footing and remain equally viable, while all three of his contributors clearly display the opposing truth of the matter.) But stylistically Williams preserves an aura of mystery - the thesis of the primacy of dispositions for which he argues would seem to amount, in the end, to the idea that the whole reality of ethics resides in the social practices of those of us who have dispositions to employ ethical conceptions in our living and reflecting. Williams wishes to preserve a kind of ethical knowledge through the 'thick' concepts of our various traditions, though he acknowledges in a footnote a point analogous to that with which we started this paragraph, that such thick 'knowledge' tends to melt away when confronted by dispassionate inquiry. Williams' ethical anti-realism wants to leave almost everything as it was.
The non-neutrality of any serious investigation of our ethical conceptions, of any serious investigation simpliciter, is worth bringing to the attention of educators, as is the point with which Williams closes: that we have to recognize the fact of ethical criticism and change of view, or more tendentiously, progress. As he says, theories that involve some sort of perception or intuition of ethical facts require, but seem unable to offer, and indeed ignore the need for, a convincing account of error. While teaching about the abolition of slavery might emphasize moral progress, most educational dealings with values assume an ahistorical stability.
They also exhibit a fault detected by Quinton in some philosophizing about knowledge: there is no recognition of the varying degrees of support for what we accept. Quinton's paper, 'On the Ethics of Belief', ranges over many epistemological issues; his main pedagogical conclusion is that teachers are more strongly obliged than most other people to keep tabs on the credibility of the claims they pass on. He assumes that teachers do generally intend to teach some second order discriminations: if not how to evaluate claims within the various disciplines of the curriculum, at least a sense of what does and what doesn't support what and some sort of 'intellectual taste'. He notes that it does not much matter if the 'facts' purveyed in class are out of date, provided teachers succeed in these second order tasks and so foster an ability to put them right.
This is no doubt true. More generally it hardly matters what first order content makes up the all-too-forgettable curriculum, if various second order aims are achieved. But that is a big if. Nor is its likelihood much increased by our current lack of attention (not only in the school curriculum but more seriously in the preparation of school teachers) to these second order issues themselves.
Besides numerous one line refutations of sceptical claims about knowledge (which, for all their brevity, may be useful defenses against criticism for teachers unschooled in second order questions), Quinton's paper displays many of the dimensions of value directly involved with passing on the truth and our traditions of inquiry: cognitive temperance; courage both to criticize received opinion and to gamble on the exploration of new ideas; openmindedness; and a self-awareness that tries to correct for idiosyncracies. Facts and values may be distinctly different, but they are interwoven in the fabric of our social and educational lives. His discussion again brings out the opposition between any recognizably educational activity and traditions of dogmatic assertion and belief that are alive and kicking in the world Haydon reminds us of in his introduction. People concerned with the curriculum may not get detailed guidance from this little volume, but they ought to carry away from it a clearer sense of the options opened, and closed, by an educational tradition. In the spirit of MacIntyre's contribution, they may also wonder to what extent the real world of mass schooling can co-exist with such an institution.
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