Common knowledge vs. local control
Part eight in a ten-part series on the topic of public education in a liberal society.
This post is the seventh full exchange between myself and Patrick J. Casey on the role of public education in a liberal society. Read the introduction to learn more about the impetus for this project and our aims for the exchange. Click here to read the first full exchange, click here to read the second full exchange, click here to read the third full exchange, click here to read the fourth full exchange, click here to read the fifth full exchange, and click here to read the sixth full exchange.
Our first full exchange focused on the topic of mandatory civic education and defined what we mean when we speak of liberal society; the second exchange outlined some assumptions we have about education; the third exchange dug into areas of agreement and disagreement between us, mostly surrounding whether to reform or rebuild our educational system; in the fourth exchange, per Patrick’s request, I lay out my vision for public schooling to which Patrick responds; in the fifth exchange we share our views on accountability and what ought to be the purpose of public schooling; and in the sixth exchange, we go deeper into the question of the highest purpose (telos) of public education and whether schools are an appropriate means to create social cohesion.
In this exchange, we discuss the idea and role of common knowledge and whether any knowledge imparted on the young ought to be shared across the nation or whether we should leave such decisions up to localities.
Dear Patrick,
When I said that you would “enjoy” Ashley Berner’s work, I probably should have said, “I think you will find her work interesting.” I figured you would disagree with her on some points. I am sympathetic to her argument that all students should be able to access and learn about the big ideas that have shaped how many view the world and behave—although I have not done this myself, I think reading the Bible would help us better understand our social mores. But the more that I think about it, I don’t necessarily think that the Bible or evolution needs to be taught to students through government mechanisms in the name of civic education. Understanding either doesn’t necessarily lead to the ability to self-govern and flourish, which is my ultimate goal for having civic education as the telos. As you mention, evolution can be taught either in a negative or positive light and still be marked off as taught.
I too think that states and localities should be able to choose how their curriculum is structured around civic education, not the federal government. I am skeptical of the motives of governments in general because I think they will always make decisions that serve their ends, thus the closer people are to the decisions of the government, the better. Even though this rarely seems to occur in practice, the people are supposed to be a check on the government. Therefore, I see it as a problem that bureaucrats in the far-off-land of D.C. are making all the decisions about such a local matter as one’s education. And I don’t think having the telos of public schooling be civic education means that there is one way to meet that ultimate goal.
With that in mind, I need to come up with a different term than civic education. When writing about this topic, I use the term civic education because it is the most familiar to people, but what I’m really interested in is providing the young with an education that will better prepare them to self-govern in our society and flourish. I think this goes beyond what is typically thought of as civic education, and I don’t necessarily think such an education is exclusive to schools. As you say, civil society likely does a better job unifying a people and engendering a sense of civic-mindedness than knowledge-driven schools. This is an area that I need to do a better job parsing: if self-governance and human flourishing are the ultimate aim of an education, as I contend, what should be taught in school versus elsewhere?
Maybe common knowledge isn’t unifying, rather a way to understand the roles and mechanisms of people and institutions in society. For example, we can be unified in our understanding of the legal system and laws and how they came about, but still disagree about whether particular laws are ethical. In other words, the unifying role of the school is not so much about social cohesion, but a common understanding of our history and institutions so that we are all working within the same operating system and can communicate effectively. And what establishes social cohesion and a commitment to each other as citizens are the connections one has to their community. As you say, different communities can be committed to the ideals of America for different reasons. We don’t need to agree on those reasons to strive toward the ideal. But we do need to be able to process information and communicate effectively, which can be the role of the school—to learn to read, write, and reason effectively.
Beyond basic skills, like reading and writing, I do think that young people need a sense of history and their place in it. I think a lack of historical context leads to much of the tension and many of the controversies we experience today. But, students should be able to support or question the decisions of the past, and they should not be coached into being reflexively patriotic or anti-America. This might be where the ultimate tension lies: if we want students to go beyond learning and regurgitating facts (as I do), teachers need to be trusted to guide students rather than tell them how to think. Teachers are humans, thus fallible and liable to push a particular perspective. (This is a random aside, but perhaps we need more teachers who score high on disagreeableness on personality tests?? I would venture to guess that most teachers score high on agreeableness.)
This gets to your point about learning other traditions, not just our own. Although, as a member of a Great Books group, I see value in having a core set of books to teach the Western tradition and other traditions, but, because I’m not willing to support a national curriculum, I must support localities choosing the texts that are taught. However, those texts ought to be good. This may be a topic for another time, but one thing that I agree with Ashley Berner on is that the standards currently set for schools focus too heavily on skill development, which opens the door for teachers to choose the crappiest books to teach those skills. But I don’t know how to ensure good books are chosen without mandates, and I don’t want the top-down mandates—a cyclical problem.
Before I close out, I want to get back to your question about which sciences are required versus electives in schools: Like you, subjects like sociology and psychology were electives in my high school, but biology and chemistry were mandatory. I suspect this trend can be traced back to the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Scholars like John Dewey thought that the scientific method was a marvel and an answer to our societal problems. He was the pioneer of pedagogical approaches to learning like inquiry-based learning, experiential learning, and project-based learning, which are all essentially the same in their focus on learning by doing. Although he did acknowledge that knowledge about a subject is necessary before engaging in experiential learning, he did not support a liberal arts approach to education and was outspoken against great books programs when they were first conceived. I don’t think Dewey’s ideas about how schools should be structured were fully realized, as is often the case, and are often bastardized, but nonetheless, his idea about infusing the scientific method into schools was quite influential.
With the telos of self-government and human flourishing in mind, I’m still trying to work out what ought to be the role of the school vs. family vs. community in educating young people with this end in mind. What do you think about my assertion that common knowledge is more about a level playing field than social cohesion, and what ought to be the role of schools in this endeavor? And do you think talking about self-government and human flourishing is a more sufficient, less controversial aim than civic education?
Sam
Sam,
It’s interesting that you mention you need to come up with a different name than “civic education” for the goals you have for the education system. In working on a project with a professor of education, we faced a similar question: should we coin a new term to describe our vision for our education program or should we espouse a more widely accepted term and simply be clear about what we mean by it? I don’t know very much about the history of education, but given what you said in a previous letter, isn’t what you’re describing something like liberal education or classical education? That’s what preparing young people for self-government and human flourishing in general sounds like to me. If liberal education is education for free people, this could be free in both the sense of “self-governing” as well as in the sense of “people who have the leisure to pursue the life of the mind.” You know more about this than I do, certainly. So I would guess there’s a reason you haven’t already adopted that term? Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you’re trying to label. Perhaps you’re trying to label the attempt to use liberal education as the basis for social cohesion and it’s that which lacks an accurate label?
I feel the dilemma that you mention very keenly. On the one hand, it seems like a society needs the education of the young to provide a common framework for understanding ourselves, our community, our history and our place in it, as well as a framework for communication. On the other hand, both of us have reservations about a national curriculum. We both hold to something like the principle of subsidiarity—that people should be ruled by members of one’s own community, not by people in a far-off place who might have quite different beliefs and values. Additionally, I think we worry about bringing the state—especially the federal government—into close contact with culture.
One way out of this dilemma might be to suggest that communities should be responsible for making decisions about curricula but to have some kind of requirement that they pass on the best that’s been thought and said within their own tradition as they see it or from a multiplicity of traditions. In what is easily my favorite work of philosophy of education, The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis suggests that education is essentially older birds teaching younger birds to fly. The older generation passes on the best that they have—largely, the best that has been handed to them by prior generations—to humanize the young. Lewis, drawing from many classical authors from virtually every major civilization, argues that it’s not enough to train the mind of the child. One has to train their emotions as well. Plato argues that humans have three parts: the head, which is the seat of reason; the chest, which is the seat of the emotions; and the belly, which is the seat of the appetites. Lewis suggests that it is this middle element—what Plato calls “thumos” (and of which Francis Fukuyama made so much in his book Identity)—that makes us human. If we were only minds, we’d be purely spiritual beings. If we were only appetites, we’d be merely animals. It’s the chest—the emotions—that make us the strange hybrid creature that we are.
The head rules the stomach through the chest. What Lewis means is that, for example, students should not only know that cheating is wrong; they should feel a sense of disgust at it. Otherwise, the knowledge that cheating is wrong is impotent against the temptation to cheat. Yet, the emotions must be trained to be the obedient servants of reason. As it is, my students report to me that they not only lack the appropriate emotions but almost the ability to feel. This is a real problem! How can we expect students to live well if they lack the relevant training—the relevant virtues, really—to actually enact how they know they ought to live?
And this brings me to your question about what I think about your claim that knowledge is more about having a common language than developing social cohesion (this is how I understood your point, at least). I agree that a focus on skills or knowledge can at most provide something like a common language, since, as you say, people could agree about what our laws are and how they came to be and still disagree about whether the laws ought to be the way they are. To have social cohesion, people need to have attachments which I think is part and parcel of what Lewis is talking about when he talks about training the emotions.
I think education—and perhaps schools themselves—should have a role in fostering social cohesion, but that this should be threaded through local communities (or families) and their individual traditions. Each can find its own reasons for endorsing the values of the whole state. And I think that if we focus education more on instilling relevant virtues rather than skills, then allowing the local community to pass on these virtues through their own distinctive traditions is probably the way to go. I think we can embrace pluralism about these traditions to a significant degree—or, to put it another way, we can be flexible about what each tradition includes in their “canon”—precisely because the virtues and values that are found in the great civilizations are substantially the same. While the “theological” differences between, say, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Norse, Greek, and Roman traditions are, in my view, rather sharp, the differences in their ethics are not. To use Lewis’ language, the Tao can be found in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish tradition as well as in the Bhagavad Gita and the Hindu tradition.
This isn’t to say that all the major traditions embodied in the great civilizations are precisely the same, but it is to say that the great teachers of humanity have discovered a similar body of ethical truths which are embodied in the classic literatures and philosophical works of these various traditions. For example, love of home combined with openness and benevolence to the stranger are common themes. Each tradition would teach solidarity with one’s fellow countrymen as well as love of home as appropriate emotions that a properly humanized person ought to feel. This would be a vast improvement over the contempt for one’s home and country that many students express as products of our current K-12 system. If this could be combined with Rawls’ idea that each tradition can perceive values worthy of endorsement and commitment in a good state, then this might go a long way to securing the stability of society in a legitimate way. After all, if stability is founded upon humanizing each successive generation by instilling in them appropriate emotions, each community doing so in accordance with its own tradition, these traditions are ancient and not liable to drastic changes.
I sometimes think that perhaps K-12 education should induct young people into a tradition while higher education should be more freewheeling, even critical. I mean this more as a matter of emphasis. As I mentioned in a previous letter, it’s not the case that traditions are static and admit of no criticism. In reality, I think the best—that is, the most effective—critics are internal to the tradition. So, learning about a tradition is, in part, to learn a tradition of criticism. Of course, there is a danger of passing on prejudices and mistakes. But passing on a tradition doesn’t mean the tradition is closed. Traditions are organic things, not closed canons. One belief that has been implicit in all of my writing from my dissertation on has been the idea that the best arguments for change come from within the tradition. In fact, I might have first gotten this idea from Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, so when I came across it again in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Alasdair MacIntyre, it struck a chord with me. To get people to change, you have to appeal to values and beliefs that they already have and show that the projected change would be an extension or fulfillment of those values rather than a repudiation of them. I think one of the problems now with critical social justice or “wokeness” or what have you is that it tries to change society simply by repudiating and replacing the past. In my mind, this strategy for reshaping society is wrong-headed and is likely to lead to instability. You can’t change a society by demanding a change while repudiating the very tradition that gave rise to the values that you’re appealing to make the change. That’s to saw off the branch that you’re sitting on.
As for your other question, “Do I think talking about self-government and human flourishing is a more sufficient, less controversial aim than civics education?”, I think that philosophers have generally agreed with Rawls that any talk of the goal of human life—“human flourishing” is generally taken to be an example of such a goal—is more controversial than narrowly “political” aims like an informed citizenry or stability or the ability to self-govern (in the narrow sense of be a functioning member of a democratic society), etc. Of course, a number of philosophers have denied that you can divorce purely neutral or political goods from a more comprehensive account of the purpose of human life, what constitutes human flourishing, and so on. They argue that even the “political” goal of self-governance or autonomy reflects a commitment to a particular view about what kind of life is good for human beings to live. So, I would say that talking about human flourishing definitely makes the goals of education more controversial.
But I’m also not sure of another way out of the dilemmas we face. Every society needs to raise the young to be functioning if not flourishing citizens. Using the power of the federal government to produce such citizens presents problems for legitimacy, since the state effectively conditions the next generation’s commitments. If the state waters down the curriculum too much, instability will increase because there is nothing to bind us together. If the state presses its interests too much, then legitimacy decreases. Our collective suggestion seems to be to allow decisions about education to be made at the local level as much as possible. The difficulties there are (a) pluralism and lack of cohesion, (b) how to guarantee effective standards, as well as (c) the legitimate concerns of feminists about justice for young girls. To develop cohesion and guarantee competency while still respecting pluralism, we can allow families and communities to raise their children as they see fit, provided that they instill a respected tradition which instills virtues necessary for living as self-governing and flourishing citizens as well as producing reasons for being committed to one’s fellow citizens and one’s home. We try to address the feminist concern by arguing that traditions are not closed canons. The right way to deal with insufficiencies in any tradition is not to uproot it but to appeal to the resources within the tradition to make the case for change—change which is better in line or at least consonant with the deepest values of that tradition. The concern with legitimacy is addressed because, on the one hand, people buy into the state for whatever reasons their tradition provides them for doing so. And on the other hand, the state isn’t the originator of the traditions themselves. These precede the state and are an organic function of each generation passing on the best that was given to them in an attempt to humanize the succeeding generation.
I’m deeply curious about your reaction to what I’ve said. Are we reaching a point of consensus between ourselves about what education should look like? That would be interesting! It seems like we’ve got at least three propositions on the table. In my own words: First, a principle of subsidiarity—education should be locally run as much as possible. Second, education should be tailored towards passing on a minimal knowledge base supplemented by the virtues necessary for self-government and human flourishing. Third, stability and cohesion of societies can’t be secured simply by a shared language or a shared body of knowledge but requires having specific kinds of attachments to home, to one another, and to the state. Is this a fair summary? Have I left anything out or would you modify anything? And do we agree on these three?
Patrick