Why Education Matters

Yes, this post comes out of my reading about philosophy, but I think education belongs to all of us. Notice what I named this blog.

The underlying article is Philosophy’s blindspot Education has long been ignored by contemporary philosophers. That is a myopic view that must change by David Bakhurst and published by Aeon. Some pertinent parts follow:

The distinguished philosopher Philip Kitcher is an exception that proves this rule, but it is noteworthy that in the preface to his recent book, The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education (2022), he laments that most philosophers think of the sub-discipline of ‘philosophy of education’ as an academic slum occupied by intellectual mediocrities who produce dull and unsophisticated work. Kitcher himself dissents from this view, but he is right that it’s the prevailing opinion. Most philosophers are content to see philosophy of education as a backwater, and are unmotivated to engage with it because they don’t believe that education matters to philosophy.

I thought of this as strange. While I have not read John Dewey widely, I know he took seriously the importance of education. I would say Socrates and Plato and Aristotle shared an interest in education, being teachers themselves. 

The article then addresses my question, which then led me to read further - it is always nice to find others sharing one's own thoughts. Makes a person feel less lonely.

So let me spell out why exactly education should matter to philosophy. The reason is that education makes us what we are. Human beings do not enter the world with their rational powers ‘up and running’. Those powers are actualised in the child in a process of formation, or education in the broadest sense (the ‘upbuilding’ of a human being, as Kitcher puts it, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson). This occurs through the acquisition of natural language and the conceptual structures embodied therein, through initiation into styles of thinking and reasoning, and the assimilation of communal practices that structure the normative landscape in which children must learn to orientate themselves.

Human individuals do not have to find the world anew; they are the beneficiaries of a cultural legacy, the appropriation of which enables them to relate to the world as an object of knowledge. This is true of every human child, though it applies equally to those who participate in any particular domain of knowledge. As philosophers, for example, we enter an ongoing conversation – to invoke a favourite image of the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s – and we have the benefit of, or are hampered by, that which has come before as it is manifested in contemporary belief and practice. Education is the formation of reason, the vehicle of human possibility. Anyone who wishes to understand the ways in which mind, reason and knowledge are expressed in human life had better have education in view.

Looking around, unreason seems to be the result of our educational system - a system I think extends beyond our schools. I saw my counselor today. We talked about the attractions  - or, rather, the repulsion - of porn. For all the trouble that the stuff has caused me, I find it unreal, unattractive, and unappealing rather than promoting excitement. This does not seem true for the more current generations - they seem to find obsession, and, seemingly, reality in porn. I find that reaction as irrational.

And rationality makes us human. One thing I have yet to understand about Trump and his cadre of election-deniers is there was no rational basis to thinking Trump would have a Nixon '72 or Reagan '84 landslide. Trump cannot claim he was a popular president outside his own party; his strategy for the election was not to make himself more popular outside his base. Further, the lack of evidence supporting Trump's claims of election fraud shoves the election-deniers across the line to the land of magical thinking, even to that of outright delusion - if they honestly believe Donald J. Trump was elected President. They have no legitimate claim to rationality.

In my view, however, there remains at least one natural-historical judgment that is true of the human: the human being is a rational animal, whose powers of reason are brought to actuality only through education. This captures the centrality of education to our life-form. The human child is born into a world in which reason is ‘externalised’ in so many forms – in spoken language, of course, but also in artefacts, in the written word and other media, in practices of enquiry, reasoning, teaching, and in copious forms of intelligent and creative activity. Children’s powers of reason find expression as they become at home in this world. But that doesn’t happen just by maturation. It’s possible only with the help of others. That’s why education is not a merely contingent addition to the human life-form. Education is reason’s vehicle.

It is the following kind of rationality which we need more of, rather than the delusional irrationality of conspiracy theory:

To speak of education as the ‘formation of reason’ might seem to suggest a rather narrow, even elitist, focus on the cultivation of intellectual abilities – on interpretation, reasoning and argument conceived as skills of ‘critical thinking’. This is not my intention. I believe we should work with a more expansive conception of reason’s domain. It’s not just that we must consider reason in the service of determining what to believe (theoretical reason, so-called) and reason devoted to deciding what to do (practical reason). We need to recognise that, in both the theoretical and the practical, responsiveness to reasons is not always the outcome of reasoning or deliberation.

Let me say the following contains what I think of the relation between rationality and politics. I got this from John Dewey, but it has a long history in America. I think it goes back in this country to Thomas Jefferson. He wanted free public schools for the purpose of teaching citizens, not cogs for the economy:

Education’s relation to democracy is a central theme in a text I mentioned earlier: Philip Kitcher’s The Main Enterprise of the World. This book is an exemplary contribution to the philosophy of education and deserves to be taken seriously. Kitcher combines a broad vision of the centrality of education in human life with discussion of many concrete questions about how schools should be organised, curricula designed and so on. The discussion is framed by the big question: what is education for? He argues that the way politicians and policy-makers answer this question is usually distorted by economic priorities. They think educational institutions exist to prepare the young for the workforce, and thereby to contribute to their nation’s ability to compete in the global capitalist arena. But such an answer is myopic and, moreover, out of step with economic reality. With increasing automation and global outsourcing, there will be less and less desirable work to prepare students for, and the majority of tomorrow’s workforce will find itself in service jobs. In light of this, we must rethink our priorities. We need to recognise the value of service work and reward it accordingly. And we need to embrace the view that education exists to prepare students not just to make a living, but to lead flourishing lives, and to equip them for democratic citizenship....

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Kitcher embraces John Stuart Mill’s view that a flourishing life must be ‘one’s own’ as it were – a life one has, in some sense, chosen. This means that we must educate for autonomy, so that students are enabled to decide for themselves how to live. Of course, we want to equip students not just to choose, but to make good choices. How are we to reconcile this ‘perfectionist’ sensibility with liberalism’s reluctance to take a stand on where the good lies? Kitcher responds by introducing a social dimension into his vision of flourishing. Individuals’ life-projects should be freely chosen, but they should aim not just at personal flourishing, but at the flourishing of others, including future generations. Our lives must contribute to the human project by being to the benefit of humankind.

This view takes inspiration from John Dewey, and so too does Kitcher’s conception of education and democracy. Kitcher – who, as it happens, is John Dewey Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York – is inspired by Dewey’s idea of democracy as a way of life. Because the institutions of representative democracy are prone to familiar failings, he endorses Dewey’s conception of deliberative democracy in which inclusive, informed and engaged dialogue among citizens seeks outcomes that are acceptable to all, in a spirit of mutual recognition and respect. If such a vision is to be realised, children must be introduced to democratic practice as early as possible, so this must become part of the ethos of the school.

The following comes from Indiana's Constitution, which was written in 1851. I suspect all 50 states have a similar provision.

Article 8. - Education.

    Section 1. Knowledge and learning, generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to encourage, by all suitable means, moral, intellectual, scientific, and agricultural improvement; and to provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all.

If conservative means holding onto the past, then I must be a conservative for holding onto the ideas in this provision. 

Note this, too, this state constitutional provision imposes a positive duty on the State of Indiana. Does Indiana live up to its duties? If not, why not? 

I wonder who benefits from voters whose education trains them to be drones, not rational and involved citizens?

sch 1/9/23