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EDUCATING FOR AUTONOMY: AN OLD-FASHIONED VIEW

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 December 2014

Kyla Ebels-Duggan
Kyla Ebels-Duggan*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Northwestern University
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Type
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Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 257 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2014 

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References

1 Note that the labels “old-fashioned” and “progressive” are misleading in another way. It is not difficult to find exemplars of educational approaches that wholeheartedly embrace the “old-fashioned” model, seeking to shape students’ loves and allegiances, but aim to do so in politically progressive ways.

2 See, e.g., Gutmann, Amy, Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 43 Google Scholar; Macedo, Stephen, Diversity and Distrust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Harry Brighouse, On Education (New York: Routledge, 2006), 18.

3 See, e.g., Clayton, Matthew, Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Feinberg, Joel, “The Child’s Right to an Open Future,” in Freedom and Fulfillment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, also advocates a version of this view; For an opposing view see Shelley Burtt, “The Proper Scope of Parental Authority: Why We Don't Owe Children an ‘Open Future’,” in Child, Family, and State, Stephen Macedo and Iris Marion Young, eds., NOMOS (New York: New York University Press, 2003). Burtt’s view is in some ways similar to my own, though she seems to grant that what she calls “fundamentalist education” is in conflict with autonomy.

4 D. C. Phillips, “Philosophy of Education,” http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/education-philosophy/. For some other examples see Nussbaum, Martha, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1–49 Google Scholar; Ackerman, Bruce, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 139–67Google Scholar; Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Brighouse, On Education: 13–26; Feinberg, “The Child's Right to an Open Future.”

5 Cf. e.g., Callan, Creating Citizens; and Brighouse, On Education.

6 Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, chap. 1.

7 E.g., I. Snook, Indoctrination and Education (London: Routledge, 1972); Feinberg, “The Child's Right to an Open Future.”

8 For discussion of the issue of moral testimony see, e.g., Nickel, Philip, “Moral Testimony and Its Authority,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 4, no. 3 (2001)Google Scholar; McGrath, Sarah, “The Puzzle of Pure Moral Deference,” Philosophical Perspectives 23 (2009)Google Scholar; Sliwa, Paulina, “In Defense of Moral Testimony,” Philosophical Studies 158 (2012)Google Scholar; Jones, Karen, “Second-Hand Moral Knowledge,” The Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 2 (1999)Google Scholar; Hopkins, Robert, “What is Wrong with Moral Testimony?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74, no. 3 (2007)Google Scholar; Driver, Julia, “Autonomy and the Asymmetry Problem for Moral Expertise,” Philosophical Studies 128 (2006)Google Scholar; Hills, Alison, “Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology,” Ethics 120 (2009).Google Scholar

9 Cf. Gutmann on developing children’s sensibilities so that they are repelled by bigotry. Gutmann, Democratic Education, 43. It is interesting, too, that Gutmann describes the later stage of moral development as coming to “feel the force” of the reasons to avoid bigotry, not as being able to state these reasons. This bears on what I say below.

10 Westlund, Andrea, “Selflessness and Responsibility for Self: Is Deference Compatible with Autonomy?” Philosophical Review 112, no. 4 (2003).Google Scholar

11 It is worth noting that Westlund carves out an exception for deference to experts. Her view seems to be that such deference is compatible with autonomy as long as we are appropriately reflective about and responsive to challenges to the purported expert’s authority in the domain (ibid., 486).

12 Challenges like this might be better met with storytelling, or simply by relating to the challenger in a way informed by one’s own ethical convictions. Or, rather than trying to say why Mozart’s music is good, one might do better by playing some of the music for the skeptic.

13 Westlund’s characterization draws on Thomas Hill’s description of the Deferential Wife. See Thomas E. Hill, Autonomy and Self-respect (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Westlund chooses the case because she is interested in whether and how autonomy is compatible with deference. The case is potentially confusing for our purposes, because the content of the Deferential Wife’s commitments seems paradigmatically heteronomous, and this may confuse the issue about whether the form of her reasoning is also objectionably heteronomous.

14 Ibid., p. 487. And later, “ . . . she appears not to grasp how the first-personal perspective from which she is being asked to defend her deference might be staked out independently of the perspective to which she defers” (488).

15 This is the view, advocated by I. Snook, Indoctrination and Education (London: Routledge, Kegan, and Paul, 1972), among others.

16 Cf. Snook’s discussion of religious education. Snook holds that any attempt to teach religious convictions amounts to indoctrination. He characterizes practitioners of religious education as aiming only to instill convictions that have a certain content, without regard for the reasons for them. This strikes me as a straightforward misinterpretation of the aims of most religious educators, one that assimilates them to advertisers of soft drinks. As far as I can tell, Snook falls into this misinterpretation because he takes it to be clear that there is never sufficient reason to believe any religious claim. It is this normative conviction that does the work in his argument. And this commitment about what we have reason to believe, rather than any disagreement about the value of autonomy, divides him and the religious educator. Snook, Indoctrination and Education, 74–76.

17 Likewise, most self-conscious enactments of the old-fashioned approach embrace the formal aims, and are in this sense instances, of the progressive approach. There is an asymmetry though: once we fix some conception of autonomy — including the content of the convictions to which it applies — educators could choose to embrace or reject the aim of autonomy, so specified. But no education can avoid communicating normative commitments, and in this sense any education will be an instance of the old-fashioned model.

18 This seems to be the sort of non-neutrality that Macedo acknowledges and embraces in Macedo, Stephen, “Liberal Civic Education and Religious Fundamentalism: The Case of God v. John Rawls?” Ethics 105, no. 3 (1995).Google Scholar

19 My view has some similarities to the view advocated by Amy Gutmann (Gutmann, Democratic Education.) and Stephen Macedo (Macedo, “Liberal Civic Education and Religious Fundamentalism: The Case of God v. John Rawls?”), among others. These thinkers agree that autonomy is not neutral with respect to worldviews or value convictions. But their view seems to be that this is so because thinking critically, or autonomy itself, is an ideal that is affirmed by some outlooks and not by others. They are concerned to argue that it is nevertheless appropriate for the liberal state to seek to aim to make students autonomous thinkers. My view is different. I claim that autonomy itself is an underspecified ideal, one that different normative outlooks do or can fill out in different ways.