Chapter 20: Education as procedural

Chapter 20:

Education as Procedural

Throughout these chapters, I have continually returned to the idea that education, properly understood, is a core expression of the principle that all persons are of intrinsic worth, and that they are equal in that value. The expression of that value rests in our duty to live our lives well. This means that we should arrange conditions of learning and experience for each other, for ourselves and for all of our young to facilitate their abilities to develop for themselves good, fulfilling and meaningful lives. These conditions should continue to be sustained throughout all our lives, since what can be good about them is a matter of continual construction and maintenance. Our value, as human beings, is neglected otherwise.

But I have emphasized, too, that this respect for persons includes respect for their independent self-determination. What their good is, and what is to be meaningful or satisfying about it, is something that they are to be the authors of. It is their responsibility and their right. This means that the job of education – of providing the conditions of experience and learning that will enable them to flourish and to tend to their own worth – must equip them to figure out and implement their best lives for themselves. We may not impose our ideas of good living on them. We may not choose for them or manipulate, or pre-empt their choices of their good. But we may provide conditions that encourage them to reason well about these things.

Being good at choosing what to do with your life is a complex task, and depends on all sorts of complex understanding, and skill, and sensitivity. So is the development of the possibilities of lives by others, and that development cannot be left to chance. Creating a world in which the best sorts of learning and experience are available to everyone insofar as we can create external conditions to facilitate them, as it needs to be if these abilities are to be developed and maintained, is equally complex, demanding, and very, very challenging. It is certainly one of the larger, most demanding and ambitious human enterprises in which we could ever engage. Arguably, too, it may well be the most noble, claiming the moral high ground above all others, since true health, true wealth, truth, real justice and proper authority are all impossible without it.

The dilemma, though, is how to come to grips with this enterprise without imposing life-plans, without manipulating or pre-empting choices, while also respecting the seriousness and complexity involved in being capable of adding real value to them, enabling people to be able to make profound choices of rich and substantial ways of living that can fully express their human worth. Though we give lip-service to the idea that we should not impose conceptions of the good through manipulating learning, and shy away from anything that might attract public controversy, our contemporary practice – our schooling – overwhelmingly structures life-planning in ways that violate this respect for the learner all the time. It continually manipulates and preempts choices that we are warranted to make, and the powers of choice that our proper respect entitles us to have.

Quite apart from the many agendas that exist for exploiting and managing learners at the expense of putting their interests first, this happens because too little thought has been given to what might really be involved in standing up for this basic principle of human respect. The educational implications of the idea have never been articulated fully enough to enable these abuses to be seen and prevented. There are no real principles, or criteria, or even rules of thumb beyond not being caught out by public outrage, and things are well out of hand before that stage is reached.

If there is a laxness about this across our social life, education faces a double-jeopardy. We all begin in utter dependency and have to have our decisions made for us. It is easier, when you have charge of someone, to continue in this way rather than to defer to them. The parenting relationship, since it involves dealing with a developing person over an extended period of time, is challenged by that development, and is gradually forced into some sort of confrontation with the problem of letting go.

We hand our children over to schooling, though, and teacher, by definition, knows best. Since schooling is arranged in age cohorts, advancing through the years, with the teachers changing as they go, the developmental issues and challenges of “letting go” are much muted. They are transferred to a higher and more abstract level; the curriculum planner, where the problem loses any touch with the specifics of the achieved independence of any particular child.

The incentives favour delay in properly dealing with independence, since delay is the easy way out, and safety seems to justify it. It is so easy to impose our conceptions of good living simply through such lack of awareness.

What knowledge is of most worth?

This thoughtlessness about what respect for our minds requires enables us to persist with our traditional “educational” obsession with the substantive content of what is to be learned. We are beside ourselves that learners may learn the wrong things, or may not learn the right ones. At a more fundamental, philosophical level, this problem is seen in the traditional question of “what knowledge is of most worth?” We find ourselves in need of an answer to that question so that we can establish the content of education and design a curriculum, with all its assessments to see if the right content is being acquired properly.

This is deeply problematic because the philosophical question is pitched in the wrong location. “What knowledge is of most worth” is a philosophical question to be asked and addressed by policy-makers and educational planners only in the most oblique of ways. The real location for this question to make the most substantive decisions should be in the minds of the learners themselves, since the ultimate decisions should be by them and about them.

Ironically, of course, this is where these questions are ultimately decided, anyway – though no doubt very poorly when not properly attended to. Whatever the pretensions of policy-makers, planners or teachers, it is the learner who ultimately does decide the worth of what they are supposed to have learned, or are learning, and it is they who do decide what to do with that stuff at the end of the day; often to the frustration of those who believe to know better. The unfortunate oversight is that we give learners no help with deciding that profound philosophical question for themselves, so they probably do decide badly on a regular basis.

Whatever other interests we might have in the philosophical question “what knowledge is of most worth?”, in the domain of education, this is not a question that some group of people should be deciding for others. Here, it is an existential question. It is a question each of us needs to seek answers to in our own unique lives.

It is an illusion that we can devise content and then teach it without pre-empting so many of the decisions about life that should really be in the responsibility and under the authority of the learner as soon as possible. It is an attempt to force people’s lives to fit our maps. But there is another way.

Instead we should embrace the dilemmas of good living by abolishing attempts to construct substantive conceptions of education – ones in which we pretend to decide on the content of what should be taught and learned – and focus instead on constructing a procedural conception of education, on the principles by which content (and many other matters) should be decided. Such a procedural conception would have actual value for learners, since they could use it, or their own maturing form of it, to make their own content decisions intelligently.

This approach will still involve the consideration of content, of course. Questions of “what knowledge is of most worth – to enlarge growth, or to facilitate life-planning” will still need to be asked. They will need to be asked, because in the early stages the consent to the educational constitution will be virtual in varying degrees, and this means that caregivers and other educators must make decisions on the learner’s behalf. They must, of course, do so with a view to the learner assuming their own responsibility as early as possible.

But all the way through, people will need, and will often seek, guidance about content and its priorities, and for this, suggestive and provisional proposals, rich with justification – and alternative interpretations and possibilities – need to exist. Similarly, if resources are to be provided, we would need proposals, suggestions and debate about what would be helpful and why, and we would need very rich and diverse storehouses, annotated, critiqued and reviewed. The debates would be perpetual, and that is a good thing. This book, for instance, makes suggestions about content all the way through. The suggestions are offered as the beginning for discussion, not the end. And in the end, they should bind no one.

But what is important is not some specification of the content itself, except, by the learner at the learning point. It should be an emerging, evolving thing, with a plurality of points of view contributing to debates at all levels and never assumed to be settled.

Whatever the content that is chosen by anyone at any level, however, it is the powers and processes of individual choice that must have priority. This is in the spirit in which content must be addressed. How the material is approached, processed and judged is more important to the power of the learner than how we might describe the material independently of the learners’ lives. Once again, all of these processes are ones which learners themselves should be aware of, and their role in the decision-making should become primary.

The procedural approach

This distinction between the substantive and the procedural has been developed in discussions of the problem of justice. One great example of a procedural approach is John Rawls’s notion of the Original Position, as he developed it in his work “A theory of Justice”. Another philosopher, who explained it rather well, is Stuart Hampshire, in his book Innocence and Experience.

Hampshire considers the situation in which two parties – perhaps neighbouring States, come together in an attempt to resolve some dispute between them, but they are deeply divided, culturally. This division between them is a division about what good living is, and this extends to fundamental disagreements about the nature of justice.

Justice, on the one view, might be what God commands, as interpreted by their high priests. Justice, on another, might be whatever magistrates from a particular hereditary ruling class decide, guided by custom. Trying to resolve their difference over the essential nature of justice is likely to be impossible – neither is ever going to abandon its culture in order to reach the necessary agreement with their neighbour.

What they can do, however, is firstly negotiate a process of decision-making about this issue that both can accept. Together they create a decision-procedure. Before they negotiate their dispute, they negotiate the steps of the negotiation. If a process is found that both can agree to as fair and acceptable to themselves as a process for resolving their difference, then they agree in advance that they will each be bound by the outcome. If, for instance, they agree to a process of tossing coins, or a contest between champions, then they agree to be bound by whatever call of the coin turns up, or whoever prevails in the single combat.

But of course we can often do better than decide matters by coin-toss or the combat of champions. We can agree to a process of joint deliberation towards a solution, and we will do well to ensure that such things as the impartiality of adjudicators, the rules of collecting evidence, the inspection of sites, the weighing of competing interests, and the settling of issues in a proper order of priority are all well-developed. The initial dialogue is about the steps and the rules by which we will both negotiate and proceed. The confidence that each can have that we will be able to accept the outcome depends upon how thoroughly each of our interests and concerns are taken account of in the procedure. Then we deploy the procedure.

The point of a procedural approach to educational decision-making is that our objective should be to put the decision-making about what to believe and to do, and about the meaning and purpose that life should hold, as fully as possible into the hands of the learner, where it truly belongs, because that is where we should want it to belong for the person who is to be created by the learning.

The dilemma is that we don’t, for their sakes, want them to make their decisions about their lives ignorantly, naively, or in ill-informed and thoughtless ways, but at the same time we want their decisions to be as genuinely free and independent as they can be. We don’t want them just to be mimicking or aping, or depending simply upon our reasoning or understanding, or the peculiarities of our experience and what we have made of it. That simply privileges us and our convictions over them and the potential for theirs.

Over generations, in which the decisions and reasons of the older teachers are privileged over the young, an illusion is constantly smuggled forward, because although the reasons of the elders are privileged, much that makes them what they are was created under the same conditions of dependency and unfreedom when they too were the learners.

What we need, instead of focussing on the conclusions that are to be reached, is to focus on the background conditions on which the conclusions depend, the history behind them – the things that might influence the freedom, the comprehensiveness and the power with which the decisions are made. When we do this we need to address the educational environment in terms of four aspects, regardless of the subject matter or the potential conclusions. 

These aspects are, firstly, the breadth, depth and richness of the diversity of views, positions and understandings that might have a bearing on the conclusions. Secondly, the availability of serious tests and challenges to those positions, and these tests must include challenges to distortions, biases, agendas of power and conventional wisdom that might serve to illegitimately pre-empt the outcome or favour some of the alternatives.

Thirdly, there must be a process of examination of these first two dimensions, building awareness and ownership of them in the learner.  And fourthly, we must view this over a long haul – that is, our collective arrangements must resource and model these procedures throughout the developmental life-time of learners.

Equally, it is the enduring experience and disposition to employ these procedures that must reconcile us to the actual conclusions and decisions that each learner might happen to reach. Though we might not personally like what they decide, our acceptance of their decision should be reassured by the ways in which they go about making decisions, and by what we have all done to enable that. Typically, though, in the world we are actually parties to, we have done remarkably little.

This is why the educational scheme that has been proposed throughout this book is a procedural one, and it has been employed in a number of ways.

The most obvious way, of course, has been the basic decision procedure that has been used as the core justification of principles, and to address the dilemma of the developmental loop. An attempt to make this procedure vivid has been offered in the extension of Plato’s Myth of Er; the decision-making of our little soul in the annex.

A second employment of the procedural approach lies in the conduct of educational communities of inquiry. Here the role of the facilitator is largely procedural. Within the context of the ECOI, they must attend almost exclusively to procedure, and not to content.

The selection of subject matter for ECOIs, and for educational challenges, must also give priority to procedural consideration, in the form of educational principles, and through collaboration with the learners who will participate. This form of mentoring and coaching will extend, of course, to the regulation of independent study. Mentors and coaches will collaborate with learners in the design of such studies, both giving weight to educational principle and learner interest in considering their advice and support.

Giving priority to learner interest throughout – both because it is motivationally desirable, but more importantly because it is ethically correct – is itself a tool that transfers much of the burden of content-decisions from the “educational authorities”. The appeal to such interest is itself a procedure. What knowledge is of most worth becomes something for learners to see in their own terms, even if counselled by mentor experience in the discussion of the educational principles used for the development and testing of those interests.

Thus, if there are such things as “bodies of knowledge”, these things do not comprise educational content but become part of a large body of resources to explore and understand as the real content is built out of the very animation of the learner’s real lives, and not their hypothetical future lives. As a result, each learner’s encounter with such “bodies of knowledge”, and their contact with them and their path through them will be unique, and something will be going wrong if it is not.

Even now, each learner’s actual path through “bodies of knowledge”, predetermined and taught in schooling factories, is already and inevitably unique. It could not be any other way. But the uniqueness at present is hidden, ignored, or even disapproved of and suppressed except where it superficially coincides with predetermined assessments. Instead of being at the essence of the matter, this dynamic uniqueness is systematically invisible. In this sense, it is not even a particularly desirable learning outcome.

The procedural approach and its adoption as an educational point of view should also be our answer to questions such as “what if they arrive at the wrong answer?” “What if they draw the wrong conclusions”, or, more tellingly (but voiced, if at all, in much more of a whisper) “what if they reject our cherished beliefs, reject our most familiar institutions in which we have invested our security, and work for something entirely different?” If we have been serious, and conscientious in our educational designs and practices, this last question should begin to approach “what if our own decisions, conclusions and institutions were not as reasonable as we thought?”

To the extent that we seek to impose our own conclusions on the young we will take these questions – as we do now – as clues to ways in which our educational efforts might be going wrong. If they disagree with us, then the problem is them, and our “educational” approach is failing. We need to do more of the same – more rigorously ensure that they reach our conclusions. We must respect them as adults, but not that much. Not if it means that our own reasoning is going to lose its priority.

The real answer lies in the educational procedures. If we really did equip them properly to grow up to reason and to think for themselves as our equals, then there appears to be just one disturbing possibility. We have been holding to our own conclusions with excessive confidence. We may be right, but the fact that other reasonable people have arrived at different conclusions should introduce an element of uncertainty, particularly about the degree to which we would ever have been free to impose this view on others.

The other possibility, of course, is that we haven’t done the job properly; perhaps there has been something wrong with the educational world that we were parties to. Perhaps we have failed in our duty to respect them in and through the cultivation of their reason.  But of course it is a bit late for that, and again, we can only look to ourselves.

Bias and balancing – the “challenge” revisited

There are always those, of course, who are going to say that this whole approach to education is impractical. We can’t create institutions and practices that will enable people generally to be much more reasonable. But that, too will just raise questions about the likely imperfections in our own conclusions. We could sink a little lower, though, and say that we are the sorts of people who can be brought up to reason, but they are not. They are the sort that are better shaped to our reasons. But then we will need to abandon our common ethical high ground of equal respect, and establish another; and the history and the experience of these across the globe isn’t looking too good. Such answers are beginning to look a little grubby.

We so often say, of those who must now be considered adults – “well, it is their decision to make, after all” – and everything is summed up in this; not only that we have no business trying to manipulate the decision that they have made, or are about to make, but also that any fears about the outcome that we have must rest on their capacities to make the decision well, and on the likelihood that they will be disposed to do so. If we have fears, our fears for the content must be shifted to fears for the process, and about its history. We are now forced to make our peace with the process that has unfolded, or will now unfold.

When our son or daughter must make a profound, life-directing decision in the next six months, it is not just the process and reflection that goes on over those six months that matters, it is their life-time so far of experience of reflection and interrogation of similar matters that will largely determine the quality of what happens in those six months.

It is the intellectual, emotional, physical, moral and spiritual decisions that have already been made that will give so much shape to what they are doing now. How these too were made in the past is going to matter now. Our concern, when they decide, and when we truly care for them as intrinsically worthwhile human beings whose moral independence is to be respected, should not so much be with what they decide, but whether they know what they are doing in deciding.

And we can worry, and ask them if they have really considered this or that, but our true confidence, or lack of it, should not rest on these last minute doubts and interventions, but on our confidence or lack of confidence, in the long-term process that got them to this point.

Thus we  may see them decide to be plumbers or war correspondents, or legal clerks, or to devote their lives to collecting souvenirs of royal visits or regimental buttons, or beer cans. They might choose to become stock market traders or start bungee-jumping businesses, or marry into a culture totally foreign to us. Any of these decisions may please us or distress us, or utterly perplex us, but since it is their decision to make, our hope for them has to depend on their ability to make it well.

Our concern for their decision should be a concern for how adequately their lives have so far prepared them to make it, and what we have done to enable that well by creating the conditions under which their lives have so far been lived. This is a big question – one that we can ask just as readily about those who turn to drugs and prostitution and crime in those mean streets, or of those who are living out their parent’s dreams or fears, or limitations.

What alternatives could they have seen for themselves? How much emotional freedom did they have? What did they believe to be the real possibilities for people like them – as well as what the realistic possibilities were in other respects? How well prepared were they, to know what they were doing?

Since human beings cannot know everything, explore everything, be exposed to everything, doubt and be challenged by everything, engage in dialogue about everything, we have to develop good ways of making the procedural decisions – of sampling to create the optimal affect to enlarge experience and deepen the powers of reflection – selections that will be fair to the possibilities of life.

Will we be able to create some sort of unbiased knowledge? Will we be able to create some sort of enquiry that is not biased by the available materials? Of course not! Will we be able to create some sort of perfect human freedom? Of course not! Bias is inevitable, and we must be careful about aspirations to neutrality, particularly the idea of achieving “balance” by equally “canvassing all the views”.

We certainly can’t create any sort of environment that will be neutral among life’s choices. Heavens! Everyone is going to grow up among other older people who have already made many of their significant choices, and they will be surrounded by products, activities and the material things of life that they have various commitments to. Some of this will go to their identity forever. They come from this sort of family, those sorts of streets. That is just who they are. It is also just who we are.

When those around them have made these choices extraordinarily well, and assembled their environments with great educational insight, they will still heavily favour some conceptions of good living over others. Even if the young are brought up with remarkable independence of mind, equipped with considerable powers of careful thought and resistance to undue influence, they will continue to make up their lives out of the prevailing materials, which will continue to remain heavily favoured.

They will still be creatures of their age, which means that they will fail to see things that people in other historical times and places might have seen, or will come to see quite well, because they will still be restricted to some extent by what is cast among the litter in their day, by what is taken for granted, and what achieves prominence, and the conceptual distinctions that prevail for them in their time.

And we need to be careful too, that we don’t fall into a trap in our concern about bias among the possibilities. It is not a matter of being fair among all alternatives, or fair to all groups, as if they are candidates in some sort of competition, and we must create a level playing field for them all.

On the contrary, the focus of our fairness is to be our focus on the learner, not the potential content. If we are not careful here, we will find ourselves trying to be fair to all those who want to have a stake in the growing person’s life and mind, and educational discussion will reduce to a rabble of quarreling parties or subtle and not-so-subtle exercises in power.

This would simply be to fall back into the error that we constantly make at present. We don’t put the learner first. The value of the learners, in themselves, has simply become subordinate to the interests of others. But it is the learner we must be fair to.

This necessity of selection means that we need to be able to make the hard decisions in education about the relative significance of biases, about which biases and distortions we must really be sure to address – even when we cannot hope to eliminate them entirely.

We are not seeking to fulfill some idealized vision of a learning human being, but how to optimize learning in educational ways so that the intrinsic worth of the human being is as fully respected as possible. Our conception of education should be driven by ethical interests, not by some reified conception of the world of possibilities of human knowledge, as it has sometimes been in the past. Hence we must build principles of decision that start with the context of origin into which each human being is born, and build outward from that.

This means, to some extent, that the proper educational path for each person will be as unique to them as their context of origin and their learning history that develops out of it. This is where we look for bias. What needs to be built on is the experience they have had. What needs to be challenged is the experience they have had. What needs to be challenged in one life might well be ignored for another.

This immediately defeats the idea that what should be presented to them should be “balanced”. Instead, it should be balance-ing. It should attempt to challenge where they are coming from, and this will not mean challenging all of them in exactly the same way. The people best able to see how to do this are those who are working closely with them, aided by encouraging each of us to see it in ourselves, and to seek the challenge we need to experience. Am I right about this? Would it make a difference if I was wrong? Am I missing something? Do you see something that I don’t see?

Ivan Snook, when discussing the problem of neutrality in schooling, once wondered if neutrality was really what education should be seeking. Perhaps, when experiential history already has a bias in one direction it needs a healthy challenge in order that the learner be properly able to evaluate the bias. (NS)

If one grew up in a Catholic family and neighborhood, perhaps one needed a  healthy dose of sophisticated and sensitive Protestantism. If one grew up in a Protestant family and neighborhood, perhaps one needed a  healthy dose of sophisticated and sensitive Catholicism.

If our context of origin is right wing, perhaps we need a healthy dose of a sophisticated and sensitive left wing or socialist perspective. If our context of origin is left wing or socialist, perhaps we need a healthy dose of a sophisticated and sensitive right wing perspective. Christian contexts of origin perhaps need a proper exposure to Islam. Monotheism perhaps needs to be strongly balanced with something like Buddhism. Religious and atheistic views need each other too.

Given the timidity of conventional schooling, and its inability to respond to the uniqueness of individuals, it is utterly implausible that conventional practice would have any chance of responding to the obvious wisdom of such insights. The principles that I have been advocating here utterly change these circumstances, however.

Indeed, if anything would demonstrate an inability to apply educational principle, and engage in educational development, it would surely be for a learner to fail to identify and catalogue the major biases in their own context of origin, and to identify and wish to engage with the views that would challenge them. And these decisions on their own behalf should completely neutralize the very concerns that panic contemporary “educational” authorities.

We cannot canvas every option when we are trying to create a pool of potentially useful educational resources. We can, though, try and ensure that we cover a broad range of potentially relevant domains, that we explore key concepts in those domains, and a range of ideas and values that have persisted through various world communities.

We might create a rough list or even alternative lists of domains that are commonly prioritized as potential aspects of good living – perhaps things like health and wealth and the means to life, productive and creative work, and play or recreation, love, friendship and family, sexuality, the political, the patriotic, the religious and spiritual, beauty and the arts, the natural world and the advanced pursuit of various kinds of knowledge and understanding.

We might also identify categories that don’t fit well into such lists – such as mortal questions about longevity, aging and death, about the fragility of life, and about things worth dying for, or at least worth giving up other major goods in life for. This, in turn, might raise questions about the importance of the balanced life. If it is sometimes worth giving up some part or aspect of life in favour of another, what will be the long-term implications of that for our future choices? How do we judge whether “the price” is worth it?

Or, we might ask what a good person is – what would be a virtue in one, and what vices are at odds with being one. Such a question might require looking again at the whole list. All of these things could be examined against one over-riding background frame of reference, one architechtonic art: what is involved in planning and realizing a good life, and in handling the contingencies that might arise within it. The idea of “rational life-planning” offered by Rawls might suggest such an art. It is, again, procedural.

The potential content here is indeed enormous, but all that would be needed in order to bring about a huge transformation in our personal and social lives would be an examination of the main concepts in each area, along with an exploration of a spectrum of issues in each, undertaken in some depth and in a sustained way – following up on doubts and questions and side-paths that might arise.

We want to cover the main areas of consideration, we want some depth, and we want practice – practice that internalizes the questioning, the challenging and the invention, and is not limited to some narrow domain, or few domains. And we want this moderated and tailored by our growing insight into the powers and limitations of our own particular contexts of origin.

What we do formally here will only be the smaller part of what actually goes on, because if it is done well formally, the work will continue in the minds of learners far beyond the formal contexts – in the shower, while driving or travelling on the bus, while queuing in the supermarket – and without many of the inhibiting internal barriers to reflection that currently exist – the ones that say it is pointless, that it can’t be done, and that they would have told us if it mattered. If it is institutionalized properly, exploiting and following natural interests in living well, it will also continue in less formal social contexts – in the coffee shops, around the dining tables, on our walks, and even, perhaps, around the water cooler.

When media and entertainment also become a part of this sensitivity – developing their own educational awareness, along with a strong sense of the educational importance of their own roles – they would provide nourishment and enrichment too, as they sometimes, and somewhat accidentally do now.

The media constantly excuses itself in terms of “giving the public what it wants”. It would be interesting to see what would happen if this was tested by developing a public sensitivity to what it might want, and to the complexities and paradoxes of wanting, and as a result the public came to want more depth, more challenge and less titillation and hooting. Ideally such industries could exercise more leadership, but that is a lot to ask where the incentives of capitalism are so overwhelming.

What are the most important issues that people face in their lives, and what strategies might be invoked to resolve them? What is there to find out about these things? What are the most important moral dimensions to these issues? What is a well-ordered society? What should be the relationship of the individual to such a society, to its diverse communities and other individuals, to the State? What should it be when the society is less than well-ordered?

What are the ways in which people attempt to order their lives in an effort to live them better? How should we evaluate these attempts? What is there to know and face about our fragility, our vulnerability? How should we consider our impending death, or our disabilities – the ones we already have, or the one that might emerge at any time, with their potential dependencies? How can we understand the experiences of others?

What are the views, as Aristotle proposed, of the many and the wise? What is popular opinion about this, and what has been said or written about it by people with a reputation for thoughtfulness? What are the merits of the intellectual life, or the spiritual life, or the entrepreneurial life, or of life given over to family, or to Monday night football, or beach parties with one’s mates? Are there any issues, in all this, that we would be wise to return to, and reexamine a number of times throughout our growing up, and even throughout our whole lives?

The problem of indoctrination

In a later book that is currently in preparation – “The Fear of Education” – I will be talking, along with politics, about religion and its educational problems. We need to. Given the role of religion in the human experience of the planet, it cannot be ignored educationally, as it so often is in conventional schooling. Its central claims, too, about meaning and purpose in life – the big existential questions – mean that it must be addressed.

In our time once again, religion is heavily embroiled in war and chaos in many places around the globe, and the issues affect the lives of many in countries quite remote from armed conflict. These conflicts bare a striking resemblance to the conflicts that gave birth to the ethic of respect that is the justification for education throughout this book. Religion has also long been at the centre of issues of education. Its  promotion has far too often been undertaken in ways that are educationally destructive. So what would be required in order to put it on the table of choice – real choice – so that its acceptance or rejection is something that people could do in well-considered ways?

At this point, though, it is enough for us to be aware of the extent to which religion has tended, and still tends, to define the issues of good living. In almost all of the areas and domains that have been canvassed above, various religions will have something to say. That is no doubt valuable. But our awareness of these issues have been so shaped by religion over thousands of years that we sometimes struggle to think outside some of its categories. It has had the ability to define good living at the expense of other vital possibilities. What is there, for example, that lies outside religion?

If we don’t attend to this properly, it will fall into the category of “if there was something important here, they would have told us”. We must be careful of invisibility. The purpose of raising this here is to highlight another task that needs to be undertaken in order to improve our ability to make educational decisions procedurally, and this is that there will be all sorts of areas in which further philosophical and conceptual work needs to occur. The problem of religion can highlight this need quite well.

What is there, for instance, that lies outside religion? The remainder appears to be “unbelief” or “atheism”, or more recently “secularism”. The peculiarity about each of these – even when people identify themselves as “non-believers” or “atheists” – is that they are not really positions at all, and become deceptive or highly peculiar identities as well. Not being religious – or not being theistic – has no content except the negative one of saying what it is not.

This is not to say that an atheist cannot live by a positive conception of good living – let alone a profound one. They may well do so. But the concept of atheism renders it invisible, and makes the differences among atheists seem of little importance. And when the possibilities of good living as an atheist are raised, the content inevitably seems simply paltry, or negative and wanting.

This means that the very vocabulary stacks the cards in favour of religion dominating the high ground of the good, or good living. This conceptual problem may lie behind, not only the failure to develop a proper education in the West, but even the superficiality of much of life in the West.

When we stepped away from religion in public life we also stepped away from the one vocabulary in which we had been adept at talking about good living. When we try to talk about it in any alternative way, scholars tend to go back to discuss philosophical schools of the ancient Mediterranean, such as epicureanism, scepticism, or stoicism. Others fall back on the concept of culture, and that only tends to mask the religious issues. Yet others resort to the light-weight language of the personal development movement, in which conceptual clarity often struggles to rise above remarks that are entirely empty of meaning – such as that “reality is an illusion”.

One way in which this is so impoverishing is that in one sense religion in itself often specifies so little. Unless you become a cleric, or join a monastic order, few religions tell you much about what to do with your life – apart, perhaps, from family commitments and your hours of devotion. Do you become a farmer or a fashion-designer, a computer geek, or a caregiver? In the triad between work and play and love – what work? What play? Who to love – apart from another member of your sect or denomination?

Three people can give their lives to the ocean, spending it entirely with boats, and years at sea, navigating their way around the globe.  One may be a Catholic, one may be a Buddhist, one may be an atheist – whatever that may amount to. Their difference will affect their devotions or spiritual moments, their interpretations of nature, and their relations with others, but it is their passion for the sea that gives their living the greater shape that it has – compared with the farmer invisible among the corn, deep in the Mid-West, or the financial broker in a high tower on Wall Street.

In the absence of a social order – a culture that dictates “my station and its duties”, this intellectual vacuum becomes even larger. That religion takes on different expressions in different cultures is well known, and particularly obvious when populations migrate. Culture takes up a lot of the religious slack, and it does so differently in different times and places. But what happens when religion settles itself down in a culture that privileges choice? What takes up the slack then? The Western experience is that, where there is a failure to address the problems of choice in any significant way, capitalism will take up the slack.

The second door that these considerations of religion ought to open up is the area of indoctrination, an awareness of which should be vivid in the decision-making of learners and their mentors. Religion, perhaps more than any other domain, is drenched in indoctrination – so drenched that far too few involved with religion seem to be able to consider any other way of enabling commitment to it. Faith, commitment and conversion are usually prioritized over any consideration of truth. Good history and good science are too eagerly trampled down in the interests of recruitment and maintenance. Persuasion will often play on any gullibility or fear, and when reasons are engaged, rational discipline is only maintained so long as its manipulation can reach a predetermined end.

Being trapped in such exchanges is one of the reasons so many people in secular societies feel their hearts sink when religion comes up, work so hard to fend off religious enthusiasts and advocates, and feel sad and estranged when a friend embraces one. When indoctrination is discussed, religion is one of the first areas, along with politics, that people think of, just as these two were at the centre of the two debates about indoctrination that philosophers of education have engaged in historically. It is almost as if religion and education are mutually exclusive.

Religion has done a poor job of keeping up with the  requirements of education – because of what religious people perceive to be the high stakes – the fears about life and the ambitions for salvation that are so often contained within them. Today, with the advent  of violent Islamic militancy we are being forced to face this disastrous failure of religious education yet again – conversion at any price – in new and frightening ways.

But the approach is dishearteningly familiar from throughout religious history and widespread throughout religious practice, even if it is not always so extreme. It is typical of the educational failure of the West, though, that we are doing nothing educational about it. We are getting better at electronic surveillance and withdrawing people’s passports, torture and imprisonment without proper trial, and control of information and the press, than we are at creating a genuine education for a free people. Indeed, there has been such a betrayal of core Western values in the West over so much of this that it has given subtle victory after victory to their very enemies.

But if religion is our first awareness of indoctrination, it needs to grow beyond it.

Enormously.

Our awareness of indoctrination needs to be seriously expanded until it can be understood as a significant educational problem in every sphere of life, and potentially, in every corner of our minds. Then, our understanding of indoctrination can be a superb procedural tool for deciding the content we need to pursue.

Indoctrination is a huge topic that I can’t explore here. For our purposes, “indoctrination” is those features of any arrangement or practice that, through the learning that is involved, thwarts, obstructs, opposes or otherwise works to defeat educational purpose. That is, it is learning harmful to the development of learners’ powers to construct and realize their own conception of their good, consistent with their equal duties to others. It does damage to our moral and intellectual independence. It is any agenda to have us believe or do something by circumventing our reason and compromising our capacities to choose well.

Even where there are no overt or deliberate agendas, there are abundant practices, social pressures, conventions and ideologies that coerce or manipulate belief, or sustain ignorance in ways that encourage us to adopt recipes for life or convictions about life blindly; recipes and convictions that we might not adopt if we had a proper chance to think about them effectively.

These distortions in our institutions and our practices follow lines of power, advantage and privilege that often have histories. Battles over difference have been won or lost, or the interests of those with power and confidence have swamped the interests of others at the price of fairness and respect.

Sometimes there has been considerable self-consciousness, of victory and defeat. Sometimes parties have been oblivious to what has truly happened; the victors taking their superiority for granted, and the losers their inability and unworthiness, because, deprived of the resources and learned powers to know better, they were in no position to understand their situation, or to doubt the superiority of the winners.

Bad history maintains these injustices. Bad history tells us of the inevitability of our situation. Good history reveals the malleability of life. It shows us how things have been different, and why, and in doing so it reveals that many things we now take for granted could still be different. It takes good, critical history driven by a desire to understand the circumstances of respect in order for us to understand the limitations, but also the possibilities, of our lives and relationships. 

This is true, both of our personal histories as well as our collective histories. Our beliefs about what we are capable of, both individually and collectively, of what we can do, or dare do are conditioned by the stories about our pasts. The nature of this self-understanding is crucial to our abilities to imagine alternative possibilities as real.

Seams of injustice and lines of morally illegitimate power generate rationalizations and ideologies that support them and give them the appearance of justification. These potentially toxic and corrupting features of our relationships and social systems go to the very humanity of our society – yours and mine – and they are enabled and allowed to persist so long as we are unaware of them.

Thus, issues of gender, race and social class have long been strongly identified as areas of indoctrination. Alongside religion and politics, institutions such as the workplace, the family, sport, entertainment, the media, advertising and public relations and our political and bureaucratic arrangements are all sites riddled with indoctrination, in addition to medical and caregiving establishments, churches and schools.  Much comes to light in these contexts, in our time, simply by following the spoor of capitalism, seeking its role in the development of mind.

Considerable resources already exist for indoctrination-studies – particularly in sociology and history as well as psychology – though their entry into educational consciousness is highly selective since that is so much reduced to schooling. This work stands to expand hugely once an educational point of view is properly adopted.

Awareness and sensitivity to indoctrination provide powerful tools to sharpen our educational focus and identify what counts – both in toxic aspects of our institutions and practices, and in terms of the unique barriers within each of us that are holding us back.

In the early years of my work I restricted most of my attention to indoctrination, because I was awed at the improvement that could be brought to our lives simply by reducing the range and power of the harm. Learning about indoctrination, and working to reduce the damage it has done, and is doing to us – to each one of us – is remarkably effective in grounding educational judgment, individualizing it, and making it matter.

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