Abstract:
The article argues against the popular notion that people have an
unrestricted right to their beliefs as it advances the case that
education is essentially involved with addressing, challenging and
changing the minds of learners. Genuine educational process must
alter the mindsets (the beliefs and the systems of beliefs) and
habits of mind of learners (the manner in which beliefs and
information are obtained, organized and evaluated) in order to
increase learner's intellectual resources to benefit both the
individual and society. Educators, while fulfilling these
professional responsibilities must be aware of the possible harm
involved in such challenges and must protect learners from whatever
harm is foreseeable, avoidable and unnecessary.
Thesis: Not only is it ethically or morally appropriate and
correct to address and seek to remediate habits of mind but it is
also a fundamental responsibility of professional educators to do so.
I. Introduction
If, as with all humans, educators must avoid harming others, then
there are two major concerns about the "harm" education can cause
and thus about the morality of educational practice. The first
concern is education itself as an "invasive" enterprise and one that
causes harm as intellectual discomfort or distress to the learner,
if only to produce some other more positive result, such as a mind
that is "educated" and better capable of learning. The second
concern is with harm that might be produced when educators conduct
the pedagogic experiments that they must do in order to advance the
profession and continue improvement of the efficacy of instruction.
This latter concern is the subject of another work ( "Ethical
Issues in Pedagogic Research", Community
College Humanities Review, Vol. 26, No.1, Fall 2006. Herein the
focus is on the issue that education itself may be seen by learners
and their families and communities as causing harm when education
changes the minds of students and some of those changes are
perceived as harm because they upset learners and their families and
friends. In fact, some view challenging some of the beliefs of
students as unacceptable educational practice precisely because of
claims and protests that beliefs are sacrosanct domains to be held
aside from the meddling of educators. Such challenges to beliefs
often cause upset and even worse in students when cherished beliefs
and feelings of esteem might be disturbed.
This work presents the case that education is essentially the
process of informing, challenging and changing the minds of
learners. Genuine educational process must alter the mindsets (the
beliefs and the systems of beliefs) and habits of mind of learners
(the manner in which beliefs and information are obtained, organized
and evaluated) if there is to be an increase of their intellectual
resources (knowledge and cognitive skills) to benefit both the
individual learner and society. In so doing, educators, while
fulfilling their professional responsibilities to learners and
society, must protect learners from whatever harm is foreseeable,
avoidable and unnecessary. In this work the notion of a habit of
mind is an application of the analysis and position advanced by
Charles Sanders Peirce in "The Fixation of Belief",(Popular
Science Monthly
12 (November 1877), 1-15.
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html).
This work might be read as an application of Peirce's ideas to some
of the challenges, faced by educators now.
Given the professional duties of educators, not only is it ethically
or morally appropriate and correct to address and seek to remediate
habits of mind, but it is also a fundamental responsibility of
professional educators to do so.
The most significant ethical issues with regard to education may
arise from the very nature of the act of educating someone. Beyond
that, the most significant issues arise from the social role that
the institution of education is to serve. These matters are the
focus of this work which will deal with the ethics of education and
matters associated with changing habits of mind.
Serving the requests of clients: Tolerance
While tolerance is promoted as a value in a pluralistic society, to
what degree, if any, should educators be tolerant of sets of beliefs
and habits of mind that establish those beliefs? All students,
beginning with the very young, hold beliefs that are in conflict
with one another and with empirical evidence. Is education to
remediate that situation? If students object, claiming that they
have a right to their beliefs, should such a claim be recognized and
accepted by educators? Must educators be tolerant of beliefs and
habits of mind that present threats to individuals and to society
itself?
Obligations to others beyond the student
There are times when questions arise as to the appropriateness or
acceptability of a program of instruction or a mode of instruction
because there was no clear indication of benefit to the learner. Who
is to benefit? Is it the individual learner, society itself, or
both at once? How should the educator handle possible conflicts
between on the one hand serving the interests of society by having
education support the increase in human intellectual resources to be
shared by all and on the other hand serving the interests of the
individual learner increasing the individual's abilities to grow and
to occupy a desirable position in the social order, principally
through some vocation?
II.
Responsibilities of educators to change habits of mind
Learners will at times claim that they have a right to their
opinions and beliefs and that they have the right to go on believing
them despite what the instructor is teaching, including evidence
that contradicts or disproves the learner's positions. This claim
is often made with regard to religious beliefs, but it carries over
to any belief, even those beliefs about physical events and
conditions expressed through empirical claims. Too many learners
believe and hope that associating any belief with religion will let
them escape reflection upon and criticism of their beliefs by
putting a cloak of immunity over any beliefs which they associate
with their identity and take as basic to their view of life. Such
beliefs may provide them with comfort and consolation or at least
the stability of the familiar and thus function to stave off what
the learners perceive as a number of undesirable consequences. Such
claims of immunity are sometimes made in the name not of "religious"
beliefs but also for "personal” beliefs as well.
"You have no right to challenge my beliefs!"
"I have a right to believe what I want to believe!"
"These are my personal beliefs and I am entitled to hold them
without having them examined or criticized."
"You have no right to force me to examine or change beliefs that I
have every right to hold as I please."
Unfortunately, there are educators who think that to some extent
the learner is correct and that the educator has no right to be
addressing, challenging and seeking to change beliefs that are
claimed by the learner to be either highly valued and /or core or
foundational beliefs. While this concession to the claim of
immunity may be fairly wide spread, it is deplorable because it is
in effect a denial of some of the most important goals of
education. A mind that is unchanged by an educational program is a
mind that has not been educated. To educate is to lead or draw out
of a mind what it is capable of doing and that is in fact to change
that mind, to make it grow.
The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind
should be a thing that works.
-Sherwood Anderson
In addition to specific beliefs there are habits of mind with which
the beliefs are settled into the mindsets of individuals. The habits
of mind of learners are the manner in which beliefs and information
are obtained, organized and evaluated. There are some, even within
education, who think that there are limits to addressing, let alone
attempting to change, a habit of mind when it supports some
fundamental and /or religious beliefs. While this may be a fairly
common idea, it is nonetheless mistaken. It is not what education
has been and is and will continue to be all about. It is an idea
that is itself a product of a relativistic mindset that rejects any
reason for or manner in which basic habits of mind can be or should
be legitimately compared, let alone evaluated.
If students are permitted to maintain beliefs, especially
inconsistent and contradictory beliefs and beliefs concerning
physical/empirical claims that have been refuted or disproved by
evidence, and to maintain them without challenge and without serious
attempts to have students think reflectively and critically about
those beliefs and to think about the habit of mind that had them
accept and hold those beliefs, then granting that permission would
constitute a formal failure on the part of educators. Whatever
motives such educators have, they are failing their students
nonetheless. Educators who fail to encourage and promote and
support the examination of beliefs for fear of being subjected to
criticism by organized groups of ideologues, dogmatists, or
fundamentalists of any order are guilty of a failure to fulfill
their professional responsibility as educators. The tenet of
Academic Freedom rests in good part upon the need for educational
institutions and their faculty to be insulated from such pressures
from those outside of education to thwart the fulfillment of the
professional responsibilities of educators for the pursuit of truth
and knowledge and the development of critical thinkers for the sake
of preservation of some state of affairs or valuations. Those who
teach science and grant permission for their learners to regard
science as being a belief system akin to any other and akin to
religion in particular also fail in their professional
responsibility to advance their academic discipline. Such educators
undermine understanding of, respect for and valuation of science. In
light of challenges by students and outside groups to what
mainstream science holds as well established that portrays those
findings as simply beliefs akin to any other, more than one college
professor of science can be found to take the position that:
" I tell them that I don't care what you believe; all I care about
is what you answer on the exams."
Educators who accept the claims of immunity or allow the learners to
believe whatever they wish to believe without challenge as long as
they memorize and offer back "correct" answers on exams and other
forms of assessment are in a very fundamental manner failing in
their professional responsibilities as educators to engage the minds
of their learners in an examination of and possible alteration of
the basic habits of mind through which their beliefs systems are
created and maintained. Educators who remain shy and retire from
direct engagements with the actual belief systems and the habits of
mind of their learners are not developing the critical thinking
skills and the reasoning abilities of their learners. They are
neither encouraging reflective thought nor recognizing the need for
and the methods of reviewing ideas and beliefs to determine the
veracity and accuracy of empirical claims and the value of
non-cognitive claims.
"In my class I teach science. I tell them to keep their other
beliefs out of this class."
Education is in a most fundamental sense all about challenging and
changing minds. Education is at its most basic level about
addressing and changing habits of mind. Educators must move or
change a mind from habits and conditions which close it off and
which prevent its growth. Minds that work too impulsively and
reflexively are close to minds that do not work at all as they
respond at the lowest levels at which humans think. Education
succeeds when the learner assimilates that process of inquiry that
fosters intellectual growth. For too many people education has not
succeeded well at all. Effective educators teach subject matter
and information but even more so they attempt to inculcate the
skills of acquiring information and of organizing it in the most
effective manner to address problems and to question, set and
accomplish their goals, and the skill of challenging the received
view, the facile, simplistic notions and uncritical positions.
Inculcating such skills is an essential part of what genuine
education is about. Education is about opening minds and having
them grow through careful and critical thought about experience.
Education functions well when it fosters inquiry that leads to
continual growth. Education does this for people of all ages.
The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without
a teacher.
-Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
There are studies indicating the under preparedness of students for
college work, and we have too often seen people who have proceeded
through several levels of formal education and yet are possessed of
incorrect information, deficiencies in intellectual skill and
debilitating habits of mind. An important aim of education is to
address those conditions and to remediate them. Consequently,
educators must be prepared to both change the manner in which minds
operate and the contents of minds. Habits of mind that close off a
mind to inquiry and provide for false notions of certainty are the
nemesis of education and a threat to social well being and advance.
There are students/learners who enter college believing that:
·
heavier things fall faster than lighter things because they are
heavier
·
the sun rises and sets
·
only cold environs or exposure to drafts cause colds
·
humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs
·
the earth and universe have existed for just over 6,000 years
·
events associated with a house in Amityville in the movie, the
“Amityville Horror”, are true because they were described in a movie
or book
·
members of one group of people are naturally inferior/superior to
others
·
if a person believes that X exists then X does exist
·
if a person thinks that a proposition or claim is true then the
claim is true
·
all opinions on all subjects are of equal value
·
the shape of planet earth can be flat and spherical at the same time
·
evolutionary theory and creationist theory are equally acceptable
and effective explanations of life forms on planet earth
·
a person is entitled to believe any claim or proposition accepting
it as true whether or not that claim has supporting evidence until
someone else can prove that claim is not true by empirical-logical
method and not even then must a person surrender belief that the
claim is true
·
there is no problem in holding beliefs that are contradictory to one
another
For the rational mind educated in logic and science none of the
above claims or statements is true under the most common and
effective notions of what truth is. Education needs to address the
believing in or holding of such claims, and, even more importantly
and most essentially, education must be involved with altering
the method of thinking that led a person to hold false claims to be
true. Effective pedagogy seeks to identify such ideas that are
empirical claims or logical claims as have been proven false but
that are still held in the mind of students as being true and then
proceed to correct or alter those beliefs that are disproven claims
and to change the method of thought that led to disproven empirical
or logical claims being held as true. Education as a process has a
multiplicity of desired outcomes but the one most highly valued for
its utility for learner and society alike is truth. Falsehoods may
serve short term interests, but that perspective is itself born of
ignorance and needs to be remedied by the same process of education
that instills modes of thought by which the false is detected and
the true is approached.
Many people holding beliefs making claims that have been disproven
may not like being challenged to confront them and to examine their
habits of mind that may not be beneficial to them and/or to the
human community. Some learners may feel threatened and may insist
on their "right" to continue to hold their beliefs. Some beliefs
may be closely held because they provide comfort and protection from
a sort of existential terror that can result from seriously
examining a set of what would be "basic" or "fundamental" beliefs
about the physical world and human life. Beliefs can and do provide
a sense of order in the midst of an otherwise harsh and chaotic
universe, as well as provide identification with something greater
than the individual, and a sense of belonging with others. Beliefs
can keep such emotional disturbance at bay and thus the prospect of
critically reviewing such beliefs creates anxiety over the
possibility of having to face the world without the familiar compass
and measures and meanings. To avoid such a prospect, those who have
fundamental beliefs challenged will often respond with a
heightened need to maintain faith and remain loyal to the beliefs
and to those who hold them. Those who would criticize fundamental
beliefs that are part of or constitute entire worldviews will be
seen as the deviant other who must be resisted. Thus students and
their supporters will claim that educators "have no right" to do
anything that might cause them some disruption in their thought
process and beliefs. The closed minded and obstinate believer is
often the person acting out of a real fear of being left to cope
with reality and the disquietudes of human existence without the
familiar beliefs that provide the becalming salve of certitudes.
The fear is that critical consideration of belief would threaten a
disintegration of the edifice of belief that they think of as the
only available remedy for the angst of facing a life without order
or meaning or value. They hold the belief that there is no habit of
mind capable of providing their salvation other than that which they
have been acculturated into using.
Further, there is as well for some the real sense that they are
being tempted to become "disloyal" to what they have held for so
long and to those who have shared those beliefs with them. Thus, to
accept challenges to those beliefs would constitute a threat for it
would tempt them to "betray" a faith in the worldview in which they
were raised.
While some may hold their beliefs to be immune to challenges, there
is no such right where the relationship of the educator to the
learner is concerned. There is instead the obligation of educators
to assist learners to confront beliefs proven to be false and
beliefs that are inconsistent with one another and their method for
fixing beliefs so that learners develop methodologies to produce
more accurate understanding of how things are and how knowledge of
such matters is obtained and how such claims are evaluated. This
would include claims that are empirical as well as those concerning
interpretations of texts and situations. As it is the obligation of
educators to teach and to provide the methods for determining truth
within each discipline, then the educator is obliged to effectively
recognize and remove impediments to learning and to set in place the
methodologies for distinguishing truth from falsehood.
The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but
the means of education. - Ralph Waldo Emerson .
No learner who comes to a professional educator has a mind that is
tabula rasa. Minds come to educators filled with a
great many things and even the youngest of minds arrives as
tabula congesta. The task of educators is to have learners
examine what they believe as well as the methods for acquiring ideas
and fixing beliefs. To develop in learners the intellectual
abilities to acquire not simply information such as what is known to
be true and what is known not to be true is insufficient. What is
required is to assist and direct learners to develop and use and
value the intellectual skills with which to discriminate what is
true from what is not true.
Education: Being able to differentiate between what you do know and
what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need
to know; and it's knowing how to use the information once you get
it. - William Feather
In the Liberal Arts and Sciences, education is at its core all about
changing minds. This is what the General Education core of a
curriculum is about at the level of higher education. It is not
about training. Training involves the deliberate shaping of minds
in order to fit the thought and/or behavior of individuals into some
set manner of relating to their environment and their fellow humans
in some common enterprise. Education is all about learning how to
adapt and to grow and thus to change. Education is about growth as
presented by John Dewey.
If at whatever period we choose to take a person, he is still in the
process of growth, then education is not, save as a by product, a
preparation for something coming later. Getting from the present
the degree and kind of growth there is in it is education.
--John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy,
1920, Boston: Beacon Press, 1952,p. 184-185.
Growth requires minds that are open to growth and thus to
development and change. Education is about fostering habits of mind
that do not develop fixed notions resistant to a continuing process
of inquiry but instead are open to the possibility of the need to
change beliefs in the light of new information and changing
circumstances.
Societies create institutions to provide for many things necessary
for their maintenance and progress. Among those institutions is
education, offered in order to increase human intellectual
resources. This produces humans with knowledge and skills and
shared values that benefit both individuals and society as it
provides for social cohesion and progress.
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social
progress and reform. All reforms which rest simply upon the law, or
the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical
or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.... But through
education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its
own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and
economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.... Education
thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science
and art conceivable in human experience. --John
Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, 1897
When the identity of the moral process with the processes of
specific growth is realized, the more conscious and formal education
of childhood will be seen to be the most economical and efficient
means of social advance and reorganization, and it will also be
evident that the test of all the institutions of adult life is their
effect in furthering continuing education.
--John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy,
1920, Boston: Beacon Press, 1952,p. 186.
Society provides for the movement of the nascent mammal, the human
infant with potentiality for rationality into the conditions within
which the individual can realize in an ongoing manner the freedom
and support for the realization of that potential growth. Humans are
,as Aristotle phrased it, zoon politikon, social
animals. There are no individuals as human individuals without
society since incorporated in those characteristics that define
homo sapiens is a set of properties, skills and features
that are the products of a social life: being with other
humans. What is of benefit to society is thus of benefit for the
individuals within it, assisting them to realize what they are
capable of being, having and doing. So then what is of benefit to
individuals through education is of benefit to society as well.
Consequently, society establishes and requires formal educational
institutions and requirements setting as a self serving goal the
development of its members, the increase in intellectual resources
of society.
Government, business, art, religion, all social institutions have a
meaning, a purpose. That purpose is to set free and to develop the
capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class,
or economic status. And this is all one with saying that the test
of their value is the extent to which they educate every individual
into the full stature of his possibility. --John
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1952,p. 186.
These benefits are particularly realized at the level of higher
education through the study of the liberal arts and sciences more
than through the training programs that prepare people for
occupations. Individuals on their own may be inclined to look to
the institution of education to derive a personal benefit: an
instrumental and self centered benefit rather than to obtain a
portion of the public benefit, the public good serving the public
interest.
Education provides a structure for changing the lives of people
through a process that can, does and should change minds, by
changing the contents of minds and the manner in which minds
operate: education changes habits of mind.
Professional educators have a responsibility to produce minds
capable of continual growth as well as responsibilities to those
they instruct that arise from sources other than their direct
relationship with the learner and that extend beyond the period of
instruction. Educators are not simply providing a service for the
consumers of instruction. Professional educators, particularly in
higher education, have a responsibility to their academic
professions and to society to produce changed minds that continue to
change as they grow. They owe it to society to increase human
intellectual resources, one of the aims of education. They owe it
to their academic and pedagogic professions to transmit their
knowledge and to develop the skills of acquiring such knowledge and
skills as are possessed by members of the professions for the
continuation of the professions.
Society creates and sustains the institution of education for a
pragmatic end: members who are capable of living peacefully with one
another, supporting the common good and in joining together for
common purpose and for contributing to the general advancement of
society. None of this is possible without education.
The heart of the sociality of man is in education. --John
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1952,p. 185.
Education is about preparing people for life, and the most important
and essential aspect of that life is that it is typically lived with
others: a social life. It is not simply preparing people to occupy
a very limited and well defined location in a community of believers
and a community of employees or to occupy a position in the economic
order. Education is not simply about preparing people for entering
into a vocation or the labor market. It is about assisting people
to learn how to learn and how to reflect and criticize and enter
into the exploration of the wider range of experiences in order to
derive a greater amount of the potential of those experiences
offered. Education is not about the transfer of information and the
development of some limited set of skills.
Acquisition of skill, possession of knowledge, attainment of culture
are not ends: they are marks of growth and means to its continuing. --John
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1952,p. 185.
Education in the liberal arts and sciences is about examining,
developing and changing mindsets (the beliefs and the systems of
beliefs) and habits of mind (the manner in which beliefs and
information is obtained, organized and evaluated). It is about
moving people from a closed to an open mental posture that will
enable continued growth, more efficacious thinking and an expansion
in the range of human experience and particularly of that which is
valued. Rationality and the need for evidence and supporting
reasons are common to the disciplines of science and the liberal
arts. They share in a method that involves a community of inquiry
continually subjecting claims to critical analysis and evaluation in
the light of increasing experiences and information. The natural and
social sciences are founded upon a reasoning process and habit of
mind that advances knowledge and criticizes claims of knowledge.
Teaching science effectively is not possible without every effort to
develop the rational mindset and habit of mind. To teach History or
Philosophy also requires the inculcation of reasoning as a habit of
mind, and so it is likewise with Literature and the Arts. The aims
of any General Education program, once enunciated, are the litany of
the components of what has been described herein as the rational
habit of mind.
The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but
the means of education. - Ralph Waldo Emerson .
Education is a basic activity of every human group. It is that
process through which humans develop the modes of experience that
most typify the species. It is the process through which humans
develop their abilities to have experiences that are most typically
those of humans. Parents, siblings and extended family, friends and
neighbors provide for informal education as they instruct others in
language and behavior. Human offspring left alone without any
contacts with other humans will not display the characteristics that
most distinguish the human species from others. Children who are
not provided with formal education, private or public, cannot enter
into those aspects of common life that most typify the level of
achievement of a society as is evidenced in the arts and sciences.
Where formal schooling carries the aim of technical skill
development and vocational training there may appear to be a
diminished need for the mental skills set of the rational mind but
that is a conclusion drawn by considering the human only as an
employee and technician and not in the fullness of the human
experience which extends far beyond the workplace. Given that
humans are homo faber and that technology marks all
human societies and that the technological advance is as much a sign
of humanness as are the products of technology there is a need for
humans to keep pace with technological development. As the
twentieth century was marked more by the dramatic change in the rate
of change than by any single development in technology (first noted
in A.N. Whitehead’s observation), thus even in technical programs
there is the need to have the learner be one who has learned how to
learn, as Harry Harlow would express it, as technologies will
continue to advance and with that a cycle of creation and
expiration. The human world does not remain fixed in any way for
very long. There is a need for people to learn how to acquire
knowledge and skills needed to advance and grow along with the
developments that will surround them. Thus, to be capable of and
practitioner of the sort of thinking that will best serve anyone,
whether in the job setting or not, will be the mind that has
acquired the habits of mind that can keep abreast of change and make
contributions to it.
Educators and educational institutions have a fiduciary
responsibility to those who attend them as learners to assist the
learners to gain benefits through the acquisition of information,
knowledge and intellectual skills. Such institutions have as part
of that basic responsibility the subsequent responsibility to hire
and retain and further develop educators who fulfill their
responsibilities to educate and thus to most effectively address the
task of developing the basic intellectual skills of their students.
Education: Being able to differentiate between what you do know and
what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need
to know; and it's knowing how to use the information once you get
it.
- William Feather
Learners and their parents place trust in educational institutions
and in individual members of the profession to fulfill their
fiduciary responsibilities.
Both educational institutions and their instructional staff have a
fiduciary responsibility to protect and advance the interests of the
learners and in so doing to make the best judgment about what is in
the interest of learners. Such judgments are reviewed by others so
as to maintain a check against excess, insufficiencies, prejudices
and ineffectiveness. The judgments of instructors are reviewed by
their peers in their profession as members of academic disciplines
and in their profession as educators. The judgments of institutions
as evidenced by their programs, curricula, courses and rates of
success are reviewed by institutions of the state in the form of an
accreditation process.
There is a tension between educators and the general society with
regard to their relative judgments as to what learners need to know
and be able to do. This would be a necessary tension that is
moderated by accrediting agencies. The faculty aim to educate
students to grow in information and skills and teaching them how to
continue that growth, continue to learn and to question and
challenge and reflect and reason and create. Society has an
interest in meeting immediate needs and is inclined to emphasize
what is popularly thought to be most needed at the present. Society
in its demands tends to be conservative as it presses for
conservation of order. Faculty tend to be liberal as they demand
thought from their students that will lead to change within the
learners and within society. The emphasis for the faculty,
particularly in the Arts and Sciences, is for education over
training, while society wants training more than the cultivation of
that which would transform it and continue progression into unknown
futures with only a hope that human welfare will improve.
Accreditation agencies serve to moderate the tension. They insist
that certain criteria be met for accreditation and such criteria
change over time reflecting the changing values in society. Faculty
assert what they think necessary to continue to educate and to
educate in the sense of the liberal arts and sciences for the growth
of individuals as well as for the benefit to society. Accreditation
agencies may insist on assessment of all classes to insure their
quality for producing graduates with certain well-defined skill sets
and quantities of information while faculty insist that there be no
fixation or standardization of instruction and curricula allowing
for them to develop the intellectual skills needed for the
production of new knowledge and arts and for social reforms and
changes in the priorities assigned to commonly held values.
Educators cannot allow learners who refuse to embrace rationality
itself to go unchallenged. They must have their learners reflect
critically on the effectiveness of the learners’ beliefs about
making judgments and about formulating and maintaining their
beliefs. Learners who want to remain unchanged do not want to
learn. If students refuse to enter into the community of informed,
critical and rational thinkers, i.e. the educated community, and the
more general community of rational discourse planet-wide, educators
have no obligation to accept that refusal. There is no duty on the
part of educators to respect the claim that there is no need to
reason nor to change fundamental beliefs about how claims of
knowledge are to be analyzed, criticized and reviewed. Indeed
formal education is about overcoming obstacles such refusals pose to
accomplishing the goals of education.
Learners might embrace their beliefs and wish to maintain them if
only to spare themselves the labor of conducting critical reviews
of beliefs and the work of overcoming anxiety when cherished
beliefs are challenged. Many, if not most, learners might be
pleased to be left with the simple mind of a well trained person
with a successful vocation. Nonetheless it is the responsibility of
educators to persist in challenging learners with their own
intellectual development and with truth in the face of false beliefs
in the interest of all of society that sustains itself through
continual growth.
Challenging learners to confront their beliefs and their habits of
formulating beliefs and organizing them and maintaining them is the
duty of educators. Such education assists individuals to fulfill
their own moral responsibilities in as much as beliefs should not be
held without sufficient warrant or justification. Individuals are
responsible to their communities to hold beliefs that are based on
truth and supported by both reasoning and evidence. The moral
foundation for promoting the use of reason in drawing conclusions is
argued in The Ethics of Belief (1877) ( Originally published in
Contemporary Review,1877)
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html
wherein William K. Clifford concludes that :
We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is
inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not
know is like what we know.
We may believe the statement of another person, when there is
reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he
speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.
It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and
where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is
worse than presumption to believe.
The argument made by Clifford and others is that humans are best
served when they do not hold beliefs that are not supported by
reasoning and evidence. Humans must base their beliefs, especially
those that go beyond what they have actually observed and have
evidence to support, only on what has been observed, tested and
proven and what can reasonably be expected to follow consistently
from that evidence. Humans must not accept as true what is
reported or claimed by others without good reasons to accept those
sources as being worthy of trust as established by prior evidence.
Finally, it is wrong for humans to believe anything without
sufficient evidence for that belief especially where there are good
reasons to doubt. The rational Habit of Mind is advocated by
Clifford on moral grounds that humans ought to be careful and
skeptical until evidence and reasoning establishes sufficient
warrant for holding a belief. Humans ought to avoid risks to their
well being both individually and collectively that are born of
acting on unwarranted beliefs.
As long as the current set of beliefs and Habits of Mind are
providing all that the thinker/learner wants or considers as valued
or relevant there can be resistance to examining Habits of Mind and
belief systems reinforced by fear of the unknown in the face of
ignorance of alternatives. If efforts to educate so as to develop
the rational Habit of Mind are not made evident or relevant or to be
valued in some way, learners are likely to resist, dismiss or
minimize any effort to enter into experiences that might cause a
change in the basic Habit of Mind.
"What do I need to know this for?"
"What has this to do with me?"
"This is not needed for my major."
Changing a mindset or a set of beliefs involves great mental effort
along with some disturbance and emotional upset. Thus, there is the
need for the educator to persist through the resistance to bring
about the greater social or public good through increasing the
resources of the individual learner. If both the educator and the
learner fail to appreciate the fundamental social goal of the social
institution of education, that can thwart both the teaching and the
learning in the deepest and most socially responsible sense.
The right to believe
It is altogether another issue as to whether people, and in
particular the less well educated, less informed and those of less
intellectual capacity, have a "right to believe" at least in those
situations that present circumstances where decisions as to what to
believe are as described by William James (The Will to Believe) ,
"living", "forced" and "momentous."
There is to be no advocacy by the rational mind of any beliefs held
without sufficient reason. Those who have developed a rational mind
will accept that there is a duty to attend to the evidence and to
hold those positions best defended by reason and supported by
evidence, at least by the preponderance of the evidence. Rational
persons are to avoid positions not supported by the preponderance of
the evidence as they are the most likely to be in error or contain
errors. The "right to believe" is to be restricted to
those circumstances in which there is not such a preponderance of
evidence and where decisions as to what to believe are "living",
"forced" and "momentous". In such circumstance a rational minded
person is justified in accepting a “hypothesis which, if true ,
would offer a way, more or less probably effective, of safeguarding
those values , or if not, of anesthetizing him self more or less to
their loss." and further to believe that which would be a "source
of comfort, courage, and strength , and an inspiration to
beneficence"
(C. J. Ducasse, A Philosophical Scrutiny of Religion
(New York: Ronald Press, 1953,p.166)
"provided that it is not in conflict with our duty to attend to
evidence and it cannot be in conflict with that duty if the there is
no preponderance of the evidence. "Causing,
Perceiving and Believing: An Examination of the Philosophy of C. J.
Ducasse.
With Edward H. Madden. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1975. p150.)
When there is not preponderance of the evidence , a person may in
some cases use powerful techniques of suggestion which virtually
preclude recognition of the relevance of any future preponderance of
counter evidence. Although, on the one hand, philosophers are
mistaken who suppose that belief without adequate evidence almost
invariably impairs our ability to attend to evidence, on the other
hand, philosophers are equally mistaken who suppose that it is
impossible or highly unlikely that belief induced when evidence is
inadequate will seriously impair the ability to attend to future
evidence. All such generalizations about the benefits and dangers
of suggestion and hypnosis are questionable.
Causing, Perceiving and Believing: An Examination of the Philosophy
of C. J. Ducasse.
With Edward H. Madden. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1975. p149.)
Some, like C. J. Ducasse, suggest that the "vast masses of mankind"
possessed of lesser intelligence might be afforded such a "right to
believe" less they suffer the consequences which suspension of
judgment may have for them.
(Causing, Perceiving and Believing: An Examination of the
Philosophy of C. J. Ducasse. With Edward H. Madden.
Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1975. p153.)
Most of those receiving formal education do not have ‘lesser’ minds.
Nor, particularly in elementary and secondary education, are there
circumstances where decisions as to what to believe are "living",
"forced" and "momentous" or where there is not a preponderance of
the evidence. It is a professional responsibility of educators to
make known the evidence upon which their instruction is based and to
inculcate the rational habit of mind and its reliance on evidence
and reasoning in support of positions. In formal education, when
those circumstances where there is not a preponderance of evidence
arise, there can and should be a suspension of belief and of
judgment on the part of educators. Such suspensions can furnish
occasions for further education in the very process of inquiry and
deliberation that leads to decisions concerning what to believe.
These decisions remain subject to continuing review in light of new
evidence and experiences by minds that are open to inquiry and
questioning as an essential, even quintessential, element in the
life of the mind.
The habit of mind that leads people to believe what there is
insufficient reason or evidence to support is a habit of mind that
presents for both the believers and for others potential harm in as
much as such beliefs are more likely to be incorrect and decisions
based on such beliefs are more likely to lead to unsuccessful
results. People who claim a right to belief that is an unqualified
right and people who practice believing without sufficient reason or
evidence are thus presenting society with a challenge as they
threaten both society's need for social cohesion and for progress.
Unwarranted beliefs do not lead people closer towards truth. Such
beliefs and the habits of mind that lead to unwarranted claims and
beliefs being held are thus socially dangerous.
There is no unrestricted right to believe and not have those beliefs
questioned or challenged in general society and particularly within
the institution of education. There is no right to beliefs immune to
criticism and challenges. Society can ill afford to permit the
formation of habits of mind that settle beliefs without sufficient
reason and warrant to support those beliefs. Such habits of mind do
not further either social cohesion or progress. The fixing of
beliefs without evidence to support them or in contradiction to
other beliefs is the fixing of a habit of thinking that leads away
from truth and away from what is needed for the resolution of
conflicts through compromise and non-violent measures. Thus,
society should neither acknowledge nor promote an unqualified right
to belief. There is no such right to belief that holds that beliefs
are not to be subject to review, questioning, examination and
criticism. In education the beliefs held by students are to be
examined and questioned and subject to reformulation as rational
thought might produce evidence counter to beliefs and reveal beliefs
that are inconsistent, contradictory or incoherent. Education
should develop habits of mind that would arrive at people holding
the most well formulated and defended beliefs and even then they are
to be understood as subject to continuing review. Society can ill
afford the encouragement of dogmatism, ideology, and the closing of
minds and so it cannot afford its members an immunity from
challenges to their beliefs nor can it afford any recognition of an
unlimited or unqualified right to belief.
III. The Habits of Mind
What are the basic habits of mind that confront educators? There
are those habits that create minds that are closed to inquiry and
development and growth, and there is one that does not do so. It is
only the rational habit of mind that is the goal of education and in
particular the liberal arts and sciences because it is a learning
objective such programs of study that aim to produce a mind fully
capable of critical thinking and reasoning and self reflection and
arguing to the best defended positions amongst well considered and
examined alternatives. The other habits of mind either cling
tenaciously to ideas and beliefs often with the claim of certainty
despite evidence and reasoning to the contrary or they accept all
beliefs as equivalent in worth with only the social setting upon
which to settle preferences.
All educational institutions and their accreditation agencies
express that graduates are to have developed their critical thinking
skills, information literacy and communication skills and are able
to make mature and well reasoned judgments including aesthetic and
ethical decision making. As laudable as such goals are, are those
who trumpet these notes at all serious about the import of such
declarations? Do they make a commitment to consider and address the
most basic habits of mind and belief systems of their learners? If
we take seriously how we are to achieve the general objectives for
degree programs, then we would need to consider some of the most
central elements of the lives of our learners: their mindsets or
habits of mind. We have not as yet begun to do this. An
institution that wants to develop rational habits of mind must face
a disturbing fact: the particular mindset or habits of mind that are
characteristic of the faculty of most colleges do not match those of
most of their students, even upon graduation. The alternative
mindsets of students must be directly identified and addressed if
they are to be moved into that of the rationalist mindset consonant
with the aims of general education.
Heterogeneous Groups
It is more and more the case that educators at all levels and most
particularly at community colleges in urban settings face students
that are quite heterogeneous in several ways. The most common basis
for describing these classes as diversified is the ethnic nature of
the learners. Add to that the further distinctions that of language
differences and cultural differences and religious backgrounds, and
one just begins to appreciate how diverse each group of learners in
a single class can be.
But what are the distinctions that matter most for the enterprise at
hand: teaching and learning? The diversity that matters for
learning comes into focus beyond that of culture, language, and
ethnicity. The learners have different learning styles that need to
be taken into effective consideration by instructors who want to
insure as best they can that the learners achieve the objectives of
the learning experiences being formulated for them. And, of
course, one of the most obvious of differences for educators is that
the learners have different knowledge backgrounds and different
levels of basic skills attainment.
Habits of Mind or Mindsets
Beyond the differences in learning styles and background knowledge
there are the even more fundamental differences in the most basic
habits of mind. These include the most basic ways in which the
learners gather and receive information and deal with it, the
background against which new experiences are interpreted, with which
they are valued and to which responses are formulated. There are at
least three basic habits of mind that instructors in a
multi-cultural environment need to be mindful of when designing
programs of instruction. These habits of mind or mindsets may be
described in different ways. One might be to characterize them in a
temporal ordering such as: Pre Modern, Modern, and Post Modern in an
effort to link them with those periods where the mindsets
predominate within the modes of discourse shaping the culture. This
terminology might also be viewed as polemical and so it will not be
used here. Another might be to describe them as fundamentalist,
scientific and relativist to use terms popular in contemporary
discourse. These would be both pejorative and misleading as they
would introduce terms that are value laden for many. In this work
the terms used will be a combination of those cited and those used
by Charles Sanders Peirce in "The Fixation of Belief",(Popular
Science Monthly
12 (November 1877), 1-15.
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html)
Peirce identified four ways in which people fix their beliefs:
tenacity, authority, a priori and science. In this work the
three basic habits of mind being described will be termed: the
tenacious-authoritarian, the rational, and the relativistic. I am
combining the first two methods for fixing beliefs as described by
Peirce and associating it with a popular and most basic mindset that
is herein termed the "tenacious-authoritarian". I am associating
what Peirce termed as the "a priori" method with the "relativistic"
mindset as Peirce recognized that this mindset or method for fixing
beliefs was ultimately one that based positions on a set of given
truths or a priori truths that were usually simply the
most popular ideas of the time.
It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste;
but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of
fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed
agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a
more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest
times to the latest.
-
Charles Sanders Peirce in The Fixation of Belief.
Finally, I rename his fourth and preferred method with the more
general descriptive: "rationalist" as reasoning and critical
thinking are what it emphasizes and what most distinguishes it from
the other methods for fixing beliefs, habits of mind and mindsets.
It is not to be identified with science as science is but one
manifestation of this habit of mind through which positions taken
are arrived at and defended using thought process that involve
reflective and critical thinking that is considerate of alternatives
and insistent upon well formulated and defended positions. This
rational habit of mind is one that holds all positions as hypotheses
subject to continuing review in light of new evidence, reviews of
reasoning and the development of or acceptance of new perspectives.
The use of the terms, "rational" or "rationalist" or rationalistic"
is not to be associated with the meaning of rationalism as in the
long history of that term in philosophy that links it with thinkers
from Plato on through Descartes and others who held that knowledge
was contained in the mind or soul and could be recognized or
achieved without experiences involving the senses, the community of
inquirers or the external world.
To attempt a single manner of approaching learners in a
heterogeneous group with these different habits of mind is bound for
failure for the learners for whom the single approach is without
meaning or value. Instructors have these manners of approach that
are based on their own habits of mind. To operate out of ignorance
of the mismatch between the habits of mind of the instructor with
groups of learners in the class is a method that will leave some
learners with little real learning and more likely with some form of
failure.
The instructional staff is nearly exclusively populated by those
with the rational mindset placing high value on reasoning and
critical thinking and the need to support claims with evidence and
reasoning. The student body in our ethnically diverse urban
community colleges is composed of learners with different
mindsets: the tenacious-authoritarian, the rational, and the
relativistic.
The Tenacious-Authoritarian Habit of Mind
The tenacious-authoritarian students come from cultures in which
there is high value placed on respect for authorities and official
texts. They are literalists and unfamiliar with and anxious about
multiple interpretations of texts and information and history. They
are also inexperienced with diversity and find it difficult to
accommodate with the pluralistic society they find in the country
and on campus and in their classes and with the faculty. People
are acculturated into possession of this mindset with little
conscious effort on their part. The perception would be that this
habit of mind is simply the way people think within their culture or
their cultural groups.
At this moment this mindset is oft times described as
“fundamentalist” when those so characterizing it want to identify
the set of religious beliefs that are a part of this mindset as
being the defining characteristic of it. This may be historically
and socially relevant but in terms of the cognitive or psychological
processes it is not. The mindset is a deeper formation that accepts
a particular form of religious life but is not constituted by that.
With this habit of mind faith is generated by a basic need for order
and order at any cost. Faith can be set against reason as a result
of satisfying a basic drive, perhaps rooted in a genetic disposition
(a "god gene"), that results in a belief system conveyed through
story that provides order or "cosmos" for the believer. Such faith
is held tenaciously and all the more so when reinforced by its
endorsement and promulgation by a variety of social institutions
each carrying the weight of authority.
The tenacious-authoritarian mindset would view the rational mindset
as a threat to disturb the order of things as held in the belief
system that was uncritically acquired.
The tenacious-authoritarian mind would likely view the relativistic
mindset with contempt but as no threat because the relativistic mind
accepts and is tolerant of all views, and so the
tenacious-authoritarian belief system is beyond challenge. The
tenacious-authoritarian can hold that their beliefs are better than
others and expressions of the actual one and only truth and the
relativistic cannot criticize them given their denials of
absolutes, trans-cultural universals, objective knowledge, and
objective truth.
The Rational Habit of Mind
The characteristics or the rational mindset are those found in the
outcomes of the typical general education component of the Liberal
Arts and Sciences core of any degree program. This mindset places a
high value on reason and believes in the possibility of human
progress through the use of reason.
This pragmatic function of Reason provides the agency procuring the
upward trend of animal evolution.--Alfred
North Whitehead
,
The Function of Reason,,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1929, p. 27
But when mentality is working at a high level, it brings novelty
into the appetitions of mental experience. In this function, there
is a sheer element of anarchy. But mentality now becomes
self-regulative. It canalizes its own operations by its own
judgments. It introduces a higher appetition which discriminates
among its own anarchic productions. Reason appears. It is Reason,
thus conceived, which is the subject-matter of this discussion. We
have to consider the introduction of anarchy, the revolt from
anarchy, the use of anarchy, and the regulation of anarchy. Reason
civilizes the brute force of anarchic appetition. Apart from
anarchic appetition, nature is doomed to slow descent towards
nothingness. Mere repetitive experience gradually eliminates element
after element and fades towards vacuity. Mere anarchic appetition
accomplishes quickly the same end, reached slowly by repetition.
Reason is the special embodiment in us of the disciplined
counter-agency which saves the world.--Alfred
North Whitehead
,
The Function of Reason,,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1929, p.34.
This habit of mind is characterized by critical thinking skills and
reflective thinking. Those with such a mindset accept science and
technology and place trust in reasoning and experimentation and fact
gathering and testing of hypotheses and ideas. They are willing to
offer and ask for reasons and evidence in support of claims that are
made and in defense of positions taken on issues. The rational mind
accepts Whitehead's pronouncement that:
The rejection of any source of evidence is always treason to that
ultimate rationalism which urges forward science and philosophy
alike.---Alfred
North Whitehead
,
The Function of Reason,,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1929, p. 61.
The critical use of reasoning or rationality itself is applied
across disciplines. Science is but one form of thinking in which
reasoning is an essential method for arriving at conclusions and for
defending positions using evidence in support of claims and for the
verification of hypotheses. The rationalistic habit of mind
develops appreciation for methodology and for systemic knowledge
along with reliance on logical analysis and inference. The rational
mindset is not one that embraces the philosophical tradition of
rationalism with its holding for innate ideas or for truths that are
realizable through thought alone. The rational mindset values
science but does not make it either the summum bonum
or establish science on a pedestal of faith. The rational habit of
thinking is far more likely to interpret and analyze religion as a
social phenomena and religious beliefs as expressions of values than
to accept religious claims as literal truth or unquestionable
claims. The rational mind is found in and can be developed by
nearly all forms of writing. It is in evidence in analysis and
criticism of literature, film, music, the visual arts and all
expressions of human creation in the arts and crafts. The rational
mind is found operating in social analysis and commentary and
historical research and publications. It is necessary to the
technologies and engineering as well and to all the applied arts.
The rational mind accepts the role of fact in its relation to the
efforts of speculation and imagination.
The basis of all authority is the supremacy of fact over thought.
Yet this contrast of fact and thought can be conceived fallaciously.
For thought is a factor in the fact of experience. Thus the
immediate fact is what it is, partly by reason of the thought
involved in it. The quality of an act of experience is largely
determined by the factor of the thinking which it contains. But the
thought involved in any one such act involves an analytic survey of
experience beyond itself. The supremacy of fact over thought means
that even the utmost flight of speculative thought should have its
measure of truth. It may be the truth of art. But thought irrelevant
to the wide world of experience, is unproductive.
The proper satisfaction to be derived from speculative thought is
elucidation. It is for this reason that fact is supreme over
thought. This supremacy is the basis of authority. We scan the world
to find evidence for this elucidatory power.
Thus the supreme verification of the speculative flight is that it
issues in the establishment of a practical technique for
well-attested ends, and that the speculative system maintains itself
as the elucidation of that technique. In this way there is the
progress from thought to practice, and regress from practice to the
same thought. This interplay of thought and practice is the supreme
authority. It is the test by which the charlatanism of speculation
is restrained.--Alfred
North Whitehead
,
The Function of Reason,,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1929, p. 80-81.
Beliefs are subjected to a critical examination by the use of
reason. The logic to be employed is as described by Whitehead, a
derivation of what starts with the Greeks in the West:
The Greek logic as finally perfected by the experience of centuries
provides a set of criteria to which the content of a belief should
be subjected. These are:
(i) Conformity to intuitive experience:
(ii) Clarity of the propositional content:
(iii) Internal Logical consistency:
(iv) External Logical consistency:
(v) Status of a Logical scheme with,
(a) widespread conformity to experience,
(b) no discordance with experience,
(c) coherence among its categoreal notions,
(d) methodological consequences.
The misconception which has haunted the ages of thought down to the
present time is that these criteria are easy to apply.--Alfred
North Whitehead
,
The Function of Reason,,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1929, p. 67-68.
Unlike with the tenacious-authoritarian mindset and the relativistic
mindset people are not acculturated into possession of the
rationalist mindset with little conscious effort on their part. This
habit of mind is the result of effort and self reflective thought.
It is not perceived of as simply the way people think within their
culture or their cultural groups. It is the result of education,
whether formal or informal. It is not an innate habit of mind.
Neither is it often the mindset typical of most groups within which
people develop and from which they learn. It is the mindset of
professional scholars and researchers and people of letters and
others who are themselves products of formal education.
Despite the fact that many secondary institutions embrace the
rational mindset as an educational goal and the goal of General
Education, students with the rational mindset are nearly always in
the minority of those entering colleges in this country at this
time, particularly in large urban settings with a multicultural
setting and a multicultural student body-a stated desire of many
colleges. Students with the rational mindset are both native born
and immigrants. They share much in common with faculty and find it
relatively easy to perform well on all forms of assessments prepared
by a faculty with rational mindsets of their own.
With this habit of mind faith is the result of what reason holds and
supports and faith is maintained for the sake of hope. Belief
systems must adhere to the rational criteria of coherency and
consistency. This is so even for religious belief systems and they
are held as sources of value and as the reservoir for hope.
Religious language is operative as expressive of axiological
positions rather than empirical claims.
The rational views the tenacious-authoritarian as uncritical and
even irrational and in need of further education or development into
the rational.
The rational views the relativistic as riddled with inconsistencies
and self refutations and in need of reform that incorporates the
core values of the rational.
The Relativistic Habit of Mind
There are a large number of students with the relativistic mindset.
In the main they are products of European and American cultures that
are post religious and post modern. For them all opinions are of
equal worth and entitled to equal respect and protection. For them
there is no position that is privileged except through power of some
form. The power that establishes the preferred or privileged
position or sets out the criteria for judgments and sets out the
values to be held is not the power of tradition nor of authorities
as established by tradition or by some divine act as with the
tenacious-authoritarian mindset. It is the authority or power of
the social group or institution. It is a power that rests on the
most common or most popular beliefs. The learners who are
relativists will accept as a correct answer that evolution is the
best explanation for the development of life forms in order to get
credit for the preferred answer of the empowered instructor but many
of them will maintain that creationism is also true or even more
true or true because they believe it to be true and are so entitled
to believe it to be such.
As with the tenacious-authoritarian mindset people are acculturated
into possession of this mindset with little conscious effort on
their part. Again the perception would be that this habit of mind
is simply the way people think within their culture or their
cultural groups. This habit of mind is the consequence of a series
of historical events and movements that challenged the assumptions
and operations of those engaged in the disciplines that marked the
rise of the "modern age". The presence of this habit of mind in
individuals is not likely to be accompanied by an awareness of
itself or of the historical dimensions of the development or
popularizing of this mindset. This mindset as with the
tenacious-authoritarian mindset is arrived at through an
unquestioned acceptance of both the habit of mind and its attendant
and resultant set of beliefs.
The relativistic views the tenacious-authoritarian as one of many
possible mindsets that are equally acceptable. The relativistic
views the rational as being intolerant and outmoded with sets of
values and criteria for evaluations and judgments that are not
absolute or universal or objective and , worst of all, not popular.
For the relativistic mind the acceptance by and assimilation within
a group is the valued end. This mindset rejects the goal of having
the most well founded position on an issue or the best hypothesis as
supported by reasoning and evidence. Science is no better than any
other way to arrive at a position, belief or thought for the
relativistic mindset. It is the popularity of the position that
matters. The criteria for accepting a belief has become for this
group whether or not the holders of the belief have a community
within which they feel comfortable and accepted. The distinction
between fact and opinion and the real and the simulated has broken
down for the post modern and relativistic learner.
With this habit of mind , faith is a form of discourse and is akin
to any other in its basic social foundation and functioning. A
religious set of beliefs is as valued as its social setting has
determined. Beliefs based on faith need not adhere to any criteria
external to the group discourse nor be subject to any review by
those outside the group of faithful that the adherents to that faith
need accept.
The relativistic mind has moved beyond science and reason as having
diminished in their importance in determining knowledge or truth,
even truth concerning such physical matters as the shape of the
planet or the origins of disease or the process through which life
forms.
The relativistic mindset is post historical and focuses on the
eternal “now” with no value placed on historical perspective. The
past matters little as an aid to understanding because all thinking
about the past is just discourse or opinion and all opinions have
equal status.
The relativistic mindset flourishes in what is an age of
simulation. The simulation is no longer opposed to the real or the
authentic. The distinctions are not respected. They have no
effective meaning for the relativistic mindset. The distinction of
the real from the fake or the representation or simulation is
meaningless. The real is whatever is perceived. “Reality TV” no
matter how prearranged and orchestrated is reality. What is seen on
television or through any other medium is as real as it can get and
as authentic as any other mode of receiving information. If it has
been on TV or in the movies it is real and genuine and as accurate
as any other report or depiction or interpretation. There are no
criteria for determining authenticity or accuracy that are objective
so, anything goes!
For many of the young with the relativistic mindset fame is real and
fame, no matter how achieved, is the value. All fame is equal and is
itself what matters. Opinion polls no matter how conducted and how
influenced by media reporting are the indication of the real and the
genuine, no matter how produced or measured.
So there are people who arrive in college with minds that are
developed enough to have accomplished college admittance and yet
they hold beliefs that are not rational in the sense of not having
been arrived at through processes involving careful and critical
thought and some beliefs that are even anti-rational in the sense of
being inconsistent with or in contradiction to other beliefs that
are also held with equal fervor.
In college classes the basic mindsets can remain submerged from view
as much formal instruction does not reach down to the level of the
basic manner in which ideas and information are processed and
beliefs are fixed in the learners. In teaching some subjects such
as Philosophy the basic mindsets are exposed. Over a number of
years students in Philosophy classes have admitted to or
spontaneously made claims to many or all of the following beliefs
and many continue to hold them throughout their time at the college
as they are not effectively challenged to do otherwise:
If a person believes that "X" is true then "X" is true.
If a person believes that "X" is real then "X" is real.
There can be one god, many gods and no gods all at the same time.
A physical object can be a flat disk and a sphere at the same time.
Astrology and astronomy are just different ways of knowing things
but equally valuable.
Evolutionary Theory and Creation Theory are equally acceptable
explanations for life forms on planet earth.
John Edwards talks to and hears dead people. (cold reading trick)
David Blaine can actually levitate his body. (the Balducci
levitation illusion)
Science is no more than a special type of opinion.
All opinions are of equal worth.
There is no objective knowledge or objective truth about anything.
There is no real problem in holding beliefs that are contradictory.
They are concerned with being “politically correct” or socially
correct or popular and accepted rather than accepting that there
may be criteria for determining the correctness of beliefs that have
been established in ways that all peoples may share in regardless of
culture, class, religion, age, or any other consideration that may
be relative.
The student with a relativistic mindset is more concerned with
appearance than what might be under or beyond that appearance. They
mistakenly accept that “perception is reality” and arrive at
conclusions that there are multiple realities that exists
simultaneously even when “reality” is defined to be "the sum total
of all that is real". They are as indifferent to equivocations as
they are to other mental machinations that would be termed
"fallacies" by those possessed of the rational mindset.
Tenacious-Authoritarian to Relativistic Habit of Mind
The tenacious-authoritarian mindset that arrives at college is more
inclined to go to or relate to or fit in with the relativistic
mindset when confronted with a pluralistic society that has great
cultural diversity and a range of mindsets and habits of mind. As
the tenacious-authoritarian mindset believes in a “truth” even as a
sacred or unquestionable “truth” and does not want to subject that
truth to examination let alone to possible revision or rejection.
The tenacious-authoritarian mindset thus accepts the relativistic
mindset’s celebration of the equality of all truth claims and all
claims of privilege. In this manner, the tenacious-authoritarian
mindset can maintain that their traditional dogmas and doctrines and
received truths go on as such even in the midst of contrary and
contradictory claims by those who are possessed of the rational
mindset and its mechanism for establishing truth and for
determining which would be the best defended of all hypotheses and
positions and beliefs.
Since all positions are afforded equal entitlements within their
social settings in the post-rational or relativist mindset, so it is
that the tenacious-authoritarian mindset can feel that their
"official" or received beliefs are just as important and to be just
as valued as with any other set of beliefs or claims or practices,
for that matter. This explains how what would appear as
conflicting mindsets can coexist in a pluralist society. There is
the appearance of respectful tolerance and peaceful coexistence.
The frictions that lead to violence in a pluralist society are not
likely to be those of the rationalist mindset with either of the
other two mindsets but of the tenacious-authoritarian with the
relativistic because lurking under this surface appearance of
peaceful coexistence there are still the deeply held beliefs and
intolerant mindset of the tenacious-authoritarian mind that can act
against others if threatened or if the ability to resist being
"converted' is feared to be weakening. In contemporary times this
is evidenced by fear of the challenges to the belief systems of the
various orthodoxies being made by the materialism and wantonness of
the "infidels" of relativism.
A pluralistic society holding pluralism as a value based on
conclusions arrived at by the rational habit of mind is much more
secure than that resting on the relativist habit of mind. This is
so because it would not hold for uncritical acceptance of all belief
systems nor for an unqualified celebration of tolerance.
Education and the Habits of Mind
Education is, in its most genuine sense, the effort to develop the
rational habit of mind. People born into cultures in which the
other habits of mind are predominant and even linked with popularity
and success simply acquire those habits of mind through
acculturation. Only the rational habit of mind results from formal
or intentional acts of education. The self reflective and careful
and critical thinking that mark the rational habit of mind are not
innate but are the products of a series of interactions with others
who model that behavior and encourage and recognize and reward it in
others. In the perspective set out herein the rational mindset is
the basic goal of education.
Not only is it ethically or morally appropriate and correct to
address and seek to remediate habits of mind but it is also a
fundamental responsibility of professional educators to do so.
When the instructional staff that is of the rational mindset or
habit of mind confronts a student body that is diverse in mindsets
and diverse in habits of mind and in their associated values there
results a tremendous challenge to bring the diverse group of
learners into the rational mindset or to have them achieve the
outcomes of the typical general education component of the Liberal
Arts and Sciences core of any degree program.
Among those challenges is the confrontation with the risks inherent
in the enterprise of education involving the changing of minds,
basic habits of mind and mindsets.
IV.
Risks Involved in changing minds
A risk can be taken to mean the possibility of negative outcomes.
In the relationship of the educator to the learner there are such
risks of outcomes that are in opposition to the aim or purpose of
the basic endeavor. There are definite and unavoidable risks
involved in the process of changing minds. There are risks to the
learner and to the educator. These risks include the most serious
of all: the failure to learn and to teach.
The risks to the educator involve charges of being abusive or
exceeding the bounds of what is proper for an educator. There are
risks of not being appreciated or even being criticized for
performing the basic task of an educator to challenge beliefs and
confront false ideas and foster the growth of the mind. The educator
might then retreat from being provocative and evocative and from
attempting to change minds. This would amount to a failure to
teach.
In upsetting learners and causing them to fear change the instructor
may receive some harsh comments and critiques from the learners and
their parents who would not understand the aims of education and
prefer to be left with the apparent comfort of holding to beliefs
unchallenged, a comfort enjoyed by the ignorant and poorly
informed.
The risks to the learner include developing a strong resistance to
the challenge to confront one’s own ideas and beliefs and habits of
mind. This would be a refusal to open up the mind to the possibility
of change. This would amount to a failure to learn.
Beyond the risks of fundamental failure are the risks of poor
performance. Instruction that aims at developing minds and changing
mindsets and habits of mind can be done so poorly that the outcome
may be a changed mind but not a well developed mind capable of
further learning. Poor education will not develop the rational
habit of mind. Teachers who are authoritarian will not develop
critical habits of mind. Instructors who are excessively critical
and provide little that is positive in place of the belief sets that
are challenged and the habit of mind that is subject to reformation
might produce a habit of mind that is excessively skeptical and one
that rejects the possibility of achieving any form of knowledge and
of developing any manner of making effective judgments.
V.
Ethical Implications: Problems
In most social interactions there are some ethical concerns. What
are the moral responsibilities of professional educators? How is it
that educators are to go about changing minds? How far do they go?
Are there any moral prohibitions?
A. Do no harm - no unnecessary and avoidable harm
A basic moral prohibition found in all societies is
Do no harm !
In the context of education that injunction needs to be modified a
bit to what is more accurate.
Do no unnecessary and avoidable harm!
First and foremost and most basic and foundational for any set of
obligations for a professional educator is the ethical obligation to
avoid deliberate harm to another human being. This is taken to be a
fundamental and universal ethical obligation found in all human
societies. It appears as if it is a necessary feature for social
life. It is a basic principle found supported by all religious
traditions. It is also a principle that finds support being
provided for it from nearly every philosophical tradition of thought
in ethics. So with this as the" given" what sort of harms are to
be avoided?
Harm can be produced through omission as well as commission of
acts. When harm occurs and it has been produced by the educator and
it was foreseeable, avoidable and unnecessary then there is a
failure to have fulfilled an obligation that is both a professional
and a moral obligation. It would also be construed as malpractice.
It is malpractice to perform at a level below the standard set.
The standard is set to avoid whatever harm is foreseeable, avoidable
and unnecessary.
Professionals with a fiduciary responsibility are not responsible
for harms that is
not foreseeable. Such harms may not be avoidable at all.
Professionals with a fiduciary responsibility are not responsible
for harm that is not capable of being avoided by that very reason.
Professionals with a fiduciary responsibility are not responsible
for harm that is a necessary part of what they are doing for those
who entrust themselves into the care of the professional.
It is not necessary to avoid all possible harm. There
may be and often is some harm that will be caused in order to
achieve the basic aim of the endeavor. Even so if that goal, aim or
purpose can be achieved without the harm then the harm should be
avoided. The harms that are avoidable and unnecessary can be
distinguished from those that are necessary and unavoidable as will
be seen below. At this point the concern is on the reasoning for
causing such harms as may be necessary. What benefit justifies
harming a person?
Whose benefit is to be achieved? Most learners would look to their
own benefit and that would be to realize some instrumental value for
the achievement of some personal end. Professional educators have a
responsibility to not only benefit their learners but to do so in
service to the greater society for which the aim is to increase
human intellectual resources for social cohesion and progress. In
serving the greater society individual learners may not appreciate
or accept that the professional educator will be causing some harm
that is avoidable in the view of the individual learner with
individual self interested goals but not avoidable if either the
enrichment and empowerment (education) of the learner or the more
general social goals of improving human intellectual resources are
to be realized.
In changing minds there is quite often harm caused to learners. The
task is to minimize that harm to what is absolutely necessary to
produce the change and the growth of the learner. How is harm to be
envisioned and dealt with, particularly when the aims of education
are not simply to provide for benefit to the individual learners but
to benefit society, serve the public interest and increase the
public good through educating to increase the human intellectual
resources?
As an analogy consider the role of medical provider to the person in
need of such services as compared to that of the professional
educator to the persons who receive instruction. This analogy is
not to be taken as being an exact analogy nor is it to be pursued
into every possible mode of comparison. The medical model or
analogy is useful up to a point as would be the psychotherapeutic
model. Either of those is more apt than the parental model as the
responsibilities involved are different in kind and degree. In
common is the responsibility for the one served by the more
knowledgeable other. The difference is in exactly what the one is
responsible for and to what extent. There is the therapeutic
relationship in which it is the obligation of the physician to
restore a person to wellness and to maintain wellness. Does
something akin to this relationship exist between the educator and
the learner?
For wellness the human needs to grow in a number of ways: physical,
social, intellectual and emotional. Parents assist the child in that
development. Parents can contract directly or indirectly with
professional educators to assist them in the
intellectual development of the child. If the child encounters a
pathology the parents seek to ameliorate, remediate or alleviate
it. Parents are responsible to provide for such as best they can.
Many times parents seek professional assistance in addressing these
needs to fulfill their duties to their children. Something similar
exists when focusing on the intellectual development of the child.
In performing this duty toward children most parents look for
assistance from professional educators to accompany their own
efforts to develop intellectual capacities and to address
intellectual pathologies.
What would be an intellectual pathology to be addressed through
formal education? Given what we know from cognitive and
developmental psychology, there is a range for normal development of
cognitive skills and acquisition of information. For students
outside of that range the professional educator would need to
address the cause of such differences in a student’s intellectual
skills. What might those causes or factors be? It might be
cognitive development that was running behind the range of the
normal or it might involve the actual contents of the intellect: its
beliefs, information and habits of organization. If so, what would
be the pathology to be remedied, remediated, or cured? As humans
are born without the products of formal education thus the
development and learning of a human cannot be viewed as a
pathology. Learning about what one does not know is not treating a
pathology. It is not ignorance so much as false beliefs and
mistaken thinking that are the pathology. So where would be the
need for a cure or treatment?
Consider this analogy further.
|
Physician |
Educator |
|
|
|
|
Bacteria |
incorrect belief |
|
Virus |
incorrect information |
|
Injury |
debilitating habit of mind |
|
|
|
|
|
|
A belief held that is not supported by evidence and has counter
evidence in abundance available to the believer is as a bacteria.
An educator can identify such beliefs and then attempt to remedy
them if there is an available “anti-biotic” in the form of counter
evidence or the presentation of other beliefs held by the learner
that are inconsistent with the belief identified as incorrect in
some way.
Humans also acquire viruses and some viruses remain in the human
body for life but have been fought by the immune system so that the
virus no longer threatens the health of the organs. The educator
deals with incorrect information as if it were viral so as to place
it in proper context and provide the needed correctives and more
accurate information. The learner continues to remember the
incorrect information but know recognizes it as inaccurate or
incorrect in some way.
A method for organizing information and acquiring knowledge and
fixing beliefs is a habit of mind that might not always be the most
effective at enabling a person to make the best judgments,
decisions, and evaluations. When the predominant habit of mind is
faulty it is as if an injury had occurred: a debilitating
condition. Such habits of mind can be identified by the educator
and then repaired or improved upon through a program of studies and
experiences intended to develop in the learner an alternative habit
of mind that would better serve the student’s personal and social
needs or the healthier functioning of the entire organism in the
midst of the human community.
The recipients of surgical interventions submit to the surgeons and
their staff and give consent either directly or indirectly through
their guardians to be subject to the surgeon and subject to the
procedures trusting that the surgeon will exercise the fiduciary
responsibility to benefit and not to harm the person who is ill and
in need of surgery.
Surgeons cause harm to those upon whom they operate in an effort to
produce benefit. They make incisions and expose people to
infections in the process of attempting to improve their health and
bodily functioning. In an effort to produce, support or restore
health there are times that harm results. It is termed as
“iatrogenic” harm or consequence as it was the result of an attempt
not to harm but to benefit someone.
The surgeon should make every attempt to avoid harm, either physical
or psychological, and to minimize it wherever there must be some
harm. The patient is prepared for the surgery with explanations of
the procedures and likely post operative events and experiences
explained. The environment is prepared and made as aseptic as
possible. Antiseptics, anesthetics and antibiotics are employed to
deal with the threat of infections. The surgery is as minimally
intrusive and disruptive as possible to the body and the functioning
of the organ systems.
Just as a surgeon does harm in order to heal, an educator must seek
to remedy pathological habits of mind and contents even if the
process is in some ways painful.
There are times when the ill person may resist efforts to ameliorate
the pathological condition and even deny consent for the therapies
available. If the threat of the pathology to the public health and
safety is great and well substantiated then treatment may be ordered
by the authorities even over the objections of the individual.
These cases are rare enough and include situations where the threat
is a physical disease that is highly infectious. A similar case
where the threat would be posed by a belief set or habit of mind
would be nearly impossible to substantiate at the present time. A
person acting on such beliefs and habits of mind and deemed criminal
would be dealt with after the fact and the likelihood of repeat acts
would lead to separation from society. Although in some instances
the beliefs themselves have been the basis for charges and
considered criminal and have led to additional incarceration such as
with actions that are termed “hate crimes”.
If an individual were possessed of an infection treatable by
antibiotics most effectively rendered intravenously but such person
wanted to refuse an injection for fear of the pain of the needle,
the medical staff would reason with the person, cajole and perhaps
mollify by administering a local anesthetic upon the epidermis at
the injection site for the desired delivery of the antibiotic. The
medical staff, having a professional responsibility to render
effective care while avoiding whatever harm is foreseeable,
avoidable and unnecessary, would attempt to avoid abandoning the
person in need as well as avoiding proceeding to invade their person
or body without consent.
A person having false beliefs, incorrect information and
debilitating habits of mind that were remediable but who wanted to
refuse what effective instruction was available for fear of
emotional upset or fear of the unknown or of change or of threats to
self esteem or of feelings of disloyalty to groups sharing those
beliefs, then the instructional staff should reason with the person,
cajole and perhaps mollify by administering local and temporary
appeasements to secure not only consent but a sincere participation
in the program of instruction. The educational staff, having a
professional responsibility to render effective care while avoiding
whatever harm is foreseeable, avoidable and unnecessary would
attempt to avoid abandoning the person in need as well as avoiding
proceeding to invade their person without consent in a manner likely
to be counterproductive to the aims of education.
There is not a concern for the unforeseen and unintended harms as
they are not within the realm of moral responsibility. It is the
harm that is foreseeable and actually foreseen and even intended
where attention needs to be paid to discern when such harm may be
acceptable and when they are not.
Learners give consent either directly or indirectly through their
guardians to be subject to instruction trusting that the educator
will exercise the fiduciary responsibility to benefit and not harm
the learner.
What is the variety of harm to which learners are subject? There is
the possible harm, the necessary harm and the unnecessary and the
avoidable and unavoidable harm.
Possible Harm
Some types of learning create the perception and even the experience
of harm. In the changing of minds there can be distress that
results as the learners may experience a variety of emotional states
of discomfort:
·
Fear of the new
·
Fear of the unknown
·
Fear of loss of hope
·
Feeling threatened by the unknown and the new
·
Fear of the loss of the comfort of familiar beliefs
Necessary Harm
Some types of learning situations that would be perceived by the
learner as harmful but which are necessary experiences for the
growth in knowledge, self reflection, critical thinking and growth.
These “harms” would include:
·
Loss of certainty- the creation of doubts
·
Loss of comfort- anxiety over the consequences of change and of the
unknown
·
Loss of confidence-feelings of inadequacy
·
Loss of self esteem-feeling ignorant
·
Sense of disloyalty to groups
The single most important necessary harm is the arresting and
divesting of the sense of certainty from the learner. Knowledge of
uncertainty and of one's own ignorance is healthy and a sign of
growth. It is preliminary to and necessary for learning. Knowledge
of ignorance is not the end but the starting point for learning.
Education is the progressive discovery of how little we know"- Will
Durant
Educators must facilitate the entry of the learner into a discourse
that will acknowledge and dispel ignorance. Education aims to
counter the Dogmatism of Ignorance.
There will be necessary harm as there is the pain associated with
growth.
NoPain, No Gain.
The pain and harm associated with education may be thought of as a
most important part of what are commonly referred to as "growing
pains".
Unnecessary Harms
Other types of learning may produce situations that would be
perceived by the learner as harmful but they are not necessary
experiences for growth in knowledge, self reflection, and critical
thinking. These “harms” would be gratuitous. They include:
·
Feeling hopeless
·
Feeling helpless
·
Feeling ashamed
Professional educators should make every effort to avoid these
outcomes. They are harmful to the learning process itself.
Interactions of educators with learners that are insulting or
demeaning are to be avoided as they are both directly harmful to the
learner and stultifying to the learning process and poison the
relationship of learner to educator.
A student’s feeling of being hopeless or helpless due to accepting
that one is in error or that one held a false belief is not based on
fact and can be both avoided and remedied if it emerges out of
instruction. Fear is natural in the face of the unknown and so if
there is to be a displacement from what has been held as known and
true but falsely so there should be the notion that there is an
alternative to complete ignorance and beliefs that are better
established and closer to the truth than those that were proven
false or inconsistent or contradictory. They can learn that we all
make mistakes and that we can learn from our mistakes. They can
learn that Science learns more from disproof than from proving its
conjectures. Science learns more from that which does not prove to
be so than from that which was suspected to be so and then proven to
be the case and so too individuals can learn as much from revealing
what is false or not the case as through discovering truth. The
recognition of the false belief is a part of the process of learning
and advancing knowledge. They can learn the process or habit of
mind that continually examines what is thought to be known and to be
true and learn that it is self correcting and makes progress over
time. Learners must come to understand that because not everything
is known does not mean that nothing is known. That mistakes are
made does not mean that all is mistaken. That to have made a
mistake is not to be ignorant and bereft of the ability to learn.
"I know this is a stupid question but..."
"I am so dumb for thinking that..."
"I can't believe that I thought that was true! What a .. I must be."
The learner must understand and accept that to admit ignorance or a
mistake is not grounds for shame but it opens the possibility for
learning.
B. Paternalism
When can a professional educator cause a harm to benefit the learner
and society and do so over the objection of or without informing the
learner? With what learners and to what extent is paternalism an
ethically acceptable attitude and basis for action? When is it that
an educator can make decisions as to what is best for the learner
without informing or involving the learner or the guardians of the
learner in that decision making process?
Some educators consider themselves to have responsibility for the
well being of those who come to them for assistance. They think of
themselves as a parent would think in relation to their children.
The term “paternalism,” literally means treating someone in a
“fatherly” way. Traditionally, this entails providing for a
person’s basic needs without giving them autonomous, decision-making
authority. The professional practitioner of education assuming the
role of a parent will make decisions for the child (student),
determine what information will be provided, and provide only as
much information as the teacher thinks best for the student. The
educator might even act in ways to influence or coerce a student’s
decisions or actions. At bottom, pedagogical paternalism is the
tendency of educators to act in what they believe to be in the best
interest of the student, regardless of what the student actually
perceives as his her own best interests. This attitude often
results in a teacher acting in a most authoritarian manner, even
though the educator believes he or she is acting in the best
interests of the student.
Important in the understanding of paternalistic models of education
is that the profession of education, rooted as it is in the
fiduciary (from the Latin fiducia – trust) has
commitments of beneficence (charity, benefit, kindness), and thus
has an intrinsically paternalistic dimension. All teachers make
decisions regarding course content and pedagogical methodology.
This means that teachers are deciding what students should
know, what sorts of criteria for assessing that knowledge, the
format for inquiry and discussion, and the normative claim that this
knowledge will benefit them.
Educational paternalism occurs on many different levels. First and
foremost, education is paternalistic in the sense that students (or
their parents) have implicit trust that we, as educators, will teach
them things that will benefit them in the future. However, the
paternalistic implications of pedagogy are not consistent over
time. As Ronald Dworkin argues, children are not autonomous, and we
are justified in making decision for them in their own best interest
because they “…lack some of the emotional and cognitive capacities
in order to make fully rational decisions.” It is a mistake to
assume first-graders, for example, will make informed decisions
regarding their education, and so we, as adults, structure their
education in ways that we think will benefit them in the long run,
and to best provide for the development of autonomous
decision-making in the future. As students age, their choices
become more informed, and so they are allowed to make more and more
significant choices regarding their education.
Adult learners, while in possession of the emotional and cognitive
capacities that allow for informed consent and autonomy, may still
lack the intellectual capacity to decide the content of their
studies . A student might make autonomous decisions regarding their
career path and major field of study, but most students are
ill-equipped to make decisions concerning course content. ( Of
course students in upper-level and graduate courses often do make
these sorts of content decisions in independent studies, senior
projects, and thesis projects and yet these are simply another
result of growing academic autonomy of advanced learners.) In
making the informed choice to attend college, students are
implicitly giving institutions the right to determine curricular
programs and standards, and giving individual faculty members the
right to set content and methodology in the classroom. This tacit
“approval” of paternalistic treatment given to colleges by students
carries with it a set of reciprocal obligations on the part of
administration and faculty. All individuals involved in post
secondary education must constantly evaluate, and where necessary,
modify, their curricula and courses to meet these fiduciary
obligations. The right of faculty and institutions to make
decisions on behalf of those they serve is not sacrosanct. The
decisions made by both faculty acting individually and collectively
are subject to review. Individual faculty members have their
decisions reviewed by peers and the collective is reviewed by
agencies that conduct periodic reviews of programs, courses, and
curricula.
At its most basic level the relationship of the educator to the
learner is paternalistic. The basic responsibilities that
individuals have to respect the autonomy of others are radically
transformed in the context of the teacher/student relationship.
Educators, in their professional roles as teachers, encounter a new
set of responsibilities akin to that of parents. The professional
responsibilities of the educator are also dictated by the educator's
social role. The educator is in a covenantial role with society and
with the individual learners. The educator is, in John Dewey's
view, not simply the transmitter of some well defined set of skills
or body of knowledge. For Dewey, education prepares people for
fulfilling lives not only by simply providing them with the
information and the skills they need for professional success but
also by providing the instrumentalities, the skills and the habits
of mind for continual learning and growth. Education is, in this
ense, like life itself. Education is preparation for continual
growth, learning and development. And so one of the crucial
functions of education is preparing people for a lifetime of
learning. This is all the more evident and made necessary in
cultures in which change and the rate of change are characteristics
of the culture itself.
Like it or not, the educator plays a central role in shaping the
decisions of students, both academic and personal. In giving bad
grades or performance ratings, for instance, an educator can close
off entire avenues of professional development. And on these
grounds, an educator is not only responsible for student learning ,
but in one sense functions as society's "last line of defense" with
regard to the maintenance of accepted standards for personal
achievement and professional development.
The educator must determine for each student:
·
what potential for academic, professional, and personal growth the
learner has
·
what is known and still unknown and yet to be known
·
what there is to be accomplished by the learner
·
how knowledge and skills can be used
The educator serves in loco parentis in the
development or growth of the child and as parents nurture and
support the growth of their children, educators must produce changes
in their students, else they suffer the death of intellect for lack
of intellectual change known as intellectual growth. Students left
untaught will not prosper in the social setting or even long survive
as involved in social life in any positive sense. The ignorant and
uneducated burden us all to bear their physical survival on the
outskirts of society and often times outside of the accepted norms
of behavior. Educators must attend to the needs of their learners
before such needs are even understood or appreciated by their
students. Educators, at least those who attempt to be responsible
educators, must make their best judgments as to how to best serve
the needs of their students for physical and intellectual
development or growth. So educators, having entered into this
fiduciary relationship and its incumbent duties of their own accord,
are actually obliged to produce changes in their students.
Educators have the fiduciary relationship. This set of duties are
based on an actual contract that explicates the duties of the
educator and through the general covenant between the educator and
the community of learners.
Throughout life people grow in the capacity for autonomy or a
"generative autonomy " on the part of children as children in their
role as students and thus as they do so there is a tendency for
paternalism to decrease with the least evidence of paternalistic
behavior exhibited in graduate and post graduate education. In
later life there are sometimes conditions that lead to a
"degenerative autonomy" whereby children often need to exercise a
paternalism in their relationship to their aging and ailing parent ,
a "reverse paternalism" that has adult offspring "enrolling" their
parents in education programs aimed at assisting them with adapting
to circumstances of their aging.
Most mature adults do not want to be treated as if they were
children: they want to maintain their autonomy and right of
self-determination. The law supports the rights of individuals to
make their own decisions and their right to the information needed
to make good decisions. This paternalistic model may work well with
small children and those lacking full intellectual capacity as
autonomous moral agents capable of responsible decision- making.
Paternalism does not work well as children mature into adults and
certainly becomes most problematic, if not downright insulting, when
used with adults. Nonetheless, in education the relationship
involving the educator and the learner is always one where the
parties are not equal in knowledge or skills, and so there is often
need for the learner to surrender decision-making authority to the
educator, who assumes the fiduciary responsibility for decisions on
behalf of the learner that must aim to both benefit the learners and
protect the learner from harm.
C. Whose Benefit?
Necessary Harm for the Benefit of Society
A harm to a learner may be regarded as a necessary harm over the
complaint of the learner if the professional educator is to achieve
the fulfillment of the responsibility all professional educators
have to the more general public they serve in producing an increase
in human intellectual resources needed for social cohesion and
progress. But in this case the harm is one that is warranted out of
a sense of paternalism.
"Dworkin does not draw a sharp distinction between weak and
strong paternalism - and perhaps there is no sharp distinction to be
drawn - he does argue that Mill was mistaken to reject paternalism.
According to Dworkin,
Gerald
Dworkin, Paternalism, The Monist, La
Salle, IL., Vol. 56, No. 1.
the wager view by which Mill justifies paternalism with respect
to children can be extended to adults.
The Wager View: It is morally permissible to restrict the autonomy
of children for their benefit since they are not fully rational and
we bet (wager) that if they were, they would concur with our
decisions.
But extending the wager view to adults requires that we assume that,
if the adult were fully rational, the adult would concur with our
restrictions on his or her autonomy. What this implies is that
1.
Those who would restrict an individual's autonomy bear the burden of
proof-i.e., they must demonstrate that paternalism is justified. It
is not required that the individual justify that paternalism is
wrong, since paternalism is presumptively wrong.
2.
In cases were paternalism can be adequately justified, the
alternative which least restricts autonomy should be adopted over
any other alternative.
Given these restrictions on paternalism, it is astonishing to
realize the extent of unjustified paternalism on the part of the
Federal and State Governments. For example, the so-called 'War on
Drugs' and the prohibition of drugs for recreational use is morally
illicit, since the government has clearly failed to adopt the
alternatives which least restrict autonomy, even assuming it has
borne the burden of proof to justify the prohibition, which, to be
sure, it has not." -
- Don Berkich of University of Massachusetts-http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~phil100/units/unit-07/lecture-01/dworkins_argument.html
As an example of such a harm requiring an act of strong paternalism
on the part of the social institution of education consider the case
of those who hold ideas and beliefs supportive of bigotry,
prejudices, stereotypes, and racial hatred. The belief systems of
racial supremacists need to be challenged despite the potential harm
to their self-esteem and self-image. It matters not how hard such
people might protest the attempts to change their minds on this
matter or the harm they claim are being done them by those
attempts. What does matter is that the debilitating habits of mind
be effectively addressed and that these people become better
educated and relieved of those mindsets that impair their
intellectual growth and threaten social cohesiveness. A person with
an infection that was highly communicable and dangerous to the well
being of others would be required to undergo treatment for the
benefit of themselves and for that of society or be isolated.
Treatments need to be rendered against the protests of the
infected. Such people might need to be observed undergoing the
treatment to insure that they received it and even physically
confined as long as they were a threat to the general well being of
society. This is more controversially true of rendering educational
efforts to those in need for the benefit of themselves and the
greater whole.
It must be noted that there are important ways in which the
institution of education can not be compared to that of medicine in
so far as treatment of the abnormal or pathological is concerned.
In education there are many people who are in the sense above
infected in some way with a remediable pathology who may feel good
about their condition as they do not perceive any pain or harm
caused by their ignorance or lack of skill. They remain a danger to
society nonetheless and should be treated while in formal
educational institutions for the benefit of both the individuals and
the general society. In education the "patient" must be an active
participant in the process of intellectual development if
educational efforts are to succeed. There is labor, effort or work
to be done and this is often perceived as disruptive, painful,
costly and unnecessary by learners whereas in medicine it can be the
case that a remedy can be delivered effectively while the recipient
remains in a passive role.
There are times when dealing with learners that questions arise as
to the appropriateness or acceptability of a program of instruction
or a lesson or a mode of instruction and those questions result from
there not being a clear indication of what benefit there is to the
learner. Who benefits? The individual learner? Society itself? Both
at once? How is it that the educator handles the conflict between
serving the interests of society in having education support the
increase in human intellectual resources to be shared by all in
society and serving the interests of the individual learner in
increasing the individual's abilities to grow and to occupy a
certain desirable position in the social order, principally through
some vocation?
It would be a professional responsibility of an educator to make it
clear to the learner the reasons why the educational program and
experiences and exercises are what they are. This mitigates
unnecessary harm.
D. Tolerance
People have a right to believe what they wish, but that is not an
absolute right and, in particular and most acutely, that is not a
right to be recognized in educational institutions. Whatever is its
status in popular culture, tolerance as an absolute value is not a
value within the institution of education. Tolerance and education
are at odds with one another when tolerance is taken as acceptance
of beliefs no matter their content or implications.
To tolerate some person or behavior or rule or regulation is not to
accept it and embrace it or support it. In tolerating something
there is the idea that there is some aspect of it that is
undesirable or troubling else it would not be tolerated but some
other relationship would obtain such as endorsement, acceptance or
celebration. When the undesirable aspect of what is being tolerated
reaches a point that it is harmful to the person or institution that
is tolerating it, then what had been tolerated would be tolerated no
longer. Parents can tolerate certain behaviors of their children up
to a point. When that point is reached there is an end to the
toleration.
"Alright buster, now you have done it. Now you have gone too far."
In educational institutions unsupported beliefs about the physical
universe including the human species and its history and varied
cultures cannot be given any protection from being challenged and
being made the object of careful examination. Behaviors and beliefs
that interfere with instruction or thwart education cannot be
tolerated in an educational institution.
For example the following notions or behaviors (mental) should not
be tolerated in the sense of being accepted and approved or
followed:
"Where I come from we believe that :" or "My personal belief is
that:"
Blacks are grossly inferior to other peoples and should be treated
as property and made into beasts of burden.
Women are not the equal of men and ought not to be allowed into
commerce or into the same rooms as men in schools.
The belief that the earth is flat is to be challenged and changed by
education. The belief that women are inferior to men is to be
challenged and changed by education. The belief that the cure for
AIDS is to have sex with a virgin(the latest appearance of the
centuries’ old myth of the virgin cure ) is to be challenged and
changed by education. The belief that one group of people by virtue
of skin color is superior or inferior to another is to be challenged
and changed by education. Claiming that these beliefs are part of
one’s religion or culture or are personal to one's self and thus not
to be subject to examination or challenge or the effort to have them
removed from the mind of the believer is a claim that should not be
respected in any educational institution and not in civilized
societies. This has grave implications for the practice of
allowing religious organizations to teach basic subject matter.
“Separate but equal” is as near impossible with religious schools
being separate from public schools as it was for schools that were
for what were thought to be different races. The religious habit of
mind is not that which is developed in public education through a
study of math and science and other forms of rational thought. A
curriculum in the liberal arts and sciences is a curriculum to
develop critical thinking and the appraisal of empirical claims by
the careful review of the physical evidence in support of these
claims. Such a curriculum is not the same as and in some ways
antithetical to a program of religious instruction that would foster
a habit of mind that is authoritarian or tenacious. To encourage
the fixing of beliefs on blind faith or acceptance of authorities
either individual or institutional is to encourage that which
liberal arts education is to be set against. The tension between
inculcating the tenacious mind and the rational mind is difficult to
resolve in the environment of religious education.
The habit of mind that accepts what authorities have claimed as true
without asking for support for those claims is to be challenged by
education. Every effort should be made within the educational
institution to change minds from being formed and informed by habits
of mind that are closed to inquiry and testing and evaluation into
minds that are open to inquiry: from the willing believer into the
skeptical inquirer seeking the best possible positions supported by
reasoning and evidence. Minds should be challenged to grow and
realize their potential. Such growth would be supported by
insistence upon respect for individual expression and participation
within every form of social association. The education of such
minds has been and will be a civilizing force.
Humans progress when they do not believe that the earth is flat but
learn through experience and minds open to experience that the earth
is an oblate spheroid. Humans progress when they do not believe that
disease is an unavoidable condition resulting from some supernatural
cause but learn that disease results from bacteria and viruses.
Humans progress when they do not believe that people are superior or
inferior to one another because of their sex or skin color but learn
of the fundamental similarities and the valuable differences amongst
humans. Humans progress when their simple-minded and false beliefs
are displaced by learning that develops minds open to inquiry and
knowledge and a notion of truth that tempers the impulse to jump to
conclusions and for prejudgment and for violence.
Tolerance has as its root meaning "to endure". Recent events are
making it increasingly clear that the celebration of tolerance as a
high value is something that needs to be rethought. Endurance of
behaviors that are threatening to civilization itself is no longer
desirable. In the assault upon innocent lives and the core values
that mark civilization itself, the idea of unqualified tolerance and
the practice of permitting people to maintain their beliefs and
habits of mind unchallenged by education are no longer to be
tolerated.
It was never a very good idea to make tolerance so important or to
identify it as a cardinal virtue for a liberal or democratic
society. Unlimited tolerance could never serve as part of some
universal bedrock for society or culture let alone for
civilization. Tolerance as an absolute could not be promoted if it
would mean to tolerate the intolerant. That is a self defeating
notion. Those who hold beliefs that are intolerant of those not
sharing those beliefs are a danger to those desiring to be
tolerant. The fanatic believers often want all others to join with
them in their beliefs or to remove the non-believers altogether:
convert or die. Tolerating killers is not a good idea. Tolerating
that which produces, supports and encourages killers is also not a
good idea.
Tolerance has always implied a temporary state of affairs. It has
always indicated that what was to be tolerated was not altogether to
be accepted and certainly not promoted or valued highly: it was to
be simply put up with, but up to a point. The toleration of belief
systems that support the destruction of the social fabric through
deliberate acts of homicide and homicidal acts targeting the
innocent and children and the needy has now reached that point where
tolerance can be tolerated no longer.
What exactly is no longer to be tolerated? Acts of violence have
never been tolerated. So, the ideas, the beliefs, and the belief
systems that lead to and support and celebrate those acts of
violence are not to be tolerated. The belief systems that threaten
human life and civilization itself cannot be tolerated. Mental
process and beliefs set against humans being civil towards one
another and advancing their interests, their abilities to realize
their values are not to be tolerated. Such beliefs need to be
challenged and they need to be changed. The minds that possess the
ideas, beliefs, sets of beliefs and habits of mind that oppose civil
lives need to be changed. Education is the institution that serves
societies in changing the minds of its members in a fashion that
promotes the development of individuals and provides for the social
cohesion and progress needed for the social life. Educational
institutions that offer mere vocational training and permit
simple-minded holding of beliefs fail to produce minds that are open
to ideas and that insist on the critical examination, review and
evaluation of ideas before holding them to be true and acting upon
them. Such genuinely uneducated minds are the target of attack by
those possessed of the opposite: minds that are programmed to refuse
careful examination of beliefs.
This is not so much a clash of cultures or a culture war. It is an
assault on civilization itself. Those who commit the violent acts
against innocent people, children, the aged, and those who disagree
with them or who do not share their views or values attack not so
much people as the very way of life and the values supporting that
way of life of those who are respectful of persons and tolerant in a
positive qualified sense, that is, as supporting the open
exploration of ideas and the progress of thought and of institutions
following upon such thought and that way of life is one identified
with being civilized. Those who organize to commit violence
against those of a different mind do not simply act out against
freedom and materialism or any particular listing of the attributes
of the enemy they despise and would eliminate, they act against the
values placed on human life: the idea that innocent people are not
to be harmed and other ideas that mark being civilized, support
civility and permit the process of civilization.
Civilization is represented in those who are compassionate to those
in need. Civilization is represented in the idea that children are
not to be killed or offered up in sacrifice in the service of some
ideal, and particularly not in service of some political cause.
Those who commit these acts are barbarians in the sense of being
truly foreign or outside of the culture of civilization itself as
they hold different values from those who cherish civilized life and
value its continued progression.
What is it that advances the process of civilization? It is the
process of educating people that develops human potential by
development of minds capable of critical thought and evaluation. It
is a process of intellectual growth that moves beyond basing human
action on beliefs alone. Civilization advances not on belief but on
knowledge. It is knowledge of the cause of disease that leads to
their curtailment or elimination. It is knowledge of the plight of
the other that can develop effective feelings of empathy and
sympathy.
Belief can serve for a time as a basis for social unity and
identification. Belief can help humans to form groups and deal with
one another and the environment. But beliefs can and do lead to
some most horrible atrocities as people come to hold the
continuation of their beliefs as more important than life itself.
This occurs when beliefs are challenged by experiences that
contradict those beliefs. Then some, fearing loss of all identity
and value, might react to remove the perceived threats to those
beliefs even to the point of lethal violence. In the defense of
such beliefs, particularly those supporting intolerance, humans are
killed. Innocent humans are killed, children are killed, and the
injured and needy and incapable of defense are killed.
Before the killing of humans there must be the killing of knowledge
and truth and value for human life that would stand in the way of
the decisions to do violence. This destruction of openness of
thought, critical thinking, a process of inclusion of the widest
range of considerations occurs when education becomes indoctrination
and training. The ability of the mind to reason from premises to
conclusions and to examine the conclusions reached and to have them
tested again by thought is found in many disciplines but it is the
basic stuff of mathematics and science. When mathematics and
science are forbidden or reduced to simple belief systems there is
surrender to simple beliefs and a flight from beliefs that are to be
tested by reason and evidence. The Taliban presented us with what
education becomes in the service of ideology and what education
becomes when there is a need for the production of suicide bombers.
Education becomes indoctrination with only one truth to be memorized
and the authority conveyed upon the transmitters of that truth to be
considered as absolute authority.
Against this is the teaching that develops minds capable of making
judgments about beliefs using reasoning and evidence. Such habits
of minds must be deliberately developed beyond the earliest habits
of mind that emerge in the young who must accept what authorities
provide and quickly if they are to survive. The educated mind is a
mind that is distrustful of ideology and indoctrination. The
educated mind is a mind that is open to inquiry and wants evidence
to support or falsify claims and theories.
E. Focus: learner or content
It happens at times that physicians focus more on the disease entity
or illness or the infected or injured organ system than on the
person who is ill, the patient. This has been commented on often in
the fields of medicine and medical ethics as this situation brought
attention to itself through the resultant set of problems generated
in the realm of interpersonal relationships and respect of basic
human rights and sensibilities that becomes lessened when the focus
is not on the person. There are ongoing attempts to address this
through medical school curricula incorporating more humanities
instruction and legislative measures setting out basic rights for
recipients of medical care. Likewise in education a professional
educator can become more focused on the curriculum or the discipline
and its cognitive contents than on the people being educated. When
this occurs, educators can lessen the emphasis on the growth process
of individuals as they attend to the development and delivery of
course content. Some attempts to address this are now in evidence
as there is a rapid rise in centers for excellence in teaching and
learning and the move towards learner- centered education. The
current literature or scholarship of teaching and learning is
replete with materials urging a focus on the learner.
The contrast between focusing on the content of the curriculum
rather than on the development and growth of the learner is revealed
in discussions on the relative importance of depth as compared to
the breadth of the instructional program or class. It is also in
evidence in the nearly perennial debate amongst those in higher
education that pits instruction in the liberal arts and sciences
against vocational and professional training. For the professional
educator the obligation to benefit the individual learner cannot be
supplanted by the obligation to serve the public good or the
advancement of the academic discipline.
VI.
Conclusion: Responsibility with Sensitivity
Not only is it ethically or morally appropriate and correct to
address and seek to remediate habits of mind but it is also a
fundamental responsibility of professional educators to do so.
Changing the contents and the habits of mind of learners is the
object of education. Education is about teaching people how to
think, and the foundation of the academic enterprise is suffused
with reasoning, the value of reasoning and the hope that reasoning
will be accepted as the corrective to much that is wrong with
thinking. Such an objective must be approached by professional
educators with not only an ethical awareness and sensitivity to the
needs and rights of the learners as human beings who entrust
themselves to the educators for presumed benefit but also an
awareness of the obligations that professional educators have to
their disciplines and to society that entrust educators with their
professional responsibilities. Educators seek to increase the
intellectual resources of their learners; their knowledge, skills
and habits of mind. Educators should then avoid causing their
learners whatever harm is foreseeable, avoidable and unnecessary.
Professional educators must think about those harms. Professional
programs that prepare educators should address the ethical
obligations of professional educators to their disciplines, their
society and their learners along with their rights as educators
while never losing focus on the primary tasks of education to foster
the intellectual growth of learners for their own benefit as well as
in the service of the social need for cohesion and the progress of
civilization resting both on the sensitive and compassionate and the
careful and critical use of reason.
Notes:
1)
This presentation is a development upon another work:
Pedagogy and Habits of Mind: Learners, their Mindsets and General
Education Objectives
Available at http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/SocialSciences/ppecorino/Pedagogy-and-Habits-Mind.html
2)
This presentation has been greatly assisted by Shannon Kincaid, Jay
Mullin and Deleri Springer. Special thanks to Bob Brain, Louise
Triano, and Mike Fitzgerald who assisted with more felicitous
phrasings.
last revised 10-4-10
send comments
to ppecorino@qcc.cuny