Education in ideology

Abstract

There is a thought that stops all thought. That is the thought that ought to be stopped. (Chesterton, 1952, p. 58)

In this paper I distinguish between two sorts of ideologies, moral (or ethical) ideologies that embrace the conceptual condition of human agency: free will, moral intelligence, and fallibility; and amoral (or non‐ethical) ideologies that do not. Initiation into the former, which are suited to open societies, is best accomplished through education, whereas transmission of the latter, which are preferred in closed societies, is most often achieved through indoctrination. It follows that the difference between education and indoctrination is first ethical and only secondarily epistemological, or, in other words, that ethics should be understood as first philosophy in education. Human agency, I argue further, is lived in particular ‘norming’ communities with visions of a higher good. It follows that education in open societies requires a ‘pedagogy of difference’ according to which learning to respect the distinctiveness of others requires acquiring an appreciation for one's own uniqueness as a member of such a community.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr Yossi Yona of Ben Gurion University and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Professor David Carr of the University of Edinburgh, and other members of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain for helpful comments and criticism on this paper.

Notes

I use the term amoral rather than immoral here, since without a conception of agency it is impossible to make sense of normative statements altogether, to distinguish between that which is to be positively valued or counted as moral and that which is not.

This is a generous account of ideology which entails the possibility that ideologies can be assessed both positively and negatively. They can be better and worse, true and false, and falsifiable as well as non‐falsifiable. In contrast, Karl Popper uses the term ideology as something like an antonym of theory. On his account only theories can be proven false, while ideologies cannot. This is closer to what I have called amoral (or non‐ethical) ideologies. I might have referred to the moral (or ethical) ideologies as open, since on the account presented here they are open to engagement with other moral (or ethical) ideologies. I chose not to do so, however, to avoid the confusion that might arise from Popper's negative accounting of ideologies, on the one hand, and my contention that moral (or ethical) ideologies can be found in what he called open societies, on the other.

Some philosophers have found it useful to make a rather rigid distinction between the terms morals and ethics, reserving the former for the concern in modern philosophy since Kant with deontological questions and the latter for the pre‐modern and post‐MacIntyre interest in virtues and values. Since I hold that the aretaic focus on conceptions of the good is logically prior to and wider than matters of duty, it could readily be argued that the two sorts of ideologies I have distinguished should be called ethical and non‐ethical rather than moral and amoral. While I agree with this point in principle, in everyday speech, especially among educators, the terms ethics and morality are used more or less interchangeably, and attempts to insist upon more restrictive uses of the terms leads more often to confusion than to increased clarity. For example, although character education fits squarely into the Aristotelian concern for virtues and should hence be referred to as educational in ethics, it is regularly designated as moral education, in part perhaps to contrast it with other more Kantian approaches, such as those of cognitive developmentalists influenced by Kohlberg. In this essay I follow the tendency among educators to use the terms interchangeably.

The term amoral is used by some philosophers to designate activities for which moral or ethical assessment is irrelevant, such as tennis or cooking. I use the term in a different sense which suggests that when the conditions of human agency are denied moral assessments are meaningless, even concerning matters where it would otherwise be relevant, such as the oppression of the poor or unequal or unfair distribution of economic and other resources in society. In all events, I am not inclined to separate categories such as sports or food so readily from value concerns (consider for example questions of sportsmanship or vegetarianism).

To the extent that these entail some sort of intentional inquiry, John Dewey might have called these intelligent as opposed to unintelligent habits; see Garrison (1999).

These three conditions are interrelated. The most basic is indeterminism, or the idea that within reasonable limits we are in fact the agents of our actions and beliefs. However, without some understanding of the moral and practical significance of our options, it is difficult to imagine how our choices could be other than arbitrary. Some conception of moral understanding is required. Similarly, if we choose as we do only because it is in our very nature to do so then we could not exercise choice in any meaningful sense. To be the agents of our actions, therefore, requires not only that we possess some sort of moral understanding but also that we can get it wrong, because we are fallible. Here again my use of the term fallible is broader than Popper's. It includes the possibility of moral as well as cognitive mistakes. This latter condition is especially important, and controversial, in discussing matters of religious doctrine and faith.

Some eastern religions, such as certain interpretations of Buddhism, teach transcendence of self. Many of these hold, with a number of western mystical traditions, that abandoning a false sense of self yields a truer more authentic person that is in greater control of her being since she has come to understand the nature of existence more deeply. This way of thinking is quite in keeping with the conception of agency required for ethical discourse and moral ideologies. Other orientations preach a wholesale abandonment of self, losing it within God or the cosmos altogether. These orientations tend to abandon the sort of human agency discussed here, and to that extent may be at odds with the conceptions of freedom and responsibility consistent with open society and democratic citizenship.

Consider, for example, the ways in which athletics entail discipline, strategic thinking, and a commitment to fairness, and how team sports promote the values of teamwork and cooperation in addition to competitiveness.