Politics Without “Brainwashing”: A Philosophical Defence of Social Justice Education

Abstract

Social justice education (SJE) is a ubiquitous, if inconsistently defined, component of contemporary education theory and practice. Recently, SJE has come under fire for being politically biased and even “brainwashing” children in the public education system. In a liberal democracy such as our own, it is important that state‐sponsored actions and essential public goods can be justified to all citizens, not only to those with a particular set of beliefs. To defend SJE against its detractors, therefore, it is insufficient to argue over the concrete values that SJE seeks to inculcate; it is instead necessary to develop a philosophical argument situating SJE within a conception of democratic liberalism. This article provides such an argument by reviewing competing conceptions of liberalism, analyzing the political culture in Canada, and applying an interpretation of comprehensive liberalism to specific educational initiatives. Rather than defining or justifying all instances of SJE, the goal is to show how some, but not all, substantive political views can be coherently espoused in the Canadian education system without turning into “brainwashing.” Five specific criteria are offered for discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate forms of education within Canadian liberalism. I use these criteria to show that much of what we recognize as SJE is justifiable, not because every citizen endorses the concrete values it represents, but because and only insofar as it reflects a democratic political culture that does.

Notes

Notes

1 I take the informal term brainwashing used here to mean what educators and philosophers usually refer to as “indoctrination.” Indoctrination is regarded as miseducative because it presents one, usually narrow and intolerant, view as being the only correct possible way of seeing the world. It can also be criticized particularly for interfering with the right of parents to inculcate their own values in their children, as is suggested in the Maclean's article (see also Callan, ). Throughout this article I will argue that SJE is necessarily guilty of neither charge.

2 Importantly, the Maclean's article conflates questions of age‐appropriateness with general questions about what type of political messaging belongs in schools. In this article I will bracket the former, while acknowledging that it is bound up with the definition of brainwashing insofar as older students are less likely to uncritically imbibe their teachers' views.

3 Other defences or types of evidence could be offered, such as the claim that SJE leads to improved educational outcomes. However, there would still be a further philosophical question to answer about whether improved educational outcomes (whatever those are) justify the apparent abrogation of political neutrality in the common school system, as I discuss in the rest of this essay.

4 I will not attempt in this article to present any justification for SJE or politically loaded educational activities outside the Canadian context, as my argument is dependent on specific Canadian political traditions, policies and documents.

5 Note that my purpose here is broader than staking a claim in the debates over whether and how to raise controversial topics in the classroom (see, e.g., Hess, ), although controversy is of course essential here. SJE and the other forms of political education I am concerned with do not necessarily arise in discrete, nugget‐sized topics with clearly opposed positions available (e.g., the morality of abortion), but are infused across the curriculum and may be pursued in highly subtle, even unconscious, ways, such as in the choice of texts or offhand comments. This exacerbates the concern over “indoctrination.” Hence, although defending SJE may in some cases translate into defending teachers who take a conspicuous stance on a particular controversial issue (the oil sands, for example), I am not limiting my inquiry to such cases.

6 Other criteria may need to be added in certain cases. I am reluctant to label these exhaustive given the nearly infinite possible scenarios in which teachers may incorporate controversial beliefs into their teaching.

7 The expansion of sex education and critical study of religion are widely regarded as projects of left‐leaning social justice educators, as I explain below.

8 Stevenson further argues that the meaning of ethical terms just is their emotive content, and that there are no moral facts and no ways of making moral arguments beyond emotional debate. I reject this meta‐ethical view, but we can usefully adopt the term emotive without subscribing to it.

9 I will ultimately argue that the defence of SJE appeals to the status quo in terms of laws, national identity, and other aspirational sources for social organization, but criticizes the status quo in terms of how these ideals are presently realized.

10 For an alternate list of five principles of SJE, see Carlisle, Jackson, and George ().

11 These and other criteria for justice in the liberal state are most famously articulated by Rawls ().

12 Of course, the format that liberal societies have determined to be most conducive to such legitimacy is democracy, but democracy and liberalism are separable (Mouffe, ). For example, the electorate of a democracy could opt for highly illiberal governing principles, as emerging democracies in parts of the Middle East are demonstrating.

13 Rawls uses “reasonable” in a very technical sense to mean the willingness to participate in constructing fair political processes. Reasonable people “are ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will likewise do so. Those norms they view as reasonable for everyone to accept and therefore as justified to them; and they are ready to discuss the fair terms that others propose” (Rawls, , p. 49). In his earlier work, A Theory of Justice (1971). Rawls spells out a substantive theory of fair political processes, which he calls “justice as fairness.”

14 The extent to which Rawls changed his views between 1971 and 1993 is contentious among political philosophers (e.g., Waldron, ). Although he repudiated comprehensive liberalism in his later work, some philosophers still view him as a veiled comprehensive liberal. It is not my purpose here to take a position on this debate.

15 Rawls () expresses hesitation about using the term neutral in his discussion of political liberalism, explaining that “[j]ustice as fairness is not procedurally neutral … its principles of justice are substantive and express far more than procedural values …” (p. 192). It is statements such as this that give fodder to the interpretation that Rawls is himself a comprehensive liberal. Yet in the same section, he argues for political liberalism as “neutrality of aim” (p. 192) in the sense that “the state is not to do anything intended to favour or promote any particular comprehensive doctrine rather than another, or to give greater assistance to those who pursue it” (p. 193). Although neutrality of aim “is not to be confused with neutrality of effect or influence,” these latter effects of state actions are supposed to be unintentional. As I will argue later, there are situations in which it is impossible for the state to avoid intentionally favouring certain particular comprehensive doctrines over others, and the same is true for educators.

16 “Political virtues” are defined in reference to Rawls's theory of justice as fairness. They include “the virtues of fair social cooperation such as the virtues of civility and tolerance, of reasonableness, and the sense of fairness” (Rawls, , p. 194).

17 For the purposes of this article, I leave aside the question of how, absent overlapping consensus, such a state position is legitimated.

18 “Reasonable persons,” Rawls () argues, “will think it unreasonable to use political power, should they possess it, to repress comprehensive views that are not unreasonable, though different from their own” (p. 60). That is, they will hold liberal beliefs about political arrangements. Reasonableness and liberalism are defined with reference to one another.

19 While remaining as generous as possible in his definition of “reasonableness,” Rawls affirms this conclusion. Rawls's (, p. 59) overlapping consensus is not intended to include or satisfy unreasonable citizens.

20 Rawls himself emphasizes the need for the state to extend the means to all citizens to achieve freedom and equality. His theory of justice as fairness (1971), which elaborates basic ideas of distributive justice and access to resources, supports this conception. Regardless of whether Rawls is properly understood as a comprehensive liberal, I wish to endorse comprehensive liberalism as the more persuasive, and, in fact, actual Canadian, version of the theory.

21 The Maclean's article focuses exclusively on students in elementary school. I am sidestepping the question of when children stop being children on the assumption that there is a blurry continuum of development that each child proceeds through at her own pace.

22 Using Hess's four types of responses to controversial issues in the classroom, a strictly political liberal would endorse either “avoidance” (“The issue is controversial, but … I do not think I can teach it fairly”) or “balance” (“The issue is controversial and … I will try to ensure that various positions get a best case, fair hearing”) (Hess, , p. 259). The political liberal would further have to argue that there is relatively little implicit bias in educational choices that do not directly engage with recognizably controversial issues.

23 Kant (1803/2007) makes an argument to this effect in his Lectures on Pedagogy—first children must be taught what is moral, then they can learn to see it for themselves.

24 Referring to Hess again, the response here would be that (1) controversial messages are imparted in education even when there is no conspicuous introduction of a controversial issue (e.g., abortion) in the classroom, and (2) it is not illegitimate in some cases for teachers to adopt the “privilege” approach (“It is controversial, but I think there is a clearly right answer and will try to get my students to adopt that position”) (Hess, , p. 259).

25 Keegstra was an Alberta teacher who was censured for attempting to indoctrinate his students into extreme racist views. See Hare, .

26 To some advocates of SJE, its cross‐curricular (or super‐curricular) nature is paramount. The fact that oppression and inequality are pervasive means that questions of social justice need to be tackled everywhere, not reserved for courses dedicated to politics or controversial issues. This is no doubt one of the complaints of detractors.

27 Bill C‐279, which would protect “gender identity and gender expression” under the Criminal Code, was introduced on September 21, 2011, was deferred most recently on June 25, 2013. There remains controversy over the appropriate way to protect transgender people in federal law, and of course transgender individuals are still severely discriminated against in many systemic and explicit ways. My point is not to suggest that we have completed our work in protecting people of all sex/gender identities, but rather that there is some official commitment to inclusion and anti‐oppression, which is more than many states—even liberal ones—have done. I return to this gap between legislation and reality in the conclusion.

28 Once again, I am not suggesting that such programs are adequate, particularly as they are under extreme assault at the moment. Instead, I am pointing to elements of Canada's political culture that demonstrate a more comprehensive liberalism than what Rawls () strictly requires.

29 This is more or less what Rawls means by “egalitarian liberalism.” See Sandel, , pp. 184–185.

30 In Canada, as in the United States, the legal right to access abortion is undermined in many ways by additional laws, restrictions, and a dearth of clinics in many regions. For example, there is currently no abortion provider in the province of Prince Edward Island. This constitutes a mismatch between the substantive stance taken by the government and the reality for many Canadians, which in fact helps define the work of SJE, as I argue below.

31 Neoliberalism is rightly considered a species of liberalism, but one that does not graft neatly onto the political/comprehensive divide I have been discussing. Rather, it is an outgrowth of what McDonough and Feinberg () call “classical liberalism,” which believes in the maximization of liberty through small government and unrestricted markets, as opposed to “contemporary liberalism,” described above. Neoliberalism is not less comprehensive than contemporary liberalism, but proceeds from different views about justice.

32 Many critics such as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the United Nations Human Rights Committee have decried Canada's selective funding of Catholic schools to the exclusion of other faith‐based schools, which is protected in the Constitution. However, this issue is actually tangential to my point. In a liberal state, it seems unjustified to allow religious schools, whether government‐funded or not, to teach exclusionary doctrines. All schools that grant common degrees should be subject to the same standards of inclusiveness and consistency with Canadian law.

33 This is an example of the failure of Rawls's ideal of “neutrality of aim.”

34 This risk is of course in addition to the more immediate risk of homophobic bullying and personal distress arising from developing one's sexual identity an anti‐gay environment.

35 It is possible that these awareness days were also objected to on the grounds that students may hail from countries or cultures where such violence is accepted; there may even be girls in the class who have undergone FGM. This “cultural relativism” concern is ruled out on the version of liberalism I have espoused. There is no place in Canada, much less the education system, to talk about FGM as a reasonable culture practice that happens to differ from others that are more common in Canada. Personal experiences of violence, as well as distress over conflicting messages between school and home, need to be dealt with sensitively, but validating FGM so as to “include” these cultures is not consistent with Canadian, or any liberal, values.

36 These activities would probably fall flat with students in a Grade 3 classroom, suggesting that opposition to the protest was likely also based on concerns about age‐appropriateness (indeed, what counts as indoctrination among young children may not count as such among older students with more developed critical‐thinking skills). Based on my criteria, the mandatory protest of the oil pipeline is not a legitimate activity at any grade level, but older students, such as those in Grades 7 to 12, could benefit from an exploration of the politics of the pipeline.

37 In a civics class, it would be appropriate to assign students the task of choosing a political issue and writing a letter about it to an MPP of their choice, because this encourages democratic participation and political development without forcing students into a particular partisan stance.