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Abstract
In this article, I propose that a careful consideration of liberal-democratic aims of education is essential for evaluating the quality of the Ethics and Religious Culture program's (ERC's) stated aims, and the adequacy of its strategy for implementing those aims. The core of the author's argument is that the ERC fails to distinguish clearly between the aim of promoting personal autonomy and flourishing and the aim of promoting democratic civic virtue. This failure, he argues, leads to educational confusion and potentially to grievous mis-educational consequences. In Section 1, he elaborates the two fundamental aims of liberal-democratic education through a discussion of recent work in contemporary philosophy of education. In Section 2, he discusses the dangers of conflating different liberal-educational aims as they arise in the ERC. In Section 3, he focuses on the missing dimension of ethical and political conflict in the ERC's notion of civic education.
Notes
The title comes from Locke's Essay Concerning Toleration, as cited in Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Liberal Education: The United States Example”, in Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, eds. K. McDonough and W. Feinberg. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57.
See Ron Morris's contribution to this special issue.
M. Schleifer, “Québec's ethics and religion course is worth defending; it has become a model of how to foster respect and tolerance,” The Montreal Gazette, May 19, 2009, p. A17.
A. Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 19.
T.H. McLaughlin, “The Burdens and Dilemmas of Common Schooling,” in Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, eds. K. McDonough and W. Feinberg (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122–123.
Ibid., 121–122.
For an excellent general discussion of the moral and political aims of education from a liberal-democratic perspective, see H. Brighouse, “The Moral and Political Aspects of Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education, ed. H. Siegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35–51.
“Education for Citizenship,” in Education in Morality eds. Terence McLaughlin and Mark Halstead (London, UK: Routledge, 1999), 91. Also see Brighouse, 2009, 40.
Will Kymlicka, “Education for Citizenship” in Education in Morality, eds. Terence McLaughlin and Mark Halstead (London: Routledge, 1999), 79–102.
Brighouse, 2009, 36.
E. Callan, “Discrimination and Religious Schooling,” in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, eds. W. Kymlicka and W. Norman (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 60.
S. Burtt, “Comprehensive Educations and the Liberal Understanding of Autonomy,” in Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, eds. K. McDonough and W. Feinberg (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 179–208. See also: S. Burtt, “In Defense of Yoder: Political Authority and the Public Schools,” in NOMOS 38: Political Order, eds. I. Shapiro and R. Hardin (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 412–437.
K. Strike, “Liberalism, Citizenship and the Private Interest in Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 17 (1998): 225. I should also note here that my discussion of personal autonomy and practical reasoning dovetails with Ron Morris's concerns about the ERC's move, in its final version, away from an emphasis on the “subjective” aspects of personal reflection. See R. Morris, “Cultivating Reflection and Understanding: Foundations and Orientations of Québec's Ethics and Religious Culture Program,” this volume.
I have borrowed this example from David Waddington. He discussed the real life legal case of Richard Morin, who was fired from his job as a teacher in Prince Edward Island, Canada, for showing his Grade 9 class a film that was critical of Christianity as part of a unit on “What Religion Means to Different People”. This was in 1988. Morin was eventually vindicated in 2002 when a higher court overturned an earlier ruling supporting the school's decision to fire him. Waddington discusses this case in an interesting paper, “A right to speak out: The Morin case and its implications for teachers’ free expression,” forthcoming in Interchange, 2011.
Much more could be said here—for example, if the teacher has indeed determined her primary purpose to be the cultivation of civic virtue, further questions can arise in relation to the different ends with respect to which civic virtue might be valuable. For example, the teacher may be primarily concerned with fostering an understanding of the complexities involved in balancing considerations of difference and commonality, between minority rights and a vision of the greater good. Or the teacher may be concerned primarily with promoting capacities associated with criticism of political authority, or with promoting a sense of welcoming inclusion and belonging among students from different ethnic and national backgrounds. On these points, see: T. Modood, Still Not Easy Being British: Struggles for a Multicultural Citizenship (Trent, UK: Trentham Books, 2010), 6–7.
Notably, the focus on liberal-democratic constraints here does not commit me to any particular conception of liberal-democratic citizenship or civic virtue. These constraints apply to any conception of citizenship that aspires to be consistent with liberal principles of justice and democratic commitments to collective political authority. This is evident, for example, in Claudia Ruitenberg's interesting critique of Callan's book Creating Citizens. There she argued that Callan's particular (Rawlsian) conception of civic deliberation is deficient precisely because it understates the degree of conflict that liberal citizenship entails in practice. I doubt that Ruitenberg's critique of Callan stands up to scrutiny, but my point here is just that even her notion of “agonistic” democratic deliberation, which views citizens as political adversaries rather than as co-deliberators, also explicitly demands the recognition of liberal constraints on political deliberation. But if this commitment to “fundamental liberal principles” is to be retained, as Ruitenberg insisted, it remains unclear how democratic citizens who act as political adversaries rather than as co-deliberators can avoid using the sort of civic respect Callan attributes to deliberative citizenship. As such, the alleged gap between the deliberative and adversarial conceptions of democratic citizenship has to remain much closer than Ruitenberg often suggests. See: C. W. Ruitenberg, “Educating Political Adversaries: Chantal Mouffe and Radical Democratic Citizenship,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 28 (2009): 269–281. The relevant passage about liberal principles occur at p. 276, where Ruitenberg approvingly cites Chantal Mouffe, who insists that agonistic citizenship must entail a commitment to the “fundamental ethicopolitical principles of liberal democracy of liberty and equality.”
S. Macedo, “Reply to Critics,” Georgetown Law Journal 84: 329–37; 329, cited in Callan, 2000, 60.
Ibid., 61.
Appiah, 2005, 58.
Ibid.
Appiah also noted that equating education aimed at fostering democratic civic virtues like mutual respect (which are aimed at achieving collective reasonable agreement on matters of justice) risks conflating liberal education with morally, politically, and religiously authoritarian views of education. Thus, Appiah wrote, “this [liberal] moral conviction [about personal autonomy] is not only modern but also, on a world scale, decidedly controversial. It is not the view of the Ayatollahs in Teheran or the Party leaders in Beijing; it is not even the view, to come somewhat closer to home, of His Holiness and the various eminences of the Vatican. For all of these people hold that what is morally required of people is given in advance—by an eternal order for the Ayatollahs and the Curia, by the truths of Marx for the heirs of Mao Tse Tung. All of these positions recognize that one can have obligations that arise out of choice: they recognize promises as binding and duties particular to vocation; and they recognize that roles bring obligations. But none of them agrees with the liberal that sometimes the right thing for me to do is right because I have decided that doing it fits with my chosen sense of the meaning of my own life: none of them therefore accepts the political consequence that in forcing me to do what is best for me according to someone else's conception, you may do me not good but harm.” (Appiah, 2005, 57).
Ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport, Québec Education Program: Ethics and Religious Culture (Québec, Canada: Gouvernement du Québec, 2008): 292.
Ibid., 458.
Ibid., 295.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 296.
Ibid.
For a clear example in which all of these things are emphasized together, see the discussion of “The Classroom Environment, The Role of the Students and The Role of the Teacher” in Ibid, p. 306.
Ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport 2008, 296.
S. Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport 2008, 500, 521.
Ibid., 500.
Ibid.
Ibid., 517. Similar references to this feature of the ethics competency occurs at ibid., 493: “explain what tensions and conflicting values involve.” See also brief references to conflict or “managing conflict” at ibid., 521, 529, and 531.
E. Frazer, Review of Conflict Citizenship and Civil Society, eds. Patrick Baert, Sokratis M. Koniordos, Giovanni Procacci, and Carlo Ruzza, British Journal of Educational Studies 58, no. 3 (September 2010): 357.
Ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport 2008, 508.