Should we forget God, Satan, the Communist Party, Freud, and our mothers in schools?

"I think, finally, among intellectuals, certainly in Western Europe, we can grapple really importantly with Darwin's central message - which is far too difficult and far too reductive for most people to grapple with - the basic notion that man is eminently very material and materialistic, and the only conceivable reason we are down here is to procreate, and that basically life is totally and absolutely purposeless; so finally, for the first time, we can forget God, Satan, the Communist Party, Freud, and our mothers. We are on our own, which I think is FANTASTICALLY liberating, and which would also prove that all the other checks, all the other codes, all the other organizations of our lives are human constructs, which we have attempted to invent in order to attack the notion of purposelessness." - Peter Greenaway

I will admit that I find Greenaway’s “we are on our own” arguments “FANTASTICALLY liberating” at this time of year when the “world of work” starts nudging at the “world of leisure”.  For if I am really “on my own” - if I am really autonomous - I can quite cheerfully delete all those over capitalised IMPORTANT SURVEY FOR ALL LEAD PERSONNEL IN EVERY ICTPD CLUSTER type start of the year email requests, and add the inventor to my Blocked Senders list without a second thought.

In muting the white noise from organisations feigning purposefulness in January, I am free to continue reading Stephen Law’s latest book The War for Children’s Minds.   I like Laws writing in The Philosophy Files and The Philosophy Files2 – I often used the structure of his ideas  within community of inquiry discussions with students.  His latest book is a little different, in it Laws brings a much needed clarity to my befuddled thinking around liberalism, authoritarianism, and relativism in education, he looks at “How do we raise good children?”

I have always been curious about the many different “checks”, “codes” and “organisations” we use to influence children’s minds in education.  And in my blackest moments I do wonder whether Greenaway is right and these checks, codes etc are just inventions that allow us to escape the essential purposelessness of all institutional educational endeavour. I just didn't have a good framework to work through these ideas of what really distinguishes liberal from authoritarian in schools until I read Laws.

Authoritarian/ liberal arguments over whether schools should forget or remember God, Satan, the Communist Party, Freud, and mothers when attempting to raise good children arise all the time in education.  And they can be quite hard to challenge.

I was quite cheered to come across an educational argument for forgetting mothers in this morning’s Herald. In an opinion piece on the educational downside of blurring the roles of teachers and parents in raising children,  John Langley’s (Dean of Education at the University of Auckland) suggests that in schools teachers should forget the mother stuff. 

“Schools seem to be charged not only with ensuring higher levels of socialisation but with teaching children the most fundamental behaviours.”  ......“Increasingly it appears that early childhood centres and schools are being expected to undertake fundamental areas of teaching that parents and families have always performed and should continue to perform.”

Langley argues that in taking on responsibility for stuff our mothers should teach us we end up “teaching less and less about more and more”. Oh I know - hardly liberating in Greenaway’s sense but perhaps I can position it as the “thin edge of the wedge” in the “slow slide” towards personal autonomy.

Then we have the God and Satan Arguments. Parents prepared to pay big money for the promise of The NZ curriculum with “character education extras” that include provision of a special moral or religious authority, believe that schools are best when they remember God and Satan. I mostly meet these as dinner party arguments for private (we like to spin this as “independent” in NZ) schooling over the local state school, but they do come up in the media and they hinge on the perceived benefits accruing from the values inherent in learning environments where God and Satan are not forgotten.

And finally the Communist Party Arguments. I obviously mix in the wrong circles - I have yet to hear any Communist Party arguments on raising good children in NZ schools but The Draft Curriculum writers did feel that NZ schools are best when they remember a set of “New Zealand Community values”. 

These "NZ Community values" are: Excellence/ Innovation, enquiry and curiosity/ Diversity/ Respect/ Equity/ Community and participation/ Care for the environment/ and Integrity. 

[It is important at this point to neglect to ask how they identified a “New Zealand community” and to acknowledge that although I know I should I just don’t have the energy to determine how these individual values were isolated]. 

However, my anxiety developed when I realised that the suggested pedagogical approaches to these draft curriculum values give every appearance of being extracted from a primer for moral relativism (that who am I to judge - right is indexed to the individual stuff ).

For example The Draft Curriculum writers suggest (under Values p10) that learning experiences should develop students’ ability to:

• express their own values
• explore, with empathy the values of others;

Exploring with empathy worries me - I concur with Laws here- there are many programs posing as philosophy in schools which on close examination turn out to be little more than “flaccid exercises in self expression in which pupils do little more than collectively dive into a stream of consciousness lacking any kind of structure or rigour.” (p184)

The first two approaches may smack of moral relativism but the next two sound great

• critically analyse values and actions based on them;
• discuss disagreements that arise from differences in values and negotiate solutions;

Problem is we are pretty hopeless at designing learning experiences that analyse and evaluate values - and we have scant real life experience of it in our media or politics. 

It is interesting in reading Laws to discover that I assumed approaches encouraging critical analysis and disagreement over values would appear to struggle to meet the pedagogical value of deference to authority espoused by the God and Satan crowd.  My inference being that they would be unlikely to embrace a pedagogical approach that seems to encourage a “pick ‘n mix” approach to religion. 

But this is where Laws’ book comes in handy.  His writing challenges me to recognise that in raising children it is possible to be liberal in thought and liberal in action, liberal in thought and authoritarian in action, authoritarian in thought and authoritarian in action, and finally authoritarian in thought and liberal in action.  [I know is clearer in the quadrant graph]  makes me realise that when I limit my thinking about the values in New Zealand's secular education to include stereotypes such as the religious authoritarian and the liberal atheist I exclude the religious liberal and the atheist authoritarian.  Lovely stuff  However, Law's most powerful argument is that it is possible to espouse liberal values and reject relativism.  Must read the next chapter.

Comments

[Stephen Downes]

Depends on how you define 'relativism'.

Related: posted for discussion at ITForum:

Learning Wisdom, by Clark Quinn http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper95/ITFORUMLearningWisdomCQuinn.pdf
http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper95/LearningWisdom.htm

He writes, "We’d need to discuss values and deliberately choose a value system to embody. Whichever one we choose (and this is difficult subject all on it’s own), we’ll want to make it explicit."

That seems to me to be the cookie-cutter response to what is actually a much harder problem. I write,

"Living meaningfully is actually a combination of several things. It is, in one sense, your dedication to some purpose or goal. But it is also your sense of appreciation and dedication to the here and now. And finally, it is the realization that your place in the world, your meaningfulness, is something you must create for yourself."
http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2006/08/things-you-really-need-to-learn.html

So I really do challenge the premise that it is in some way appropriate to raise children liberal or to raise children conservative or whatever. This approach is to impose oneself between the child and his or her own self-determination.

[mlu]

This approach is to impose oneself between the child and his or her own self-determination.

In my experience, this sort of relativism leaves many young people believing beliefs matter too little to invest much thought or effort into. Appetite is loud enough and easy enough. I believe I'll have another drink, as W. C. Fields put it.

Older people have some responsiblilty to discern what they can of what is good and true, and then to teach that as best they can. Of course, it is good and true that we should teach young people how to be free, I think.

[Artichoke]

These are good challenges. And thanks for the links Stephen.

I will admit to always being made anxious about the explicit teaching of any kind of values in schools fearing that “teaching” values however well intentioned can too easily become indoctrination - the antithesis of reasoning.

How do we ensure that the learning environments and experience we provide in schools allow the free establishment of values and dispositions rather than the imposition of values and disposition?

Perhaps the first step is as Stephen suggests to deliberately avoid choosing a particular value system. To let the student experience the raft of different values approaches that have already been developed. To find commonality, difference, cause and consequence, hidden assumption and unwarranted claims, to make generalisations, abstractions and predictions about value systems in future worlds – and then and only then encourage students to look at what might explain their value system.

But then I realise that anything we set up within an institution like school (including this approach) will always involve the imposition of oneself between the child and his or her own self-determination?

I am reading Chapter 4 where Law reminds me of Milgram’s 1950’s deference to authority experiment – where 65% of his ordinary American citizens “were prepared to electrocute another human being to death if told to do so by a white coated figure” (p45) It makes me wonder if the figures would be so alarming if we repeated the experiment in 2006. And then I remember a incident at a local primary school my kids attended where the children had been through a 6 week programme inculcating values around “stranger danger”. A male student teacher unknown to the class came into the classroom when the teacher was absent and invited the class to come with him to see some juggling. The whole class bar two kids left the classroom and followed the student teacher to his car parked outside the school. The teachers were horrified at the ineffectiveness of their attempts to explicitly teach values.

So I guess I do want to impose a value – I want to design learning experiences that alert kids to the consequences of mindlessly deferring to authority – Like mlu I want kids to value thinking for themselves …

[lucychili]

which bit of lifelong learning does this fit into
http://www.unisa.edu.au/hawkecentre/events/2007events/Beyond_Beliefs.asp

where do the skills of negotiation develop
http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=410

where does the question of the models we use and how they interface with ecology individual and community happen? perhaps not in school.

perhaps school is the last bit where society feels it can think about itself, and that in itself is the problem.

where does the whole of society think happen? in government?
it feels like that kind of negotiation space is compacted into school.

schools are a great space for learning negotiation skills as a personal skill but if the rest of society is not learning modelling using this kind of thinking negotiation and responsibility it is a set up?

ps. perhaps the kids were right
1 student teacher v whole class of kids is their advantage? =)