Cosmopolitan Education and Pedagogy: Liberal Education in the 21st Century

It is to John Locke whom we owe modern conceptions of “dignity” (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/states/nc05.htm). Locke essentially conceptualizes it as an enabler for someone to hold special standing and/or an entitlement to respect. Nowadays it seems that everyone is in possession of this “enabler”; you get it just by being born, by simply showing up. This dignity that is widespread among humanity, once only ascribed to landed nobility—negating the plebian, serf, servant and slave, is perhaps one of the driving forces of liberalism today. Couple this notion (and Protestantism) with Immanuel Kant’s first articulation of the philosophical concept of Autonomy and we begin to see how liberalism is a peculiar creature of the west.

One cannot accurately engage liberalism without coming to a realization that implies an inherent pluralism in terms of human flourishing. In other words, a liberal perspective on life is conceptually an autonomous one—one that gives ample recognition and encouragement to personal development as one sees fit under the assumption that there will be equal recognition (because of inherent dignity) for everyone’s ability to also do the same so long as one’s own personal development does not encroach on the ability of another to also flourish. This liberal abstraction meets certain bulwarks as we begin to consider the institution of the public school, and dynamics of identity.

This Liberal idea of autonomous identity can be cause of political strife if we consider the debate over what should be taught in schools regarding identity claims and the seeming acceptance or recognition of some, and not others—Christian let’s say and not lesbian and gay. Again, this liberal idea of identity has resulted in substantial national and ethnic political debate over just what the truth is and at times resulting on a turn on the liberal state’s premise of acknowledging a person’s identity and protecting each person’s ability to flourish. Conflicting claims to identity-flourishing are not easily solvable by experts or ad hoc committees,-- and when considering claims of morality, which arguably lead to notions of identity, there aren’t any experts or supreme authorities to settle these moral arguments once and for all (take the debate on evolution and intelligent design for example and the gradation of opinions therein).

So, then, with these often conflicting metaphysical projections in the liberal state, educating children in many ways requires preparing them for an autonomous relationship with the dignity and autonomy of others. Because one, we as humans are not capable of developing on our own. Two, we are inextricably tied to others via relationships (parents, friends, lovers, family, children, neighbors, etc.). And perhaps third, because the things we come to value that concern the arts, the culture, money, food from other places, depend on the network of society. To be sure, we should not assume that the school has the primary role in educating children—we can rightly assume that parents have the central role. While it is true that the state may disagree with parents on how to teach children, the parents do not lose their roles. The state, in my own and the view of other philosophers, should intervene to protect the child’s growth into autonomy by promoting the notion of choices among options so that one, the child is aware of the choices of others by virtue of their equal dignity and autonomy, and two, the child’s parents still have the role of primary instruction when it comes to raising their children, and three, for the child to make the decisions that would lead her into autonomy.

Another problem then occurs if we accept this notion of choices among options within the school setting. How does this doctrine, then, suggest proper pedagogical methodology? In particular, if we hold true to the choices among options doctrine, we then should not omit some options. In the West, we have a peculiar way of asserting Euro-influenced methodologies essentially negating the other options other groups of people have come to raise and educate their children. For example, Harvard Economics Professor, Roland Fryer mentioned recently on CNN’s Black in America that African-American students perform lower than children in third-world countries. In many ways we could argue that all the options aren’t being afforded to children via routes to autonomy because those options have been restricted to a Euro-American sensibilities and politics of pedagogy while giving arguably proper avenue to place some responsibility on parents (or the lack thereof) which may lead to other critical forces causing such disparity. How, then, should the liberal state decide on a curriculum teleologically aimed at autonomy? Better yet, how can the liberal stat ensure it?

There is immediately the problem of what we can all agree the truth is (take religious education which preaches certain things about homosexuality and abortion). There is also the conflict of how much weight to place on different topics often among the same topic. Consider what I call the Lincoln paradox: In American history, just how much focus should be placed, pedagogically, to his decision to emancipate the slaves? Lincoln is generally depicted as a pariah of social justice given his time, but of what mention is equally often given of the political benefits of the emancipation for Union forces and of how he did not view blacks as equal to whites? The issue is not what the facts are, but which ones we should focus on as we teach children about events, ideas, and subjectivities—not just what happened, but what narratives those lessons are wed in. Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that since children are not readily able to absorb truth in all of its complexity, we must begin with simplified truths and perhaps what is even untrue. For example, we are taught untruth when we learn physics: We learn Newton and Maxwell before we learn Einstein and Schrödinger. Newton and Maxwell, he says did not know about relativity or about interdeterminancy of fundamental physical laws and so their physics which assumes absolute space and infinite divisibility is just not true. Perhaps this argument does not hold as much water when we move from concrete mathematical principles to the subjectivities of the mind, but maybe there is something to it all.

This “subjectivity problem” in education is highly critical because subjectivity arises generally from some interaction with the world (or lack thereof) and there are notions of intersubjectivity as noted by Sartre and also W.E.B. Du Bois’ thesis of double consciousness which unquestionably play a role in how people become aware of choices among options. And since subjectivity is a necessary child of autonomy certain claims of truth are made based on identity and of moral reasoning which are both plural by liberal nature. To these problems, Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that a compromise should at least be considered. He states that when identity claims are at stake, parents are permitted to insist that their children not be taught what is contrary to their beliefs and in turn the state insists that the child be told what others believe in the name of a desire for the sort of mutual knowledge across identities that is a condition for living productively together.