There can be no agreement between those who regard education as a means of instilling certain definite beliefs, and those who think that it should produce the power of independent judgment.—Bertrand Russell
Abstract
Many important goals or values of education are tokens of either one of these two meta-goals-values: raising our children to be autonomous, or raising them to choose rightly. Thus, the conflicts between many educational goals-values are tokens of the meta-conflict between these two, and the questions of priority that such conflicts invite are tokens of the meta-question of the priority between these two. Still, the discussion of this question is scarce. When engaged, it soon leads to an impasse, since priority cannot be meta-contextually assigned to either one of the two goals-values in question. Hope for progress seems to lie in our willingness to talk honestly about it all.
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Notes
Kaufmann (1973, p. 273).
Stanford online Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Kisner (2011).
Most famous is the quote from Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: “the Idea of the will of every rational being as a will that legislates universal law.” (Kant 2011).
Russell’s most articulate and concise advocacy of personal autonomy, to my knowledge, is in his The Conquest of Happiness of 1930, especially in “Chapter 9: Fear of public opinion.”
“A hundred children—a hundred individuals who are people—not people to be, not people of the future, not people of tomorrow, but people now… right now… today.” (Korczak 1919, p. 208).
These ideas were mostly expressed in the Kibbutz ideology in more lofty, exalted terms, openly following in the style of the Progressive Movement in Education, such as the idea of “helping the child realize his potential” or the idea of “the development of all sides of the child’s personality” etc. (Alterman-Lahav 1969, pp. 129–130, 133–134). The exact phraseology is not important, only the implicit denial of conflict within the educational goals in question, as if potentials or different sides of the personality never clash.
Aviram (1995).
Anderson (1872). I strongly recommend reading this gem even if you have heard it a thousand times.
See the quotation in the opening of the present paper (Russell 1926). In the phrase “certain definite beliefs” Russell neither says that he is—nor must he be understood as—referring only to false beliefs. Significantly, in his writings on education he exhibits a more balanced approach. For example, in his Education and the Social Order, he maintains that "the fundamental characteristic of the citizen is that he co-operates" (Russell 1932, p. 9), and contrasts the goal of educating people as individual humans with that of educating them as citizens.
Significantly, the linkage of collectivism to authoritarianism and to totalitarianism, goes to the enemies thereof, such as Popper (1945) and Rand and Branden (1964).
The chief advocate of authoritarianism in Israel today is Professor Amos Rolider (2011). A concise argument for the legitimacy of authoritarianism was offered by Joseph Featherstone (1972, p. 97), following George Dennison, (Dennison, The Lives of Children, NY, Random House, 1969): the question of the source of the legitimacy of adult authority over children, he says, is itself illegitimate, because the answer is obvious: children need and trust the authority of their parents. Karl Popper too maintains that the question is best not asked, but for a different reason: it leads to totalitarianism. We need to ask not whence authority derives its legitimacy, he said, but how can we minimize its harm. (Popper, 1966, Vol. I, 20–121).
For the present purposes the two terms are synonymous: since we are talking about classical—i.e., radical—liberalism, often referred to in the political and the economic context as libertarianism.
Rousseau (1979).
Burroughs (1912),
This argument was made in one version or another by many anarchists. Probably the most famous is the argument that morality is dependent upon autonomy, found in Rousseau and chiefly associated with Kant.
Lao-Tze, Zhuang Zhou, the Cynics, the Stoics, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, William Godwin, Josiah Warren and so on: all anarchists and all, in one way or another, individualists.
It was best described by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. (1971 paperback edition, p. 157).
Today the custom is to resort to the expression, “making educated choices, after weighing all the relevant facts and considering all the consequences” instead of “choosing rightly.” This is because the demand to choose rightly has fallen from favor for its obvious utopian connotation. The demand to choose educatedly, after weighing all the relevant facts and considering all the consequences is just as utopian, but less obviously so. To see this it may be helpful to consider the alternative, i.e., the suggestion to choose relatively educatedly, after weighing the main relevant facts and considering the chief consequences.
Agassi (1985).
John Holt offers a method: we must help children learn rather than teach them. Agassi takes this a step further when he suggests self-education. By this he does not refer to the view expressed in Emile, for example, that autonomy consists in complete self-sufficiency and, thus, that we must completely abstain from teaching children; but to one found in Homer Lane, Albert Einstein, and Janusz Korczak, that we must take away the teachers’ authority to force education upon children (Agassi 2014, Chap. 2, “The Autonomous Student”, pp. 14–20.). Possibly the most concise expression of this view is in Korczak’s description of constitutional education: “If I devote a disproportionately large amount of space to the court, I do this in the conviction that the court can contribute to children’s equality, can prepare the way for a constitution, can force a declaration on the rights of children. Children possess the right to have their problems dealt with seriously and thought through in a just manner. Until now everything has depended on the teacher’s goodwill, good or bad mood. The child has lacked the right to protest. This despotism must come to an end…” (Korczak 2009).
Russell offers a criterion: “one should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways”. (Russell 1996, p. 107).
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Yehezkely, C. The Dilemma of Individual Autonomy Versus Choosing Rightly. Interchange 46, 187–200 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-015-9247-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-015-9247-5