Moral and Political Education

NOMOS XLIII

Stephen Macedo, Yael Tamir

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780814759820
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

What are the proper aims of education in a liberal democracy? Given the deep disagreement about moral and religious values in modern societies, what is the proper balance between public and private claimants to educational authority? Should parents be given greater control over their children's formal education? Are today's public schools promoting a culture of rootless individualism? Do we increasingly resort to prisons and punishment instead of schooling and moral education to control young people? And what, finally, should be the fate of the great project of racially integrated schooling: a project that energized a vast expenditure of hopes and resources in the latter half of the 20th century in America? Should we recommit ourselves to the ideal of integration, or should we embrace other, perhaps better, ways to help the disadvantaged and promote social integration? Should we go further, and affirm that predominantly black educational institutions have intrinsic benefits, such as preserving black culture and providing role models for black youngsters?

As education reform takes center stage these questions are at the heart of what it means to be an American and participate in a democratic society. The essayists in this volume bring philosophical, political, and legal reflection to bear on the practical questions of how education should be changed to meet the needs of the twenty-first century. In so doing they display a determination to illuminate the educational choices that lie before all modern democracies.

Contributors: Anita L. Allen, Lawrence Blum, Harry Brighouse, Randall Curren, Peter de Marneffe, James G. Dwyer, Christopher Eisgruber, William A. Galston, Amy Gutmann, Michael W. McConnell, Rob Reich, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Yael Tamir, John Tomasi, and Andrew Valls.

PART I

DEBATING DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION

1

CIVIC MINIMALISM, COSMOPOLITANISM, AND PATRIOTISM: WHERE DOES DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION STAND IN RELATION TO EACH?

AMY GUTMANN

Defenders of democratic education argue that democratic governments should publicly subsidize and mandate schooling that tries to prepare students for exercising their civil, political, and social rights and responsibilities. They also argue that democratic governments can and should do this consistently with respecting parental authority to educate their children in their family and in other civic associations of their choice. Parents may also choose private schools that supplement but do not supplant the requirements of civic education.¹

Some critics charge that democratic education is too demanding and others that it is not demanding enough. Defenders of civic minimalism argue that the civic educational requirements imposed by governments must be minimal so that parental control over children’s education can be close to comprehensive. Democratic education is unjust insofar as it imposes educational requirements that exceed what critics call the civic minimum.

In contrast to civic minimalists who argue that democratic education is too demanding of parents, cosmopolitans suggest that democratic education is not demanding enough of citizens, educators, and parents. Whereas civic minimalists challenge democratic education from the perspective of “familial reproduction,”² cosmopolitans challenge it from the perspective of cultivating “citizens of the world.”³ Democratic education, cosmopolitans charge, mistakenly focuses on cultivating the skills and virtues of citizenship specific to a single country. A morally good education should aim to educate citizens of the world. Still worse than educating citizens of a single country, according to cosmopolitans, would be educating unreflective patriots. What is the relationship of democratic education to the claims of cosmopolitanism and patriotism? Does democratic education aim to educate cosmopolitans or patriots, neither, or both?

In this essay, I examine the relationship between democratic education, understood as an ideal, and civic minimalism, cosmopolitanism, and patriotism. Civic minimalism, on close scrutiny, does not offer either a substantive or formally coherent challenge to democratic education. The challenge of civic minimalism turns out to be either empty or self-defeating. The challenge of cosmopolitanism, by contrast, is substantive and formally coherent. Democratic education is compatible with a kind of cosmopolitanism, but the kind—egalitarian cosmopolitanism—should not be confused with cosmopolitanism in all its forms. Democratic education is also compatible with a kind of patriotism, but not with a kind that advocates unqualified love and devotion to country. Democratic education is compatible with educating patriots who love their country because—and to the extent that—it makes liberty and justice possible. But democratic education makes neither cosmopolitanism nor patriotism morally mandatory. It recognizes that there are multiple self-identifications that are compatible with being a moral person and living in a way that is compatible with liberty and justice for all.

The response of democratic education to the challenges of civic minimalism, cosmopolitanism, and patriotism suggests its strength as a publicly defensible philosophy. In the first part of this essay, I argue that civic education need not be minimal to be justified to democratic citizens. Democratic education is more defensible both in form and in content than civic minimalism. Democratic education does not make the mistake of confusing the basic rights of parents with the power to deny children an education adequate to exercising their basic rights and responsibilities as free and equal citizens. In the second part of this essay, I argue that democratic education should welcome the kind of cosmopolitanism and patriotism committed to treating all people, regardless of their citizenship, as free and equal beings. But cosmopolitanism and patriotism per se do not necessarily entail such a commitment. We therefore need to define a particular interpretation of cosmopolitanism, egalitarian cosmopolitanism, and a particular interpretation of patriotism, republican patriotism. And we also need to rid these “isms” of their exclusivist claims to being the only morally right modes of self-identification.

Before I consider the challenges of civic minimalism, cosmopolitanism, and patriotism, I should briefly characterize the perspective of democratic education. At the core of the democratic ideal that informs democratic education is a commitment to treating adults as free and equal beings, and therefore to educating children so that they become free and equal beings, and so that they can relate to one another as citizens as such. Free and equal beings should offer one another morally defensible reasons for the laws that mutually bind them.⁴ A deliberative conception of democracy highlights this ideal of reciprocal reason giving, but the ideal is not unique to deliberative democracy. All defensible conceptions of democracy underscore the importance of a universally available education that develops the capacity to deliberate among adults who should treat one another and be treated as civic equals. Deliberative accountability and decision making (including the decision not to deliberate about some matters) presuppose a citizenry whose education prepares them to deliberate, to evaluate the results of the deliberations of their representatives, and thereby to hold their representatives accountable. A primary aim of publicly mandated schooling is therefore to cultivate the skills and virtues of deliberation. Prominent among the deliberative virtues is the ability to think, reason, and discuss public matters publicly.

Why should deliberation be considered primary when the opportunity for most citizens to live a good life today requires many more basic skills than public deliberation? The capacity to deliberate about civic matters presupposes many other skills and virtues, a bundle that certainly includes the basics of literacy and numeracy. But just as certainly literacy and numeracy are not enough. The basic liberties and opportunities of individuals and their collective capacity to pursue justice also rest on virtues such as veracity, nonviolence, practical judgment, civic integrity, and civic magnanimity.⁵ By cultivating these and other deliberative skills and virtues, a democratic society treats its members as free and equal citizens, rather than (more simply but less justifiably) as deferential subjects or self-interested individualists.

The willingness to deliberate about mutually binding matters distinguishes democratic citizens from self-interested individualists who argue merely to advance their own interests and deferential citizens who turn themselves into passive subjects by failing to argue, out of deference to political authority. Justice is far more likely to be served by democratic citizens who reason together in search of mutually justifiable decisions than by people who are not interested in politics or interested in it only for the sake of power. Even when deliberative citizens continue to disagree, as they often will, their effort to reach mutually justifiable decisions manifests mutual respect, which is itself a civic good. Because ongoing disagreement among reasonable people of good will is inevitable in any free society, mutual respect is an important virtue. Good-willed deliberation manifests mutual respect; it demonstrates a good faith effort to find mutually acceptable terms of social cooperation, not merely terms that are acceptable only to the most powerful, or for that matter to the most articulate.

If civic education should aim to cultivate the deliberative skills and virtues of democratic citizenship, it does not follow that these skills and virtues should be the focus of all educators of children. Outside of schooling, parents are and should remain the primary educators of their children. Parents should not be constrained to focus their educational efforts on preparing their children to become citizens or cosmopolitans. Civic education that is publicly mandated is all the more justifiable in a constitutional democracy where educational authority is divided among parents, citizens, and professional educators. I turn now to the challenges, first of civic minimalism, and then of cosmopolitanism and patriotism.⁶

I. CIVIC MINIMALISM OR DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION?

In a “parentalist manifesto,” Stephen Gilles argues that the authority of parents over the schooling of their children should be treated in the same way as their custodial authority:

States do not substitute their judgments for parental ones when it comes to nourishing or nurturing children; they assert the narrower power to condemn some parents’ conduct as inconsistent with any reasonable conception of good nourishment or nurturing.⁷

Analogously, civic minimalists argue, states may outlaw certain clearly unreasonable educational practices but they must otherwise support the preferences of parents with regard to their own children’s schooling. Civic minimalism says that the requirements of publicly mandated (and subsidized) education must be minimal so that parental authority over the schooling of their own children may be correspondingly maximal.

A major attraction of civic minimalism, most advocates argue, is that by virtue of minimizing the civic component of schooling, it can resolve the problem of achieving a consensus about civic education under conditions of reasonable pluralism. Parents can decide for their own children how best to interpret the demands of civic education, its ends as well as its means above the mandatory minimum. Democratic disagreement over public schooling can thereby be minimized.

But what are the minimal requirements of civic education? Like ordinary people, philosophers disagree about what the civic purposes of schooling should be. Disagreement per se is no reason for abandoning our efforts to develop and defend a conception of civic education. Quite the contrary. Within a democratic society, the project of defending a conception of the public purposes of schooling is all the more important in the face of reasonable disagreement. The theoretical and practical alternative to publicly defending a controversial conception is imposing one without defending it.

The fact of disagreement per se does not favor a minimalist position over a maximalist position or over a moderate set of requirements for civic education. Civic minimalists argue that the publicly mandated requirements of civic education in schools must be minimal for two reasons: to diminish democratic disagreement and to increase parental control over schooling. Requiring anything more than the civic minimum, they claim, constitutes an illegitimate exercise of political authority on the part of citizens, and therefore should be constitutionally prohibited.⁸ A prohibition on publicly imposing more than a minimum set of requirements on schools does not follow from the fact of disagreement over what constitutes a good civic education in schools, even though civic minimalists often argue as if it does.

Civic minimalism is at least as controversial a position as democratic education. Democratic education gives citizens the discretion to mandate more than a civic minimum. Civic minimalism prohibits citizens from mandating more than the civic minimum. The ideal underlying civic minimalism is therefore more plausibly a defense of near-comprehensive parental control over education, including the publicly subsidized schooling of children, rather than an avoidance of public controversy. A defense of civic minimalism is almost always accompanied by a defense of parental choice over schools, often through a voucher system. Many civic minimalists argue that the government should give every set of parents a stipend to use at the school of their choice, public or private, secular or religious. Some civic minimalists do not defend vouchers but argue that dissenting parents, especially those parents who dissent on religious grounds, should be exempted from any educational requirement that cannot be demonstrated to be a necessary part of the civic minimum.

Civic minimalism thereby tries to amalgamate near-comprehensive parental authority with a minimalist civic education. Civic educational requirements are justifiable if but only if they do not exceed the minimum. Beyond the minimal requirements, parental authority must be supreme. Is civic minimalism a defensible alternative to democratic education, which permits democratic governments to mandate more than the civic minimum and thereby to limit parental authority correspondingly?

Let’s consider the different implications of the two perspectives in the context of American constitutional democracy. Some school districts in the United States support standards of civic education that civic minimalists say are above and beyond the civic minimum. A school district in Tennessee, for example, teaches elementary school students from basic reading texts that expose them to the idea that boys as well as girls can enjoy cooking. One story reads: “Pat reads to Jim. Jim cooks. The big book helps Jim. Jim has fun.”⁹ Civic minimalists deny democratic citizens the discretion to require this reading if a student’s parents object. Judges should overrule the teaching in the name of the constitutional right of parents to determine all parts of their children’s education, including their schooling at public expense, except the civic minimum. (Note that whereas democratic education permits but does not require any school district to mandate this curriculum, civic minimalism requires that no school district mandate the curriculum. A position that recommends but does not require a civic minimum is therefore inconsistent with civic minimalism.)

Whereas civic minimalism authorizes, indeed requires, judges to override any democratic decision that enforces more than the civic minimum, democratic education grants democratic governments discretion over how to interpret the demands of civic education, provided the demands are not discriminatory or repressive. Parents do not have a general right to override otherwise legitimate democratic decisions concerning the schooling of their children.¹⁰ But why, civic minimalists might ask, are democratic decisions to mandate more than the civic minimum legitimate?

Civic minimalists offer a grab bag of reasons for challenging the idea that there is a range of democratic discretion over civic education. One recurring reason is that “the child belongs to its parents.” In Democratic Education, I criticize this idea, upon which civic minimalists rely when all else fails.¹¹ Children are no more the mere creatures of their parents than they are the mere creatures of the state. Moreover, claiming that children belong to their parents proves too much for civic minimalism, since the claim leaves no principled room for mandating a civic minimum.

The second recurring argument offered by civic minimalism against demo...