Educational Goods

Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making

Harry Brighouse,Helen F. Ladd,Susanna Loeb,Adam Swift

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226514208
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

We spend a lot of time arguing about how schools might be improved. But we rarely take a step back to ask what we as a society should be looking for from education—what exactly should those who make decisions be trying to achieve?In Educational Goods, two philosophers and two social scientists address this very question. They begin by broadening the language for talking about educational policy: "educational goods" are the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that children develop for their own benefit and that of others;"childhood goods" are the valuable experiences and freedoms that make childhood a distinct phase of life. Balancing those, and understanding that not all of them can be measured through traditional methods, is a key first step. From there, they show how to think clearly about how those goods are distributed and propose a method for combining values and evidence to reach decisions. They conclude by showing the method in action, offering detailed accounts of how it might be applied in school finance, accountability, and choice. The result is a reimagining of our decision making about schools, one that will sharpen our thinking on familiar debates and push us toward better outcomes.

Part I

Values

CHAPTER ONE

Educational Goods

Many values are relevant to decisions about education. We divide them into three groups: educational goods, distributive values, and independent values. We discuss educational goods in this chapter and distributive values, independent values, and the relationship between the three in chapter 2.1

Educators have aims—they want to instill knowledge, skills, dispositions, and attitudes in the children they teach. These attributes are what we call educational goods. They inhere in the people who have been educated, contributing to their own prospects for flourishing and to their ability to contribute to the flourishing of others. Many aspects of children’s upbringing create educational goods. How parents talk to, discipline, and socialize their children are as relevant to the development of educational goods as are experiences in day care, school, and other formal settings outside the family. In addition, the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions that children develop are influenced by peers and by their interactions with cultural content through the media and the internet.

The process of developing educational goods begins before children enter formal schooling and continues long after they leave it. Most people continue to acquire knowledge and skills, and their attitudes and dispositions evolve throughout their lives. But we focus in this chapter, and in this book, on the processes producing educational goods before adulthood because that is when educational goods are produced most rapidly and because deficits in childhood are difficult to eliminate in adulthood. Moreover, public policies, primarily in the form of schooling, have great leverage on the production of educational goods at this stage in people’s lives. Most industrialized societies have taken responsibility for the development of educational goods in children, creating large-scale, heavily resourced institutions—namely, schools—for that purpose.

We further focus on decision making linked directly to schooling even though children also develop educational goods at home, at the playground, and in early childhood educational settings. Similarly, health policies, tax policies, and housing policies can all affect children’s educational development. Although the division of policy sectors is artificial, decision makers are bound to focus on the values that are most readily realized by the levers at their disposal. Schools are the natural focus because they are designed specifically to produce educational goods in children.

We characterize educational goods as knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions. Knowledge, in this context, and to simplify greatly, involves both understanding and warranted true belief, such as knowing the names of the US presidents, knowing the branches of the US government, understanding how an automobile engine works or how a law is passed, or knowing that the square of a right triangle’s hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of its other two sides. Skills involve being able to do things, from analyzing data and identifying errors in reasoning to planning and cooking a meal or negotiating a compromise. Attitudes are conscious bases for motivation that normally (though not always) result in action when triggered by external stimuli; one might have an attitude of respect for people who are manifestly kind. Dispositions are the inclinations, often unconscious and sometimes even irrational, to deploy whatever skills and knowledge one has in particular situations. Courage, for example, is a disposition to act in particular ways when confronted with danger. Dispositions and attitudes are usually congruent, but they need not be: somebody might consciously believe that they should exercise regularly and yet, contrary to their attitude, when faced with the choice of stairs or an elevator still choose the elevator. As we shall make clear in the next section, educators should usually be aiming to instill both dispositions and the corresponding attitudes.2

The use of the term goods in the phrase “educational goods” may suggest concrete or material commodities, but we are using it just in the sense in which they are opposite to bads. They are positive in that they contribute to valuable outcomes for the individual possessing them or for others in either the present or the future. Cognitive skills and socioemotional capacities are educational goods because they generate value in the current period for those who are being educated and contribute to their future income and health and hence to their overall well-being. They also benefit others, whose lives go better through the actions of those being educated. Attitudes and dispositions that enable and incline individuals to participate responsibly in the democratic process may sometimes benefit the individuals themselves and may at other times benefit only other members of their polity. They are educational goods in both cases.

The fundamental value that underlies our discussion of educational goods is human flourishing. Educational goods help people’s lives go well—and what matters, ultimately, is the creation and distribution of opportunities for people to flourish. We focus on opportunities for flourishing rather than flourishing itself because the most that educational goods can do is equip people with what they need for their lives to go well, including the capacity to make good choices. Whether people do in fact choose well is a further question. Luck—serious injury or illness, for example—is also bound to play a role in determining the extent of people’s flourishing however well equipped they are and however well they choose. Figure 1.1 describes this relationship.

As a guiding principle, “produce opportunities for human flourishing” is not, by itself, particularly helpful. It does not describe flourishing in enough detail to identify human qualities that are likely to enhance it. In order to act on the principle, one needs to know what constitutes human well-being, because otherwise one cannot have a sense of what knowledge, skills, dispositions, and attitudes to aim for. Although there is widespread agreement on some elements of flourishing, there is no consensus theory.3 Rather than attempting to defend a particular view, we rely on reasonably (though not entirely) uncontroversial assumptions about some of the constituents and prerequisites of a flourishing life. Disagreement will persist, but our approach is useful even for those who disagree with our choice of the particular constituents of flourishing. It lays out a method for moving from theories of flourishing to determining which educational goods to pursue and, ultimately, which education policies and practices to endorse. The method could be applied to other conceptualizations of flourishing.

Figure 1.1. Educational goods and flourishing.

The value of any given set of knowledge and skills depends on context. In the United States today, literacy is more or less essential for generating income in the labor market, but it was much less important in the eighteenth century. Physical strength and coordination are less valuable today than they were then, and technological change has reduced their value even since the 1970s. Some capacities, of course, such as the capacity to defer gratification or the cognitive capacities that psychologists call “executive function” (planning for the future, attention, working memory, connecting past experiences to present situations), may be essential for some reasonably high level of well-being regardless of context. So decision makers have to supplement the directive “promote flourishing” with a set of intermediate educational aims, which are the specific educational goods—knowledge, skills, dispositions, and attitudes—they should be trying to create in their particular context.

Constructing a comprehensive list of the specific knowledge, skills, dispositions, and attitudes needed to enable people to flourish, and to contribute to the flourishing of others, would be an unmanageable task. The list would be extremely long, and the precise items on it would vary across contexts. But we can identify, at a general level, six capacities that everyone should have in modern societies and which, when deployed effectively in appropriate circumstances, will tend to support the flourishing of both the educated person and others: the capacities for economic productivity, personal autonomy, democratic competence, healthy personal relationships, treating others as equals, and personal fulfillment. These capacities—and the dispositions to act on them in the right circumstances—should guide decision makers in determining what specific educational goods to foster. Figure 1.2 shows this relationship between educational goods and the capacities that contribute to flourishing.4

Figure 1.2. Educational goods and capacities.

Capacity for Economic Productivity

In market economies, unless they have extremely wealthy parents or some other source of guaranteed income, people’s flourishing depends on their ability to participate effectively in the economy. Some will not need to work for an income to meet their needs, but we cannot identify most of them in advance, so a sensible policy will aim to equip all children with this ability. Even those with independent sources of income usually benefit from the kinds of capability that labor markets reward. Developing individuals’ economic productivity—for example through enhancing their cognitive skills—is also in the interest of the broader society. The increased economic capability of the educated person increases the aggregate stock of human capital that society can harness to the benefit of all. Of course, this capacity is only beneficial if it is deployed, so alongside the capacity, educators should inculcate a disposition to work. As with other dispositions, the educator must exercise and encourage moderation. For most people a flourishing life will be one in which the disposition to work is balanced by other dispositions (e.g., to engage in leisure activities or to devote oneself to friends and family).5

Capacity for Personal Autonomy

Children benefit from the ability to make and act on well-informed and well-thought-out judgments about both how to live and what to do in their everyday lives. For human beings to flourish, they need to engage in activities and relationships that reflect their sense of who they are and what matters to them. So, for example, some people may flourish within the constraints laid down by the religious strictures of their parents, but others may be stunted by those same requirements. Knowledge of other religious views, and of nonreligious views, supports flourishing by giving the individual the opportunity to choose alternatives or aspects of them.6 Even with knowledge of the alternatives, the self-knowledge, habits of mind, and strength of character to make the appropriate alternative choice are also needed. The same logic applies to choice of occupation. Some children find themselves under very heavy parental pressure to pursue a particular occupational path. Nonautonomous people will follow the path chosen by their parents because they do not know about alternatives or lack the personal qualities to choose them. Autonomous people, by contrast, will have sufficient knowledge of the relevant variables, and sufficient self-knowledge and fortitude, to make the parental pressure an appropriate influence on their choice. Whether ultimately they choose for or against will depend on their own independent judgment of the fit between the occupation and their interests. However, autonomy does not only contribute to flourishing via its significance for major life decisions. In their everyday lives, people make and act on judgments about what to do that are not fully determined by their most fundamental commitments—like what to eat, what leisure activities to engage in, and who to talk to and about what. These choices, too, will typically contribute more to their flourishing if they have a reasonable range of valuable options and the capacity to make and act on their own judgments.

Capacity for Democratic Competence

In a democratic society, citizens benefit from the ability to use their political institutions both to press their own interests and to give due weight to the legitimate interests of others.7 Educating children to have the personal attributes that enable and incline them to become effective and morally decent participants in social life and political processes benefits both them and others. The knowledge and skills needed for democratic competence are various and depend on context. A basic understanding of the history and structures of a society’s political institutions is usually valuable, as is a basic ability and disposition to bring reason and evidence to bear on claims and arguments made by others. Institutions vary considerably in the informational demands they place on citizens, and in the deliberative resources they provide. The US electoral system, for example, with its numerous levels of government and frequent elections, places high demands on citizens, especially in those states where candidates for most elections may not register their party affiliation on the ballot paper. Political advertising gives citizens very limited help in their deliberations. Democratic systems with fewer and less frequent elections and more controls over political advertising may make it easier for citizens to participate in an informed and meaningful way, and thus will require less in terms of knowledge, skills, dispositions, and attitudes. Many policy issues are hard for citizens to evaluate because they lack a good understanding of the way the institutions work and of the possible side effects of any proposed reform. We are not advancing, here, a particular theory of what constitutes democratically competent behavior. For some theorists obedience to the law suffices; for others actual engagement in the political process is required, while some hold that competent behavior might sometimes involve challenging and breaking the law even in a democracy. Exactly what the capacity requires depends on settling these issues. But on any account, being able to engage is required, and acquiring the capacity for democratic competence is important for a flourishing society.8

Capacity for Healthy Personal Relationships

Recent empirical literature confirms the commonsense view that successful personal relationships are at the center of a happy life. The same is probably true of a flourishing life. For most of us, flourishing requires a variety of relationships, including lasting and intimate relationships with others. People derive meaning from their relationships with their spouses, their parents and children, their close friends, and even from looser ties with acquaintances in their neighborhoods and at work. Successful personal relationships require certain attributes—emotional openness, kindness, a willingness to take risks with one’s feelings, trust—that do not develop automatically but are in large part responses to one’s environment. We can hope that families will provide the kind of environment in which children will develop these qualities, but not all will, and even if they do this process can be supplemented and reinforced by other institutions, including schools.

Capacity to Treat Others as Equals

Equal respect for the basic dignity of persons underlies the idea that everybody has the same basic human rights regardless of their sex, race, religion, or nationality, and it grounds norms against discrimination in hiring, promotion, and government provision. Regarding others as equals does not require that we care about strangers as much as we do about our family members or ourselves. Nor does it rule out judgments that people are unequal with respect to attributes such as strength, intelligence, or virtue. It means simply that we think of all people as fundamentally equal in moral status. That attitude and the accompanying dispositions are important for flourishing. Racism, for example, does not have to be legally enforced in order to be damaging. Even without legal discrimination, black Americans continue to be disadvantaged, due not only to the continuing material effects of legal discrimination but also to their treatment by others who, often unconsciously, assume superiority. The experience of slights grounded in assumptions of racial superiority—as with gender, sexuality, or physical or mental abilities—undermines the self-respect and self-confidence of the slighted, making it harder for them to flourish. The impact is worse if the slighted themselves share the attitude that they are infe...