I want to clarify some of the things I was trying to say at the end of class, when I was addressing the issue of whether the public school system should be teaching people "community values" and "civic virtue." Originally, I addressed the topic in response to the excerpt in the article that said public schools do not merely teach the public, but create the public; after this I was responding to the various questions and comments brought up in relation to my home schooling background. The last thing I said was that there are other ways for people to learn values apart from the public school system. This is where I would like to continue.
As Shannon and I discussed after class, the problem with home schooling is that it's so dependent upon parents teaching their kids the right things, and teaching them well, and Shannon's point was that you can't guarantee kids are going to learn the values I admired--such as community togetherness and civic virtue--if the teaching of these things is left solely to parents and close family. In a way, I agree. A mandatory public school system in which these values are heavily emphasized is a far greater guarantee that children will be taught to treasure civic virtue and community awareness.
However, I think there is a greater issue at stake here. It is no less than the issue of freedom. In the United States, among all our founding principles I believe the most highly treasured is freedom, and this freedom means many things. It means we have an explicit right to say what we think, follow our own religion, and be protected from arbitrary arrest. We also have freedom of conscience, which means we are entitled to determine our own values and to act on them, so long as those actions do not violate the rights of others.
Freedom of conscience is paramount. It is absolutely essential in a just state. Mandating that a person is not allowed to believe what he or she feels is true is the epitome of oppression. It is exactly the sort of thing that drove the founders of our nation to emphasize freedom so strongly, and it applies to all areas of conscience--religion, morality and patriotism included. With regards to schooling, this means all Americans are entitled to a legitimate education, but this education should not be an indoctrination of beliefs by the state. Such an idea would be anathema to the founding fathers, who defended freedom of conscience so vehemently. Therefore, to argue that the place of public education is to instill certain morals and virtues in children is to argue against the very principles on which the nation was founded. Even apart from how the nation was founded, such a practice is clearly contradictory to the belief that people should be free to determine for themselves what is right or wrong. Teaching children values is a dangerous thing, because they are not yet capable of analyzing things themselves and often accept the teachings of adults as absolute truth. These conceptions of truth often last much longer than childhood and affect people for their whole lives. The act of teaching children, then, is one that should be handled with the utmost delicacy and care, as the things taught to children can permanently define their identities in a way that completely circumvents their free will and powers of deliberation.
Indoctrination of children is not entirely avoidable because of their unique position of not possessing full cognitive abilities, but the only people who have even a tenuous right to decide how children's identities should be formed are their parents. Therefore, it is a necessary condition of a free society that parents be able to raise their children according to the principles they value most. If those principles include community values and civic virtue, all the better, but if they emphasize individualism and self-interest, so be it. It is not the government's or society at large's place to indoctrinate people's children into whatever morals the majority thinks should govern behavior. This is nothing but tyranny, even if it is a tyranny of the majority. Controlling a person's very conception of right and wrong from the time they are a small child is the most monstrous form of despotism I can imagine.
In closing, I want to clarify that I am not arguing explicitly against the emphasis of certain largely-shared community values in education. I am arguing against the notion that children need to learn their values from public institutions, and the further argument that these institutions are rightly the main source of this kind of moral education. The argument in class seemed to be either that home/private schooling was dangerous because kids couldn't learn the "right" values in those settings, or that the kids couldn't learn how to get along with other kinds of people if they didn't go to public schools. These two things are by no means dependent on public schools, nor should they be made the sole province of the state. As members of society, we need to (1) respect the rights of people with different opinions to raise their children as they see fit; (2) understand that no solution is going to completely eliminate the existence of parents who are either apathetic or incompetent; and (3) respect the ability of every individual to come to his or her own understanding of right and wrong, regardless of how he or she was raised. Just because children had parents with terrible values doesn't mean the children themselves will necessarily turn out "bad."
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"It is not the government's or society at large's place to indoctrinate people's children into whatever morals the majority thinks should govern behavior. This is nothing but tyranny, even if it is a tyranny of the majority."
ReplyDeleteOverall, you definitely struck a chord with me, as I feel the same way. I feel that it is not the role, nor should it be the role of public education, or education in general, to instill these values upon our citizens. By the same reasoning, we should be forced to instill the values of all religions, all branches of philosophy, and all of the ideas of various theoretical sciences in order to cover a broad spectrum of things.
I'm a moral relativist, and thus I believe that some morals are not universal(at least certain aspects of them), but are distinct to each culture. Now, one might argue that we need public education to instill the cultural values of America on our citizens of the future, but I would respond that it is not the purpose of education to do this, this is better left, as you pointed out Dave, to family and religion, as well as other sources. This is all assuming we are talking about the moral values of things according to society.
The response to Shannon's concern that not everyone will be exposed to these values. Whether it be that their parents are too poor to afford losing work time, or that their parents just simply don't know them themselves, it isn't public schools responsibility to pick of the slack and enforce a pristine set of moral values upon students. I guess the response to that would be 'then whose responsibility is it?' To this question, I don't know the answer, but it does seem like a complete lack of freedom to enforce a specific way of thinking on your future generations, especially in a time of their life so crucial to thought development.
I feel as if there is a great over statement of the virtues that students learn from public school. I attended public school and did not feel that I was indoctrinated into one set of values or that there was an agenda being forced on me. I would argue that more or less public school does little to influence the values and virtues of individuals. More or less I feel as if the parental beliefs are what heavily influences a child and that the interaction that public school children have with another are what is the main force in determining specific values students come to believe. There are certain things such as being told to follow the laws and interacting within a group are influenced and beneficial to children and should be passed on in public school. Civil Disobedience aside, I don't feel as if public schools are machines of indoctrination nor do I feel as if that's what is necessarily implied in the article.
ReplyDeleteAs a further comment... Where I was 'quoted'(for lack of a better word) as saying that sometimes the school has to pick up where parents sometimes aren't doing their jobs in regards to instilling community morals: I'm saying this because we are trying to rely on a community attitude to fund our public schools that often just doesn't exist in our country. Go to many other places in the world, and the majority of people just seem to think that taking care of each other and stepping up to support one another's education (and health care for that matter) is just something you do as a member of a working community. If we are going to have a public school system at all, we need to be willing to pay for it. If we are going to raise a generation of people willing to pay for schools, someone is going to have to teach them that. Yes, there are people in those same countries that still don't believe in spending their own tax money on others, but they are no longer in the majority, which is what I firmly believe that America as a whole is lacking. Maybe its because we're such a large country, geographically, economically, and population-wise we are huge. I'm not sure if this is what makes us feel so disconnected from our neighbors, or what it is. But until we have this sense of community we will continue to struggle to fund things like public education, which when not failing, provides what I believe to be another fundamental value of our country, equal opportunity. MMmk. Off my soapbox :-)
ReplyDeleteIn response to Shannon, I agree that this spirit is lacking, and I think it's a shame. However, I think it is dangerous and short-sighted to say that public education is the place to instill these principles. Essentially what you said, Shanon, is that since public education depends on community spirit for its funding, it should institute those principles in children. To me, this is like saying that because churches need money, they should indoctrinate Sunday school kids to put 20% of their money into the offering plate each week. This kind of moral education should not be undertaken through indoctrination at all, if possible, and the indoctrination should certainly not be carried out by the very institutions that stand to benefit from it.
ReplyDeleteAs I said before, with children it is probably impossible and maybe even dangerous to avoid indoctrination entirely. However, the only people who have a right to teach children life-governing morals should be those closely related--in blood and friendship--to them. It should not be left to a state-sponsored and state-run institution, and that institution should certainly not seek to emphasize the morals which promote its own interest.