MARY WARNOCK
I must begin with
a brief apology. My paper will be extremely simple-minded. It may seem
that the questions raised in it are almost all of them empirical and
practical rather than philosophical. If anything philosophical is
discussed it is because the issue arises by the way. I find that this is
the regular order when one is supposed to be discussing the philosophy
of education, but I can only hope that in the course of the later
discussions I shall learn different.
Those who advocate
neutrality in teachers do so, in my experience, with great passion.
There appear to be two major grounds for their advocacy, which are not,
however, totally distinct from each other. The first ground is the
desire to avoid turning teaching into indoctrination. The second is the
desire that pupils may learn whatever they do learn by discovering
through experiment, trial and error and genuine argument; that they may
have the pleasure of coming independently to their own conclusions, with
the teacher simply as chairman of their meetings.
I want briefly to
consider the indoctrination argument first, but this will not take long,
since it will be clear already how this argument shades off into the
second. It is worth considering the word 'indoctrination',
however, since it is rather a vogue word just at the moment.
Indoctrination means the imposing upon a captive child the body of
doctrines held by the teacher (or supposed to be held by him. It would
obviously be possible for a freethinking teacher to impose Christian
doctrine on a child, but we need not consider this case.) The essence of
the situation is that what the teacher says is true is to be accepted by
the child uncritically. The bad feature of indoctrination therefore (and
the word is obviously pejorative) lies precisely in the docile and
uncritical state of mind which it produces in the pupil. the concept of
indoctrination certainly has some use; but there are great difficulties
in marking off its limits exactly. For instance, if the teacher is a
charismatic person it may well be that his pupils are disinclined to
doubt what he says, even in areas where doubt is perfectly reasonable.
If he is the opposite, whatever he says may seem dubious or at least
unmemorable to his pupils. Again, it is not clear whether the word
'indoctrinate' means 'to induce uncritical belief deliberately' or not.
If I am an absolutely convinced believer in the single authorship of the
Iliad and the Odyssey, such that I have never even raised the question
whether Homer was one author or several, then I may teach my class that
the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by one Greek whose name was
Homer, and they may go through the rest of their lives believing this,
especially if they do not develop any particular interest in Greek
poetry. It may become simply part of the seldom-examined furniture of
their minds. Have they then been indoctrinated? I certainly did not
mean to indoctrinate them. I simply meant to tell them what I took
to be the truth. I did not even know that it was controversial. But, it
may be asked, does anyone ever set out deliberately to indoctrinate
another? Do we not always attempt simply to teach them the truth?
Perhaps sometimes, in cases where there is a received body of dogma
which hangs together, and belief in which is thought to be particularly
desirable in its effects, a teacher may say, like the Jesuits, I will
catch him young, and ensure that he accepts it all, lock stock and
barrel. But when you come to think of it this is a pretty rare
phenomenon. For most teachers the question whether or not to
indoctrinate in this narrow sense, hardly ever arises, Apart, then, from
'indoctrination' in the narrow sense, the word seems mostly to be used
of other people, when we ourselves disapprove either' of the content of
their teaching, or of the methods. As such it is perhaps not a very
useful word to analyse further.
Let us move on,
therefore, to consider the second ground for holding that a teacher
should be neutral. This is the desire that pupils should learn by
discovering things for themselves rather than by being told; and this
course of discovery will include among other items the discovery that it
is possible to hold different views about a vast number of subjects,
between which views he will have to choose. Thus, the neutral teacher
will present to his pupil the different views that exist, will put him
in the way of evidence or other considerations which might favour the
different views, and will then sit back and allow him to make up his own
mind. Now it will be obvious at once that this kind of description of
the teacher's role applies only to certain kinds of material, if at all.
There are some sorts of teaching situations in which the question of the
pupil's deciding something for himself does not really arise, and this
even where the material is, in a sense, controversial. Let us suppose,
for example, that I am trying to teach someone to do something. In the
very simple kind of cases, such as where I may try to teach you to ride
a bicycle, there will be very little theoretical content to my teaching;
I will merely guide your efforts with advice and physical support. If I
am trying to teach you, on the other hand, to drive a car or play the
French horn, there may be a good deal of theory involved. But
nonetheless my aim in teaching is to get you to be able to do something.
And when you can do it reasonably efficiently, then you can perfect your
technique by practice, rejecting some of my teaching if you find it
better to do so, that is if you find it more efficient. The question of
neutrality can hardly be made to bear on such cases at all. A great deal
of what one teaches at school is in fact of this kind, disagreeable
though it may be for some theorists to accept this. Reading and writing
are indeed often spoken of as 'skills' and it is acknowledged that in
teaching them we are teaching children how to do something. But a great
deal of mathematics must also be learned as a matter of skill or
technique; and in the case of languages, the aim is also to teach people
how to talk, write, or translate. Of course a teacher may get things
wrong. He may simply teach his pupils to write bad French, or give them
a cumbersome or confusing method for solving equations. But this again
has virtually nothing to do with whether he is neutral or not. It is a
matter of whether he is intelligent and understands his subject matter.
I mention these cases only to show that there is a vast area of very
important teaching, (though somewhat neglected in the writings of
educationalists) which is the teaching of techniques or skills, and
where it does not enter our heads to demand the neutrality of the
teacher. The question of whether he is neutral or not, again, does not
arise.
But obviously,
embedded in these technique-subjects there generally lies a core of fact
and of theory. I teach someone to read Latin, and teach him in doing so
that Cicero uses the subjunctive in relative clauses to convey
this or that nuance. This is taught as a fact, which can be verified by
appeal to the texts. And behind this fact lies a theory, or at least a
system, which enables me to split up written words (in this case) into
sentences, and sentences into clauses, to distinguish nouns from verbs,
and to distinguish, within the class of verbs, those which are
indicative from those which are subjunctive in mood. And so on. At last
we may begin to see some of the difficulties. How are we to distinguish,
in what lies behind the taught technique, between fact and theory? Are
we to teach the theory as well as the fact? Must we preface all our
teaching of Latin syntax (to stick to this example) with the words 'This
is a subjunctive verb according to our present classification; but of
course there could be other classifications'? How much do such provisos
actually add to a pupil's understanding? Do we want him to be thinking
all the time about alternative geometries, or do we first want him to
learn a bit about Euclidean geometry, and then contemplate alter-
natives? One thing is certain. In teaching such subjects as Latin
syntax, a teacher cannot simply act as a chairman. His duty is to
provide positive information, which he must make intelligible by as many
examples as he can. No child can be expected to discover Latin syntax
unaided from the ancient texts. In such a case the teacher must actually
teach, that is
pass on information and understanding which he has and his pupil, so
far, has not. Whether or not he wishes to preface all his teaching with
remarks of the form 'things being as they are' or 'using the syntactical
classification we do', he must at some stage actually assert what is the
case. I think that, empirically speaking, it would create endless
confusion if he always put in the covering clause; and no sensible
teacher who actually wanted to get his pupils to learn something would
think of doing so.
We have come upon
a case, then (and there are very many such) where although it is
logically possible to regard the matter in a wholly different light, yet
the teacher is justified in teaching certain facts as facts, as an aid
to teaching certain skills. He need not continually point out that
someone else might deny that what he had taught was a fact. If he wishes
he may suggest that there could be a different frame of reference within
which things would look different, but to point this out is most of the
time irrelevant to his purpose. A teacher who never pointed this out,
who either did not believe it, or had never thought about it one way or
another, need not be described as doctrinaire, nor need his teaching be
described as indoctrinating. A man who accepts some facts as such, and
passes on his knowledge of them is not failing to be neutral.
However, up till
now, we have been dealing with the easy cases. We have looked only at
cases where the pupil has little scope either for discovering facts for
himself or making up his own mind between conflicting accounts. But we
have only to think of a few more lessons in the school day to come upon
subjects where the distinction between what is a fact and what is not is
much harder to draw. In the discussion of history and geography (as they
used to be called), indeed of the social sciences generally, it is
frequently claimed that it is absolutely impossible to distinguish
between facts and non-facts, that the notion of a fact is dangerously
misleading, and that teachers must not deceive or bully their pupils by
telling them things on the assumption that this distinction can be made.
I want now to examine this claim a little further.
In the first
place, it will be agreed that in the teaching of, for example, history,
there has to be considerable selection of material, even if a teacher
himself does not do it, but relies on a text book or syllabus-maker to
do it for him. Selection, notoriously, may be biased or onesided. The
good teacher will do his best to supplement material which he feels is
inadequate in this sort of respect; but he would find it very hard
radically to change the assumptions of our whole culture about what is
worth discussing and what is not. The main historical issues to be
examined will remain the same , changing only gradually, for many
generations. The teacher cannot aspire to a god-like status as far as
selecting material goes. If he chooses, he may preface all his remarks
with th~ warning that he is looking at the thing from the standpoint of
a twentieth-century historian. But this warning, like the general
warnings we looked at before, turns out to be empty, because he cannot
specify at all exactly what alternatives there may one day be. He is
after all a twentieth-century historian. That he will be teaching
from largely preselected material, then, is necessarily true, and need
not be taken to impair his neutrality, nor need it be taken to undermine
the whole concept of the fact. But this is not the whole story. In most
branches of the social sciences, the main purpose of the teacher is not
only to impart information but to give to his pupils a sense of
evidence, of what does and what does not count as an argument, so that
they may if they wish go on with the subject by themselves. It is in
this area that the demand for neutrality is likely to become insistent.
A teacher must present evidence fairly; he must not conceal evidence,
nor exaggerate that which is favourable to one side or the other. His
pupils must weigh the evidence, and decide on the truth. Is the teacher
thus put, whether he likes it or not, into the chair? Is chairmanship
enough? Let us take a concrete example. Suppose a class to be discussing
the history of Mary Queen of Scots. They have arrived at the stage of
the murder of Darnley. The question arises, was Mary or was she not
implicated in this murder? Now one thing is certain. Pupils in an
ordinary school class cannot examine any fresh evidence on this point.
They cannot even read the secondary sources in detail, still less can
they go back to contemporary sources. They must use evidence which is
merely described to them, rather than presented in detail. The teacher
must tell them what the sources are, and must tell them, for example,
that Buchanan's history was specifically designed to incriminate Mary,
that it contains inconsistencies, and cannot be taken as true or
unbiased. The teacher must help his pupils to reconstruct the probable
course of events, relying on his own knowledge of the period, and his
own common sense and experience of how people in general behave. But in
helping his pupils, is he not to tell them what he thinks is the most
likely account? Of course in a case like this no one cares very much one
way or the other, and no one is likely to attack the teacher for
non-neutrality even if he does say what he thinks. But there is a point
in choosing such an example since the principles governing the teacher's
behaviour in this case are general, and apply equally to cases in which
the passions are likely to be involved. I would argue that unless the
teacher comes out into the open, and says in what direction he believes
that the evidence points he will have failed in his duty as a teacher.
For what his pupils have to learn is not only, in an abstract way, what
counts as evidence, but how people draw conclusions from evidence. The
whole notion of evidence independent of any probable conclusion is
meaningless. Of course there may be cases where the teacher thinks the
evidence is genuinely inconclusive, and in this case he must say that
there is really no ground for coming down on one side or the other. But
such cases are rare. If all evidence were inconclusive, then the concept
of evidence itself would be, if not empty, at least radically different.
Thus the teacher must if he is to teach his pupils to assess evidence
fairly, give them actual examples of how he does this himself. His
pupils may disagree with him. The more adult they become, and the better
their earlier experience of arguments, the more capable they will be of
weighing the probabilities differently. But unless they see before them
the spectacle of a rational man drawing conclusions rationally, they
will never learn what rational probabilities are. Obviously all kinds of
factors personal to the teacher come in here. If he is dynamic and
likeable his views may tend to be uncritically accepted. If he is
despised, they may be uncritically opposed. But all the same to see that
the teacher is committed to a view which he thinks rationally follows
from the evidence is of tremendous value in itself, whether his pupils
follow him or not. The teacher must be a leader in argument if he
is to teach argument. And a leader cannot sit on the fence for ever.
So far I have been
treating only of fact$, albeit selected and dubious facts. In this area
I hope I have suggested that uncommitted neutrality in the teacher, in
so far as it is possible, is not desirable. I want now to consider
whether this conclusion has any bearing on the real question, the
problem that all the fuss is about, namely the question whether or not a
teacher should be neutral when the subject of the class is a matter of
values. I do not wish to embark here on the problem of distinguishing
facts from values. It is sometimes argued that as there is no such thing
as a pure fact, no proper distinction can be drawn between fact and
value. If so, then perhaps we could take a short way with the subject
and say that what has been said about facts ought to be said about
values since they cannot be distinguished. But this would not be
convincing. I would rather assume that we can all of us give examples of
what, in non-philosophical moments, we should be prepared to call
statements of fact. An example would be that Mary Queen of Scots knew
that Darnley was to be murdered on February 9th 1567, or that she did
not know. (The fact that many people would be inclined to condemn her
for conniving at the murder of her husband, however unsatisfactory, is
neither here nor there. The factual question is, did she know about it
or did she not?) We can, I shall assume, also all of us produce
instances of obviously evaluative statements, such as that the
publication of pornography ought to be severely restricted by law. It is
to the second kind of statements, and the arguments which may take place
in class about them that I want now to turn.
Now it is a truism
that matters of fact may be relevant to the drawing of evaluative
conclusions, though they may not entail these conclusions. That being so
( and especially since relevance is one of the main lessons he has to
teach), it follows that all the duties a teacher may have with respect
to evidence in the historical examples already considered will be
equally incumbent upon him in the evaluative case. And of course many of
the historical cases may also be evaluative. But the collection and
presentation of evidence is likely to be fraught with difficulties in
the evaluative cases. Notoriously, for example, it is hard to discover
what the effect of pornography is upon its willing consumers, even if an
agreed starting definition of pornography can be arrived at. It is
perhaps still harder to discover its effects upon those who have to
consume it whether they like it or not. All evidence of the form 'people
in general do or suffer x' is extra- ordinarily hard to collect or
present fairly. Still worse is evidence of the form 'people suffer harm
if x is done to them'. For it is not only the scope of the
generalisation which causes difficulties, but the conceptual content as
well. What is to count as harm? Such difficulties as these must be faced
by the teacher who is trying to present the ma terial on which his
pupils are to base their judgement of whether or not pornography ought
to be radically further restricted by law. But he must be neither
daunted nor deflected by this. He must plough his way on as best he can,
making it absolutely clear what he is doing, where he is assuming
something that he cannot prove, and what he is preparing them to do. He
must use the material, as far as he is able to collect it, as grounds
upon which to found a judgement. But now what happens? Does he jib
at forming a judgement himself, and simply demand that his pupils make
one? Or does he state, as I have maintained that he should in the
relatively 'pure' historical case, his own view? Once again, I have no
doubt whatever that he should state his own view, and thus demonstrate
to his pupils the whole process of basing a judgement on an
interpretation of the facts. Insofar as the argument we are supposing is
just an argument, the very same considerations apply to it as applied to
the argument about Mary Queen of Scots. A pupil cannot understand the
relevance of factual considerations to conclusions, without experience
of the conclusion's being actually drawn. But in the evaluative case
there are other and more important considerations as well.
First, as will be
obvious from a consideration of the foregoing example, the facts cannot
be absolutely deter- mined. Interpretation is going to enter into the
presentation of the grounds right from the start. It is therefore
virtually impossible to separate a conclusion from its grounds. The
conclusion, as it were enters into the presentation of the grounds. But
even if such separation were possible in practice, other objections
would remain. There is a psycho- logical objection to the spectacle of
some one's remaining neutral in a highly charged dispute about a subject
which is supposed to affect everyone and therefore be everyone's
concern. The neutral man cannot but seem uninterested, and however much
he claims to be putting aside his own beliefs, in order to act
the part of neutral chairman, this does not prevent his seeming either
alarmingly remote, or positively scornful or patronising, if he will not
join in the dispute. There is a kind of nightmare in which one is in
danger or pain or in some state of emotional tension of a painful kind
and all the time on the sidelines, there is a perfectly impassive
observer, taking no steps to help or comfort, or even to acknowledge the
existence of a crisis. It is the nightmare of the knitters at the
guillotine, or of the absolutely rational parent observing a child's
tantrum and letting him simply go on screaming. Something of this
nightmarish sense is conveyed to pupils whose teacher will not take part
in a debate, or state his own moral view.
It may be argued
that this is a neurotic, or at any rate an exaggerated, reaction. Any
such disagreeable effects are far outweighed by the desirability of
getting pupils to see both sides of any question so as to ensure that
they judge, when they do, rationally and without prejudice. Since a
teacher has, it is argued, no right to impose his own prejudices on his
pupils, he had better not voice them. He cannot expect his pupils to
eliminate prejudice from their minds if he is seen to be guilty of
prejudice himself. So runs the argument for neutrality. The weakness of
the argument lies, self-evidently, in the word 'prejudice'. I wish to
distinguish between a prejudice and a moral belief, and thus to conclude
that if a teacher states clearly his own moral belief, he is not
displaying prejudice. He has not prejudged anything. In the case
supposed, he has examined and assessed the significance of what facts he
has been able to assemble, and then made his moral judgement of what
ought to occur.
Very well, it may
be said, let him express his moral belief, provided that he both shows
how he has arrived at it, and is careful to say that it is simply his
opinion. Let him by no means seek to impose this opinion on his
pupils If he cannot keep his mouth shut, or if he feels that he must
state his own conclusion in order to demonstrate the drawing of a
conclusion, let him at least clearly show that he realises that other
opinions are just as good ( or, as people prefer to say, as
valid).
But alas, this is
impossible in the nature of the case. And here we have come upon the
real nature of evaluative judgements. It is strictly impossible at one
and the same time to say 'this is wrong' and 'but you need not think
so'. Although we all know perfectly well that values are relative to our
society and our culture (or even to our little bit of society or
culture) yet it is impossible to assert this truth and in the
same breath seriously to assert a value judgement. We are inevitably and
for ever divided in our minds. Either we make no value judgements, and
are content to stand outside the making of them, or, if we do make them,
we must for the time being put on one side our anthropological
spectacles through which we survey the conflicting opinions of the human
race. Moreover, if we have come to our moral judgement by the route of
serious thought and a consideration of the evidence as fair as we can
make it, then we cannot think that an opposite judgement follows equally
'validly' from this same evidence. If we have concluded that something
is wrong, we must think that everyone ought to hold it wrong,
even though we know that they do not, and that we must put up with this,
Now this feature of evaluative judgements is something that at some time
or other pupils must learn to recognise, and, if possible, understand;
and they can start to understand it from the expression of genuine moral
convictions by their teacher. They will learn that someone who sincerely
holds a moral conviction does not and cannot feel that any other
conviction is just as good. That is the nature of the case. Moral
relativism may be a fact; but it is not a fact that we feel while we are
forming moral judgements. If we really believed that any moral view was
as good and worthy to be adopted as any other, then we would of course
make no moral judgements at all. And the same is true of all other,
non-moral, evaluations. We cannot evaluate, and accept another
evaluation at the same time as equally sound. Moral views, then, are not
prejudices; but they are also totally distinct from matters of 6pinion.
One may, of
course, raise the question what is the point of getting people at school
to discuss such topics as whether or not the legislation about
pornography should be changed. Part of the point, as has been suggested
already, is to teach them to judge fairly on the evidence, and to
understand the arguments both for and against the proposition. But part
of the point is also actually to get them to think about right and
wrong, good and evil, to think, that is to say, about morals. If this is
accepted as part of their education, then they must not be deprived of
the spectacle of a teacher who holds, and clearly expresses, moral
views. There is nothing but benefit in the contemplation of a man of
principle. A man without moral views is after all a monster, and it is
hard for pupils, especially if they are quite young, to realise that the
neutral teacher is only play-acting. Moreover, if they do realise this,
they resent it. Practically speaking, one of the things one learns from
teaching children is that play-acting is despicable. The first rule of
teaching is sincerity , even if one's sincerity is dotty or eccentric. A
man ought to have and to express moral beliefs, and this entails that as
a teacher he cannot remain neutral. For holding a moral belief is in
some respects like having a vision. It is in a sense, an imaginative
vision of how things ought to be though they are not. Expressing a moral
belief is thus attempting to share a vision or way of looking, and this
cannot be done without in some sense attempting to get your interlocutor
to see things as you do, if only for the time. A pupil may discover, in
the course of discussion, what he himself thinks, what moral views he
holds. But he cannot do this without exercising his imagination to see
in the material under discussion a moral issue. He must see it as
a starting point from which he may envisage a world in which such things
do not happen, or do happen freely. The teacher must help him to
exercise his imagination; it is indeed his only serious function; and
thus he must help him to see the material as morally significant. This
he can do only by demonstrating that it appears so to him. If a teacher,
by the attractiveness of his personality, causes his pupils for the most
part to share his vision, aesthetic or moral or of whatever other sort,
the passage of time will remedy this, if remedy is needed. To have been
conscious at some stage of one's life how someone else, a grown up,
actually saw the world is far from harmful, even if later the viewpoint
is totally abandoned. I conclude therefore that in the sphere of the
evaluative, as of the factual, the teacher has a positive obligation, if
he is to teach well, to be non-neutral; and that this is necessary
because of the nature of moral, and other evaluative judgement.
It will be noted that in the foregoing argument I have seemed to assume that the teacher is older than the pupil, more knowledgeable and more rational, and also possessed of more experience, common sense and imagination. I make this assumption knowingly. I realise that there are teachers who are in all these respects (except generally that of age) the inferior of their pupils. Nevertheless the teacher's essential role is to be in all these respects his pupil's superior, and this is the role he must try to fill, necessarily. It is the role which creates the teaching situation, with all its intrinsic authority, and it is this role, not any particular occupier of it, which has been the subject of discussion. In such a role, I have maintained, the teacher will fail if he attempts to remain neutral.
The Neutral Teacher?
RICHARD NORMAN
Mrs Warnock concludes that the teacher will fail in his role if he attempts to remain neutral. I agree. I shall not, however, simply leave the matter there, not only because it would make for a rather boring symposium, but also because I suspect that there remain important aspects of this subject on which Mrs Warnock and I would disagree. I hope that the disagreement will emerge. At any rate, what I shall do is to take Mrs Warnock's conclusion and push it further -further, I think, than she would be prepared to take it.
INDOCTRINATION
Before turning to the main
theme I should like to say something briefly about the notion of
'indoctrination'. Mrs Warnock speedily dismisses it, concluding at the
end of a paragraph that it is 'perhaps not a very useful word to analyse
further' (p. 160). But can it really be so easily dispensed with? One
would perhaps like to think so, but unfortunately the phenomenon to
which it refers remains depressingly familiar. The only reason which Mrs
Warnock offers for abandoning the term is that, although teachers may in
fact 'induce uncritical belief', they rarely do so deliberately; most
teachers simply aim to impart the truth, and if they fail to present
other points of view, this will be because they do not regard what they
are teaching as controversial. This is probably true. It shows only that
the teacher's intentions are neither here nor there, and that the
process we are talking about may have to be described by saying that,
although the teacher indoctrinates, he does not do so deliberately.
What is it, then, that people refer to as 'indoctrination'? The phenomenon is marvellously captured in a passage from Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie which, though it refers to the writer's own childhood, can be all too easily updated:
Through the dead hours of the morning, through the long afternoons, we chanted away at our tables. Passers-by could hear our rising voices in our bottled-up room on the bank; 'Twelve-inches-one-foot. Three-feet-make-a-yard. Four- teen- pounds- make- a-stone. Eight -stone-a-hundred -weight. , We absorbed these figures as primal truths declared by some ultimate power. Unhearing, unquestioning, we rocked to our chanting, hammering the gold nails home. 'Twice-two-are-four. One-God-is-Love. One-Lord-is-King. One-King-is-George. One-George-is-Fifth...' So it was always; had been, would be forever; we asked no questions; we didn't hear what we said; yet neither did we ever forget it. (Op. cit., Penguin edition, p. 53 ff.)
Here we have, delightfully conveyed, the continuity between traditional
ways of teaching mathematics, for example, and the implanting of the
'received truths' of religion and politics. If the latter seem more to
warrant the label 'indoctrination', this is only because the
subject-matter is more controversial; the procedure is the same-
'Twice-two-are-four, One-God- is-Love, One-King-is-George'. The
essential contrast is between learning which is based on sheer
repetition, and learning which proceeds from understanding. Now of
course there is no absolute dichotomy here; all human learning, even the
mechanical memorising of multiplication tables, involves some degree of
comprehension. It is never just the parrotting of mere sounds. For this
reason, the term 'indoctrination' may be misleading. It suggests
some special, refined tech- nique, totally distinct from the normal
processes of teaching, whereas what one is really concerned with is a
matter of degree -a failure to produce sufficient understanding, a
failure to teach well enough or to effect more than the retention of
ritual formulae.
It is of course
the desire to produce genuine understanding that lies behind the recent
progressive developments in education- child-centred education, the New
Maths, the whole stress on the learner's own activity and experience. As
Mrs Warnock rightly observes, the argument about indoc- trination shades
off into the argument about learning through discovery. I do not need to
emphasise this theme. I am sure that many of the participants in this
conference will know far more about it than I do (the universities have
yet to catch up with the primary schools in this field).
But it does seem
to me that Mrs Warnock obscures the matter. She presents an unreal
either/or; the teacher is either the conveyor of truths, or the
near-silent chairman of meetings, leaving the pupils to discover
everything for themselves. This second alternative is of course
untenable. The teacher is an active participant in the process. But so
are, or should be, the pupils. What Mrs Warnock's either/or rules out is
the possibility of education as dialogue, as a co- operative
activity. The pupils, as much as the teacher, have something to
bring to the educational process. They have their own experience to draw
on, and unless they are helped and enabled to articulate that
experience, what they are 'taught' will remain external and mechanical.
This sounds like a bland truism. In practice, I think it raises great
difficuties. I know from the teaching I do (and I am sure this is
general) that one can all too easily miss the point of what a student is
saying. In order to appreciate its relevance and importance, one may
have to set aside one's own preconceptions, and the difficulty is that
these preconceptions may well have become one's own implicit definition
of 'the subject', so that whatever cannot be assimilated to them is seen
as irrelevant. I am sure that what goes for the teaching of university
students goes equally for the teaching of five-year-olds. How much of
children's painting, for example, is dismissed as inadequate or
incompetent because the teacher's own unconscious pre- conceptions make
it impossible to recognise what the child is doing?
The general point I am making is that the term 'indoctrination' is regularly used to contrast with learning which proceeds from genuine understanding, achieved by the active participation of the learner in the educational process. The term may not be ideal, but in this sense indoctrination is a reality, and needs still to be attacked.
Nevertheless, I would not attack it in the name of any ideal of 'neutrality' -- and this now brings us to the central topic under discussion. According to Mrs Warnock, 'the desire to avoid turning teaching into indoctrination' is one of the major grounds for the advocacy of neutrality in teachers. It might consequently be expected that, since I have been emphasising the need to attack indoctrination, I should go on to defend neutrality. But that is not what I intend. I do not want to set up 'neutrality' as the desirable alte~ative. Such an ideal presupposes as its conceptual background an extreme and untenable liberal individualism. It assumes that education consists essentially in the child's (or the learner's) being left alone, left to grow and develop under his own impetus; the task of the teacher is to make experiences available to the learner for him to draw upon, but not to influence him positively in any preconceived direction, since this would be to impose one's own values on another. The picture at work here is the classical liberal one of an area fenced around, within which the individual lives his own life, immune from the influence of others. I would reject this picture. I regard the activity of education, like all characteristically human activities, as one of social interaction and mutual influence. And I would aim to avoid indoctrination not because I want to avoid imparting my values to others but, on the contrary, because I am committed to certain values and want to promote them. I want those whom I teach to become free human beings, sceptical of authority, capable of seeing through and rejecting the ideological props of existing social institutions, capable of directing their own lives and their own society. To talk of 'imposing' these values is self-contradictory; but I would certainly want others to acquire them, and I would certainly teach with that end in view.
POLITICAL
VALUES AND THE TEACHING OF 'FACTS'
We have arrived, then, at
what Mrs Warnock calls 'the problem that all th~ fuss is about' -the
question of neutrality in relation to values. But notice -and this will
be my theme for the remainder of the paper- that Mrs Warnock understands
this question in a very restricted sense. She glosses it as 'the
question whether or not a teacher should be neutral when the subject
of the class is a matter of values' (p. 166; my emphasis). In other
words, she is concerned solely with what one ought to do when one is
explicitly teaching about values, and it is within this context
that she suggests that the teacher ought not to be neutral. Her only
example is the following: if the class is discussing the censorship of
pornography, the teacher should state his own view. Insofar as one can
generalise from this, one supposes that Mrs Warnock has in mind
something like a sixth-form 'General Studies' or 'Current Affairs'
lesson, or perhaps a trendy version of Religious Instruction. But is
this really 'what all the fuss is about'? Well, some of it perhaps.
Certainly, the practical dilemma is one which teachers do genuinely
face. And if one resolves it as Mrs Warnock recommends, this may well
give rise to a certain amount of controversy, especially if the moral
beliefs which one presents to a class are unorthodox ('TEACHER IN SEX
LESSON ROW' -Daily X). Nevertheless, where questions of
neutrality are concerned, the following example seems to me to be much
more typically controversial. Just over a year ago, a lecturer in
English at the University of Lancaster was threatened with dismissal on
the grounds of 'political bias'. He had previously been removed from a
list of examiners on the grounds that 'a candidate writing answers for a
known socialist would be under invidious pressure'; and it was
subsequently suggested by one of the examiners that the scripts showed
'clear evidence of an undue orientation in the teaching towards
political rather than literary themes'.
Notice how this example differs importantly from Mrs Warnock's example. In moving to the discussion of questions of value, she says:
I do not wish to embark here on the problem of distinguishing facts from values. ..I would rather assume that we can all of us give examples of what, in non- philosophical moments, we should be prepared to call statements of fact. ..We can, I shall assume, all of us produce instances of obviously evaluative statements, such as that the publication of pornography ought to be severely restricted by law. (p. 166)
Mrs Warnock's
assumptions are quite legitimate. Some such distinction can undoubtedly
be made; there certainly are statements which are undeniably statements
of fact, and others which are undeniably evaluative statements. But Mrs
Warnock actually assumes much more than this. She assume s not only that
there are clear instances of factual statements and clear instances of
evaluative statements, but also that one can talk quite separately about
the teaching of facts and the teaching of values. However, as my example
shows, the important questions about neutrality arise precisely because
the two kinds of teaching may coalesce. The problem is whether the
teacher should be evaluatively neutral, not just 'when the subject of
the class is a matter of values', but when the subject of the class is
history, or literature, or philosophy. F or, at the level of logical and
linguistic distinctions, though facts and values can in some way be
distinguished, the philosophical problems stem from those cases where
statements of fact seem to be at the same time evaluative, that is,
where values seem to be built into the facts. Correspondingly, at the
practical level, one may teach facts, and one may teach values, but one
may also teach facts in a way which is clearly value-laden. One may then
be accused of importing one's own values into an area where they do not
belong; and it is at this point that the ideal of 'neutrality' may be
invoked or questioned.
Notice also a
further feature of our example. The 'fuss' here is not so much about
'values' in a general and rather woolly sense, but, characteristically,
about political values. When teachers are accused of failing to
be neutral, what is regularly meant is that they are politically
committed, and that this commitment is apparent in their teaching of
history , or literature, or sociology, or philosophy, or whatever.
Therefore the
crucial question which we ought to consider is this. Can one exclude
values, and in particular political values, from one's teaching, either
by eliminating them entirely or by reserving them for a specific
occasion - perhaps some special slot on the timetable, of the sort that
Mrs Warnock refers to, in which the class is specifically required to
'discuss values'? In attempting to answer this, there are obvious
distinctions to be made. Some kind of teaching are more obviously
value-free than others. For example, the teaching of the natural
sciences, in contrast to the human sciences, undoubtedly can be, and
normally will be, politically neutral. Even here, however, there are
problems, of the sort which emerge from current debates about social
responsibility in science; thus the intellectual abstraction of
scientific knowledge from the social uses to which it is put could well
be seen not as 'scientific neutrality' but as 'political
irresponsibility'. In other words, the decision whether to exclude from
one's teaching any political judge- ment about the applications of
scientific knowledge is, even if it is made by default, necessarily a
political decision, and one which the science teacher as such cannot
escape.
Again, there is
the area which Mrs Warnock identifies, for other purposes, as the
teaching of skills and techniques. Here too it seems plausible to
suggest that one's teaching can quite feasibly be politically neutral.
The teaching of reading, for example, might seem to have its own purely
internal and purely technical criteria of success. Yet one has only to
invoke the notorious 'Janet and John', or their equivalents, to be
reminded of how political values enter in even here. The normative
status which is implicitly attributed to the respectable middle-class
home, the nuclear family, masculine superiority, in reading material of
this kind, is familiar and easily mocked. It is a fit subject for
ridicule, but the point is a serious one. Reading is not a pure
technique. What the child learns to read has a content, and in
particular it is likely to have a moral and social content of one sort
or another. Moreover, the content that is chosen will reflect a
particular conception of the social use which the technique of reading
is intended to serve. Reading may be taught either as the passive
initiation of the child into an alien universe in which language is a
'scarcely-comprehended mystery and hence an instrument of domination, or
as a process of making language available to the child as an instrument
appropriate to his needs, an instrument for understanding and assessing
his own world and reflecting critically on it. The choice is a political
one.
The most
interesting cases to consider, however, are obviously the teaching of
the humanities and the human sciences. To the question of the
possibility of political neutrality in these areas, certain standard
arguments about the logic of the human sciences are clearly relevant --
arguments about whether history, philosophy, sociology , etc., can be
written in a way which is politically neutral. There is, for
example, an argument familiar from the philosophy of history and the
philosophy of the social sciences, about the necessity of selection.
The reality which is the potential subject-matter of any of the
human sciences is an infinite multiplicity. To provide an exhaustive
account of it would be impossible. One has to select -and one
necessarily does so on the basis of values, in accordance with what one
takes to be important in human life, practically or morally or
politically. Now, this is sometimes taken to be no more than a pragmatic
point: one has to choose how to apportion one's time, one cannot study
everything, nor can one teach everything, one has to choose what to
concentrate on. It is then supposed that this still leaves open the
possibility that, having made one's choice, one can go on to study or to
teach whatever one has opted for, in a purely neutral, purely factual
way. Values may enter into one's choice of what to focus on the subject,
but they can be excluded, it is assumed, from what one then says about
it.
This assumption is
questionable, and so is the distinction on which it is based. To the
extent that values enter into one's selection of what to study or teach,
they also enter into one's conception of the subject-matter. Take the
case (not an imaginary one) of a student who, having read Kafka, wishes
to study further the question of the meaninglessness of life, its
depersonalised and alienated character, in modern bureaucratic society.
He is told by the teachers of literary criticism: 'We can discuss with
you questions about Kafka's literary technique -the means he employs to
convey such ideas, his use of symbol and allegory. We can perhaps
discuss also questions of interpretation -whether, for example, Kafka's
presentation of the predicament of the individual in an absurd and
incomprehensible world is to be read primarily as a religious or as a
political statement. What we cannot discuss is whether Kafka was right;
that is a philosophical question, and for that you must go to the
philosophers.' By the latter, however, he will no doubt be told: 'We can
help you to analyse the concepts that are employed here. We can discuss
with you whether such statements are intelligible, and how, if at all,
they are to be verified. But we cannot enter into the substantive
questions; if you want to talk about the alienated character of life in
modern society, you should read novels or plays, rather than turn to
philosophy .' If the student is not by now completely disillusioned, he
may think of turning to the sociologists or the psychologists. But from
them he will receive the answer: 'These large-scale metaphysical and
political questions cannot be dealt with by an empirical, value-free
science such as ours. There are no hard data to be gathered here; there
is nothing to be measured. You had better return to the philosophers.'
The upshot is, of
course, that the student can find no academic subject in which he can
engage in what interests him -an overall moral and political
understanding and assessment of his own society. The self-justification
of his teachers will be: 'Such questions no doubt have their place. But
we simpJy do not choose to concern ourselves with them. They belong
elsewhere.' But the fact of selection actually carries a wider
significance. I t carries with it some such implication as the
following: 'Questions of that sort do not warrant serious intellectual
enquiry; they can properly be relegated to the realm of irrational
reactions; they are no more than the product of adolescent emotion.' And
the crucial point is then that the dismissal, the exclusion of certain
kinds of political discourse as unimportant or improper or irrational,
is itself a political stance. In short, to exclude is as political a
step as to include.
So the necessity
for selection is not just a matter of personal convenience. It
inevitably imports certain moral and political evaluations into one's
conception of the subject- matter. And this point can be taken a stage
further; the necessity for selection is not just a practical necessity,
it is an epistemological necessity. The argument will again be
familiar from the philosophy of history, so let us take history as an
example. It is not just that the historian has to direct his interest in
one direction rather than another. Given the infinite multiplicity of
the potential data of history, the historical facts are not even
describable except insofar as they are formed into a pattern, viewed
from a perspective within which some things come into prominence as
foreground and others merge into a background. This selection of one
pattern rather than another will again have evaluative implications, and
this will again be apparent in the teaching of the subject. The
conception of history which I was first introduced to at primary school
was the history of the British monarchy and the growth of the British
empire. This was replaced by what was still, I suppose, a conception of
history as the history of nations, but with the emphasis now on the
development of mankind towards the liberal-democratic nation-state. If I
am now more inclined towards a conception of history as class-struggle,
I do not regard this as differing from the others in being more
political, but only in being more valid. I would not criticise the two
former versions for being political; but I would criticise them for
being ideological -for being based on political preconceptions rather
than on reality, for being an uncritical reflection of the political
status-quo. Each of these historical perspectives, however, is equally a
political perspective -and so would be any other alternative.
The argument in terms of 'selection' here merges into another argument familiar from the philosophy of history. The relevant claim, with which I would agree, is that the historian (and likewise the teacher of history} is inevitably committed to one political point of view or another by vocabulary which he employs. Consider the following passage taken at random from a standard work, avowedly written for sober educational purposes, not for those of political partisanship:
The most important fact about all three single-party states (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalinist Russia) was not economic but political: the fact that they were governed by men who wielded, more completely than any other rulers in history, absolute power of life and death over all their subjects. The unique feature of modern dictatorship is that it tends to be totalitarian; that is, it contrives to concentrate in the hands of the ruling group a degree of power which enables them to control all aspects of the national life...Ballyhoo and brutality were made the foundations of the state. Behind the party, engaged in monopolizing and running all the important organizations of society and state, stood in each country the terrible power of the secret police...Each dictator found that he could muster, from modern society, a large enough number of utterly unscrupulous, devoted, and brutal henchmen to gain him this power of terror...The story of tortures and cruelties, of total degradation of the human personality and of vicious sadism, was by the mid-twentieth century familiar enough. There is little mystery left about how a single-party dictatorship works. The more difficult question is how such absolute power could be generated and accumulated in apparently civilized cultured European communities of modern times. One explanation is the appeal made to fanaticism -the as- tounding force of ideologies whether Marxist, nationalist, or racialist.
(David Thomson: Europe Since Napoleon, Penguin edition, pp. 728-9)
In this passage
the political attitudes of the writer are blatantly apparent. The very
fact that he classifies Nazism, Fascism and Stalinism under the single
term 'totalitarian' immediately commits him to a specific political
stance -to the claim that the similarities between these regimes are
more important than their differences. The use of the term implies that
what is significant about Stalinism is the concentration of power rather
than the direction in which it is aimed; therefore Stalinism can be
lumped together with Nazism and Fascism. The defender of Stalinism2
would of course use a different vocabulary. He would not use the term
'totalitarian'. Still -less would he describe Stalin's actions in terms
of 'brutality' and 'cruelty'. And he would certainly not charac- terise
the driving force of Marxism as an appeal to 'fanati- cism'. Instead, he
would describe Stalin's policies as the harsh measures necessary to
safeguard the fruits of the revolution, and without which the whole
movement towards socialism, and therefore the hopes of humanity, might
have been shattered for ever.
The question then
is whether, as historian or as teacher of history, one could abjure both
political vocabularies and give a purely neutral description of the
history of Stalinism. Certainly one could say that each of these two
descriptions is over-simplified, and that the reality of Stalinism was
much more complex. One might have to use elements of both vocabularies,
and say that though the original impetus behind Stalin's policies was an
authentically revolutionary one, it led to the creation of a ruling
group set only on perpetuating its own power. Numerous variations are
possible here; but each of them would constitute another political
perspective. Less plausibly, a desperately liberal historian intent
on doing justice to both sides might oscillate between one vocabulary
and another; but this would simply produce a bizarre history, not
politically neutral but politically incoherent. Could one, however,
abjure all politically-loaded vocabulary and employ nothing except
purely neutral descriptions? Well, in a sense one could do so. One could
confine oneself to stating that from the year 1924 onwards, Stalin
uttered certain commands and signed certain documents, which resulted in
the deaths of such-and-such persons and the creation of such- and-such
institutions. This would be neutrality of a sort. But it would not be
history. It would reduce Stalin's actions to unintelligibility, and turn
them into dehumanised motions of an automaton, a set of meaningless
physical movements. As soon as one even begins to ascribe to Stalin one
motivation or another, one is embarked on the enterprise of political
justification and political criticism.
It may be objected
that my argument is fallacious insofar as it runs together the activity
of the writer of history with that of the teacher. For, it
might be said, though the historian cannot escape being committed to a
political perspective, it is the -task of the teacher to acquaint his
students with the competing viewpoints of different historians. With the
latter suggestion I would agree. But I do not think that it requires
political neutrality on the part of the teacher. It is at this point
that I would invoke Mrs Warnock's discussion. The good teacher will make
his students aware of the strength of competing arguments; but he cannot
do this properly, he cannot help his students to develop a sense of the
difference between a good argument and a bad argument, unless he commits
himself, unless he 'states his own view and thus demonstrates to his
pupils the whole process of basing a judgement on the interpretation of
the facts'.(p. 167).
I have, I am
afraid, concentrated overmuch on the example of history (though what I
have said is applicable to other disciplines). In doing so I have raised
issues in the philosophy of history which demand a discussion to
themselves, and which I have had to treat rather cryptically. Let me
therefore end this section by reiterating the basic claim which I hope
at ieast to have substantiated. In leaving open the question of the
relation of facts and values, Mrs Warnock obscures a crucial aspect of
the question of neutrality. If, as I think, the logical separation of
facts and values is untenable, if our factual knowledge is essentially
value-laden, then correspond- ingly, we have to recognise the inevitable
intrusion of values, and in particular political values, into the
teaching and learning of facts.
Insofar as I talk here of a necessary intrusion, I am going beyond Mrs Warnock's conclusion in a further respect. She concludes that the teacher ought not to be neutral. I would say that the teacher cannot be neutral.
THE POLITICAL
CHARACTER OF TEACHING METHODS
I want now to propose a
second way in which Mrs Warnock's discussion of the problem needs to be
extended. In consider- ing whether or not the teacher is neutral, we
need to look not just at the content of his teaching, but at the
manner of his teaching. At the end of my earlier discussion of
indoctrina- tion~1 suggested that my own wish to avoid indoctrinating
was to be explained as stemming not from an ideology of neutrality but,
on the contrary, from a specific political commitment. Here, the
impossibility of neutrality applies not to what one teaches, but
to how one teaches. Or rather, the two cannot be separated. The
teaching of values is not limited to 'moral education' classes of the
kind that Mrs Warnock seems to have in mind. One puts across certain
values not just through what one explicitly says, but through the way in
which one organises the learning situation. Here again, this is
something which one cannot help doing. For example, every teacher,
especially in a primary school, faces a choice between organising the
classroom on a basis of competition or on a basis of cooperation. The
children may be perpetually encouraged to aim at doing better than one
another, and made constantly aware of their relative'superi- ority' and
'inferiority' by the usual paraphernalia of marks and stars, and the
ordering of the class in terms of 'top' and 'bottom'. Alternatively they
may learn to work together, to pool their abilities, to adapt their work
to that of others in joint activities; they may be taught that, where
one can do easily what another child finds difficult, the appropriate
response is to help him, not to feel superior. The point is, once more,
that the choice, even if it is made by default, is one which the teacher
cannot help making. And thus he cannot help inculcating certain values.
What may seem more controversial is the suggestion that the values in question are political values. This can be made more obvious if, in our example, we remember the kinds of justification likely to be offered on either side; on the one hand, that the child should be prepared for the competitive society in which he will have to live, or, on the contrary, that teaching can be a form of political action directed at changing the kinds of social relations which constitute our present society. At the very least, then, competition and co-operation in education are causally related to wider social relations which are undeniably political. But we can go further. If the choice between different social relationships, when these characterise a whole society, is a political choice, then it is surely equally political when made on a smaller scale: To take another example: if the conflict between authoritarian and libertarian tendencies is a political conflict when it occurs in the wider society, why should it cease to be political when it occurs within education? What is really needed here is a proper examination of the concept 'political'.3 At the very least, we need to get away from the idea that the sphere of 'the political' is delimited by the phenomena of governments, elections, electoral parties, etc.
THE POLITICAL
CHARACTER OF INSTITUTIONS
I turn now to my third and
final extension of Mrs Warnock's discussion. Mrs Warnock seems to assume
that a teacher's neutrality or non-neutrality is determined simply by
his own individual choices and actions. I think that it is fair to see
this kind of individualism in her discussion, even if she would not
explicitly avow it. In contrast to this, it is important to recognise
that human actions can have a meaning which goes beyond the conscious
intentions of the agent -a meaning which is given to them by the social
context and the social institutions within which they are performed. As
a teacher one is, whether one likes it or not, working within
institutions which have a specific political character and political
functions. I take the facts here to be obvious ( though no doubt they
would be contested). Through its processes of streaming, selecting,
examining and grading, our educational system services and perpetuates a
complex hierarchical society, separating social class from social class
and preparing some for privilege and others for drudgery. By the very
fact of being compulsory, and through more specific disciplinary
procedures, it establishes patterns of obedience and acquiescence
towards authority. And insofar as teachers work within such
institutions, their activity is, through no choice of their own,
correspondingly political. This is an unpleasant fact to have to face.
One would like to be able to deny it. For my own part, as a university
teacher I have to recognise that, insofar as I mark examinations and
give assessments and compel students to study prescribed courses instead
of exploring their own intellectual interest, I am helping to maintain a
political system which I loathe.
This is not to deny that teachers can consciously attempt to counter these tendencies, or to change the institutions. One can attempt, for example, to work as a libertarian teacher within an authoritarian structuFe. One's activity will then combine contradictory political characteristics; and although this may be rather a shattering experience, it need not necessarily be futile. Nor should one suppose that 'the system' is something totally monolithic. So the political character that is given to one's teaching by the institutional structure does not prevent it from having other political characteristics as well; but it does mean that it cannot be politically neutral.
CONCLUSION
One often hears it said that
education suffers from being made a matter for political dispute. This
tends to be accompanied by the proposal that we should 'take education
out of politics'. Such a proposal is usually itself a transparently
political manoeuvre -'Lets take education out of politics' means 'Let's
keep things as they are'. No philosophical knowledge is needed to see
this. More important, perhaps, is the fact that one finds philosophers
of education talking as though questions about the desirable aims and
methods of education were questions about which, at least in principle,
all rational men could agree, whatever their disagreements elsewhere.
One finds this manifested, for example, in the apparent assumption that
such questions can be settled simply by examining 'the' concept of
education. I would say, on the contrary, that questions about what to
teach and how to teach it can be answered only in the context of some
political perspective or other. And since those of us who are involved
in education obviously disagree politically, this means that we are also
bound to disagree about education. I therefore conclude that, within the
foreseeable future, education will be an arena of political conflict.