Educating for Autonomy: An Old-Fashioned View

Ebels-Duggan, Kyla

doi:10.1017/s0265052514000211

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Kyla Ebels-Duggan argues convincingly that the contrast between traditional and critical-thinkingbased approaches to education is a false dichotomy. 30 The traditional view is often construed as the view that the aim of education is to instil a particular normative outlook by directly teaching certain value commitments, while education for autonomy involves preparing students to choose their own values by equipping them with critical-thinking skills, without at the same time teaching any particular normative outlook or conception of the good. Ebels-Duggan argues that education for autonomy, while itself an appropriate aim, requires more than just the imparting of critical-thinking skills, and that it cannot be accomplished while attempting to avoid the teaching of any particular normative outlook.…”

Section: Education and Answerabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Who's to Say?’: Responsibility, Entitlement, and Educating for Autonomy

Westlund

2021

J Applied Philosophy

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In this article, I argue that educating for autonomy requires the inculcation of a disposition to take responsibility for one's commitments, including one's evaluative commitments, rather than the inculcation of an attitude of entitlement to those commitments. Drawing on pioneering work of R.F. Dearden, I argue that taking responsibility for one's commitments requires world-directed concern for reasons and appropriate responsiveness to critical perspectives on one's beliefs and values. Educating for autonomy thus means bringing developing agents to see their beliefs and values as answerable to shared norms of assessment. The cognitive and normative capacities that are required, for such answerability, develop gradually over the course of childhood and adolescence. The question of how best to foster their development in school settings, which are inevitably characterised by asymmetries in power and authority, emerges as an important area for further inquiry.Perhaps autonomy is like happiness in this respect: that you do not achieve it by making it your primary objective. 1 Over the last decade or so, I've encountered and thought about formal education from at least three different perspectives: first, as a parent of elementary school children enrolled in local public schools; second, as an educator who teaches philosophy at a state university; and third, as a citizen observing a trend of dwindling state support for public education at all levels. Fiscal austerity, in recent years, has all too often been accompanied by a rhetorical devaluation of educators and what they do, and, at the college level, by the idea that education in the liberal arts fails to prepare students for the workforce or to fill labour market needs and has no practical purpose but to indoctrinate students into points of view popular with their professors. Taking these various strands of public policy and discourse together, we find ourselves in an atmosphere quite sharply inhospitable to the sort of aims and values that many educators hold dear.Both as a parent and as an educator, I have tended to assume that educators aim to develop and support the autonomy of their students. (Educators' self-understanding, in this regard, is sharply at odds with the popular perception, just noted, that they are engaged in 'indoctrination'.) Many philosophers writing on education agree that the promotion of autonomy is a worthy, and perhaps even central, goal of education. But there is less agreement over any detailed conception of what it is to promote autonomy through education, perhaps in part because there is so little consensus over what autonomy itself is. My aim in this article is to make a start on saying what it would be to educate for autonomy, given what I take autonomy to require. My thesis is relatively modest and can be briefly stated: educating for autonomy requires the inculcation of a disposition to take

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Section: Education and Answerabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Who's to Say?’: Responsibility, Entitlement, and Educating for Autonomy

Westlund

2021

J Applied Philosophy

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“…With regard to the second function, autonomy needs to be conceptualised in a more demanding way as an ideal. Since autonomy, as an aim of education, must be interpreted as a gradualist and developmental category, which inevitably involves both proceduralist and substantive elements (Drerup, ; Ebels‐Duggan, ), the second function of autonomy can inform pedagogical decisions concerning the question of whether a particular practice or belief of children should be tolerated or not. This does not imply that autonomy is the only value of relevance in a justification of education for tolerance, but that it has an architectonic normative function in grounding interpersonal respect, in enabling tolerance as a democratic virtue and in specifying the limits of toleration in educational circumstances.…”

Section: Political Liberalism Liberal Perfectionism and The Foundatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Education for Democratic Tolerance, Respect and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Drerup¹

2019

Journal of Philosophy of Education

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Criticisms of autonomy‐based justifications of toleration as an educational aim and as a political principle assume that personal autonomy can provide only a partial justification of toleration and that it serves as a basis for illiberal educational enforcements of a particular conception of the good. In this article, I defend an autonomy‐ and respect‐based conception and justification of education for tolerance as a democratic virtue against its critics. I will first provide a short analysis of the concept of toleration as well as of some methodological problems concerning the application of general normative conceptions and rationales to particular cases. In a second step, I reconstruct key elements of the specific normative role and function of toleration in educational circumstances. This leads me to the third section, in which I criticise political liberal conceptions of equal respect, that tend to ignore the pivotal educational role of personal autonomy in grounding and facilitating political respect and the virtue of democratic toleration. In the case of developing agents who have not yet acquired a stable conception of the good (and thus no stable reasons for objection or acceptance), educators appropriately express their respect for them as persons and future citizens by enabling them to question and criticise their socially acquired convictions about themselves and the political world. My discussion will show that personal and political autonomy are inseparable and coordinated educational and political ideals and that the demands and preconditions of autonomy, political respect and education for tolerance as a democratic virtue are mutually supportive and intertwined.

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“…No teacher has managed not to moralise to her students: not because teachers are imperfect, but simply because it is impossible. The relevant premise here is that cultural initiation and language acquisition—what goes on at schools daily—are normative, which is a way to say that they infuse the students with moral attitudes and beliefs (Ebels‐Duggan, ).…”

Section: The Myth Of Non‐moral Education Education For Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As does Ebels‐Duggan, , . She argues persuasively against a morally (or normatively) neutral education, calling the issue a ‘liberal dilemma’, informed by a ‘broadly Kantian’ view.…”

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confidence: 99%

Iris Murdoch's Critique of Three Dualisms in Moral Education

Nakazawa¹

2018

Journal of Philosophy of Education

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There is a sustained critique of autonomy in Iris Murdoch's work in moral philosophy and moral education. I explicate Murdoch's arguments against a moral education that aims at autonomy, showing that this kind of moral education is ensnared in problematic dualisms: a fact and value dualism (sometimes discussed as a dualism between metaphorical concepts and empirical concepts); a dualism of moral and non‐moral human nature; and a dualism of philosophising and moralising (or form and content). If the dualisms go unacknowledged, I contend, the moral educator is left with the confused task of providing the foundation of moral autonomy in a morally neutral way. I argue, drawing on Murdoch's work, that there is another kind of moral education that is free of such dualisms. On this view, moral education is basic and ubiquitous. It does not aim at moral autonomy, but instead aims at the development of moral vision, a capacity to see reality more clearly. While Murdoch's conception of moral education throws moral autonomy out of the picture, Murdoch's conception of moral education is attractive because it is not beset by dubious dualisms.

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Educating for Autonomy: An Old-Fashioned View

Cited by 5 publications

References 12 publications

‘Who's to Say?’: Responsibility, Entitlement, and Educating for Autonomy

‘Who's to Say?’: Responsibility, Entitlement, and Educating for Autonomy

Education for Democratic Tolerance, Respect and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Iris Murdoch's Critique of Three Dualisms in Moral Education

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