Political Education in/as the Practice of Freedom: A Paradoxical Defence from the Perspective of Michael Oakeshott

Abstract

Creating education systems that promote democratic sustainability has been the concern of political thinkers as diverse as J. S. Mill, Dewey, Benjamin Barber and Derek Bok. The classic dichotomisation of democratic theory between deliberative democrats and Schumpeterian democrats suggests that education in the service of democracy can be constructive—that is, provide a student with the skills necessary to elect her leaders without changing her nature—or reconstructive—that is, fundamentally and radically reshape the student to produce a citizen whose goals are transformed to be congruent with society. Michael Oakeshott, who has written extensively both on political regimes and on the purpose of liberal education, offers a third way to assess the connection between government and education. Despite his own dismissal of civic or political education as fundamentally vocational and thus beyond the boundaries of the liberal arts, this paper provides a potentially surprising Oakeshottian defence of political education within the liberal arts with reference to the importance he places on experience as a pedagogic tool. Thus, Oakeshott's educational philosophy has a certain resonance with the recent calls to locate the relevance of liberal arts within the burgeoning development of experiential civic engagement programmes in American universities.

Liberal Education and the Teleological Question; or Why Should a Dentist Read Chaucer?

“…There is a tension in Oakeshott's work between his pluralism and his account of human flourishing, but he certainly does not allow that freedom is a substantive telos defining human nature. See Engel, , pp. 325–49.…”

“…Although Oakeshott is known primarily as a political philosopher, his essays on liberal education have received increasing attention in recent years, and were well received by thinkers like Richard Peters when they were first published. See, for example, Peters, ; Williams, , ; Podoksik, ; and Engel, . Herbert Butterfield and Antony Flew are among other British writers in this tradition.…”