[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="375" caption="Rocks in a window can't enjoy the view - or can they?"]
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The New York Times Education Life section last weekend was full of good stuff, including ???The Examined Life, Age 8,??? about a Massachusetts program that teaches philosophy to elementary schoolers. I think a lot of people will find it cute. I mean, how not to love this quote from Isaiah, a second-grader who's trying to wrestle with the ethical qualities of inanimate objects: ???Say me and a rock was a friend. It would be different, because a rock can't move. And it can't look around.??? Awww. (He's wrong, of course).
But there's actually a more serious case to be made that ethical inquiry is a fundamental intellectual skill that can't be sufficiently developed solely in the core subjects of English, math, history, and science. The type of reasoning you do in English is interpretation: taking pieces of art and figuring out what they mean to you. In math, it's purely symbolic and purely logical. In history and in part of science, it's about empiricism: finding the best theory to support the given evidence. But none of these directly tackle the ethical stuff: how to treat people, how to deal with the vast number of choices we face every day, and how to think about contributing to a community or a society.
Some people will object that these questions are too big to tackle in school. Moreover, this could impinge on touchy religious and cultural grounds ??? who can imagine a national initiative to discuss the ethics of abortion leaving anyone more enlightened?
This view is a typical but mostly incorrect view of what ethics really is. And the end of the day, ethics isn't about fiercely debating morally divisive issues. It's about the much more mundane topic of developing tools to help us make decisions as community members and individuals. And teaching it can be justified on the same grounds that Texans have justified including Christianity in state standards: it's not about teaching doctrine; it's about teaching the complexity of extraordinarily important issues.
There's plenty of reason to believe that even smart people are actually quite bad at making decisions, and that this hurts our country in serious ways. In fact, Keith Stanovich won the prestigious Grewemeyer Prize for Education this year for his book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought on this very topic. He's used experiments in behavioral economics and psychology to prove that being great at math and highly literate doesn't actually make you a better (or worse) decision-maker: they are independent mental functions. And I think this resonates with people. Bad or questionable behavior on Wall Street, in the corporate ranks, in the SEC, etc. etc. is rampant. Vast swaths of political debates have become more or less completely insulated against independent thought.
But could philosophy class actually make people better decision-makers? I'm not entirety surely of the answer, but I suspect that it's yes, within some limits. There's certainly a fascinating and growing literature on the predictable ways in which we make irrational decisions ??? I've personally benefited quite a lot from learning about this stuff. More than anything, I find it frustrating that our country and our public school system were founded on an immaculately-argued set of philosophical principles, but that we don't put more effort into making sure our citizens have the tools to really understand and refine them.
(Photograph by Jeremy Levine Design from Flickr)
--Mickey Muldoon