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EducationversusGuidance 5 - 16 Apr 2012 - Main.JohnBarker
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="Main.RohanGrey" |
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I found this series of interviews by Alain de Botton directly relevant to our recent discussions regarding our law school experience and the challenges faced during our 1L year and in choosing a career. In particular, I think the second video, with its discussion of the historical superiority of religious institutions over universities in offering genuinely valuable life advice, is particularly interesting in the way it relates education to the idea Eben discussed in class of law being a weak social force. Perhaps it is precisely because religious and cultural institutions provide more valuable life guidance than formal educational programs that they exert such a relatively strong influence over normative social discourse compared to, say, ethicists or political scientists. If that is the case, then De Botton's proposals can be seen as attempts to implant respect for formal education (and the law) in younger generations to the point that their formative influence eventually exceeds countervailing religious and cultural forces. If that is his goal, I believe achieving it requires a far broader review of the politicization of the schooling process beyond the moral/spiritual guidance he emphasizes. Current debates regarding charter schools, high-stakes testing and educational inequality tend to gloss over the surface of what appear to me to be more fundamental and pressing issues - lack of democratic student participation, inequity of access, and the poorly defined role of the state in child welfare. Unless those more fundamental institutional questions are addressed, how can we expect our education system to promote democratically active, tolerant citizens of a global community? | | | I don’t understand the distinctions you are making in terms of improving society versus improving schools. My point was that De Botton laments the lack of ethical guidance in schools, but does not address the question of how that ethical guidance should be developed (in this interview at least - perhaps he has commented on this in other writings. I will look further). So my question still stands in a school-limited context – how can we foster democratic and tolerant values in children without addressing the fundamental hypocrisy of the intolerant and undemocratic structure of the schooling system? | |
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< | Maybe this is what you were talking about in regards to top-down and bottom-up approaches, and maybe De Botton does agree with a bottom-up approach more than I suggest. I don’t, however, see any evidence of such agrement in this interview. | >
> | Maybe this is what you were talking about in regards to top-down and bottom-up approaches, and maybe De Botton does agree with a bottom-up approach more than I suggest. I don’t, however, see any evidence of such agreement in this interview. | | | -- RohanGrey - 16 April 2012 | |
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> | My point is limited, that de Botton actually does address the question of how the ethical guidance should be developed, at least on the surface, in suggesting that we change our school curricula to improve the practical learning environment of formal education (as ridiculous as some of his specific suggestions seem to me). What I mean in saying that he might agree with you in the necessity of a bottom-up approach (and I agree this viewpoint certainly isn't expressed in the videos) is that these videos aren't in the first place fundamentally about fostering democratic and tolerant views in children. I guess my point is that I'm watching the interviews with a more limited scope than you, not taking his conclusion that we can improve formal education by looking at religious institutions much beyond the confines of that specific conclusion. I agree with you that there are other questions to ask, probably more important ones, if our goal is democratic and tolerant children on the whole, I'm just suggesting that de Botton in these videos is more concerned with improving education for individual students.
I still think the analysis you made in your initial post, that perhaps the practicality of education from religious institutions is part of the reason why religious forces have so much societal influence and why the law is a weak social force, is really spot on. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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