A little on education

Prompted by a blog post elsewhere I've been thinking a bit about education. Pretty much everybody agrees that education is a good thing, and that it's important to educate people, but not so clear is what we want to accomplish with that education. What should people be taught, and why should they be taught it?

Here are a few popular (?) theories on why people should be educated:

1. We need an educated workforce to operate our economy, so people need to be educated in order to be productive workers.
2. Since we're a democracy, we need people to be well-informed in order to make wise decisions in their voting; people should be educated in order that they can be good citizens.
3. People need to understand the world in which they live, including how it works physically (science), its culture and history, etc. So they should be educated so they can understand how the world works.
4. People should be educated so that they have the appropriate knowledge and reactions for society to run smoothly.
5. People should be educated so that they can have opportunities to do those things that require an education if they want; since, e.g., mathematics is a prerequisite for certain vocations, so we should teach it to give people an opportunity to pursue those vocations.
6. Education is the path to power and prosperity and Good Jobs, so people should be educated in order to have a fair chance at those things.
7. It is just good, simpliciter, for people to know Certain Things which are being taught.
8. People should be educated because it leads them to some sort of spiritual-cum-philosophical growth.

There are more, of course, and most people (if they think about it at all) probably hold to several of these in mixture. Certainly most of these (except perhaps 7 and 8) are fairly uncontroversially true about education: that is, they are correct assessments of some role or outcome of education in our society. But none of them fully captures what the goal of education is.

A certain kind of cynic might say that whatever our professed goals, (4) serves as education's primary directive. Education is a tool for conformism. Well, it certainly does do that (often, anyway) -- but with someone who is certain that that is all it can ever be or that that ought to be one of its main goals I can have no further conversation.

Similarly I think that (1), (2), (5), and (6) (and to an extent (3) depending on its sense) are too much practical considerations to really capture what we want education to be. We are bound by charity and justice to at least try to give people what they need to do well, so I suppose these do form sufficient reasons for education, but they don't encompass everything. Yes, we want people to be able to do well at their job, to make good civic decisions, to have opportunities to do what they want, to not be shut off from advancement. But surely even if none of these were at stake we should still, all else equal, want people to be educated? Surely we should prefer people to understand arithmetic or read philosophy or what have you, even if (in some strange and faraway society) they would not need to?

I think that (7) gets a little closer, but begs the question a bit. Why, is it good for people to know those things, and why those things in particular and not others? (8), too, has some trouble -- at least it does not at all correspond to what we really do in modern education, close as it is to Plato's ideal. And at any rate (7) and (8) (and (3)) can easily become a sort of self-justification for high-brow "culture" and its perpetuation, especially if we just assume without justification what sorts of education really accomplish the goals.

Like any mathematician or philosopher, I think that in order to talk seriously about something, we should try to outline our assumptions (axioms, perhaps). If the theories above are unsatisfactory, that seems the only way to do better.

A. Knowledge, simply and in itself, is a good thing. It is not the greatest or highest good, and may be outweighed in some cases by the negative consequences of knowledge, but it is a simple good: that is, it is good in itself for people to know things, not just good because of some result that that state of affairs may bring about.

Of course knowledge is also instrumentally good:

B. Physical well-being is a good thing. Insofar as education provides for it, it is good.
C. Spiritual well-being is a good thing. Insofar as education leads to it, it is good.
D. Beauty is a good thing; so is exposure to and understanding of it. Insofar as education exposes people to it, it is good.

That is, education exists for the same reason as any other human institution ought to exist: for meeting people's physical needs, and so that people can have "the True, the Good, and the Beautiful". That is its purpose; this is why we ought to educate people.

So, what should we teach?

This is difficult, but the first thing to throw out is the notion that our guiding principle in education ought to be the purely practical use of the knowledge and skills imparted to the student. That would be focusing on the physical needs to the exclusion of the others. To be sure, we ought to teach people practical knowledge and skills, but we ought not to stop there. (My Latin professor remarked to me, tongue-in-cheek, that my decision to take a classics class was a decision to "finally get an education along with your training" at HMC. I'd like to think that my time at HMC, even in my mathematics classes, which relate to my future career, gave me some education as well as training, but the point is well made: there is a difference, and having the education in addition to the training is worthwhile.) Insofar as we think of education as practical training we perpetuate the notion that ordinary people shouldn't study "higher" mathematics, or literature, or philosophy, or art: it might be training for the intellectual elites, but it is superfluous for the average worker. This is no good, because there is a good reason for everyone to have exposure to and understanding of at least some of these topics, and it has nothing to do with the job they plan to hold.

Still, there is a lot to be said for teaching practical skills, not the least of which that those practical skills which one learns in school can be practical both for those jobs and for learning those things which give better access to "the true, the good, and the beautiful". We teach arithmetic, basic reading and writing, basic outlines of history, basic science -- and we used to teach languages, especially classical languages -- for these reasons. It is hard (understatement of the day) to appreciate the truth and beauty of the theories and theorems in mathematics without understanding arithmetic, besides the fact that most people are practically better off if they can add and subtract and multiply; you cannot read and appreciate literature without being able to read, besides the enormous practical importance of reading in our society.

But at some point we should actually teach those other things; those things which are not really practical for most people's jobs; those things which are good because they give access to the true, the good, and the beautiful. And we have to realize when we teach it that that is what we are doing. When we teach even calculus (which does have practical applications for many more ordinary people), we should be clear that it won't be practical for everyone, but that it can be good for those people who will never use it to know, because there is elegant truth and beauty in it: and so a primary goal should be to help people see that. When we teach literature, the focus should not be on that faux-practical aspect of knowing facts about the "greats" and understanding allusions, but we should focus on using the literature to bring out truths and moral thought and beauty. This might be hard. So much of our culture is against this sort of thing: it thinks that the practical is what is important, the rest is a waste of time (fun, or boring, but a waste of time). We have to have the courage to counter that assumption, because it is so very wrong.

I cannot stop without making some comment on religious education; specifically, Christian education. It is in some sense even more important. For of course from the Christian point of view, no matter how good your secular education is, no matter how much you give to people tastes of truth and goodness and beauty, it cannot be sufficient. The most secularly-enlightened soul is still damned if it rejects God. But I think that a good Christian education can be thought of in similar terms to a good secular education. There are practical matters (such as particulars of habit and behavior) which of course cannot be ignored, but it is important to remember that there is more good to be had than that. For in the Christian view, God Himself is the epitome of Truth and Goodness and Beauty, and contains them all within Him -- and I think that a good Christian education, in addition to the many practical matters, should really teach us how to see that. Not that many of us are truly in a position to be good teachers of that (I certainly am not). But after all it is God who provides most of the education; we can at least do our best.

Some thoughts on some Lewis arguments

I was reading a thread over at TheologyWeb, in which several people were impugning some of C.S. Lewis’s arguments with some nonsense about their being pure rhetoric with no (or highly flawed) logic behind them, and so forth. Now being a bit of a Lewis fanboy and pretty familiar with the arguments, I thought that I ought to say something in response; and since I now have this page to put my comments on where I won’t have to deal with people making inane and insulting comments in response instead of thinking. Thus, this goes here.

I’d like to start with a few comments on what is probably Lewis’s most popular and most unpopular apologetic argument, the argument known as the trilemma. For those who might not remember, it goes about like this:

“Consider the things that Jesus said and did. Things like claiming Messianic titles like Son of Man, like applying the name ‘I am’ to himself, like claiming to forgive sins against God. There are three ways in which a person can say these things. Either he does not believe them, or he believes them and they are false, or he believes them and they are true. Thus a person who says these sorts of things can reasonably only be one of three things: in the first case, he’s a blasphemous liar and malus homo (as many Jewish leaders came to think); in the second case, he’s completely insane, being an ordinary person who thinks he’s God; in the third case, he actually is who he says he is. Now if we’re convinced by his other actions that he’s not a lunatic (and we should be), and that he’s not Satanically evil (and we should be), that leaves the last option. If we think that Jesus was a good, sane man, we ought to think that he was God.”

Of course as you’ll recognize by the Latin above this argument is much older than Lewis: aut Deus aut malus homo is a very old argument, and all Lewis has done is fill in the third option (that of insanity). Now the first thing to notice about the argument is that it’s valid. Given that Jesus said such things, there are really only those three options. And it’s pretty hard to make a good case for Jesus’s being an evil man or a nutcase, so we’re left (shockers!) with the last as the most reasonable case. And since we have a valid argument, there’s only one way to get out of the conclusion...

Which is to deny the premise. Now, the funny thing about most of the people who object to the trilemma argument is that they think that the premise is part of the argument itself. So they respond with some obvious comment like, “Well, what if Jesus didn’t say those things, and other people later made it up? Then what? No trilemma now, huh? That’s another option!” Well, duh. That’s another option indeed, but it doesn’t mean that Lewis’s argument is obviously fallacious and that he was just a rhetoric-slinging illogical blowhard. It just means that they’ve denied the premise. It’s not that hard to get out of an argument’s conclusion by denying the premise. Thus we have lesson #1. Arguments have premises. Just because you think the premise is false doesn’t mean the argument is stupid.

Of course this leaves us in the position now of defending the premise. And its denial does have rather a lot of prima facie plausibility. So why should we accept that premise? And what is Lewis doing making an argument with this kind of premise?

There can be many cases made for accepting the premise. Lewis makes a number of them in other places, and hordes of other people tackle the topic also. I won’t go into them now. What I’m more interested in is the fact that Lewis doesn’t need to defend the premise here because the argument is directed at people who already (mostly) accept it. If you are convinced that the Jesus presented in the Gospels is a product of rapid mythmaking and that the things he says there are not reasonably accurate preservations of things he actually said, then the argument is not directed at you. The argument is for those people who think that the things that Jesus says (if not the miracles that he does) in the Gospels are pretty close to the things he actually said. After all, if the Gospels don’t preserve what he said pretty well, then why would you say Jesus was a great moral teacher (those that say this are the audience of Lewis’s argument here)? You’d have nothing to base the assessment on.

Now I’d like to write a little about another much-maligned argument that Lewis makes: the argument from reason (for supernaturalism). This one appears in a lot of places -- Mere Christianity, Miracles, and a number of essays -- and it has a number of variants. The basic gist of the argument is that naturalism (the claim that only physical things exist) leaves us with no grounds for trusting in our reasoning capacity. Since reasoning leads to truth, we should reject naturalism.

One form of the argument can be summarized by the statement that Naturalism is self-defeating. It runs like this. Suppose that naturalism is true. Then, all of our thoughts are nothing more than physical interactions, with purely physical causes. Thus when we believe in some logical deduction, we don’t believe it because it is true (as we think), but because of some physical interactions which have no particular propensity to lead to what we call a true belief. So we have no reason to think that our reasoning is true. But why should we believe naturalism? Well, because of some chain of reasoning. Now if we can trust our reason we might debate whether that chain is sound or not, but if we can’t, then it doesn’t matter: there’s no particular reason to think that our reasoning has led us to anything true; thus, there’s no reason to believe that naturalism is true.

There is an obvious objection to this which in my experience people never fail to bring up. They don’t want to give up reason, so they dispute that the physically-caused nature of our thoughts means that we have no reason to think them true. They say that true beliefs and accurate reasoning are survival characteristics, so evolution has produced them in us: thus we can trust our reason. This takes a little force out of the argument. Though it’s a bit question-begging to assume that correct reasoning is a survival characteristic and favored by evolution, at least with that assumption a naturalist thesis can survive this form of the argument.

But there’s still something fishy going on here. Under Lewis’s supernaturalist thesis, Reason is a given -- it’s something which God bestows on us, and we begin by assuming that our reason is reliable. Under a naturalist thesis, however, it can’t be: but this objection tries to make it so.

Consider that a metaphysical theory has to provide an answer to the question: “Why should we believe our reason?” Validity of reason is so fundamental that there is no question of accepting a theory which can’t tell why we should believe it. Now note that the answer to the question need not be derived from outside the metaphysic. Indeed it cannot be, because you can’t offer a proof that reasoning is valid (for the very obvious reason that such a proof would need to use reasoning, whose validity is the problem in question!). But there must be an answer to the question.

Now, Lewis’s Christian supernaturalism gives this answer to the question: we believe that our reason can be accurate as a premise. Because it’s a supernaturalist system it can do this; obviously the correctness of reason isn’t a physical premise, but it might as well be a supernatural one. Then, once it’s taken as a starting point, we can talk more about its source (in God, in Lewis’s case). What answer can naturalism give?

It can’t give any supernatural or mysterious source of reason, because we’re dealing with a naturalist thesis, which automatically precludes such things. So it can’t take the correctness of reason as a premise. Well, then, how will we be convinced to trust our reason, if its correctness is not a premise? By reasoning from premises, obviously... and we see the problem. We’re going to need to assume the correctness of reason – namely, the reasoning we use in our argument -- to show that reason is correct, and that is the one thing that a naturalist account cannot assume. It is stuck. There is no possible way out.

This may sound rather strange, that we’ve so thoroughly eliminated naturalism... without even considering its arguments. Isn’t there something funny going on here? Well, sort of. We’ve certainly not shown that naturalism is false. That’s not something you can do without appealing to certain supernaturalist intuitions (about, e.g., notions of self, soul, etc.), and of course the naturalist isn’t going to let us do that (how come is a topic for another time). Instead, what this shows is that we cannot rationally believe a naturalist metaphysic. Still a pretty strong statement. And (as every argument has premises) what were our premises? That our reason is reliable, and that our metaphysics should be able to tell us why we should believe our reason, given the metaphysical premises. I think that’s a pretty good criterion for rational belief in a metaphysical system.

Of course there are even more forms to the argument from reason than the ones I’ve mentioned here. (I mentioned that Lewis gives several, and the second form I have given here is one he does not give, but is my adaptation.) Still, I think this shows that there’s a lot more to the argument than its detractors give credit for. I’ll probably come back to the argument later.

But this is getting long already and I am tired, so I think I’ll stop here.

In Principio

I decided that I wanted to start a blog. Having some free time around the new year, I decided that this was a good time to do it. So I did.

I plan the contents of this blog to be mostly essays and musings on various topics, not personal journaling. (I tried that; I can't do it.)

I called this blog The Think Turtle because I felt it to be amusing and oddly appropriate; plus, the other things I thought of were already taken.

In any case there's not much else to say in an introductory post.