Freedom and Truth: Education as Liberal and Conservative

Socrates reportedly thought of himself as a midwife whose role was to elicit from the subject something preexisting deep within himself which had previously been lying dormant. The Socratic method was that of feigning ignorance while asking questions leading the subject to come to a predetermined conclusion on his own. Learning in this model is remembering. When the subject learns, it is because he got himself into proper relation to what was there all along--such essences as Reason (seen as an innate human faculty of drawing proper conclusions from true statements) and Truth (the essence to which all true statements point) must be brought out from within. Knowledge in the Platonic conception is discovered rather than created, found not made. When we refer to the field of study concerned with teaching and learning as “education,” we are using a term rooted in a Socratic view of teaching as “educing”--bringing out what was latent.

In his essay “Education as Socialization and as Individualization” (1989), Richard Rorty contrasted liberal education as a matter of educing against a conservative view of education as a matter of inducing. In the liberal perspective (and in a Rortian slogan), if we take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself. For conservatives on the other hand (and based on a far more famous slogan), the truth will set you free. Rorty explains the conservative theory as follows:

“Once such obstacles as the passions or sin are overcome, the natural light of reason will guide us to the truth. Deep within our souls there is a spark that the right sort of education can fan into flame. Once the soul is afire with love of truth, freedom will follow--for freedom consists of one’s capacity to be rational.”

Both sides accept the Platonic premise about our epistemic situation where learning is understood as getting into the proper relation to the latent faculty of Reason viewed as the natural light by which we recognize Truth conceived as ready-made and discoverable, found not made. The distinction between liberal and conservative approaches to education then can be made by determining the view of the relationship between freedom and truth implied or explicated in the approach. Is truth the way to freedom, or is freedom the way to truth?

Rorty explained the political divide on the education front as follows:

“When people on the political right talk about education, they immediately start talking about truth. Typically, they enumerate what they take to be familiar and self-evident truths and regret that these are no longer being inculcated in the young.”

On the other hand,

“When people on the political left talk about education, they talk first about freedom. The left typically views the old familiar truths cherished by the right as a crust of convention that needs to be broken through, vestiges of old-fashioned modes of thought from which the new generation should be freed.”

Instead of becoming free of our base desires and sinful natures through being educated in important time-tested truths, lefties think we need to first be freed from oppressive social conventions of the past so the light of truth can be revealed. The radical liberal view of education as educing is the process of removing the social claptrap imposing on our true selves to uncover the Truth that was always there. We can see such a radical liberal perspective in the thinking of Nietzsche and Rousseau for whom society was a corrupting influence, and the conservative view that students today are not accumulating beliefs in the right collection of true statements in the work of E. D. Hirsch.

Such an analysis reveals John Dewey’s progressive movement and the Piagetian constructivists as getting around the traditional dispute between liberal and conservative approaches to education by denying the metaphysical premise upon which both approaches are based. Truth is not a thing to be discovered. Knowledge is a construct. It is made rather than found but not out of thin air. Education in a more modest liberal view is seen neither as a matter of inducing or educing but of active engagement with the world. Education is not a matter of conservative social control, though education has the perpetuation of society as one of its aims, and it is not a matter of freeing humans from the chains of society as the radical liberal sees it, though it has the function of preparing us to critique and improve society. It is part of the developmental process of making an animal into a human being.

As for freedom and truth, I agree with Rorty and the liberals who say that if you take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself, but Rorty breaks from the radical left's perspective on education in specifying that the freedom we need to take care of is economic, social, and political rather than letting eight-year-olds decide what they feel like learning.