The Relationship Between Autonomy and Rationality in Education

The Relationship Between Autonomy and Rationality in Education

By Margaret Atherton

Agreat deal of what goes on in schools seems to involve things like conveying facts to the pupils or getting them to m a s h quite abstract bits of theory. Children are expected to come to acquire a body of knowledge, to learn representative truths belonging to history or mathematics, for example, and to understand the reasons for holding such statements to be true. But people have worried about the justification for such a procedure. For clearly, we don’t send children to school so that they will become useless storehouses of information. Instead, we expect that their schooling will be able to make a difference to how they get on in the world, that it will affect the kinds of things they will later be able to do, that it will endow them with a “prepared- ness” to act appropriately and judiciously. So it seems natural to wonder whether putting children in possession of a body of knowledge is in fact very helpful to them. Some have even thought that this sort of schooling is not only irrelevant to what ought to be the actual aim of education, but is actually detrimental to it. For, they say, an education of this sort is entirely a matter of getting children to accept the voice of authority, and this will stifle in them what education ought instead to develop, the capacity for autonomy.

The suggestion that education ought to be devoted to the development of autonomy has clear appeal on a number of grounds. For one thing, it seems an affront to a person’s integrity when what they do is under the control of another. So there are good moral reasons for enabling people to take charge over their actions.‘ But there are good practical reasons for fostering autonomy as well. For if people’s actions are dependent upon instruction from someone else, then, for them to be suitably prepared to act, that someone else must fully instruct them about whatever situations they might have to deal with. Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict what situations people might find themselves in or what wants they might feel called upon to satisfy. But if they have been taught to be in control of their actions, and are thus liberated from the need to rely on the instruction of others, they will have been made capable, insofar as i t is feasible, of dealing themselves with situations that arise, whether or not they might have been anticipated.

One might question whether autonomy is something that really needs developing via schooling. Why isn’t being in charge of our actions something we do naturally? After all, left to one’s own devices, who else could control one’s actions but oneself? But the problem is that left to one’s own devices, there is a good chance that activity would be simply random or uncontrolled, and this is not at all the same kind of thing as being autonomous. For autonomous activity isn’t undirected, but self-directed. This means that the action must have a direction for which the agent is responsible, it must have been selected or chosen by the agent, and if selected or chosen, then arrived at by means of some sorting out process. The agent must have had reason to prefer that action to others. But all this means that directing activity isn’t something that just occurs naturally, but is rather a skill that perhaps can be facilitated through schooling. In fact, it seems reasonable to suppose that someone who hasn’t been provided with such a skill will be more likely, in order to avoid aimless floundering, to take directions from others, and to do what they say.

If the feeling that education ought to be useful is understood in this manner, as the idea that education ought to develop autonomy, then what does this say about what goes on in schools? R. F. Dearden2 has proposed a method for bringing about

Margaret Atherton is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

1. It might be thought that an additional moral reason for autonomy would be provided by accepting something like self-realization as a suitable goal in life. But this is actually not the case. For i f it were thought that others were in a better position to recognize in each person those characteristics most deserving of being actualized, then the goal of self-realization could be carried out entirely under the direction of someone else.

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autonomy that is especially interesting, for it entirely supports the practice of concen- trating schooling on getting people to know things. His idea is that in developing autonomy, it is people’s choosing skills that we are trying to develop and that choosing must be based on reasons. Thus people will have become choosers, he thinks, when they are capable of thinking and acting on reasons. Roughly speaking, Dear- den’s plan is to make people rational and the claim is that once they are rational, they will be autonomous. Dearden’s proposal rests on the existence of a link between rationality and autonomy.

It is not, of course, to be expected that the acquisition of any body of knowledge or set of facts can be guaranteed to be helpful in turning people into autonomous choosers. What Dearden thinks is that a curriculum that will have this result will be one based on P. H. Hirst’s influential notion of “basic forms of understanding.”3 Hirst’s idea is that in designing a curriculum, one should try to convey what is basic to whatever knowledge might be needed in order to understand one’s situation in the world. That way, it will be possible to come to know or understand whatever might be needed when the occasion arises. He claims that i f one has grasped the meaning of a set of concepts, their relationship to one another and their method of validation, then one will have the sort of understanding that leaves one able to work out appropriate reasons for choices in new situations to which the set of concepts applies. Hirst thinks there is more than one set of basic concepts necessary for dealing with the world, in fact, according to him, there are five: mathematical, scientific, historical, aesthetic and ethical. A curriculum should be designed to inculcate students with the concepts and validation procedures characteristic of each of these five areas, for example, in mathematics, they will learn to understand concepts like ‘number’, ‘integer’ and ‘set’ and to make use of the nonempirical proof procedures typical of mat he ma tic^.^

Thus, Dearden’s claim is that it is possible to produce or inculcate autonomy by giving people knowledge of a certain sort. This assumes the existence of a strong connection between knowing certain things and autonomous behavior. It says that people who have the kind of understanding described by Hirst, of a series of basic concepts, their relations and validation procedures, will be self-directed choosers. The ability to make choices based on reasons is held to be the result of developing thought or reasoning via an understanding of concepts and validation procedures.

This recommendation of Dearden’s, however, suggests that the connection between knowing and acting is somewhat more direct than is actually the case. lt is quite true that if people have the facts at their disposal, properly understood and validated, they will be more likely to have made a good or appropriate choice, and so, if we want to develop people’s choosing skill, it will be suitable to increase their capacity for knowledge. It is also true that if people act on the basis of no knowledge at all, but randomly, their actions are not interestingly the product of choice. But it is unfortunately only too possible for people to choose, but not knowledgably, to have reasons which are silly or uninformed. Then their actions may be stupid or ineffective, but they will nevertheless have been autonomous or self-directed. So the way to be more effective is to be able to choose to act for good or validated reasons, but acting effectively is by no means the same as acting autonomously. Overcoming random behavior to allow people to be able to act at all is only linked with being able to choose knowledgably if there is a prior commitment that all actions will be effective as well as autonomous.

It would seem relatively straightforward to admit that it is not just autonomy that

2. R. F. Dearden, The Philosophy of Primary Education (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, I=), and R. F. Dearden, “Autonomy and Educatlon,” in Education and the Development of Reason, ed. R. F. Dearden, P. H. Hirst and R. S. Peters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

3. Developed in “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge,” reprinted in Education and the Development of Reason.

4. There are a number of assumptions involved in this claim which I doubt, but which will not be necessary to argue about here. Among them are that It is possible to equip people to know everything they might need to know, that these five areas of knowledge are sufficient to do the job and that knowledge can be distributed neatly into areas, each wlth their own distinctive set of concepts and validation procedures.

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educators ought to be interested in fostering, but effectiveness as well. Dearden after all characterizes the goal he is interested in developing as "personal autonomy based on reason," where in fact he doesn't mean any reasoning process, but good reasoning, reasoning to good effect. But once efficacy is admitted as an equally suitable goal for education along with autonomy, then it is appropriate to ask if efficacy and autonomy always go hand in hand. Surely there are occasions where the most efficacious thing to do would be to leave the process of choosing in the hands of experts. Dearden implies this surrender of autonomy will not happen, because people greatly enjoy being able to do things for themselves, and he cites the demands of young children as evidence of that fact5 But however pleasurable young children may find it to, for example, dress themselves, the demand on the part of adults to take charge in every area of their lives is less often heard. The goal of complete self- sufficiency has been felt by some, but not by all.

The fact that people often decide, for the sake of efficacy, not to act autonomously means that it is not always easy to identify when a person is acting autonomously. For people under a great many circumstances rely heavily on the advice of others, and it is not always a simple matter to say when they have surrendered their autonomy. For example, in the case of someone who decides to boil an egg and looks up in a book how to do it, it seems reasonable to say such a person is acting with a fair degree of autonomy, even though he is doing what the book says. Otherwise, we will have to say that anyone who seeks or has sought directions for the means to achieve goals of theirs has ceased to behave autonomously. Since this probably takes in a great many of the actions a person does (we all had to learn to boil eggs at one time) it would have as its result that autonomy was almost nonexistent. On the other hand, a man who agrees to do whatever a doctor tells him has adopted such a course of action willingly and in support of a general goal of his, that of maintaining good health. But it seems reasonable to say that such a person is not very autonomous with respect to these actions, or else we will have to collapse behaving voluntarily with behaving autonomously and thus almost every action will be an autonomous one. Needless to say, if autonomy is going to be regarded as Something educators should take as a goal to encourage it must be located in a middle ground, for at either extreme there is not much anyone can do about it.

The middle ground can perhaps be located by looking to see at what stage autonomy is surrendered into expert hands. If June chooses for reasons of her own to boil an egg and then looks up in a book how to do it, it might make sense to say she is relatively autonomous, since she is following the directions in order to perform an action she herself has chosen to do. But if Charles follows his doctor's orders for reducing chlorestorol in the blood, then reducing chlorestorol is not something he has chosen to do, since the reasons for adopting this course of action would presum- ably be known only to the expert. Thus to establish the proper degree of autonomy, we look to see to what extent the reasons for an action are known to and attributable to an agent.6 This would isolate a vast range of actions, from finding the way home to finding a problem to work on, that might be performed autonomously, and still leave some areas, medical, legal or theological, for example, that might profitably be handed over to the experts. But this summoning of experts occurs only if we decide to value effectiveness over autonomy. And similarly, developing thought processes in the way Dearden suggests will only be useful i f we decide to value effectiveness as well as autonomy. The development of these processes is not relevant to the promo- tion of autonomy alone, only to autonomy harnessed to efficacy.

Thus the introduction of efficacy into these matters produces complications, and the respective roles of autonomy and rationality under these circumstances are not as straightforward as appeared initially. For, at times, the demands of efficacy encour-

5. Dearden, "Autonomy and Education," p. 460. 6. This requires, of course, that it is possible to reach a decision about how to describe

someone's action, so that it makes sense to say, for example, that what June is actually doing is boiling an egg (for which she has her own reasons) and that covering the egg with water (for which only the cookbook author has reasons) forms a part of or is in service of June's action of egg-boiling.

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age the abandonment of a good deal of autonomy, whenever we think it appropriate to put ourselves into the hands of experts. Indeed, any education program that failed to recognize the wisdom of such shifting of responsibility and insisted on leaving all control to the individual would be utopianly shortsighted. On the other hand, without a commitment to efficacy, Dearden’s link between forms of rational thought and autonomous action is broken, for one can be autonomous, but not, in this sense, rational. The link is forged only because we believe that action in accordance with standards of good reasons and evidence will be action that will serve us best.

One might imagine the argument has focused too narrowly on autonomy of action and that things will change if we include autonomy of thought. Even though, for the sake of efficiency, people might be willing to surrender their autonomy Of action, when it comes to autonomy of thought, it would seem less desirable that they should let others think for them. One might even argue that the decision to let others choose what to do for one at least requires some understanding of the situation in thought, and that instruction in the “forms of understanding” promotes an autonomy in thinking on which any kind of decision about action must depend. But many of the considerations that come up with respect to action apply, with even worse results from the point of view of autonomy, to thinking and believing. In order to connect autonomy of thinking with a grasp of concepts and validation procedures, one would have to claim something like this: an understanding of the terms in which beliefs are expressed and an understanding of the method for showing they are justified will enable anyone to come to a decision about the acceptability of their beliefs and this is what constitutes thinking autonomously. But again this presupposes too direct a connection between having good reasons for your beliefs and having them autonomously. However important it is to be able to understand whether your beliefs are justified, this is not the same as thinking autonomously. For if Frances pigheadedly sticks to her own opinions in the face of firm evidence to the contrary, she is not only being autonomous, she is being autonomous to a far greater extent than is someone whose beliefs are governed by standards of justification. Frances’ beliefs are impor- tantly self-determined, for they are governed by her own standards and preferences, while the other person’s beliefs are governed by what is true, or can be justified, and matters of truth or justification crucially are not up to that person.

In fact, a desire to think autonomously will take a person in the opposite direction. For a person’s thought will be to a greater and greater degree autonomous or self-governed, to the degree that their thoughts are determined by goals and standards of their own. But a decision to believe only that which is justifiable requires giving up your own standards in favor of publicly acceptable criteria. Certainly, this is a move that is encouraged in education. By and large, we don’t think it is a good thing for students simply to arrive at “their own opinions,” instead we insist that they sift through them and accept only those they can validate. People are asked to surrender their autonomy, to ignore their own viewpoint, the-way-it-appears-to-them, in favor of objective standards. A person is behaving autonomously who uses the importance or the way something seems to that person as a reason for believing it, someone is showing a respect for criteria of justification who does not accept this sort of reason as the only appropriate evidence for a belief.

Dearden argues that we retain our autonomy since we freely choose to abide by standards of justification. But it is not even clear how much free choice we are actually allowed in the matter. Certainly it makes no sense to allow people to choose some criteria for justification rather than others. For unless what is put forward as evidence or good reasons conforms to public standards, then what is being expressed is simply a subjective preference, and not a demonstration that something is a fact or is true. This is not to say that it is not open to someone to propose a revision in standards of evidence or validation, and even to precede the rest of the world in making use of these standards. But for this to count as a revision, it must provide a clear improvement over previous proof procedures, according to public standards of what it is to be a good demonstration or piece of reasoning. Nor do we, in any real sense, choose to be rational rather than irrational. One might argue that this is because people, in fact, always have a desire to think rationally. Thus in conforming

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their thoughts to standards of justification, they are merely expressing what is their own goal. But this sort of general goal to be rational is like the general goal of good health. And similarly, although people might want to be rational, as they want to be healthy, the specific actions or desiderata that must be put into effect are not up to them. So an understanding of validation procedures does not directly promote autonomy.

The results for thinking are somewhat different than they were for doing. In both cases, a grasp of concepts and validation procedures, or forms of understanding, can provide a link with what is thought or done only via an intermediate virtue. Unless this intermediate virtue is accepted, autonomous thinking and doing can go on without any attention to validation procedures. But while in the case of doing, the intermediate virtue, efficacy, merely may exist at odds with personal autonomy, the intermediate virtue in the case of thinking, respect for justification, must conflict with subjective autonomy. Someone who decides to act for himself surrenders at worst efficacy, but someone who decides to think for himself, come what may, gives up all claims to rationality.

There is of course a long-standing tradition that connects a respect for the rules of thought with autonomous thinking.’ Following this tradition, one might want to say that justification procedures are of such importance that mental activity can’t even count as thinking unless it is in accordance with such procedures. And there can be no autonomous thinking until there is thinking. That is, it may be that we have been considering the notion of autonomy in too isolated a context. Autonomy, it might be said, occurs only within a framework. Autonomy in governing presupposes methods of government, autonomy in chess playing presupposes rules of chess, and likewise, perhaps, autonomous thinking presupposes rules of thought. Thinking, by definition, is not thinking unless it is rule-governed. Indeed, Hirst speaks of his forms of understanding as constituting rules of thought and both Hirst and Dearden speak as if enabling people to have reasons, enables them to be rational, and hence to have a mind at all. So perhaps it is a mistake to think of learning to give justifications as promoting autonomy directly. Instead, by getting people to surrender their autonomy in order to learn the rules by which thought is produced, they are being endowed with the ability to think. Until they can think at all, they can’t think autonomously, but once they have learned to think, they won’t need anyone else to do their thinking for them, and so will have become autonomous thinkers.

But there is a difficulty with this proposal, as I see it. That lies in the suggestion that learning rules of thought is what gives people a mind or enables them to think. Rules for thinking cannot tell the whole story with respect to the thought processes, for they can only determine whether a particular thought or train of thought is justified. Someone who knows how to think must be able to do more than check thoughts for validity, such a person must be able to produce thoughts as well (think them up as well as think them through). For validation rules can tell whether, on a particular set of data, a particular hypothesis is justified, but they don’t provide the hypothesis or any other, nor do they tell where to start, what to take as evidence. And it is within these areas that it seems more appropriate to talk about self-direction, and hence where autonomy is likely to be fostered. People are thinking autonomously when it is correct to attribute the hypotheses they come up with, the purposes for which they gather evidence, the plans they strive to realize to themselves, rather than to anyone else. Since all of these sorts of activities are just as important to thinking as understanding concepts and their validation procedures, it does not seem reasonable to assume that a grasp of these latter two alone is what endows people with a mind. And since autonomy is intimately connected with some of these other processes, it does not seem likely that it is possession of Validation procedures alone that can account for the creation of autonomous thought.

I suspect that teaching people how to think has been considered to be a matter of

7. Israel Scheffler refers to this tradition in his development of a mode of instruction based on rules, and associates it with Kant. See ”Philosophical Models of Teaching,” reprinted in Reason and Teaching (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973).

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giving them a grasp of justification procedures because such a view fits in with a particular model of mental processes. Under this model, only the process of justification would need to be taught. Such a model would describe the mind as bifurcated into a productive force that is irrational, together with a rational critical faculty that decides which ideas are justified. On this account, teaching people how to think would indeed amount to establishing or developing the rational faculty. This would be accomplished by providing them with rules of thought, which they would then use to validate their preexisting and untutored thought processes, together with a vocabu- lary in which to express these thoughts. But this picture of mental processes is not entirely convincing. For one thing, to view the mind as flinging out ideas and plans in an irrational and random manner and then checking them through for validity with a handy set of rules seems unnecessarily elaborate. It doesn’t seem to do justice to the rational context in which many of our ideas occur to suggest that first one thinks up an idea and then after one has been taught how, discovers good reasons for thinking it. It cannot be an accident that our ideas and plans are frequently to the point, and it is not easy to see how a mastery of justification procedures, to be applied after the idea has originated, can accomplish this. The assumption, too, that all the interesting work of the mind is concentrated in validation procedures overlooks the conjunction of cognitive and emotive forces that come into play in the creation of ideas.

It seems to me that what tends to give this two-part picture of mental processes its appeal is that it does, in fact, describe something that goes on, but not in the manner suggested by this model. What in fact happens is that we produce ideas, hypotheses, or arguments of greater or lesser degree of rationality, by whatever means it turns out describes the mechanisms of thought; and then, on a conscious level, proceed to check and verify our ideas, according to accepted methods of justification. But, to say this is not, of course, to say that validation procedures are a literal description of how thoughts are produced. And so, in endowing people with forms of understanding, we are not giving them a mind, but merely providing them with standards by means of which they can judge and evaluate their own mental processes and products. These standards are, as I have argued, public standards, and therefore must be taught. But the justification procedures are not rules that must be internalized before thought can be produced, they are merely tools for evaluating thought. The full range of thinking skills, including those that enable people to come by ideas and arguments, must be induced by other means. Considered in this light, it should be clear that while training in these rules will be indispensable to a good education, and will be of service to the rational and autonomous agent, they are not adequate to create such an agent, and it will not be enough to devote educational practices solely to their development.

What I think all this suggests is that the relationships between rationality and autonomy are a little trickier than might first appear. On the one hand, it seems obvious that things like justification procedures have got more to do with rationality than they do with autonomy, and that you cannot use them to promote rationality and claim that you are thereby promoting autonomy. In fact, to the extent that forms of understanding are important to rationality, as indeed they are, they must be taught and taught at the expense of autonomy. But it also seems there is more to the thinking process than concepts and validation procedures, for coming up with hypotheses, plans and projects is equally an important part of the thinking mind. It cannot be assumed that ideas will just happen, a gift from the irrational, and there is no obvious reason why training in critical procedures will be what is sufficient to produce ideas as well as to justify them. To adopt an educational program that concentrates on those areas of rationality, like justification procedures, that can be carried out without reference to autonomy, will foster a vastly impoverished form of rationality. It will leave people able to verify hypotheses, but not able to make them, to give good reasons for preferences without being able to create them. An educational curriculum that concentrates on validation procedures will not only fail to promote autonomy, but will fail to do justice to the thinking process.*

I would like to thank Robert Schwartz for discussing the issues raised in this paper with me.

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The Relationship Between Autonomy and Rationality in Education