Following the diaper bomber’s attempt to blow up a plane with explosives in his underwear, there has been a flurry of news articles about what English universities have done or should do to curtail the radicalization of their students. According to this piece in the WSJ, the British government adopted a program in 2008 to curtail radicalization called “Promoting Good Campus Relations, Fostering Shared Values and Preventing Violent Extremism in Universities and Higher Education Colleges.”
Reading about this I started to wonder whether the appreciation of liberty, tolerating the words and actions of people with whom one disagrees, is something that can be taught. Is the love of liberty natural in the sense that people will value liberty without any external encouragement or conditioning? If not, how do people learn to value liberty? Can schools play a role in promoting liberty? If so, what does a liberty curriculum look like?
I’m interested in hearing what everyone thinks.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I think that because humans are inherently selfish everyone has an appreciation for their own liberty. However, an appreciation for the rights of others is something that is learned, and certainly can be taught.
The problem with teaching liberty is that it has to be based on something. You have to give a reason for why other people are valuable and have rights. This is difficult to do from a secular platform, such as the one used in public schools.
I went to a small Christian school that taught that humans have been given value by a creator. A
Whoops. I hit submit on accident. Continued:
As such we are mandated to respect the rights of others. The curriculum of the school was called “the Principle Approach” and relied very much the teachings of John Locke. While requiring junior high students to read Locke’s “of Civil Government” in it’s 17th century form is perhaps ill advised, I do think that educating students on the foundations of government and liberty is essential.
The fact that modern education is largely devoid of such an education, and even devoid of a moral basis for such an education, explains much about the current direction of the American governmental system.
I largely agree with Joel, and I think that a large part of the problem is that people don’t recognize the problem. I think there is an assumption that the schools are covering civic education, but for the most part they are failing to do so.
If we recognized this as a problem, we would not only try to improve the quality of civic education in public schools, but other civic organizations could take it upon themselves to provide it.
My view is that civic education is too important to simply leave to the schools in the naive hope that they have it covered.
What options do we have?
Individual parents may teach tolerance. Individual teachers may teach tolerance.
Can any political process other than a free market institutionalize “tolerance”? Institutions which assemble their audience through compulsion carry a considerable burden of hypocrisy when they advocate liberty. Further, as the contest over standards illustrates, nothing guarantees that the policy which results from a democratic political contest for the control of school policy will serve the public interest.
On the other hand, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has observed in her autobiography Infidel, intolerant Islamic schools receive subsidies in the Dutch system of subsidized competition in education services. In A God Who Hates, Wafa Sultan expressed admiration for the lessons of tolerance which her daughter received in LA schools.
It’s possible to teach tolerance and respect for liberty. In an unsubsidized, unregulated system of education services, some parents and schools will teach tolerance and some will teach intolerance. In any system of compulsory attendance, it’s likely that many schools will teach intolerance, by example or explicitly.
Holding aside Malcolm’s good point about whether the state can teacher liberty in an illiberal education system, I’m a little unclear on whether people think the love for liberty is natural or not.
Joel makes a persuasive case that people naturally value their own liberty but have to be taught to respect the liberty of others. If that’s true, then who teaches that? Can we assume that parents or an unfettered market for education would naturally do that?
I think it’s self-perpetuating. If a society values liberty, tolerance, etc., then those are the values that will be instilled in children by whoever it is that teaches them. It’s not natural, per se, but if teachers believe it, then eventually most students will as well.
Obviously, that’s just an approximation – adult society is not homogenous, so the products of it won’t be either – but I think it’s a fairly good approximation. Certainly if you want to look at the free-market case, I think it’s safe to say that liberty-loving parents won’t send their children to liberty-hating teachers very often. As ever, a free market will generally produce what consumers want.
The experimental evidence collected in Pat Wolf’s article suggests that it can be taught, since it appears that in random-assignment experiments children offered the opportunity to attend private school end up valuing the liberty of others more than those who are not randomly chosen to get that offer.
My position is that, while our natural selfishness does make us value our own liberty more than that of others, our natural reason (which continues to operate in spite of the impact of our selfishness upon it) shows us quite clearly that the basis of our own claim to liberty is the inherent wrongness of infringing on liberty as such, meaning that we all do in fact know (on some level) that other people have the same right to liberty that we do. As C.S. Lewis once said, thinking that you should seek your own good more than other people’s goods simply because it is yours is like thinking that the nearest telephone pole really is bigger than all the others. You percieve it as bigger because of your perspective, but your reason corrects for the distortion caused by your perspective (if you let it).
However, while this knowledge is inherent in the love of our own liberty, we face a constant struggle between our reason (which tells us to respect the rights of others) and our passions (which prefer ourselves to others). Long years of training and discipline, especially in childhood, are what make the difference between a man who usually follows reason and a man who usually follows his passions.
Hence the results Wolf cites – private schools provide the training and discipline needed to inclucate the habit of following what our reason tells us is true rather than what our selfishness tells us is desireable.
What is the explanation for why private schools teach liberty as opposed to public schools? Is this because private schools are more disciplined, or because they often have religious affiliations?
I think Greg has very accurately summed up human nature with regards to liberty.
With this in mind, I don’t believe that parents or an unfettered market for education will necessarily teach these things by nature. Sometimes a lack of respect for other’s rights, such as racism, exists in parents and this is perpetuated in the children. An unfettered market for education is simply a mechanism for ensuring parental involvement and satisfaction with their children’s education. White parents in Jim Crow states during the 30’s may have chosen, and been quite satisfied with schools that taught blatant racism. All this to say that a society’s ability to teach inherent human rights is related to the moral fabric of that society.
However, while a parent controlled education system may or may not teach inherent civil liberty, a public education system that prides itself in being removed from a source of moral foundation certainly cannot teach this.
While I think Joel and Greg both make some excellent points, I am going to have to disagree with a few of them. I do agree with Joel when he says that humans inherently desire their own liberty. And I agree with Greg that it is through a reasoning process by which we come to respect the liberty of others. My problem with both Greg and Joel’s conclusions, however, stems from this notion that they have that people respect the liberty of others because it is the right thing to do. Joel wants to get there through God, and Greg wants to get there through “reason,” but they are essentially both saying the same thing: In the end, people will recognize–or can be trained to recognize–what is “right.”
My approach is not so pollyanna. I think you can make the case that liberty is “natural” from Joel’s first point. Joel says people are naturally selfish, so they have an inherent desire for their own liberty. What Joel fails to recognize is that this same selfishness creates respect for the liberty of others. It is in an individual’s own self interest to respect the liberty of others so that their own liberty in turn will be respected by others. Such a tradeoff is mutually beneficial, especially once strong institutions for the enforcement of violations of liberty infringements are in place.
So yes, liberty is natural, and respect for the liberty of others is natural. It is not a construct.
If, as Jay asked, love of liberty is on the decline, I suspect it is simply being taken for granted because it is fairly abundant at this point in US history.
Brian, I definitely see your point that it can be mutually beneficial to recognize other’s rights in the interest of preserving our own. In fact, I think that this is a basic principle that a majority of governments have adopted throughout human history. This sort of understanding is perhaps natural.
The problem I have with this is that it isn’t a very principled idea of libery. What about when preserving others rights is not in our best interest? What if the majority decides that it no longer has a reason to protect the rights of the minority? In this case others don’t have the power to infringe on your personal desire for liberty, so respecting theirs is moot.
In this country, we have a constitution that protects the minority on the basis of unalienable rights, even if the majority disagrees. This is what separates us from pure democracy, and from the governments that preceded ours. I think this is perhaps the type of liberty that Jay was referring to, and I believe that this liberty is rare.
The Declaration of Independence makes it clear where the founders of the United States thought these rights came from.
Appeals to principle in and of itself, in the absence of reality, are generally meaningless. You can’t create a good human society with logic in a box. Most principles that govern society are essentially societal heuristics – “If we both agree not to steal from each other, we’ll both be better off”, and the like. They’re all consequentialist arguments at root, as is natural for ideas that are governed more or less by the laws of evolution. Societies that respect the rule of law, individual rights, and all that other fun stuff simply work better than societies that don’t. Teaching it as fundamental principles, good in and of themselves, is a useful shorthand and a good method of educating children, but it’s not strictly true. They’re not good because they’re good, they’re good because they work.
As for finding reasons not to infringe upon minority rights even in the absence of overarching principle, two obvious arguments come to mind. The first is gains from trade – would white people really have been better off if Michael Jordan, Jimi Hendrix, and Tiger Woods were working on cotton plantations instead of entertaining millions of us? The second is that while you may not be a minority as regards the issue at hand, you’re always a minority on some issue, and you’d rather not get mercilessly shafted when it comes time for that issue to get debated.
Alsadius, neither of those “obvious” arguments withstands scrutiny:
1) Sure, society in general is better off if I don’t commit injustices. It’s not even much of a stretch to argue that society in general is better off every single time I don’t commit an injustice. But I personally don’t benefit as an individual (at least not by the standards of measurement you’re using) when I refrain from committing injustice. Certainly I don’t end up better off every single time, and probably not even in general. So why should I care about what benefits society in general when I personally get screwed? Unless, of course, there is a transcendent law I am obligated to obey that says I shouldn’t put my own good ahead of that of others.
2) Yes, everyone is always a minority on some issue. But what reason do I have to expect that if I respect the rights of the minority on issue A, where I am in the majority, my personal, individual actions on that narrow issue will make it more likely that the majority on issue B, where I am in the minority, will respect minority rights? Most of the time, the majority on issue B will not even know about whatever I (one lone individual) did on issue A (an issue most of them don’t know or care about). And when they do know, will they be willing to forego their own benefit solely in order to honor my having foregone my own benefit on some other issue? Moreover, will the indirect and delayed impact of my actions on the disposition of issue B be more valuable to me than the direct and immediate gain I stand to make on issue A? And will those indirect benefits outweigh the direct benefits every single time in all possible circumstances?