In ‘Religious Upbringing Reconsidered’ Michael Hand revisits the debate on the right of parents to give their children a religious upbringing in a liberal context. According to him, the logical difficulty lies in the fact that parents cannot both impart religious beliefs and avoid indoctrination. While Peter Gardner and Jim Mackenzie have responded to Hand's paper and raised a number of pertinent issues, what is missing is a fuller treatment of indoctrination and belief inculcation for children. In this paper, I (...) argue that Hand's fallacy lies in his flawed understanding of indoctrination and belief inculcation: the inculcation of non-rational beliefs, far from being indoctrinatory, is in fact necessary for children in the process of growing up. (shrink)

In ‘Religious Upbringing Reconsidered’ Michael Hand revisits the debate on the right of parents to give their children a religious upbringing in a liberal context. According to him, the logical difficulty lies in the fact that parents cannot both impart religious beliefs and avoid indoctrination. While Peter Gardner and Jim Mackenzie have responded to Hand’s paper and raised a number of pertinent issues, what is missing is a fuller treatment of indoctrination and belief inculcation for children. In this paper, I (...) argue that Hand’s fallacy lies in his flawed understanding of indoctrination and belief inculcation: the inculcation of non-rational beliefs, far from being indoctrinatory, is in fact necessary for children in the process of growing up. (shrink)

There are many historical concerns about freedom that have come to be deemphasized in the free will literature itself—for instance, worries around the tyranny of government or the alienation of capitalism. It is hard to see how the current free will literature respects these, or indeed how they could even find expression. This paper seeks to show how these and other concerns can be reintegrated into the debate by appealing to a levels ontology. Recently, Christian List and others have considered (...) how the notion of levels could be relevant to the free will debate. Invariably, however, the focus is on the significance of facts at lower levels. The threats come from below, from fundamental physics or neuroscience. Here, I aim to show how we can frame many interesting concerns about free will in terms of threats from above. After arguing that determination from above is no less threatening, I catalogue such concerns that might constitute threats to our freedom. Doing this not only allows us to show how these concerns relate to those standardly discussed, but it pushes us to expand our conception of freedom. (shrink)

Responding to claims to the contrary, this essay shows how liberal education, the education of critical exposure, indoctrinates students into a style of belief and belief formation. It argues that a common liberal view about what constitutes freedom from indoctrination is precisely the form of indoctrination feared by many conservative communitarians. While I support the style and procedures of liberal education, I argue that we cannot excise all indoctrinating components from it by semantic, logical or epistemic analyses of what indoctrination (...) or education means. (shrink)

Science educators and those who investigate science learning have tended, for good reason, to focus their attention on students' conceptual development, Such a focus is, however, too narrow to provide full and proper understanding of the complexities of original science learning. Recently developmental cognitive psychologists have called on the work of postpositivistic philosophers of science, especially Thomas Kuhn, to bolster their research into conceptual development in science acquisition. What these psychologists have not recognized is that Kuhn's position is actually a (...) derivative of Wittgenstein's methodological nominalism, a viewpoint far more favorable to behaviorism than cognitive psychology. After drawing out some of the consequences of this fact for the developmental cognitive psychologist program for studying science learning, we suggest our own radical alternative. Drawing on Floden, Buchmann and Schwille's idea of “Breaking with Everyday Experience” we propose an alternative notion of original science learning in terms of Alfred Schutz's modification of Williams James' many worlds thesis. The many worlds thesis will allow us to better understand students' difficulty in learning idealized worlds such as science, worlds that represent a discontinuous break with ordinary everyday practical experience. (shrink)

Li, often translated as "ritual" or "ritual propriety," is among the most controversial notions of the Confucian philosophy. Its strong association with the Zhou tradition has caused it to be regarded with suspicion by both Western and Chinese representatives of modernity, mainly on the basis of the Enlightenment insistence of progressive rationality and liberation from the yoke of tradition. This work endeavors to offer a more balanced discussion of li by approaching it from the point of view of the Confucian (...) view of learning or education. It offers a general philosophical discussion of the limitations of the critique of tradition and of rationality's claim to authority, leaning on several Western sources, notably Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Dewey and Pierre Bourdieu. Through an exposition of the ancient Chinese worldview of time and continuous change, it further points to the inevitability of li's adaptable and flexible nature. This underscores the argument, running through the work, that Confucius and his immediate followers did not endorse a program of returning to the Zhou tradition, but rather of reviving the "spirit" of the Zhou culture, involving active and personalized participation in tradition's sustention and evolution. An emphasis on li, therefore, is far from suggesting irrationality---such a view rather indicates the narrow definition of rationality as handed over from the Enlightenment "tradition." The difficulties with such a definition reveal themselves when trying to distinguish between education and indoctrination on a rational vs. irrational basis. The ancient Confucian philosophy of education and personal cultivation steers clear of these problems altogether while at the same time insisting on teaching methods that maximize the student's own initiative and personal realization. In this regard, li reveals itself as an indispensable pedagogical tool, both deepening students' understanding of the significance of their tradition, enabling them to realize their own contribution to its continuous unfolding and thereby providing them with a profound sense of meaning in their daily activities. The concluding chapter brings the issue to the present, and begins with a critical discussion of the prospects of li in the modern world. Lastly, it turns to the state of education both in the world at large and in the People's Republic of China, pointing out some problems for the development of effective education, but certainly some promising signs as well. (shrink)