Democratic Education and the Open Inquiry Imperative
04-26-2019Today, most people consider propaganda corrosive to both education and democracy. As Roger Berkowitz notes, Martin Luther King Jr. urged Americans to recognize this danger while also insisting that the foremost purpose of education is to support critical and active citizenship.1 During his undergraduate years at Morehouse College, King warned:
To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We
are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of halftruths,
prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder
whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. . . . If we are not
careful, our colleges will produce a group of close[d]-minded,
unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts.
Be careful, brethren! Be careful, teachers!2
His worry was that there while there were plenty of “educated” Americans in his era, too many of them accepted uncritically the biases that sustained white supremacy and Jim Crow.
As King suggests, propaganda can be conceived as antithetical to genuine political education. Propaganda paralyzes free thought, distorts politics, and diminishes civic life. In contrast, education in the name of democracy seeks to enlighten and empower us as citizens living in a complex world. How might we undertake this type of education?
Within King’s writings, as well as those of Hannah Arendt and other critics of indoctrination and propaganda, we discover resources for imagining an education that not only avoids these risks but also helps inoculate against them. Such an education helps us learn to think for ourselves and to develop political judgments, relations, and commitments to act. I draw on these ideas to illuminate the theoretical underpinnings of an open inquiry imperative that must guide any legitimate effort for civic education. I also summarize my research on some efforts designed to promote such learning. This research shows that when civic education operates from an open inquiry imperative, it can help students from many walks of life become more politically engaged without pushing them into any particular political ideology.
Education as/vs. Propaganda: Historical Perspectives
When we hear the term propaganda, we typically imagine pejorative connotations: the promotion of false, misleading, partial, or one-sided ideas and information. Illustrative synonyms include disinformation, hype, newspeak, and proselytism. And certain images may come to mind, including Orwell’s Big Brother or the “public service” campaigns that accompanied the First and Second World Wars. As framed by King and Arendt, propagandizing seeks to propagate the views held by narrow-minded conformists who cannot or do not think or act for themselves.
Propaganda has not always been a suspect concept, however. Until the 20th century, it held a largely neutral connotation of mere persuasion. Indeed, education and propaganda were often treated as synonymous
terms, and there was no sustained debate over risks of propaganda in education. Many prominent thinkers within the western canon proposed forms of “benign” propagandizing, so much so that today one could teach an entire course on the topic. For instance, in his Republic, Plato suggests that a utopian state can best educate its children by removing them from their parents and censoring dangerous views—including poetry and fiction— while promulgating a “Noble lie” designed to persuade each citizen to accept his place in the state’s ruling order.3
Centuries later, Machiavelli suggested in The Prince that rulers should deceive and manipulate the public to encourage militaristic nationalism,4 whereas Rousseau, praising Plato’s model, advocated censorship and nearly complete control over students’ environments, including with whom they could interact and what they could read.5 (Robinson Crusoe was an exception, permitted at age 16.) These and other thinkers suggested that lying and controlling access to information, i.e. propagandizing, could sometimes benefit citizens and political communities.
So how has propaganda come to be considered a threat to education and democracy in our times? History has demonstrated the dangers of deceit and manipulation—however philosophically or patriotically garbled—when it comes to modern democratic life. Important events, including both world wars, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the Pentagon Papers scandal, and others, have revealed the extent to which the promulgation of what King termed “legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda”6 can fuel human violence, injustice, and abuse of power.7
In Mein Kampf, Hitler championed propagandizing as a vehicle for deluding and subjugating democratic publics: “By the clever and continuous use of propaganda, a people can even be made to mistake heaven for hell, and vice versa.”8 He went so far as to identify propagandists’ success with their abilities to avoid rational argument in favor of simplistic slogans and to manipulate instinctual reactions such as anger, fear, and in-group biases.
The crises borne of those and other manipulations have provoked the criticism that all forms of propagandizing—benignly intended or not—violate truth-seeking, healthy debate, and the project of self-governance. This critique is potent. As Arendt,9 King, and George Orwell10 all recognized, propaganda is not limited to the messages of totalitarian regimes. In any society, those with power—parties and leaders, the press, civic groups, corporations, cultural or educational institutions—can use propaganda to distort democratic politics when they convey messages that encourage, among other things, uncritical acceptance of the status quo, blind patriotism, xenophobic nationalism, racial or cultural prejudice, or rampant consumerism and materialism.11
So what should the role of education be in our 21st century world—a world in which citizens face many variants of propagandizing, from political spin-doctoring to push-polling, to well-financed political groups and beyond? Can civic education avoid propaganda and instead provide us with tools for navigating and confronting it? Teaching for political engagement does entail certain risks,12 but while some concerns about biased educational institutions are warranted, often they are hyperbolic.13
I suggest that we can illuminate some of the deeper theoretical and ethical groundwork for civic education premised on an open inquiry imperative by drawing creatively on thinkers such as King, Arendt, and John Stuart Mill. Their ideas help reveal the importance of critical thinking and political judgment, acceptance of diversity, and an ethic of responsibility and mutual respect.14 These are essential to the ability of democratic citizens to counter propaganda; they are no less essential for the ability to act effectively and with integrity in public life.
Free Discussion, Critical Thinking, and Political Judgment
In her writings, Arendt highlights the importance of certain types of thinking, learning, and discussion that foster political judgment.15 In her mind, propaganda, which promotes censorship and intellectual paralysis, is the polar opposite of learning experiences that involve free discussion and intellectual stimulation. For, as Arendt and King both observed, the growth of German National Socialism in the 1930s was enabled in part by citizens who lacked independent minds and spirits. This stunting stands in direct contrast to the essential goals of a serious liberal education: to help “liberate” us from superstition and prejudice so that we may develop our capacities for critical thought and action.
To encourage such academic and ethical learning, factual knowledge must be complemented by a deep capacity for critical judgment. Or, as King urged:
To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is
one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to
sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real
from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.16
While traditional civics courses often focus primarily on imparting factual knowledge of influential leaders, institutions, and events in American history, King and Arendt help explain why this is insufficient. We must also learn approaches for evaluating the political information, evidence, and arguments that we encounter. Free discussion and critical thinking can turn our learning about the world into a dynamic and personally relevant enterprise, one that encourages informed political judgment. This type of engagement with received knowledge, traditions, and controversies can help us interpret “what is” and act in the present, both of which are essential,
Arendt notes, for thoughtful political conservation or change.17
Grappling with Diversity and Plurality of Opinion
Additionally, Arendt identifies our need for social settings and educational climates in which students can explore a plurality of experiences and viewpoints, thereby giving way to the formation of new perspectives and sympathies.
Informing this recommendation is her opinion of Eichmann, who was deeply flawed in Arendt’s mind by “his almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.” She subsequently diagnosed this deficiency as being “closely connected with an inability to think.”18 For Arendt, to fail to incorporate pluralism and a multiplicity of perspectives into one’s own viewpoint is to be unmoored from thinking, politics, and society. In essence, such insularity rejects the entire world, replete with its “web of human relationships, with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions” that shape interests and agency and that can bind together or separate individuals, groups, and communities.19 Some of Arendt’s attention to pluralism aligns with John Stuart Mill’s arguments for open-mindedness and diverse points of view. He too emphasizes that without the opportunity to seriously consider and debate a variety of views, even a reasonable position is likely to be held blindly or “in the manner of a prejudice.”20 Truth-seeking and understanding, especially in the political realm, both require a rich intellectual context in which to view and debate problems through different lenses (methodological, cultural, historical, etc.) and perspectives. Thus, Mill’s and Arendt’s dedication to modern civil liberties simultaneously operates to identify educational preconditions necessary for citizens to develop, exercise, and refine their capacity for political judgment and action.
Self-chosen Responsibility, Commitment, and Action
Finally, Arendt and others convey overlapping concerns for the relationship of education to political responsibility, commitment, and action— including capacities to hold leaders to account, influence institutions, and pursue reform. Arendt’s very account of the human condition is predicated on the importance of amor mundi—love and care for the world— which depends on citizens’ freely or personally chosen political commitments and actions. She also holds that a valuable education should provide knowledge and understanding of the world, its historical developments, and its challenges so that future generations may assume personal responsibility for the world they inherit: “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.”21 The role of political educators, she suggests in these types of discussions, includes helping students relate to a complex world such that they may come to embrace their citizenship for themselves.
Examples from the Political Engagement Project
Dialogues with these thinkers help convey just how important is open discussion, critical thinking, grappling with pluralism, and embracing a sense of responsibility to the project of democracy. It also indicates how much these learning processes and experiences differ from propaganda and being taught what to think.
What might an education that incorporates these elements look like? There is, of course, no “one-size-fits-all” mold. But as my Carnegie Foundation colleagues and I explored in our first book, Educating Citizens, a variety of efforts support students’ civic and political learning in classrooms, the “co-curriculum,” and broader campus life. In a second national study, Educating for Democracy, we offer three further contributions to these debates: first, we argue that education is deeply connected to the challenges of democratic citizenship and politics; second, we identify a framework for civic education premised on an open inquiry imperative; and third we show that this type of education provides measurable benefits for students’ political engagement.22 I now offer a few relevant examples from Educating for Democracy and summarize some of our research findings.
We closely studied 21 courses and programs on a variety of college campuses across the United States. These ranged from a semester in Washington, D.C., to a Model UN program, from an extracurricular group focused on campaign finance reform to courses covering topics in U.S. and comparative politics, economics, public policies, and democratic theory. At the most general level, the efforts we surveyed were designed to help students hone their ability to make informed political judgments grounded in concrete knowledge. Most of the efforts also helped to humanize politics and convey the importance of commitment and motivation for political engagement, such as by inviting guest speakers to discuss their political experiences. Finally, all of the programs used at least one “active pedagogy” to promote political learning, such as internships and placements in community groups, research projects, speaker series, intensive discussions, or student-run projects.
These types of active pedagogies are sometimes termed “pedagogies of engagement” because research suggests that they have powerful abilities to engage students intellectually, personally, and socially. In many of the initiatives we studied, students took what they learned in an academic setting and applied it to the complex world of politics – to arenas of community debate, policy work, or group initiatives and collective action around particular issues. As they did so, participants often connected with people who were interested in similar political issues. Those relationships can be inspiring, often helping to demystify and personalize otherwise abstract issues and strengthen support for a common goal.
Trying to provide this type of education is inherently challenging. As educators, we hold our own political views, yet must respect the open inquiry imperative. We are also torn between helping students find political issues they care about and encouraging them to think critically, consider competing perspectives, and keep an open mind. Additionally, these projects would be naïve or useless if we didn’t ask students to grapple with the adversity involved in politics. But it is equally important to avoid focusing so overwhelmingly on problems and critical perspectives that we fail to help students consider examples of civic actors’ influence on politics.23 Unrelenting criticism can intensify immobilization, apathy, and disengagement.
Those risks notwithstanding, we found that most of the high-quality civic education efforts we surveyed benefited students. Participants from less advantaged backgrounds as well as those with more advantages made significant gains in their political learning, including their sense of political efficacy and agency for political involvement. Of special note, those who were less politically interested or advantaged at the outset often made the largest and most consistent gains. Equally crucially, the study showed no significant changes in participants’ political ideologies or party affiliations.24
These findings are important because they demonstrate that certain forms of political learning can be consistent with an imperative of open inquiry and related academic and ethical values, such as intellectual integrity, mutual respect, tolerance, and a willingness to listen to and take seriously the ideas of others. Our study shows that, far from propagandizing, many civic educators are particularly outspoken in emphasizing the value of open inquiry and vibrant debate in their classes and on campus. In fact, many deliberately sought to ensure that their students encountered a wide array of political views via guest speakers, discussions, and other activities. To enhance students’ experiences, many educators also worked to establish an open, civil atmosphere as well as a sense of mutual respect, community, and good humor.25
To be clear, an open inquiry imperative does not mean giving equal time to all ideas, nor does it involve moral relativism. Rather, as Arendt urges, it requires that alongside our own deeply held views, we must hold a strong commitment to pluralism and an ability to seriously engage with competing viewpoints, remain open to thoughtful criticism, and avoid demonizing opponents. In our study, we saw that it is possible to combine passionate concern and commitment with openness to views different from one’s own. For instance, many students discussed how much their political learning was shaped by meeting and talking with people of different political persuasions. These experiences were of course a source of difficult disagreements in some situations, but more often than not, they helped create a space for sympathy, common ground, and shared concern. This heightened sense of respect, tolerance, and community allowed many students to develop their political convictions in a way that reduced the balkanization and stereotyping that can accompany ideological differences.
Understanding how democratic education can operate from the open inquiry imperative is vitally important. This is not simply because political bias is a sensitive topic on campuses and in public debates, but also because the validity of civic education vis-à-vis norms of democracy and academic integrity depends on honoring this imperative. As Arendt and King suggest, engaging in open inquiry is a necessary element of learning to think and judge for oneself and an enlightening, empowering education. It is equally important for assuming joint responsibility for the world. We sorely need such an educational model if we are to build a more engaged citizenry, a more inclusive polity, and a healthier democracy.
End Notes
1. Roger Berkowitz, “MLK and the Purpose of Education,” Hannah Arendt Center Blog, February 8, 2013, Accessed 7/1/2013, http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=9326.
2. Martin Luther King Jr., “Purpose of Education,” first published in The Maroon Tiger, reprinted in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. C. Carson. Vol. 1., 123– 124 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947/1992).
3. Plato, Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).
4. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. H. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. A. Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
6. King, “Purpose of Education.”
7. Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
8. Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970/1999), 95.
9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968/1973).
10. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1946/1961), 337–51.
11. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 1928/2005).
12. Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, Elizabeth Beaumont, Jason Stephens, Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).
13. Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben, Debating Moral Education: Rethinking the Role of the Modern University (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
14 For a discussion of the ethics of democratic relations and civic friendship, see Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), as well as Allen’s keynote address for the 2013 Arendt Center Conference.
15. J. Peter Euben, “Arendt as Political Educator,” Arendt and Education: Renewing Our Common World, Gordon, ed. (Oxford: Westview Press, 2001), 201–224.
16. King, “Purpose of Education,” 123–4.
17. Hannah Arendt, “In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought,”
The Crisis in Education (New York: Viking, 1954/1968), 173–196.
18. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963/1994), 48–49).
19. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958/1998), 184.
20. John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. J. Grey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
21. Arendt, “In Between Past and Future.”
22. Anne Colby, Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, and Joshua Corngold, Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2007).
23 Elsewhere, for instance, I argue that there is need for scholarly and public attention to the civic groups and social movements that influenced American constitutional development. Elizabeth Beaumont, The Civic Constitution: Civic Visions and Struggles in the Path toward Constitutional Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
24. Elizabeth Beaumont, “Promoting Political Agency, Addressing Political Inequality: A Multi-level Model of Political Efficacy,” Journal of Politics 73(1) 2011: 216–231.
25. Colby et al, Educating for Democracy.