A Common Education

Abstract

I am in the process of coming to the sad conclusion that there is no entirely satisfactory solution to what I shall call the problem of cultural domination either in principle or, a fortiori, in practice. Certainly one welcomes Eamonn Callan's attempt to offer a dispassionate analysis of common schooling and common education in the hope of arriving at a solution. And his argument seems to me both lucid and, in essentials, telling, on its own terms. Within reason (e.g., within limits that are generally accepted and that he takes for granted, such as refusing to countenance rape, murder, or, presumably, violent rebellion), he argues, cultural groups should be free to promulgate any views, provided that they accept reasonableness or the rational scrutiny of such views. He then suggests that for various reasons, most obviously the need to be aware of and actually engage with difference of opinion, separate schooling is acceptable to some extent but must at some point give way to common schooling. But even this modest position involves three questionable assumptions. First, it presumes that rationality, which is taken to be an uncontested concept, is a value that either is universally shared or ought to be. Second, it gives primacy to the view that society, meaning in effect majority opinion, should determine the nature of schooling and education for all. And third, it trades on the contingent fact that most cultures share Callan's view that rape, murder, rebellion, and so forth are indeed unacceptable. I share all three presumptions, but cannot avoid noting that each one of them is problematic. The moderate separatist position Callan successfully defends, is not, in my view, where the problem lies. That is to say, the person or group whose concern is merely to preserve a culture that is not in fundamental ways at odds with or hostile to the dominant culture, and who accepts the major tenets of that culture, is surely not a problem. (Although even here there is the question of whether one argument for a common education might not be the desirability of creating a common culture, to which I shall return. If the argument is of the form that we ought to seek a common identity and outlook for all citizens, then any degree of distinctive sets of fundamental beliefs would need to be questioned. Suppose, for example, it were argued that commitment to a particular minority culture was to the disadvantage of the individual within the context of a larger society?) But the real argument would seem to be between those who, on the one hand, advocate a truly separate education (in Callan's sense) and those who, on the other, advocate a large proportion of common education. More specifically, again in