Ideals of freedom and the ethics of thought – meaning and mystique

Abstract

This paper considers prominent forms of discourse in educational research, the nature of their appeal and the force of the idea of freedom within that appeal. For this, two different aspects of research are juxtaposed, aspects in which the value of freedom is articulated in contrasting ways. First, evidence-based education (EBE) is considered as a prominent manifestation of faith in scientific method in education: in this, it might be said, there is an obsession with freedom – the freedom of the research from bias. Second, and by contrast, in humanistic forms of educational research, freedom assumes a position of central importance, in the idea of autonomy. Here are two contrasting ethical priorities, respectively, the supposed neutrality that is achieved by excising individual judgement, and the vision of the good life that prioritises the rational exercise of that judgement. In this paper, I wish to discuss the kind of aura that is attached to these ideas, embedded as they are in a western metaphysics of free will that conditions the ethics of education. It appears to validate these ideas and, in fact imbues them with mystique. In a reading of Martin Heidegger, I offer a positive account of freedom as thinking.