Socrates on the Problem of Political Science Education

Abstract

ONTEMPORARY POLITICAL SCIENCE finds itself unable to shake off a sense of malaise concerning its educational goals. At the heart of this uneasiness, it seems to me, is perplexity about both the character of moral principles and their proper place in social science education. The upheavals of the sixties left behind a heightened awareness-or better, a bad conscience-as regards teaching; we hear continually the cry for greater attention to values in classroom instruction and the writing of textbooks. An increasingly influential body of opinion, grounding itself on the work of Piaget, Rawls, and Kohlberg, presses for a training in moral judgment that would explicitly promote a rather egalitarian or left-leaning version of contemporary liberal ideology. On the other side, conservatives of various stripes demand more campus representation in the teaching of political science. As they look on at these developments, many in the profession wonder how the committed scholarship that is thus being promoted can possibly square with the aspiration to intellectual independence and objectivity demanded by the ideal of a scientific study of politics. Meanwhile, in the background (or backwater), there remain those of us who, while doubting the possibility of simply neutral or value-free social science, nevertheless look with deep misgivings on attempts to indoctrinate students in fashionable ideologies of left or right-however respectable the ideology and however sophisticated the rendition. We ask: Will this not merely reinforce the conformism, the shallow moralism, the easy virtue as Saul Bellow calls it, that now characterizes