The Imperative of Reasonableness: Democracy and Education

Abstract

After briefly reviewing key points in the preceding chapters, I come, finally, to the topic of education and practical questions around the cultivation of reasonableness within the context of a democratic society—indeed, I see reasonableness as a key normative component of both democracy and education. The concepts of community and dialogue are crucial here; taken together, they provide the ingredients for the educational paradigm known as the community of inquiry. Drawing on many years of involvement with Philosophy for Children, I provide a detailed analysis of the community of inquiry as a model for teaching and learning, in terms of its three main dimensions: the classroom environment in affective, social, and ethical terms—based on mutual respect, empathy and intellectual humility—the content of inquiry, and the procedures of inquiry. These dimensions, taken together, provide opportunities for students to construct “Big Questions” and their own (tentative) responses to such questions. I then move to clarify the relationships between thinking and inquiry, on the one hand, and speaking/listening and dialogue, on the other, arguing that these relationships are interdependent—where this interdependence is conceptual, rather than merely empirical. In order to clarify this crucial point, I offer a brief analysis of several alternative theories of dialogue (proposed by Lev Vygotsky, Jürgen Habermas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Hubert Hermans), primarily to underscore the point that the dialogue in a community of inquiry is a relationship among persons which presupposes their identities in quantitative, not qualitative—or narrative—terms. As such, dialogue answers a question which had been on hold since my earlier discussions on personhood, mind, language, and narrative (Chapters 3 , 4 , and 6 ), namely, how to characterize the discourse needed to explain, understand, and evaluate issues of agency and moral responsibility. At this point, the key threads of the chapter so far are tied together by linking the normative ideals of reasonableness and the community of inquiry, which enables me to offer a broader perspective on the nature of schooling in a reasonable society (considering issues of ethnic, gender, sexual, religious, and intellectual diversity, and the public school/private school dichotomy). Finally, I turn to the challenge of countering unreasonableness by enacting greater reasonableness across society, given that the community of inquiry model serves as a paradigm of reasonableness within the context of formal education. The clue here is to adapt and utilize the key dimensions of this paradigm as I have identified them. I propose a modified version of the model of “Deliberative Polling” (but without the polling), which might be termed a model of “social deliberation”. I conclude by expressing the hope that such a model might open up ways to engage diverse groups and individuals in mutually respectful dialogue. Therein lies the key to enacting greater reasonableness in a troubled and divided world.