JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 1 SESS: 17 OUTPUT: Thu Dec 30 18:31:04 2010
/v2503/blackwell/journals/epat_v0_i0/epat_748
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2011
doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2010.00748.x
1
2
Dialogue in the Shadow of Ideologies
3
T K
4
Professor Emeritus of Education, Simon Fraser University
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
A large part of my work in Philosophy of Education has been influenced by important
events and significant experiences in my life.There was a time when I thought this a fault,
but now I think that it is the right way to approach philosophical problems in education.
Personal experiences are important and genuine rather than remote and abstract. ‘What
is the use of studying philosophy’, said Wittgenstein to his friend and disciple Norman
Malcolm, ‘if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about
some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the
important questions of everyday life?’.
It still puzzles me as to why philosophers have spent so much time trying to make
Descartes’ irrational doubts legitimate and consequential. If you doubt that you and the
world exist, says Wittgenstein, we don’t think you are making a mistake but consider you
ready for an insane asylum! In what way has humanity been illuminated and enriched by
focusing on such absurd ideas?
While working on my book Education as Dialogue: Its prerequisites and its enemies I was
reminded once again of R. M. Hare’s claim that the important issues in Ethics arise from
the question, ‘how shall we bring up our children?’ That, I think, is also the fundamental
question in all education; it requires, of course, that we examine not only the appropriate
content and methods for bringing up children but also the necessary social, political and
economic conditions that must prevail in our world, as well as a proper vision of a life
worth living.
Because of my bitter experiences during WW II (the Germans killed my father and the
communists my brother) and of my early life within the Greek Orthodox church, I
became convinced quite soon that one of the most important enemies of education and
of a civilized society is the continuing systematic indoctrination of the young into
arbitrary doctrines and dangerous ideologies.
The last time I went to ‘confession’ I asked the always-smiling priest to explain to
me why there was so much natural and man-made evil in the world if our Creator was
all-powerful and good. All of a sudden that phoney smile disappeared from his face, he
frowned, raised his voice and said: ‘That my son is the question the devil put in your
mind and you have to get rid of it’. I was stunned! Instead of an explanation and rational
dialogue I got an insulting retort: How could I be such a stupid sinner as to let the devil
put such inappropriate questions in my mind! I walked out of the room realizing what I
always suspected—that the priesthood was interested above all in controlling our lives;
later I concluded that they were actually working towards establishing an illiberal
theocratic state.
© 2011 The Author
Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 2 SESS: 17 OUTPUT: Thu Dec 30 18:31:04 2010
/v2503/blackwell/journals/epat_v0_i0/epat_748
2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
Tasos Kazepides
While I was in Greece in my twenties I used to write a weekly column in the local
newspaper criticizing the clergy and the public authorities for their behaviour. I had not
realized that by so doing I was actually helping them; what I was providing was internal
criticism which, however, did not examine the underlying foundations of their beliefs and
actions. I did not have the necessary philosophical equipment to address the larger and
deeper issues of indoctrination, propaganda and other forms of control.
After my arrival in the United States I became fascinated by philosophy and abandoned psychology, for which I had received my scholarship, and studied philosophy of
education instead; I felt that philosophy was an enlightening, enriching and enabling
discipline.
Among my many essays against indoctrination there was an early one (1979) written
in Greek and published in Greece criticizing the Greek constitution for sanctioning
indoctrination of the young within the public schools. The result was an uproar from
within church circles and extreme right wing groups; the public prosecutor in Athens
charged me for ‘insulting the Greek Orthodox religion’ and I was ordered to appear in
court in May 1980.The Greek church and all its fanatical adherents wrote more than one
hundred articles or letters in their papers accusing me of being an atheist trying ‘to
undermine the Greek-Christian foundations of the nation’— only two letters were
published in the papers in my defence.
My ten-year-old son asked me one day what was happening and I tried to explain
to him what the problem was. He became nervous and upset when he heard about the
trial and asked what would happen if they found me guilty. I told him that there was
a remote chance that I might go to prison for two years, (or be fined?) but I tried to
pacify him by saying everything was going to be all right, given the irrationality of the
charges and the reaction of my colleagues throughout the English speaking world.
When I asked him what he thought I should do he said with determined seriousness:
‘Dad, I think you should go, if it’s for the good’. I hugged him and told him how
proud I was of him. I still cannot forget that phrase ‘if it’s for the good’. Michael
confirmed my own belief that Lawrence Kohlberg was wrong when he claimed that
people of that age are not capable of acting on the basis of fundamental moral principles. My son had the prerequisite virtues and did not need the high-sounding but
abstract and anaemic moral principles of Kohlberg and other rationalists. The decision
as to what we ought to do, says Aristotle, must always be based on perception of a
particular situation where we are guided by our virtues and are required to use our
judgement; general abstract rules will not help us.
Well, I decided to go to my trial in Athens and defend myself and, above all, ‘the good’.
It was one of the most important experiences of my life: the Ministry of foreign affairs
received over 500 letters and petitions from colleagues from the English speaking world,
including Australia and New Zealand. The SFU senate sent a unanimous motion to the
Greek government through the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs protesting the
charges against me. Noam Chomsky and other well-known intellectuals wrote a joint
letter to the New York Review of Books drawing the attention of its readers to the
impending trial. Our colleagues at the University of London convinced one of their
representatives in the European Parliament to raise a question on whether a country like
Greece that persecutes free speech should be allowed into the European Union!
© 2011 The Author
Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 3 SESS: 17 OUTPUT: Thu Dec 30 18:31:04 2010
/v2503/blackwell/journals/epat_v0_i0/epat_748
Dialogue in the Shadow of Ideologies
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
3
That kind of overwhelming response, from colleagues most of whom I had never met,
gave me the great feeling that I belonged to an alert, genuine and committed intellectual
and moral community ready to defend our civilization from backwardness and barbarism.
Eight distinguished lawyers from Athens volunteered their services and the leading
newspapers of Athens (even other countries in Europe) all sent their journalists to cover
the trial.The trial lasted four days as I managed to persuade the lawyers to prolong it and
we turned it into a public seminar on Greek educational policy. Some of the most
important intellectuals of the country came as witnesses for me, a few drawing comparisons to Socrates and Galileo, quite heady stuff!! During the trial one of the three judges
made a serious blunder by asking me if I considered myself to be a Christian! The
presiding judge felt embarrassed and said to me: ‘You don’t have to answer that question’. I thought, however, that this was a great opportunity to put things straight and I
proceeded to answer the question. Your honour, I said, if by Christian your colleague
means whether I believe in the literal truth of religious doctrines about an after life and
about miracles which are present in all fundamentalist religions—the answer is a
resounding No. If, however, by that question he means whether I believe in the quiet
virtues of justice, benevolence and equality, cooperation, tolerance and respect and
caring for my fellow human beings, then all I can say is that I am trying to be a good
Christian. And although I am not a theologian, I think I have the support of St. Paul.
Then I proceeded to recite the whole of chapter thirteen of his first epistle to the
Corinthians about love, which I still remembered by heart. Let me just remind the reader
of what he says about miracles: ‘... and though I have all faith, so that I could remove
mountains, and have no love, I am nothing’! Some of the people in the audience broke
into applause and the judge had to caution them not to. The prosecution witnesses, all
theologians, were totally confused and couldn’t believe that this ‘atheist’ could recite a
whole chapter from St. Paul’s letter in the original and thus fight them from within their
own world.
An older priest who was in the crowded chamber approached me during the break
with a smile and said: ‘Professor, let me kiss you on the forehead because you are the true
Christian and all these theologian prosecution witnesses are primitive and ugly people’.
Also, a well-known journalist of the leading liberal newspaper in Athens came and
whispered in my ear: ‘Thank you for giving me the headline for tomorrow’s paper’. The
headline on the first page of the paper was: ‘Christians of love and theologians of
doctrines’. I knew then that we had managed to move a mountain!
As I had expected, I was found Not Guilty and then was invited to speak to thousands
of people in various Greek cities. My ‘lectures’ turned into true dialogues with the
audiences participating in a genuine way.What astonished me was that the overwhelming
majority of the people accepted my arguments and the appointed representatives of the
Church who came to disturb the meetings were completely silenced by the end of the end
of each meeting. As a result of the trial and subsequent events the Ministry of Education
revised all the textbooks on religion; the changes were not radical but improved the
textbooks considerably. Today religion in public schools is no longer a compulsory
subject.
Sorry for talking about these personal experiences at length, but they convinced me
that we philosophers of education have a highly important mission in our world. The
© 2011 The Author
Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 4 SESS: 17 OUTPUT: Thu Dec 30 18:31:04 2010
/v2503/blackwell/journals/epat_v0_i0/epat_748
4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
Tasos Kazepides
fundamental problems in education and in our public world are not abstruse, abstract
or hidden: they are ordinary and open to view. All they require is clarity of thought,
appropriate knowledge and methods for resolving them and above all, all the
human virtues and excellences that characterize genuine dialogue and a civilized way
of life.
After writing my most recent essay on ‘Indoctrination, Doctrines and the Foundations
of Rationality’ I saw more clearly what was the antidote to indoctrination, control and
propaganda, namely genuine dialogue. I wrote a short book in Greek on the importance
of dialogue because it is almost totally absent from the educational institutions and their
public life; they have what one could call public duologues rather than dialogue. While I
was working on that book it became clear to me that the most appropriate way to
approach education is to see it as genuine dialogue.
‘Education as Dialogue’ is both an introduction to Philosophy of Education and a
contribution to the field from a particular perspective; the reader will see the significant
influence of Wittgenstein’s later work on my thinking. Unlike other introductions the
book constitutes one extended argument that invites the reader to see education as
dialogue and to appreciate dialogue’s intrinsic value.
What surprised me when I examined the literature on dialogue was that there was no
serious in-depth study of dialogue in the philosophical literature. I think the most
profound relevant idea is still Plato’s view on the dialogical view of all our thinking as
expressed in the Sophist and the Theaetetus. And since we are not born with that capacity
we must develop it as we grow up within a human community; the quality of our
dialogical thinking then must depend to a large extent on the quality of dialogue that
prevails in our society. There are occasional references to dialogue in more recent works
by Gadamer, Habermas, Freire, Taylor and others, but they are usually casual, too
general and vague and of little use for educators. Above all, none of these authors
examines the prerequisites of dialogue which, as I argue extensively in my book, are the
necessary foundations of genuine dialogue and education; and they require different
methods for teaching them than propositional learning. Any discussion of dialogue and
education that does not examine their prerequisites is seriously lacking and of little
importance for educators.
I also realized that all of us in Philosophy of Education are better equipped than other
intellectuals to examine these prerequisites, appreciate their importance and suggest the
most appropriate ways of establishing them in the young.
In order to identify the proper prerequisites, however, we must first reach an agreement on the meaning and dimensions of our concept of education; we cannot talk about
the prerequisites of education if we have no clear idea what education is about. It is truly
frustrating that after half a century of intense discussions on that concept we still hear
people talking about ‘the aims of education’, ‘the process of education’ or ‘the process of
thinking and understanding’. Equally primitive and obfuscating is the pseudoscientific
definition of education as ‘the systematic socialization of the young’, which ignores or
obliterates the criteria of education and as a result cannot distinguish it from indoctrination and other forms of miseducation.
It was also astonishing to me that the standard discussions of the concept of teaching
focused almost exclusively on the intellectual acts of teaching, thus ignoring their
© 2011 The Author
Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 5 SESS: 17 OUTPUT: Thu Dec 30 18:31:04 2010
/v2503/blackwell/journals/epat_v0_i0/epat_748
Dialogue in the Shadow of Ideologies
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
5
indispensable prerequisites, which, as I argue in the book, can be established mainly by
authentic living exemplars. As a result of this exclusive emphasis the predominant
method of teaching in public schools has been embarrassingly monological, didactic and
usually authoritarian.
If however, as I tried to show in my book, dialogue is one of the most central concepts,
if not the most important one, in educational and political theory, then we have to
reconsider our whole way of thinking about the way we teach, organize our schools and
above all the way we select and prepare future teachers. If the prospective teachers
cannot be good examples of human excellence they should not be allowed to enter the
profession, no matter what their grade point average is.
Thus, the first part of the book could be described as therapeutic and preparatory for
the important discussion that follows on the prerequisites of education and dialogue, and
their enemies in the second part. In the second part I examine past attempts that
consider the important habits, beliefs, attitudes, etc., which must be established before
the young develop the ability to think rationally; unfortunately, this work was not very
helpful. It was a pivotal sentence in Wittgenstein’s Zettel that started me thinking
seriously about the prerequisites of education and dialogue. The riverbed beliefs that
form our system of verification, says Wittgenstein, ‘is something that a human being
acquires by means of observation and instruction. I intentionally do not say “earns” ’
(#279).
When I examined those ‘riverbed beliefs’ (which we ‘acquire’) in a more systematic
way I discovered that they involved a surprisingly large number of human certainties
including common certainties, such as that I have two parents or that the world exists,
but also all the language games, the principles of logic that are inherent in language, the
intellectual excellences and even the moral virtues (which, as I argue, are akin to ordinary
certainties). The study of these prerequisites that lie at the foundation of all education
and dialogue I discuss in chapter five in considerable detail; I consider that to be the most
original and important part of the book.
Two important points struck me as I was trying to sort out the character of the various
prerequisites of dialogue.The first was that those prerequisites of dialogue were identical
with the prerequisites of education. And the second point was that the intrinsic value of
both education and dialogue becomes even more obvious and convincing as one examines the character of genuine dialogue; the reason is that the prerequisite intellectual and
moral virtues that underlie all our intellectual acts must be part of the character of the
educated person who engages in genuine dialogue; they are not negotiable or conditional
like skills. I finally understood the depth of Heraclitus’ saying that a person’s character
is his or her demon!
In the next two chapters I discuss the enemies of dialogue, beginning with indoctrination. I examine the various criteria that have been proposed in the literature and
conclude that the correct criterion of indoctrination is the doctrinal content—the criteria
of intention and method being logically parasitic on content. This enables us to see
precisely the nature of doctrines, because they are neither knowledge claims nor some
kind of prerequisites of reason; unlike the prerequisites they do not enable us to think but
disable us or limit rational thought. They are arbitrary stoppers that aim at controlling
people’s thought and behaviour. Without literal doctrines there cannot be infallible
© 2011 The Author
Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 6 SESS: 17 OUTPUT: Thu Dec 30 18:31:04 2010
/v2503/blackwell/journals/epat_v0_i0/epat_748
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
Tasos Kazepides
popes, arbitrary and authoritarian hierarchies, sinners and salvation and all the rest that
Wittgenstein refers to as ‘froth’. Fundamentalist religions have us all born with original
sin; the more sinful they make us feel the greater their power in controlling us, since they
are the privileged representatives of their respective deities. The only hope is that people
will gradually begin to interpret all religious doctrines metaphorically and thus render
them harmless and allow people to live in freedom, pluralism and responsibility and with
the wonderful sense of wonder that keeps us open-minded.
Although, in general, religious people try to live virtuous lives none of their human
virtues (or vices) has its origin in any of the present religions.This should not surprise us
because virtues have not been created by prophets or saviours but have their origin in our
nature and the fact that we are social animals. The claim that Christianity is superior to
other religions because it preaches love is false for two reasons; most religions talk about
love and all of them are wrong because love in not a virtue but an emotion—unless they
are offering a stimulative definition of ‘love’ and use it as an umbrella term that embraces
all the quiet virtues, such as charity, benevolence, caring and the rest.
The enemies of dialogue are countless. There are first all the defects in our mind and
character: ignorance, lack of discipline and respect for others, selfishness and greed,
racism and dogmatism and all the other human vices. As I have suggested earlier virtues
are not like special skills or abilities that we can use if and when we need them. They are
unconditional and categorical commitments that constitute our real self; we cannot
abandon or neglect them at will without betraying our humanity. It is widely accepted
that we call depraved, inhuman or even monsters only those who perform morally
appalling and repugnant acts, not those who don’t know their way in the world of
mathematics or nuclear science.
The social and economic conditions prevalent in our world today are also serious
impediments to genuine dialogue. Ruthless competition and exploitation, inequality,
poverty, fear, violence, uncertainty and incessant wars make genuine dialogue extremely
difficult in our world today. It is unrealistic to expect educational institutions alone to
create the dialogical world. We need gradual changes in all aspects of our lives; what I
want to emphasize is that if we want to achieve our goal we must put greater emphasis
on dialogue in our homes, our educational institutions and our social life so that the
foundations of dialogue are relatively secure. The task is enormous.
Finally, we must humanize our religious institutions and free ourselves of all parochial
religious codes of conduct that distort our moral code and divide the world. The
preaching of religious doctrines very often violates our moral code or distorts it. Consider, for example, the Sermon on the Mount that deprives moral acts of their intrinsic
value by linking them to non-moral objectives, i.e. if we want to see or please God, or
because this is the only way we can inherit paradise. At best, then, fundamentalist
religions distort the autonomous intrinsic character of our moral code by reducing it to
a mere instrument, and at worst they violate it.
In the last chapter of the book I return to Plato’s seminal idea that our thinking is
dialogical. Since we are not born with that capacity but acquire it, it follows that our
human nature is not a natural given but a human achievement that can be developed
within a genuinely dialogical society; we are born, as it were, at the threshold of our
humanity but not at our destination.We have all the empirical evidence that supports that
© 2011 The Author
Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 7 SESS: 17 OUTPUT: Thu Dec 30 18:31:04 2010
/v2503/blackwell/journals/epat_v0_i0/epat_748
Dialogue in the Shadow of Ideologies
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
7
claim. Children who have been found surviving in the wild with or without other animals
had no human characteristics and, beyond a certain age, were totally uneducable; they
did not have a chance to acquire the prerequisites for further human development.
I classify all statements about human nature into four categories and examine closely
the category of programmatic statements which are religious, political or educational, in
order to show the hidden purposes behind such definitions. These purposes vary as we
go from Plato to St. Paul and Augustine who were interested in controlling people’s
behaviour, to Rousseau who tried to liberate us from such negative preconceptions of
human nature. I show how Sartre’s and Oakeshott’s claims, that there is no human
nature, prove exactly the opposite, namely, that there are many universal truths about
human beings. I conclude this chapter enumerating the numerous universal truths about
human nature and development. I close by reiterating and supporting Democritus’ view
that ‘nature and teaching are similar, for teaching transforms men, and as it transforms
them, it creates nature’.
The conclusion of the book is that the concept of human nature is, like our concept of
education, vague and open-ended; neither of them can be a specific objective that can be
reached but an ideal that can only be approximated.
© 2011 The Author
Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
JOBNAME: No Job Name PAGE: 8 SESS: 17 OUTPUT: Thu Dec 30 18:31:04 2010
/v2503/blackwell/journals/epat_v0_i0/epat_748
Journal Code: EPAT
Article No: 748
Page Extent: 7
Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Proofreader: Elsie
Delivery date: 30 December 2010