It’s not about the teacher having views, it’s about those views already being hard-coded into the context. Trying to explain why some people historically thought slavery was acceptable, e.g., is a way away from asking students to consider if it actually IS…. or if women actually shouldn’t be allowed to vote, etc etc.

None of those issues, I’d bet a significant sum on, is EVER taught as if there were really two equally-plausible sides to be debated… [Except maybe poverty?? But then again, in the USA at least, probably not… Actually, probably DIFFERENT, equally monolithic views in US and UK/Europe…]

The intellectual hard cases in the post could be coparatively easy: here is something that affects people’s lives tremendously, that has become so polarized that most people want it made a matter of law, either prohibiting X or carving out a permission for X free from interference. Here are some arguments on both sides. An un-confident teacher wouldn’t even need to allow much in-class argument (or agreement) – although I’d probably prefer one that did. (A friend, raised Jehovah’s Witness got pretty tired of saying in high school “actually parents do love their kids, which is why they cannot allow something as wrong as blood transfusions.”) Sure in the worst places it would go horribly wrong for the local-iconoclast, but then, presumably it already is pretty bad there.

Though my comment did strictly speaking imply the falsehood of the opinion your snarky reply attributed to me.

I think we disagree about the purposes of education and schooling, probably. But, and this is a sort of response to Lindsey to, what I am suggesting is developing a resource for people who either (in the case of the UK) are required to teach these things and don’t know how to or (in numerous other cases) already teach these things and would like to do it better (and are not going to accept anything I provide as definitive but are going to reflect on it).

I will add that giving up on teaching thinking about controversial moral questions requires giving up teaching history, literature, anything about religion…Well, you could teach those things without teaching thinking about controversial moral questions, but not much learning would go on.

I agree that doing this well is hard, and carries various risks. But like many activities it takes a long time to master it. Most math teachers don’t get a lot of success their first year (rule of thumb—the really good teachers start to get to be good in their 4th year or so, as a rough rule).

Short, equally snarky answer: Mr. Pecksniff/Harry—What, you think careful thinking about moral questions is restricted to those lucky enough to have brilliant moral philosophers like you explain controversial issues to them?

Longer, more decorous answer: thinking carefully about moral questions is certainly an important skill. The problem is that there is no societal consensus regarding the nature of this skill, or even regarding the set of people qualified to opine on that question. In the absence of such a consensus, we are left with the options of (1) teaching all versions of this skill with a non-negligible constituency; (2) Selecting some subset of these based on some set of criteria; or (3) giving up on the project entirely.

Option (1) (teaching “comparative morality”) might be feasible, but would produce a syllabus that looks nothing at all like yours. Moreover, I doubt that either of us would consider that syllabus to be of much value to students. Option (2) simply reproduces the original problem, since there is no consensus regarding the correct criteria. Option (3) has the advantage of freeing class time for topics that are a matter of consensus, and whose value to students we can therefore have more confidence in. And it further frees students from studying forms of moral reasoning that they, and possibly most of society—perhaps nearly everyone, someday soon—considers invalid and worthless. To me, that makes it clearly preferable to the other two.

school is not compulsory

Apart from the effect on the children, and I’d bet there are plenty of cases of damage inflicted by inadequate or perverse teachers and teaching, consider the quandary of a teacher who genuinely doesn’t care about, or have anything to say on, CMIs.

On Sunday, at a tense and joyous affair at the Britannia Stadium, I met an old school friend: a fine mathematician who recently checked out of a very interesting and rewarding job to study for a PGCE with a view to becoming a maths teacher, motivated by a genuine desire to ‘put something back’. He has chucked the PGCE because of the requirement to produce essays on citizenship and similar topics of absolutely no interest, or use, to him personally or professionally.

Discussing our common school school experience we agreed that we still feel a pulse of rage when reflecting on the brainless Toryism, unreflective smugness and pew-renting morality dispensed by the assorted humbugs, drones, Conservatives, evangelical Christians and deadbeats who thought it their duty, or right, to issue instruction on such matters at our provincial grammar school. My great comfort is the realisation that the damage done to the teachers was greater than that suffered by we pupils: a mere two or three years of unchallenged pontificating surely disfigured their sensibilities so deeply as to render them repulsive in the eyes of neighbours, spouses and children. I certainly hope so.

Also, arguments about freedom only answer the legal question: it might be worth separately discussing whether a parent should, if given the legal option, try to control his or her child’s genes.

I believe in a sort of Hippocratic Oath equivalent for teaching: first, do no harm—that is, don’t ever mislead children. Teaching controversial topics just increases the risk that children will be misled, to no particularly important good effect that I can think of.

What if we just talked to them?

You know, hire smart people, throw the desks out of the room and then just sit around and talk. Don’t bring in pillows, some comfy chairs would been fine. I know I know, it’s too DFH-ish for many school systems and there would have to be rules and a syllabus of sorts. The teacher would also need to have some experience in group dynamics.

For some reason we seem to think that we only learn through our successes and not our failures. This would be a wonderful chance to fail. In my opinion there are way too many people who have never failed.

Back on topic though, you will never be permitted to teach philosophy in any meaningful manner in US public schools because it would be a threat to religion. You think the culture wars are bad now just try this on a national scale. It would get very ugly very fast.

This argument is superficially persuasive, but false. A person is neither made better or worse off by being brought into existence. The quality of a nonexistent person’s life isn’t ‘zero’. There is a category error being made: a nonexistent person doesn’t have a quality of life, or indeed any attributes whatsoever. It’s therefore meaningless to say that a person is made better off through existing, even if they have a decent life. This confusion is made in writing on evironmental and generational ethics as well.