I recently read John Dewey's
little 1938 book "Experience
and Education". This book is
concerned exclusively with
schools. Dewey favors
progressive over traditional
education, which is seen as
the transmission of the
culture of the past to
children, while in
progressive education the
experience of the children
is supposed to be the
grounds for their further
education. Dewey cautions
progressive educators
against rejecting everything
about traditional education,
because the present and
future are consequences of
what has happened in the
past.
Every society educates its
members. In our society
schools are obviously
important, but they are
certainly not the only means
by which we are educated. In
its Statement of Purpose,
Ethical Culture calls itself
a "religious and educational
movement". Other religious
institutions are also
involved in education. As
Dewey says, every experience
we have contributes to our
education.
Although schools are
important, I would argue
that they are not the main
means by which we are
educated. Our families are
our first educators, but
almost from the day of our
birth the media of mass
communication take over the
role of our principal
educators. Children go to
school for a few hours a day
from the time when they are
old enough to do so until
they are adults, but we are
exposed to the mass media at
any waking hour, all our
lives, before, during, and
after our school years.
Therefore, if we wish to
think seriously about
education, we must consider
the role of the media in it.
In the book, Dewey doesn't
explicitly ask the questions
"What is education for?" and
"Who decides?" He implicitly
assumes that it's for the
benefit of those being
educated and of the society
they live in. The assumption
is that there is no conflict
of interest between the
educators and the educated.
To raise these questions is
to bring into consciousness
the possibility that such a
conflict of interest can
exist.
Except for a minuscule
fraction (PBS, NPR, local
cable access), mass media
are big businesses. They,
and PBS and NPR also, to a
substantial extent, depend
for their revenue on other
big businesses' advertising.
The purpose of advertising
is the transfer of money to
the advertiser from those to
whom the advertising is
addressed. The function of
an ad is is to make the
viewer/hearer dissatisfied
with some aspect of his/her
life as it exists and to
suggest that this
dissatisfaction will go away
upon the purchase of what is
being advertised. One can
wonder whether advertising
promotes or impedes the
pursuit of happiness. It is
apparent that a conflict of
interest can exist here.
Education transmits
information (or sometimes
misinformation) and skills,
but also attitudes. Media
education favors impulsive
reaction over thoughtful,
time-consuming
consideration. It favors
excitement over tranquility.
It favors gossip about the
private affairs of
well-known people, or even
of fictional characters,
over discussion of complex
subjects. In arts and
sports, it favors passive
watching/listening to
expert professionals over
participation at a
non-expert level. It favors
attention-getting, simply
understood interactions,
like violence and sex, over
more subtle relationships.
Decisions about what is and
isn't presented to us by
the media are made by those
who run them, in their
interest. We have to ask
whether it's in the interest
of the public in general. We
have to ask what kind of
people such education
produces.
|
TOP
Board Member's Column
by Brian King
Ethics is Primary
I've recently reread a short book by Alfred Tauber, a physician
and philosopher at Boston University, called
Confessions
of a Medicine Man. It's
the kind of book that bookstores don't know how to shelve, some
put it in medicine, others with philosophy. I bought the book
because I had heard the author saying on the radio that his main
influence was the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who said
that "ethics was primary." I had never heard of Levinas, but I
feel that the primacy of ethics has always been the central
tenet of Ethical Culture so I wanted to learn more.
Tauber's book is subtitled "An Essay in Popular Philosophy"
which is a fairly accurate description, except that he also
wants to look at medical ethics in a new light. Modern medical
ethics was born in 1975 with the Karen Ann Quinlan case when the
New Jersey Supreme Court required an "Ethics Committee" to help
deal with questions of discontinuation of care. He refers to
this kind of medical ethics as applied jurisprudence, concerned
mostly with protecting the rights of patients through informed
consent.
While ethical principles are important, he thinks medical ethics
has neglected the fundamental relationship between patient and
care-giver, which is inherently ethical. Instead of debating
whether medical ethics is a branch of medicine or ethics, he
argues that medicine itself should be considered a sub-specialty
of ethics.
Modern medicine has actually moved in the wrong direction with
its emphasis on "treating the disease" instead of "caring for
the patient" which he blames on the rise of university based
scientific medical education early in this century. He quotes
one of the last defenders of clinical education, Francis Peabody
of Boston City Hospital, in 1927 saying "the secret of the care
of the patient is in caring for the patient." He also thinks the
recent popularity of questionable alternative therapies is a
result of patients looking for the kind of caring that their
physicians don't provide.
I don't want to get into the details of his views on modern
medicine, but instead to look at some philosophical issues he
raises. In what may be an oversimplification, let us say that
philosophical questions fall into three broad categories: ethics
(what is right), epistemology (what we know and how we know it),
and metaphysics or ontology (the nature of reality). Early
philosophy was dominated by metaphysics until the scientific
revolution gave rise to modern philosophy by asking questions
about how the scientific method helps us know things.
Epistemology has dominated the major philosophical debates in
the 400 years since then, with ethics and metaphysics playing
only a minor role.
Levinas, Tauber, and Felix Adler before them, tried to establish
ethics as a foundational philosophy, preceding and superior to
both epistemology and metaphysics. None of them want to weaken
our scientific understanding, only to protect ethics from being
subsumed under another field of study. Levinas and Adler came
out of two very different philosophical traditions, yet they
both recognized that we form our conception of the self through
the awareness of others, and therefore the ethical relationship
is fundamental. Whether this is enough to form the basis of an
ethical philosophy is another question, but I welcome the
attempt.
TOP
Election 2012
by Andrea Perrault
It seems that the Presidential election has come upon us much
too fast, in part because of the new schedule for primaries that
had us hearing about activities in Iowa and New Hampshire during
the holidays. As we look forward to ever escalating electoral
fervor, we will need to keep our focus on what we can do to get
the representation we want. In Massachusetts, the additional
races for Senate and Congress (especially in the two districts
where there are open seats) will keep the national press in our
backyards, and candidate ads and phone calls overwhelming us
daily.
For the rest of this year, ESB platform talks will highlight
some issues that are pertinent to the election. Our usual
concerns with economic and social justice will be expanded to
address their particular relevance to the 2012 election. While
gridlock grips Washington, we understand that such trends have
meant that the business of governance has been delayed to the
detriment of the progress we might have hoped for four years
ago. While we may campaign for specific candidates, we must
focus as well on who or
what can restore a system of government that actually works
(literally)! Such progress might be beyond individual candidates
and be reliant on popular movements. ESB members and friends
will need to get in the fray and take action. Hopefully, our
platform talks can inform and inspire us to do so.
TOP
|
