The Ethics of Education

Richard Ostrofsky
(January, 1998)
One night, when I was about 9 years old, my father got an outraged phone
call from a neighbor, demanding that I be punished with a good strapping
for enlightening her 7-year old daughter about the facts of life. What had
happened was this: In the playground, earlier that afternoon, her little girl
had picked me up (I must have looked kindly and knowledgeable even
then), and started asking me questions about making babies. As it happened,
I knew all the answers. My parents, good liberals that they were, had given
me a very comprehensive children’s book on the subject a few years earlier,
when I had started to ask questions. With this result: At nine I knew enough
to deliver a very adequate lecture, complete with improvised diagrams, and
dispel the clouds of ignorance from this awakening mind.
The girl took my revelations calmly, but expressed some puzzlement that
her parents had made such a mystery over a fairly simple procedure. I, for
my part, had no sense at all of having done anything wrong. I was aware of
the taboos around sex – but in my house these were directed only at some
things that I shouldn't do, not what at I could read or talk about. When my
father got off the phone with that girl’s mother he was amused rather than
angry with me. He gave me a talk about being careful of the sensitivities of
other families and their cultures; and he suggested that the girl’s parents
could reasonably feel I had infringed on their right to educate their daughter
in their own way. A pretty cool response, to give my old man credit.
But all these years later, the episode still interests me as a case study in
the ethics of education. To the extent that thought is destiny, parents,
teachers, close friends, writers and artists, ad men and propagandists all
exert fateful influence over the minds of others. The question is, when is
such influence ethically justifiable, and when is it not?
With children, of course, the problem is especially sharp on two counts:
partly because the impulse to protect our young is very strong, and partly
because the quest for cultural continuation in our offspring is a prime
motive for most parents. And yet this parental solicitousness is not
necessarily in the child’s best interests. For example, whether or not I truly
infringed some right of that girl’s parents, I don’t think I acted against her
interests except as I unwittingly made trouble for her with her parents.
Parents fight vehemently to “protect” their children from “undesirable
influences”, which might turn a child’s values or loyalties from those in
favour at home. Several years later, my father proved no less pathetic than
that girl’s mother when, at the age of eighteen or so, I formed a friendship
with another young man, a few years older than myself, that he disapproved
of. He sensed, correctly, that I had latched onto that slightly older young
man as a kind of mentor; and recognized that this friendship spelled the end
of his intellectual authority.
The possibility that the maturing nut might be blown any distance from
its ancestral tree is always threatening to the tree in question. Conversely,
the right to influence children toward the values and habits of a dominant
culture is a jealously guarded privilege of government. This clash of
interests is at the center of much contemporary policy debate regarding
education, multi-culturalism, cultural protectionism and related areas.
Meanwhile, both the programming and advertisements on TV and the other
mass media propagate a self-fulfilling belief that the culture of the global
marketplace and the multi-national corporations is the only significant
culture there is.
Not only is there no consensus in sight, there is scarcely the beginning of
intelligent public discussion on the ethical limits of cultural penetration of
one person or people by another. In no way do I wish to justify the crimes
of cultural imperialism committed in the name of “the Holy Cross” or
“Western civilization,” or “the American Way of Life,” or any abstraction
whatever. At the same time, it seems obvious to me that the condemnation
of hegemonic power and cultural influence as intrinsically evil lapses into
irrelevant silliness. If these are always altogether wrong, then in good
conscience there is no way to bring up a child. In fact, there is no human
relationship without some degree of cultural inter-penetration, seldom on
perfectly equal terms. If you have strong feelings about this problem, one
way or the other, please drop by and persuade me. At this bookstore,
intellectual imperialists are always welcome, but will meet fierce
competition from yours truly.