How to Keep Politics Out of the Classroom

... from a forthcoming article

[I was asked this in connection to my current run for Don Valley West:

]

“As I mentioned in "What I told the Climate Lobby" on my blog, we must teach everything but the conclusion students are supposed to reach, and grade everything but the conclusion -- working backwards from a conclusion is a well-studied form of fallacious reasoning called "motivated reasoning". Teaching civics is not the same as motivated reasoning. You can even have politics throughout the curriculum without motivated reasoning.

On Plato's philosophical academy the phrase was emblazoned that one should go learn geometry first -- this is partly because Socrates's students had defected to the opponent's military -- today the situation is not much different, students should learn coding, formal logic, informal logic, math, geometry, statistics, and empirical sciences as a preparation for political thought and inquiry. The curriculum must teach the tools necessary to avoid motivated reasoning by providing a coherent alternative: valid argument -- this is one reason I am campaigning for political office as Centre Director of ultmatecoders.com: to make sure we TEACH CODING EARLY (not politics).

But how does a teacher grade the premises of a valid argument? Here the student must learn to know their audience, and in fact, students can be asked to convince each other in basic writing of a conclusion, and then they truly do know their audience and what they might accept as a premise, as those students are their peers. Then students are ready to publish in fora with audiences who are at a greater 'deliberative distance' from the student -- see also my blog post 'On Ideal Deliberative Distance'...

Obviously, bringing students to a protest is a no-no as they are not yet equipped to give truly informed consent -- I barely know what I'm walking into when I see the latest street movements from year to year -- and I am sure glad I wasn't taken to one on a school trip for any cause.

So, while I would not keep politics out of the classroom per se, I would codify the idea that it is wrong for a teacher to grade the conclusion of any argument. When I teach computer science at a synagogue, not a word of politics escapes my mouth or the teachers I train to help me, but I do occasionally connect computer science principles to morality -- and in this sense we cannot be truly politically neutral as teachers for teaching ethics deals not in facts, but in values, but the principle is the same: we must NOT teach the the conclusion -- we must teach ethical reasoning via formal reasoning. As a moral realist I believe the correct premises will ring true universally anyway.

(And educational software tools like "logicola" lead directly to tools like "ethicola" which do exactly that -- teaching ethical reasoning on top of a foundation of logic and coding -- the software author's introductory logic text is full of theological arguments but not once does it tell you what conclusion to reach.)”
—
adamgolding.ca