Bounds of Democracy docx

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Contents
Foreword iv
Abbreviations viii
1 Cultivating humanity in the contemporary world 1

2 Varieties of educational tragedy 13
3 Epistemic values in curriculum transformation 28
4 Shifting the embedded culture of Higher Education 40
5 Should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom? 55
6 Entitlement and achievement in education 69
7 Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education
institutions in South Africa 87
8 Higher knowledge and the functions of Higher Education 113
9 Learning delivery models in Higher Education in South Africa 138
Bibliography 169
Index 172
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iv
Foreword
Since the 1970s Wally Morrow’s voice has provided a vigorous and independent
commentary on educational policy and practice in South Africa. In this
collection of essays, which spans a period from the late 1980s to the early years
of the new century, he turns his attention to teaching in higher education
in South Africa.
1
The central focus of Morrow’s critical examination of key
issues before, during and since the transition in 1994 to a democratic order
is the conflict between strong populist views of democracy and the nature of
Higher Education, and consequent necessary conditions for it to flourish. Its
main theme is a concern that the understandable enthusiasm for democracy
in South Africa in the 1990s has undermined the idea of expertise in Higher
Education. Higher Education, Morrow argues, cannot be democratic.
Framing the defence of academic practice in the essays in this collection is the
metaphor of bounds, a concept that reflects an ambiguity that Morrow sets out to
illuminate. On the one hand, our thinking about Higher Education is bounded

in the sense of being limited by certain kinds of corrupting assumptions about
the relationship between education and democracy. On the other hand, the
defence of academic practice demands that bounds be set against the intrusion
of assumptions and practices that threaten to undermine it. Deliberation about
education is both inevitably bounded by its past and present contexts, and in
need of a capacity to resist elements of that context that set boundaries on
imagining new ways to conduct academic practice in the future.
Each essay in the collection reflects these concerns. Essay 1, ‘Cultivating
humanity in the contemporary world’, responds to the idea that values
education is about the development of character, understood as a ‘stable
disposition of individuals’. Prioritising character in our understanding of
education, it argues, threatens to bind us to a form of individualism that is
integral to instrumental rationality, making it difficult for us to retain a sense
of the communal ideals that shaped our transition to democracy, and to talk
of other goals – like patriotism. Instead, Morrow urges us to focus on the
educative practice of discussion in thinking about values in education.
Essay 2, ‘Varieties of educational tragedy’, discusses the bounds placed
on Higher Education by simplistic thinking about equity. Concentrating
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v
attention on liberation, understood as the elimination of poverty, distracts us
from paying proper attention to the need for economic development. Instead
of being correlative, equity and development are in tension and need to be
balanced. Yet educational policy in South Africa is driven by considerations
of equity and redress, which tend to be privileged above other considerations.
If we lose sight of the values of Higher Education, Morrow warns, we will be
left only with post-secondary education. Educational tragedy looms when
simplifying choices are made.
The potential for tragedy lurks in other educational fashions and fads. Essay 3,
‘Epistemic values in curriculum transformation’, takes the reader closer to the

argumentative heart of the collection. While curricular content does need to be
modified, our debates about this process tend to be bounded by the rhetoric of
transformation and reform, often premised on the assumption that any change
must be good. But only some kinds of curriculum change would represent
an improvement and they should be grounded on epistemic values, which
constitute the grammar of academic practice as disinterested inquiry.
Essay 4, ‘Shifting the embedded culture of Higher Education’, turns the
argument to ways in which reflection on Higher Education is bounded
not only by new fads, but by aspects of the traditional culture of Higher
Education as well. Depending on a situation of co-presence,
2
as well as the
assumption that Higher Education institutions can only be competitively
independent, this traditional model is enormously expensive. Massification
of Higher Education requires thinking in different ways about how to provide
it. Breaking down these boundaries leads towards open learning, to teaching
as resource-based learning.
Essay 5, ‘Should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom?’, was a
response to the O’Brien Affair
3
but now stands as a response to the threat to
academic freedom from the ‘marketisation’ of Higher Education. While one
possible understanding of academic freedom might cast it as in conflict with
democratic principles, Morrow’s argument is that a democrat should be in
favour of academic freedom. Drawing on an intricate discussion of ‘truth’ and
its significance in educational practice, he shows that what is constitutive of
academic practice must be distinguished from what is instrumentally valuable.
There follow two essays widely read and hopefully influential since their
earlier publication. Essay 6, ‘Entitlement and achievement in education’, can
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vi
BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY
be read as a comment on the bounds set by protest politics on the possibilities
for moving beyond the conditions that provoked struggle politics. While it
has become popular to think that Higher Education is simply obtainable by
the demands of agents, such demands misunderstand the role of agency in
achievement. Epistemological as against formal access depends not only on
teaching but also on the efforts of the learner. Too strong an emphasis on
entitlement undermines academic values and the achievement of becoming a
participant in academic practices. ‘In the same way’, writes the author, ‘as no
one else can do my running for me, no one else can do my learning for me.’
In ‘Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education institutions
in South Africa’ (Essay 7), Morrow defends higher education institutions
against the ambiguous democratic demands of stakeholder politics for the
transformation of universities. Academic practices cannot be egalitarian;
they are not transparent and senates are the appropriate governing bodies of
universities. In a warning that might equally be directed at the reduced power
of senates that has accompanied the growth of corporate, executive university
management, Morrow observes that if we lose a sense of the role of senates
then we will lose our sense of higher knowledge and Higher Education.
Essay 8, ‘Higher knowledge and the functions of Higher Education’, poses
the question: what is Higher Education for? This essay warns that modern
societies depend on Higher Education and, if we lose our understanding of
higher knowledge, South Africa’s aspirations to become a modern society will
not come to pass; such knowledge cannot be bought off the shelf. To deny the
distinction between higher and other kinds of knowledge undermines Higher
Education, which must be distinguished from post-secondary education.
Morrow’s argument is that the function of Higher Education is to constitute,
distribute and generate higher knowledge.
The collection concludes with a final essay on provision: ‘Learning delivery

models in Higher Education in South Africa’. While different ways of delivering
Higher Education have become commonplace, we need to think more clearly
about how we are to deliver Higher Education, to rethink teaching itself. This
requires liberating ourselves from the assumption that it must include face-to-
face contact. But in South Africa our interpretation of the distinction between
distance and contact provision, as well as competition between universities,
inhibits our understanding of possible future models.
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vii
FOREWORD
Morrow’s exploration of the transformation of Higher Education in South
Africa – the social forces driving it, and the demands and conceptual limits
of change in education – demonstrates the profoundly practical nature
of philosophical treatment at its best. By focusing on key concepts like
transformation, democracy, stakeholders, character and open learning, Morrow
probes the theoretical foundations and dogmas that either bound or could
enable the liberation that the passing of Apartheid promised. His analysis
deploys among its tools careful treatment of essential distinctions: between
warrant and acceptability (Essays 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7), discussion and conversation
(Essays 1 and 5), knowledge, propaganda and power (Essays 2 and 5), rejection
and refutation (Essays 7 and 8), rights and privileges (Essays 5 and 6), academic
work and ideology (Essays 5 and 7), Higher Education and Further Education
(Essay 8) and contact and distance education (Essays 4 and 9).
There are, Morrow shows, no comfortable certainties, except perhaps the
inevitability of shallow thinking. This leading commentator on South
African education has again illustrated the urgent need for systematic
philosophical inquiry into educational questions, especially teaching. His
probing examination of the presuppositions that underpin our educational
discourse exemplifies the very academic practice that this collection so
resolutely defends.

Penny Enslin
Glasgow
October 2008
Notes
1 His previous collections are Chains of Thought (1989) and Learning to Teach in South
Africa (2007).
2 Co-presence refers to teaching situations in which the teacher and learners are present
in the same place and at the same time.
3 During a visit to the Political Science Department at the University of Cape Town in
1986 the Irish politician, writer and academic, Conor Cruise O’Brien, criticised the
academic boycott. The student protests that followed led the university to suspend his
lectures and he was asked to leave. There followed intense debate about the nature and
place of academic freedom.
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viii
Abbreviations
ACU Association of Commonwealth Universities
BSc Bachelor of Science
CHE Council on Higher Education
DoE Department of Education
ICT Information and communication technology
NCHE National Commission on Higher Education
NEPI National Education Policy Investigation
NOLA National Open Learning Agency
NPHE National Plan for Higher Education
NQF National Qualifications Framework
ODL Open/Distance Learning
RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme
SAIDE South African Institute for Distance Education
SAUVCA South African Universities Vice Chancellors’ Association

SRC Students’ Representative Council
UCT University of Cape Town
Unisa University of South Africa
Wits University of the Witwatersrand
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1
Cultivating humanity in the
contemporary world
(First presented at the Department of Education conference: ‘Values, Education
and Democracy in the 21st Century’, Kirstenbosch, 22–24 February 2001)
1
… while we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate
our humanity.
2
Background to the ‘Values, Education and Democracy in the
21st Century’ debate
A good reason to launch the public debate ‘Values, Education and Democracy
in the 21st Century’ at this time in our national history is the pervasive sense
of an as yet unfulfilled hope that the transition in South Africa would lead to
the growth of a new patriotism. This hope has as one of its sources the struggle
against despotism in South Africa and the civic–republican conception of
democracy embedded in the Freedom Charter. It was also vividly expressed
in the extraordinarily sweeping shared optimism that characterised the first
general election on 27 April 1994.
But now, nearly seven years down the path, we find ourselves in a society
drifting towards greed and competitive individualism, where market forces
seem to override all other social ties, a society incrementally characterised by
the selfish pursuit of individual or sectional interests and worrying signs of
the perpetuation of the historical divisions which we hoped would have been
overcome in a democratic society. In spite of gargantuan efforts to transform

what is a key public institution in any democracy, education, and in spite of
the generation of educational policies which are internationally admired,
many of our educational institutions remain in the doldrums, with deep
demoralisation among teachers, and pupils and students who seem to be
motivated more by a sense of entitlement than by a commitment to the ideals
of education.
1
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2
BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY
In the light of these disappointments the Values in Education Initiative is
particularly welcome. This initiative is an attempt to foster a public debate
about our shared values – values that should bind us together as a particular
historical community and shape our individual and collective identities.
Values with this kind of potency are not founded by coercion or legislative fiat;
they emerge gradually, if at all, out of community life. But ongoing discussion
amongst morally responsible agents, who share a sense of a common history
and a common fate in an uncompromisingly competitive globalising world,
can serve as a catalyst. The current conference is one moment in that
discussion and, arrogantly assuming that I am a ‘morally responsible agent’,
this essay is conceived as a contribution to that discussion.
It begins by drawing attention to two significant features of the definition of
values that we find in the Report of the Working Group on Values in Education.
3

It then picks up on some attractive thoughts from Gandhi about the relation
between education and character-building and claims that – appealing as these
ways of talking might be – they do not enable us to confront the main enemy,
which in this essay I shall call instrumental rationality. The essay concludes
with a few comments about teacher education in relation to competences and

commitments, and discussion and epistemic values.
Character-building
The Report states that, ‘By values we mean desirable qualities of character such
as honesty, integrity, tolerance, diligence, responsibility, compassion, altruism,
justice and respect.’
4
There can be little dispute that honesty, integrity and so on are ‘desirable
qualities of character’ and that they are qualities which we should try to foster
in our schools and other institutions. But what I want to draw attention to here
is the eccentric idea that ‘values’ are ‘qualities of character’. It is clear that this
is an exceedingly limited definition of ‘values’, one that leaves no logical space
for most of the significant uses we have for this word. How, for example, could
we in these terms explain our thinking of the value of, say, education itself, or
mathematics or music, or the value of shelter, food and drinking water to those
mired in spirals of poverty. It cannot help to say that this definition is offered
only for the purposes of this Report. The Report is a public document that is
supposed to launch a public debate about values, education and democracy,
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CULTIVATING HUMANITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
and a restricted definition of this kind is likely to skew that debate in an
unsatisfactory and, perhaps, self-undermining direction.
But there is a related issue here, one that will shape the remainder of this essay.
If we prioritise ‘character’ and ‘character-building’ in our debate about values
and education, in the context of a democracy in the contemporary world, we
are likely to provide a hostage to what is arguably the main corrupting force
in education at this time. The problem is that ‘character’ is naturally conceived
of as a stable disposition of individuals. To highlight the development of
‘character’ in a discussion of values in education is, thus, implicitly to reinforce
a particular social ontology; one that is based on the idea that a society is a

contingent collection of human individuals who happen to find themselves
living in the same geographical space. By a social ontology I mean a map
of the possibilities for social policy.
5
To prioritise ‘character’ is to exclude
a range of possibilities of how we might address the issues that face us,
especially those possibilities harbingered in the civic–republican conception
of democracy we find expressed in the Freedom Charter. Before I develop
this central point further, I want to take a detour via the thoughts of one of
the early heroes in the struggle against the colonial oppression that was the
precursor to Apartheid.
Gandhi is an example of a thinker who forges an indissoluble link between
education and the development of character. And although his voice comes
from a historical and cultural context that is in some ways radically different
from ours, he was concerned with some problems that remain familiar to us
in our world, and his thoughts are, for this reason, likely to remain relevant for
us. He was concerned, for example, with how to achieve social cohesion in a
diverse society characterised by deep historical divisions, with how to protest
effectively without using violence, with how to escape the debilitating tentacles
of colonialism, and with how to alleviate poverty and foster development in
the increasingly borderless modernising world. We can accept that problems
of this kind provide the frame in which we need to think about education in
our context.
Gandhi says, ‘There is something radically wrong in the system of education
that fails to arm boys and girls to fight against social and other evils.’
6
We
might be envious of the moral boldness of this claim, a boldness that is
difficult for us to retrieve after a century of horrors perpetrated by regimes,
some of which, it must be said, were driven by strong moral convictions. We

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4
find ourselves in a world in which difference is celebrated, and the relativist
moral and political theories that support this stance have generated doubt
about traditional moral certainties.
Persistently over a period of three decades, Gandhi conceived of ‘arming’
boys and girls for the ‘fight’ against social and other evils by ‘building
character’. We can note that he seems to take for granted that ‘character’ is
always positive – he does not seem to acknowledge that there can be bad
character as well as good.
In 1909 we find him saying that while he was in prison he read a great
deal – from Emerson and Mazzini to the Upanishads – and discovered that
they ‘all confirm the view that education does not mean knowledge of letters
but it means character-building’.
7
He says, in 1917, that ‘all education must
aim at building character’,
8
in 1924 that ‘the formation of character would
have priority over knowledge of the alphabet’,
9
and in 1933 that ‘the primary
aim of all education is, or should be, the moulding of the character of
pupils’.
10
The confidence and lucidity of these sentiments probably have
considerable appeal to us in our situation as we consider the state of our
society and hover uncomfortably between the two poles of shallow thoughts
about child-centred education, and the distressing persistence of discipline
by violence and authoritarian modes of teaching. To reorientate ourselves

towards character-building might seem to offer us a way of navigating
between these two poles.
However, without digging further into Gandhi’s thinking, one comment
we might make about his emphasis on character-building as the primary
aim of all education, is that it has a tendency to undermine the centrality
of the development of knowledge in our conception of education. It thus
has a tendency to make it difficult to maintain a conception of education as
something different from ‘the prescription of a worthy set of homilies about
what is good or bad, positive or negative’,
11
or to sustain a distinction between
missionaries and teachers, advocacy and education. We might be concerned
about the ways in which such a view, in the wrong hands, can itself be an open
sesame to some of the worst abuses of schooling: self-righteous moralising,
indoctrination, corporal punishment and authoritarian forms of imposition.
But despite these caveats many of us, like the Report, no doubt find some
comfort in the idea that re-emphasising character-building as a central aim
BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY
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5
of education might be a way of countering the drift away from the hoped-for
new patriotism. Part of the appeal of this idea is that it resonates with the
common-sense view that intellect and character are two of the central features
of human beings, features that can come into conflict with each other. The
leaders of the Nazi party in 1930s Germany were not, in general, lacking in
intellectual abilities; nor was Wouter Basson.
12
A highly developed intellect is
compatible with a morally degenerate character.
But the deeper problem, as I previously said, is that to prioritise character

in this way in our understanding of education can commit us to a form of
individualism that is itself integral to the way of thinking which makes it so
difficult to articulate a defensible view of patriotism in the contemporary
world. We can call this way of thinking ‘instrumental rationality’.
Gandhi was also concerned with instrumental rationality and the ways in
which it undermines the value of education. The following quotation from
his book True Education might almost have been written as a comment about
the current situation in education in South Africa:
The real difficulty is the people have no idea of what education
truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner
as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange
market. We want to provide only such education as would enable
the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the
improvement of character of the educated. The girls, we say, do
not have to earn, so why should they be educated? As long as such
ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value
of education.
13
Instrumental rationality is a tightly knit web of beliefs, conceptions and
practices and there can, of course, be various ways of characterising it. One
way would be to show, as Gandhi does above, the ways in which instrumental
rationality is the guiding philosophy of markets, and that one of its symptoms
is rampant consumerism and an obsession with measuring the value of
anything – from art to sport and entertainment – in terms of money. But
another way, and one that is more fruitful for our purposes here, would be to
say that at the root of instrumental rationality stands the assumption that the
appropriate way to analyse actions is as means to some end. This assumption
CULTIVATING HUMANITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
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6

can, then, be extended into the view that the value of actions is to be assessed
in terms of their consequences, the ends to which they are directed.
Instrumental rationality
The story is somewhat crudely outlined here, but it provides us with enough
of a framework to understand how – if we prioritise character-building in
our account of education – we provide a hostage to a way of thinking that
makes it difficult for us to talk of patriotism. In briefly elaborating this theme,
I shall make three comments that might serve to enrich our understanding of
instrumental rationality.
The first is the ways in which instrumental rationality was a principal driving
force of the scientific revolutions of 17th- and 18th-century Europe, which
still shape our high opinion of the importance of science in society and
our educational curricula. There is a widespread conviction that science is
‘useful’ – that is, that it will enable us to overcome problems with which we
are confronted. The value of science, in short, is popularly conceived of as
instrumental rather than intrinsic.
In the light of the overwhelming success of science and its technological
applications in addressing the practical problems of how to improve human
life on this planet, and the ways in which the scientific enterprise is shaped
in the form of instrumental rationality, it would be simply naive to repudiate
instrumental rationality. The problem, as has been frequently enough pointed
out by, for example, Greenpeace and the ecological movement in our own
day, is how to prevent the spread of instrumental rationality beyond its
appropriate sphere, how to fight against the powerful tendency to think that
instrumental rationality is the paradigm for all rationality and the master
ruler for the measurement of all value. The problem can be expressed as that
of how to prevent the inclusion of the word ‘all’ in the basic assumption that
the way to analyse and evaluate actions is as means to some end. As soon
as instrumental rationality becomes imperialistic, it can drain our lives of
significance, as the earlier quotation from Gandhi indicates, and shut out the

conceptual space in which we can make sense of some of our crucial values,
especially those constitutive of our democracy. A main source of this problem
is that instrumental rationality can be, and typically is, presented as value-
neutral, and this takes me to my second comment.
BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY
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Instrumental rationality can be presented as value-neutral because in starting
from the distinction between means and ends, it can claim that all values or
value judgements are ultimately evaluations of the desirability of the ends.
The value of the means is derivative from that, and can be assessed according
to how effectively the means achieve the end.
The next step is, then, fairly obvious. We assess the value of the ends or the
consequences themselves in terms of the extent to which they satisfy the desires
of human beings. But the desires of human beings are essentially the desires of
individual human beings, which might sometimes contingently overlap. Thus
we discover two of the deeply embedded bulwarks of instrumental rationality:
individualism and subjectivism, or (if we take into view the possibility of
contingently overlapping individual desires) relativism. Far from being
value-neutral, instrumental rationality is itself an expression of a particular
theory of values, one which claims that all values are ultimately the subjective
preferences of individuals; whatever people de facto desire is desirable. In
the contemporary world this theory of values is so deeply entrenched that it
seems self-evident. And this leads to a third comment.
Contemporary forms of globalisation are saturated with instrumental
rationality that insidiously seeps into every aspect of our private and public
lives, from the most intimate to the most communal, and prompts us
into seeing everything in terms of instrumental values. Underwritten by
this enveloping influence, instrumental rationality and its assumption of
individualism and subjectivism becomes a social ontology, stipulating the

range of possibilities for social policy, including education. The supposed
value-neutrality of instrumental rationality makes it especially seductive in a
diverse world dominated by value-skepticism.
To prioritise character development in our discussion about values and
education is to risk falling into this trap, making it difficult either to retain a
sense of the communal ideals that shaped our transition to democracy, or to
talk about patriotism without sounding merely romantic and self-righteous.
Promoting character development comes across as a faint-hearted rearguard
action after the high ground has been conceded to instrumental rationality,
and in this way it risks merely reinforcing the imperialistic pretensions of
instrumental rationality.
CULTIVATING HUMANITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
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LEARNING TO TEACH IN SOUTH AFRICA
Attempts to counter instrumental rationality
Faced with the same kind of problem, the National Council for Teacher
Education in India has recently published an ‘Initiation Document’ that has
interesting implications for the ways we think about teacher education in our
context. The document is called Competency Based and Commitment Oriented
Teacher Education for Quality School Education,
14
and the title itself gives a clue
to what its main thrust will be. To think of teacher education in terms merely
of teacher competence, as is currently internationally fashionable and as is
deeply embedded in recent education policy in South Africa, is to lose sight of
the essential template for any professional education.
The document outlines ‘ten competency areas’ and ‘five commitment areas’.
These ‘commitments’ are definitively conceived of not as a supplement to the
main work of teacher education, but as its very rationale: ‘It is this commitment

component that plays a decisive role in effective teacher education …
fostering professional commitment among teachers must become an integral
component of pre-service and in-service teacher education.’
15
One way of
interpreting the shift that is made here is to say that while the concept of
competence can harmonise neatly with instrumental rationality, the concept
of commitment pulls away from that framework.
Two of the commitment areas are especially relevant to our concerns here:
(4) Commitment to achieve excellence – that is, care and concern for doing
everything in the classroom, in the school and community in the best
possible manner and in the spirit of ‘whatever you do, do it well’ or the do-it-
well attitude; and (5) Commitment to basic human values – including the
role model aspect comprising genuine practice of professional values such
as impartiality, objectivity, intellectual honesty, national loyalty, etc. with
consistency.
16
These views can encourage us to step out of instrumental rationality but, like
character development, they also risk trapping us in the form of individualism
integral to instrumental rationality. Commitments are ordinarily understood
as individual rather than social. The irreducibly social dimensions of our
problem get swallowed into the dominant social ontology in which society
is conceived of as nothing more than a collection of individuals driven by
instrumental values.
BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY
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TEACHING LARGE CLASSES IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Discussion: A way to think about values, education and democracy
in a globalising world

To bring this essay to some kind of conclusion (the issues raised here are
profound and cannot be solved in a few words), I shall make a few comments
about our loss of a sense of the value of education and its replacement by an
impoverished and short-sighted view in which its only value is instrumental.
I want to make the strong claim that the practice of discussion, as a specialised
form of conversation, should serve as the centre of gravity in our thinking about
values, education and democracy in a globalising world in which we would like
to give impetus to the emergence of a new patriotism. The practice of discussion
is strongly opposed to instrumental rationality and its theory of values.
Discussion shares some of the features and conditions of conversation.
Conversation is a definitive way in which human beings relate to one another
and make a human life together. One of the conditions for conversation is an
absence of systematically antagonistic or unequal relationships between the
participants. Conversation presupposes a participatory relationship between
those who are party to the conversation; they acknowledge one another
as fellow human beings sharing common human feelings, vulnerabilities,
sympathies and hopes. A conversation is characterised by mutual ties of
recognition and concern and, at least temporarily, a shared interest.
Conversations and discussions are not sharply distinguishable from each
other, but in a discussion there is a stronger sense of discipline, and this
provides the key to the conceptual relationships between discussion and
education and discussion and democracy.
Discussions have a much more definite subject matter, a much clearer purpose
and, thus, stronger principles of relevance, than other kinds of conversation.
And it is such characteristics that illuminate the conceptual link between
discussion and discipline.
Currently in South Africa, perhaps because of the priority of negotiation in
our recent history, but perhaps as a subliminal trace of communal ideals,
there are frequently references to dialogue and debate. The view I am putting
forward here is not unsympathetic to these ways of talking. Dialogue and

debate are themselves two specialised forms of discussion, but they have
shortcomings in the light of the strong claims I want to make for the practices
CULTIVATING HUMANITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
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of discussion. Dialogue still seems to presuppose (at least two) preformed
individuals (or parties) interacting with each other; debate assumes prior
rival or conflicting views about some matter. In appealing to the more
generic concept of discussion, I want to emphasise a critical characteristic of
discussion that might be occluded in these other ways of talking.
Discussion has a seminal role in human life; it constitutes a human world, and
is itself educative. For these reasons discussion, is a central concept in both a
civic–republican conception of democracy, and to a proper understanding of
education and the development and acquisition of knowledge.
Central to a civic–republican conception of democracy is the principle that
disagreements and conflicts in the society will be solved by discussion rather
than by dogma, violence, propaganda or other forms of manipulation or sheer
power. Education for citizenship in such a democracy must have as one of
its primary aims the development of the capacities, including the virtues, to
participate in discussion.
Paulo Freire’s dialogical conception of education points in an appropriate
direction. Dialogical education is contrasted with traditional education,
which is characterised as ‘monological’. But both dialogical and monological
seem to presuppose that the voices are expressing the views of individuals, or
categories of individuals. In terms of the view I am attempting to articulate
here, this presupposition is not sufficiently social. The problem is not so much
with Freire’s thesis, but with popular interpretations of that thesis. Discussion
is essentially social, and is in strong opposition to an instrumental conception
of human life and education. Discussion is educative in the sense that it has
the potential to transform our prior opinions and, over time, to reconstitute

not only our opinions, but our very identities as well. Discussion is the
principal way in which humanity is cultivated.
Knowledge itself is an outcome of a kind of discussion called inquiry. This
kind of discussion includes not only contemporary or local participants and
is characterised by specialised forms of discipline shaped by the definitive goal
of finding the truth about some matter. This is why the distinction between
warrant (or evidence) and acceptability (or mere agreement) is so central to
the disciplines of inquiry.
Like other forms of discussion, inquiry is irreducibly social – it is possible only
in communities of inquiry. Its general disciplines are familiar enough: tolerance,
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respect, impartiality, diligence, openness, justice and courage. Values such as
these are constitutive of the practice of inquiry; they are internal to that practice,
and are distorted if we try to force them into the frame of instrumental values.
The intrinsic values which make inquiry the practice that it is can be called
epistemic values. They are the shared values of communities of inquiry, and
are misunderstood if interpreted as merely subjective or relativist. In practice,
different fields of inquiry and different communities of inquirers embody
epistemic values somewhat differently (the disciplines of history are different
from the disciplines of physics), but any field of inquiry, by definition, is
constituted by epistemic values.
The ideals of education are necessarily tied up with epistemic values, and this
must be a key dimension of any debate about values and education. Of course,
we must acknowledge that education also has important contingent effects
such as the empowerment of learners, the amelioration of social and political
problems (e.g. the spread of HIV/AIDS), or the fostering of a new patriotism,
but we lose a sense of the value of education or inquiry if we confuse their
contingent effects with their constitutive values.

Learning how to be a participant in communities of inquiry is at the heart of what
we understand by education, and in education we can have no higher goal than
to try to improve the success of our formal institutions of learning in enabling
learners to develop the sense of the values that guide the practices of inquiry. Such
values are not merely an add on, an optional extra, to the practices of education
and inquiry; they are at their core. It is not merely intellectual abilities that are
involved here; it is the full humanity of learners, a humanity that links them to
other human beings and not only those in their local surroundings.
And these provide good reasons for saying that if we are concerned with the
fate of our country in the contemporary world, we will do well to emphasise
discussion in our public life, and to foster and nurture the disciplines of
discussion in education and, because of its seminal role in shaping our
future, in the education of school teachers. Unlike character development or
commitments, important as these are, this cannot be interpreted as merely a
sentimental supplement to the main business – it is the main business itself.
And it has more promise in fostering a spirit of social solidarity and, perhaps,
even a new civic pride and patriotism that can resist being interpreted as
instrumental values.
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Notes
1 This essay was published in Spirit of the Nation: Reflections on South Africa’s
Educational Ethos, edited by Kader Asmal and Wilmot James, published in 2002 by
New Africa Education and the Human Sciences Research Council for the Ministry of
Education. Reprinted with permission.
2 Seneca, On Anger, quoted in M.C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, Cambridge
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. xiii.
3 The Department of Education of South Africa, Values, Education and Democracy in the
21st century, report of the Working Group on Values in Education, 2000. Subsequently

referred to as the Report.
4 The Report, p. 10.
5 See ‘Irreducibly social goods’ in C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, Cambridge
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995.
6 M. Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, New Delhi: National Council for Teacher
Education, 1998, p. 18.
7 Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p. 2.
8 Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p. 26.
9 Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p. 9.
10 Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p. 17.
11 The Department of Education of South Africa, Report of the History/Archaeology
Panel, 2nd edition, January 2001b, p. 6.
12 Wouter Basson, allegedly, was an apartheid-era germ warfare expert.
13 In Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p. 1.
14 Competency Based and Commitment Oriented Teacher Education for Quality School
Education, ed. D.N. Khosla, New Delhi: National Council for Teacher Education, 1998.
15 Competency Based and Commitment Oriented Teacher Education for Quality School
Education, p. xii.
16 Competency Based and Commitment Oriented Teacher Education for Quality School
Education, pp. xii–xiii.
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Varieties of educational tragedy
(Prepared for the Inaugural Conference of the Harold Wolpe Memorial
Trust: ‘The Political Economy of Social Change in South Africa’,
1–2 April 1997)
A classical view of tragedy
The conventional classical (Aristotelian) theory of tragedy is (crudely) as
follows: the hero – conceived of as a good person of strong character – is

faced in a particular situation with a cruel choice between two actions that
are in conflict with each other. To choose one is to repudiate the other. The
hero finds herself, for example, in a situation in which she has either to defile
the statues of the gods or kill her child; there is no escape from this dilemma,
and whichever she chooses is not only, in effect, a rejection of the other, but in
itself an evil. It is a terrible thing either to defile the statues or to kill her child,
but circumstances force her to do one or the other.
We need to notice that this view of tragedy presupposes a moral order; a
background of shared goods that makes it understandable why the choice is
tragic. Furthermore, that moral order, if it is coherent, does not consist in a
set of logically incompatible goods; the hero is faced with not a theoretical but
a practical dilemma, one that has direct consequences in the real world. The
real world is itself complex, and human beings are neither angels nor beasts;
they are moved by both principles and passions. The tragic conflict arises in a
particular historical situation, as an outcome of the unfolding of a contingent
set of human and natural circumstances.
But, as Martha Nussbaum
1
reminds us in her discussion of Euripides’ Hecuba,
there is also a different understanding of tragedy in the classical tradition.
Here the tragedy consists not in an inescapable clash between accepted goods,
but in the breakdown of moral order as such. The deeply shared agreements
and practices that provide the framework for all our moral judgements and
moral principles, and even our human character, no longer hold and, ‘There
2
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is simply nowhere to turn. The foundation has undergone corruption … We
are confronted here with the total disintegration of a moral community, the

slippage and corruption of an entire moral language.’ The play itself depicts
some horrifying acts of cruelty and revenge, and concludes with the actors
crawling about on the stage naked and on all fours (i.e. no longer human).
This play has had, according to Nussbaum, a mixed reception in the tradition,
partly because it does not conform to the classical view of the structure of a
tragedy. But, as Nussbaum remarks, ‘This alarming story of metamorphosis
arouses and explores some of our deepest fears about the fragility of
humanness …’
Moral dilemmas and their relationship to tragedy
In the post-Kantian world, morality is widely understood as a set of universal
moral principles such as freedom, respect for persons, equality and truth-
telling. Such principles are conceived of as quite different from scientific
laws. Both moral principles and scientific laws might explain events, but
moral principles not only explain human action, they also guide and shape
it. Moral principles are thought of as providing the foundation for our moral
judgements of the actions of others and ourselves, as well as for guiding our
moral conduct and shaping the practices and relationships in which this
conduct is embedded.
But, because there is more than one moral principle, they can clash. This
possibility, familiar in our everyday lives, was fruitfully exploited by Lawrence
Kohlberg
2
in his studies of the moral development of children. Children
were told stories in which an agent is faced with a conflict between two
moral principles and then asked what the agent should do. For example,
a poor man’s wife is dying but there is a medicine that can save her life.
Unfortunately, he does not have the money to buy the medicine, he has no
friends or family who can lend him the money, the pharmacist refuses to give
him credit, and so on, but he can steal the medicine. What should he do? We
can see a formal similarity between this kind of everyday dilemma and the

conventional classical theory of tragedy.
Kohlberg used the responses children made to this and similar stories to
work out which of the conflicting principles they see as more important.
He discovered some interesting, if highly contested, norms that show how
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VARIETIES OF EDUCATIONAL TRAGEDY
at different stages in their moral development, children assess the priorities
between various principles differently.
As soon as we acknowledge that there is more than one moral principle –
for instance, the three principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity of the
French Revolutionaries – then it is highly likely that situations will arise
in our individual and collective lives in which we will be confronted with
conflicts between our principles. Such conflicts give rise to moral and political
dilemmas and, sometimes, the need for agonising, or even tragic, choices.
Some such choices will shape the future course of our individual or collective
lives. This is especially striking in the political realm, including education.
The view that the principles of Liberty and Equality can come into conflict
with each other has been at the root of some of the bitterest political
disagreements since at least the time at which they were highlighted in the
French Revolutionary war cry (echoing many theorists, we might note, with
regret, the way in which the prioritising of the conflict between Liberty and
Equality has pushed Fraternity to the margins). It is commonly argued that
Liberty and Equality are in serious tension with each other so that, to the extent
that either principle is prioritised in political policy, the other will suffer.
Debates about this tension are legion, with some participants denying the
tension and claiming that Liberty and Equality are two sides of a single coin,
but others insisting that these principles inevitably conflict with each other
and that prioritising one or the other has shaped whole world orders in
the forms of Liberalism and Socialism. There are others who argue that the

distinction between Liberalism and Socialism has become anachronistic in
the late-20th-century world. Whatever we make of these debates, what has
been, and is, perceived as a conflict between these two principles has deeply
structured the political worlds in which we now find ourselves and, by some
accounts, underlies major political tragedies.
The constant possibility of conflicts, some of them with tragic consequences,
between moral principles can explain the repeated attempts to avoid moral
dilemmas by simplifying the moral world. There are, abstractly, three possible
manoeuvres here. One is to refuse or simply fail to acknowledge the complexity
of the world and its human inhabitants – a form of moral blindness. Another
is to claim that morality consists of a single overriding principle, with all other
so-called principles relegated to the status of contingent rules to be accepted
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or rejected in the light of the single fundamental principle. And the third is to
claim that we can rank various moral principles in advance so that whenever
there is a conflict between any two principles, one of them will always take
precedence.
Moral blindness might, in some situations, have tragic consequences. The
accusation of moral complacency, the standard fare of religious and political
revolutionaries, is a call for us not to avoid moral dilemmas by refusing
to recognise them as such. But it is nevertheless true that for much of our
time we participate in the traditions, shared practices, and human and other
relationships which constitute our lives with little need for a vivid awareness of
the possibility of moral conflict. Indeed, too vivid and constant an awareness
of this possibility might not only disrupt the normal flow of our lives, but also
cripple our actions with constant guilt, self-doubt and moral agony, and mire
us in political paralysis. We cannot lead our ordinary lives in a neurotic state
of constant moral mobilisation.
Utilitarianism is an example of an attempt to avoid moral dilemmas by

claiming that there is a single overriding moral principle – ‘The greatest
happiness of the greatest number’ (in its Benthamite version) – which is the
supreme principle in terms of which to assess not only particular choices
but all policies and action-guiding rules. This simplifying strategy was
taken by its committed proponents into the world of political policy and it
profoundly shaped the subsequent course of political developments, not only
in 19th-century England, but also in the many parts of the world influenced
by the British Empire. In our own day, more or less sophisticated versions
of Utilitarianism still flourish in the decisions and actions of vast numbers
of ordinary people and in the pages of popular magazines and academic
journals. This is a symptom of a deep longing for a simpler, purer, moral
universe, one that is not vulnerable to potentially tragic choices between
conflicting principles.
Although there are other possible cases, the most familiar example of the
simplifying manoeuvre of ranking principles in advance of a consideration
of the details of actual situations is that of privileging equality over freedom
or vice versa. What is distinctive of the ranking manoeuvre is that it
acknowledges the separate significance of the conflicting principles. This
manoeuvre simplifies our moral and political choices, and thus enables us to
avoid dilemmas with tragic proportions, but at the possible cost of blunting
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our perception of the consequences of our choices and, as the disputes
between Liberalism and Socialism signal, being the cause of tragedies of a
different kind.
Indeed, such simplifying manoeuvres can all potentially lead to tragedy. Moral
blindness in political leaders has characterised some of the most terrible
political regimes, as the example of Hitler might illustrate. The conviction
that some single moral principle that can purify the world has, at last, been

discovered, has given rise to some of the most horrifying and tragic episodes
in history, as the examples of Robespierre and Stalin might illustrate.
Attempts to refashion the world so that its inhabitants become angels, who
face no moral conflicts and tragic choices, are more likely to turn them
into beasts. Simplifying manoeuvres are more prone to undermine than to
transform the moral world they are so earnestly bent on purifying. And in the
field of educational policy, the myopic pursuit of a single goal can contribute
to the disintegration of the educational world. Simplifying manoeuvres have
a questionable history as effective ways of avoiding tragedy.
Harold Wolpe on equity and development
Apartheid was an oppressive political regime rooted in inequality. In the
struggle against it, the elimination of inequality understandably became the
overriding and unifying goal of the liberation movement. Liberation itself was
largely understood in terms of the elimination of inequality. ‘Development’
was not prominent on the agenda, appearing, perhaps, in demands for
‘redistribution’, ‘redress’ or ‘transformation’ – all understood predominantly in
terms of greater equality. Perhaps an explanation for this lacuna is the ways in
which the movement nurtured exaggerated visions of South Africa’s material
riches and, thus, underestimated the need for economic development.
This is, of course, an instance of what I have called a simplifying manoeuvre.
Given the historical context and lack of an expectation that a dramatic
transition was imminent, it is understandable. The movement was driven
by a single, overriding and apparently transparent principle of equality. The
success of a popular resistance movement rests not on its recognition of the
complexities of the political world, but on its intense concentration on what
is widely understood as the main issue.
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