Philosophical Perspectives on Moral and Civic Education

Shaping Citizens and Their Schools

Colin Macleod, Christine Tappolet, Colin Macleod, Christine Tappolet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351378215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Many people place great stock in the importance of civic virtue to the success of democratic communities. Is this hope well-grounded? The fundamental question is whether it is even possible to cultivate ethical and civic virtues in the first place. Taking for granted that it is possible, at least three further questions arise: What are the key elements of civic virtue? How should we cultivate these virtuous dispositions? And finally, how should schools be organized in order to make the education of citizen possible? These interrelated questions are the focus of this collection. By considering these questions from a variety of philosophical perspectives ranging from moral psychology, philosophy of education, and political philosophy, the nine essays assembled here advance our understanding of the challenges we face in trying to shape children to be virtuous citizens.

1 The Citizen and the Situation

Situationism, Schooling, and the Cultivation of Civic Virtues

Gideon Dishon

Introduction

The recent rise of populism and authoritarianism in Western democracies, most notably crystalized by the ascendance of Donald Trump in the United States, has heightened worries concerning the fate of liberal democracies (Tucker et al. 2017). Consequently, increasing attention has been paid to schools’ role in cultivating a new generation of active and democratically minded citizens (Banks 2017; Rebell 2018). While there are disagreements concerning the exact content and methods of education for citizenship, this debate rests on the taken for granted assumption that schools can support the development of behaviors that will be manifested in civic contexts. However, this assumption has been questioned by the situationist critique of virtue ethics, which contends that empirical evidence from psychological research reveals that behavior is mainly driven by situational factors, rather than individual traits or virtues (Doris 2002; Merritt, Doris, and Harman 2010). Thus, for example, classical experiments in social psychology illustrated how moral conduct—e.g., helping a stranger in need—is shaped by even seemingly innocuous situational cues such as finding a dime beforehand (Isen and Levin 1972), being in a hurry (Darley and Batson 1973), or the number of bystanders present (Darley and Latane 1968). When applied to the context of education for citizenship, this implies that cultivating civic virtues (e.g., civility, tolerance, concern for others) is not a worthwhile endeavor, as they are not likely to have a meaningful impact on conduct in civic contexts, which will be mainly determined by situational factors, such as the number of bystanders (McTernan 2014). In this chapter, I argue that while situationism seems to pull the rug from under the project of education for citizenship, serious engagement with the situationist critique, and the debate that it spurred, offers a more nuanced and modest conceptualization of the civic role of schools.

Civic virtues are often presented as part of a broader framework that strives to concurrently develop students’ civic knowledge and skills (Gibson and Levine 2003). As skills and knowledge are potentially instrumental and value neutral, the cultivation of civic virtues is intended to provide the underlying dispositions for political participation and attitudes towards members of the civic community (Callan 1997; Kymlicka 2001). Though there are disagreements concerning what virtues schools should cultivate, scholarship in the liberal tradition highlights virtues that facilitate democratic participation in a shared public sphere, such as concern for others, civility, tolerance and respect, fairness, trust, and a sense of public duty (Cormier and Brighouse 2019; Gibson and Levine 2003; Gould et al. 2011; Gutmann 1999). Thus, the overall role of civic virtues is to function as stable inclinations to think and act well toward and with others in advancement of publicly justifiable and shared goals (Ben-Porath and Dishon 2015).

Within this context, the situationist critique’s contribution lies in motivating researchers to develop more refined conceptualizations of the interaction between individual virtues and situational features. To show why this is the case, I introduce the two responses to situationism within psychological research: (i) the trait aggregation approach (Fleeson 2001), which asserts that although individual conduct is very hard to predict in a given situation, individuals exhibit stable behavior when aggregated over extended periods of time; and (ii) the social-cognitive approach (e.g., Mischel 2009), which argues that consistency should be examined in light of subjective processes of construal, rather than by focusing solely on the situation’s “objective” features (e.g., helping a stranger). Attention to the interplay between persons and situations is particularly pertinent in the case of education for citizenship in liberal democracies, as public education is based on an assumption of inevitable discrepancies between the home and school contexts (Crittenden 1999; Levinson 2012; Kymlicka 2001). Stemming from these divergences, public schools often focus on academic aims, and limited time and resources are dedicated to developing students’ virtues (Ben-Porath 2013). Hence, schools are less likely to play a key role in the cultivation of traditional virtues such as courage and compassion. Instead, due to their function as public spaces that bring together individuals from different social groups and ways of life, schools are more suited for the cultivation of the aforementioned civic virtues.¹

The first half of this chapter offers a brief introduction of the situationist critique, followed by the two central responses to this challenge within psychology and philosophy—the aggregation and the social-cognitive approaches. The second part moves to examine how these refined models of virtue inform the aim of cultivating civic virtues via schooling in liberal democracies, arguing that these models require focusing on virtue cultivation as an organizing principle of school life—examining how academic contexts facilitate roles and goals conducive for the indirect development of civic virtues.

1. Situationism and Modified Perceptions of Virtue

(i) Situationism

Put shortly, the situationist critique of virtue ethics challenges the notion of developing in one context robust and consistent character traits that will transfer across settings (Doris 2002; Harman 1999; Merritt, Doris, and Harman 2010). Situationists assert that in contrast to common psychological and philosophical perceptions of character, empirical research illustrates that conduct is more commonly driven by situational cues rather than entrenched personality traits (Merritt 2000). The details of this argument have been often repeated in more detail (e.g., Kristjansson 2008; Miller 2013). Here, I highlight those aspects of the situationist critique pertinent to education for citizenship in a liberal democracy, focusing on the two central problems situationists identify with the perception of virtues (or traits) as drivers of individual conduct: their inconsistency and their frailty (Adams 2006; Miller 2013).

Inconsistency

That traits are inconsistent indicates that, in contrast to the assumptions underlying virtue ethics, trait-relevant behavior is very sensitive to context, and does not support predictions of behavior across settings (Merritt, Doris, and Harman 2010). At best, traits could allow us to predict how individuals would act in very limited contexts, such as Doris’s example of “sailing-in-rough-weather-with-one’s-friends-courageous” (2002, 115). In fact, situational factors are often better predictors of individual behavior and hence should be the basis for predicting, analyzing, and influencing such conduct. The counterintuitive inconsistency of character was first explored in Hartshorne and May’s (1930) Character Education Inquiry, an examination of 8000 children’s honest behavior across a variety of contexts such as lying in order to defend a friend, cheating on a test, or stealing loose change left on a table. Surprisingly, they found that participants exhibited a very limited level of consistency (.23) in their conduct across contexts. The lack of individual consistency of conduct driven through character traits was cemented in Walter Mischel’s (1968) meta-analysis of over 40 years of personality psychology that revealed character traits are statistically weak predictors of conduct across varying contexts (with correlations between .1 and .2). When applied to education for citizenship, this would imply that virtues developed in schools might remain relevant solely to that context. For instance, even if schools are successful in cultivating respect among the diverse groups within their student body, it could be the case that it is limited to the school context—what Doris might call “talking-with-peers-in-class-respect.”

Frailty

The frailty of traits, on the other hand, implies that even within given contexts, individual behavior is sensitive to what Miller (2016b) has called “surprising dispositions”—a series of situational cues, which are often morally irrelevant, seem innocuous, and influence unconscious decision processes—from the number of bystanders, to being in a hurry, to leaving a public bathroom. For instance, Milgram’s (1963) experiments on obedience demonstrated that individuals’ moral conduct (delivering dangerous levels of electric shock to a fellow participant in the study) was more strongly related to situational factors (e.g., the scientist’s physical proximity to the participant) than to individual character traits (Merritt, Doris, and Harman 2010). Thus, even if virtues exist (regardless of how context-specific they are), they are not reliable enough to drive behavior in situations not conducive to their application. In the case of civic virtues, this would imply that a virtue cultivated in schools—such as civility—is too frail to withstand the situational characteristics of civic interactions. Thus, diverse situational cues such as the number of bystanders (Darley and Latane 1968) or the norms of political communication online (Dishon and Ben-Porath 2018) could cause students to act in uncivil ways, even if they have supposedly developed the virtue of civility in schools.

While the frailty and inconsistency of virtue are often lumped together, they pose different challenges to the prospect of virtue cultivation. The frailty of virtue suggests that perhaps investment in the cultivation of virtues is not a worthwhile effort; that it doesn’t offer a good return on investment (McTernan 2014). This is the case, because when push comes to shove, conduct is more likely to be influenced by situational characteristics. Thus, even if virtue cultivation is possible in theory, in practice it is not a worthwhile venture, as virtues are not going to have the influence on conduct educators imagine they would (Doris and Stich 2005). Instead of investing in the cultivation of individual virtues, we ought to design useful social institutions, norms, or nudges (Harman 2009; McTernan 2014). Responses to the frailty of virtue might focus on overcoming the unconscious biases that drive behavior, from gradual bringing to consciousness, to offering individuals the knowledge concerning how these unconscious behaviors influence conduct (Miller 2016a). Elsewhere (Ben-Porath and Dishon 2015), I have argued that the social planning or expanded knowledge concerning these “surprising dispositions” ought to complement, rather than undermine, the effort to cultivate individual virtue (for similar arguments see: Kristjansson 2015; Miller 2016a). Here, I focus more specifically on the challenge of the inconsistency of virtue to schooling.

Existing research on virtue cultivation often treats the inconsistency challenge as analogous to the frailty challenge—if virtues are likely to be context specific, are the efforts put into their cultivation worthwhile? However, such questions overlook one of the central challenges of schooling—the transfer (or transformation) of behaviors characteristic of educational contexts to external settings. As research on the transfer of learning has shown, even transfer of disciplinary subject matter is complex and partial (Goldstone and Day 2012; Perkins and Salomon 2012), let alone engrained moral dispositions. Hence, although the situationist critique focuses on whether general traits manifest in particular settings, it also illustrates how behaviors cultivated in one context are not likely to generalize. In other words, the situationist critique raises an important question, which is in essence educational—not just whether robust virtues are applied across varying situations, but rather, in what ways are school-related behaviors likely to contribute to the development of such virtues. In order to understand how we can respond to this grave challenge, it is important to first examine the responses to the situationist challenge in psychological literature.

(ii) Modified Perceptions of Virtue

The responses to the situationist challenge are too vast and complex to be surveyed here. Yet, it is vital to point out that, over time, situationism has led many defenders of virtue ethics to offer more nuanced conceptualizations of the relationship between virtues, situations, and moral conduct. The question is no longer whether situations influence behavior (if it ever was), but rather, in what way should virtue ethics account for variation in behavior. Here, I focus on the two central responses to the situationist challenge in psychological literature on traits, and the ensuing conceptualizations of virtue: (1) the trait aggregation approach, and (2) the social-cognitive approach.

Aggregation and Density Distributions

The trait aggregation approach shifts the focus from an emphasis on one-shot experiments, in which participants are compared to a group, to an aggregation of observations of the same individual over time and in multiple contexts. A notable formulation of the aggregation approach is Fleeson’s (2001) model of traits as density distribution of states. Fleeson argues that although traits are poor predictors of individual conduct in a given context, they do allow description of a regularity of behavior over time. Relying on the Big 5 personality traits framework, Fleeson (2004) showed that whereas the manifestation of a given trait (e.g., conscientiousness) over a week exhibits high levels of within-person variation, when compared to the same individual’s distribution in another week it is likely to exhibit a stable mean and distribution. Moreover, this distribution is significantly different from the stable distributions of other individuals. Finally, conduct is not evenly or randomly distributed among situations. These within-person variations can be attributed to situational contingencies (Fleeson and Jayawickreme 2015).

The density distribution approach supports the notion of individual virtues, while accounting for both the frailty and inconsistency of virtues (Jayawickreme et al. 2014). In terms of the frailty of virtue, from a density distribution perspective, deviation from the mean is not a proof of one’s lack of virtue, but rather an expected characteristic of human conduct. Thus, the fact that individuals might be less compassionate while in a hurry does not in itself undermine the existence of the trait, as long as the overall level of compassionate conduct remains stable over time. More importantly in the context of this inquiry, inconsistency of conduct becomes an inherent feature of human behavior, rather than a problem to be explained—individuals are expected to exhibit varying levels of a given trait according to context.

Construal and the Social-Cognitive Approach to Character

While the aggregation approach continued to argue for the existence of cross-context consistency measured over time, other psychologists re-examined the meaning of consistency. Notably, Mischel and Shoda (1995) developed the Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS), which aims to reassert the cross-context consistency of traits by focusing on individuals’ subjective construal processes. Although there is behavioral variability across settings—sometimes one acts generously, sometimes not—this can be partially explained by a constancy of subjective interpretive differences. A person’s behavior is dependent less on the objective features of a situation than on her subjective interpretation of it. That is, how one evaluates the scene and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Shaping Citizens and Their Schools
• 1 The Citizen and the Situation: Situationism, Schooling, and the Cultivation of Civic Virtues
• 2 Should Teachers Encourage Curiosity?
• 3 Civic Education in the Post-Truth Era: Intellectual Virtues and the Epistemic Threats of Social Media
• 4 Creating Civil Citizens? The Value and Limits of Teaching Civility in Schools
• 5 Polarization, Partisanship, and Civic Education
• 6 School Councils as Seedbeds of Civil Virtue? Liberal Citizenship Theory in Dialogue With Educational Research
• 7 Non-Domination and Political Liberal Citizenship Education
• 8 Freedom as Non-Domination and Civic Education: Legalistic or Virtue Centered?
• 9 Equality and Adequacy as Distributive Ideals for Education
• Notes on Contributors
• Index