{"id":26,"date":"2012-09-17T21:31:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T21:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2012\/09\/17\/jonathan-sacks-on-raising-children-to-think-and-question\/"},"modified":"2012-09-17T21:31:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T21:31:00","slug":"jonathan-sacks-on-raising-children-to-think-and-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2012\/09\/17\/jonathan-sacks-on-raising-children-to-think-and-question\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Sacks on raising children to think and question"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Continuing with the Jonathan Sacks (the Chief Rabbi) vs Richard Dawkins theme, I have just been listening to Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, talking to Richard Dawkins on a TV programme (currently available here<\/span><\/a>). Sacks says he thinks children should be raised to think and question. Sacks adds that in “Jewish tradition, the first duty of a Jewish parent to a Jewish child is to teach them to ask questions” (from about 16 mins 50secs). Re Abraham and Isaac, Sacks says, “God gave Abraham a seminar: Teach your child to argue. Teach your child to challenge” (from about 17 mins). Not surpisingly, Dawkins agrees. Smiles all round.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/span>

<\/span>Actually, Sacks’s enthusiasm for raising children to think and question is rather more qualified than you might have guessed from the above exchange. I discussed Sacks’s view on the importance of raising children to be critical thinkers, as set out his book <\/span><\/i>The Politics of Hope<\/span>, in my <\/span><\/i><\/span>own <\/span><\/i><\/span>book <\/span><\/i>The War For Children’s Minds.<\/span> Here’s a brief excerpt….<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Sacks on tradition<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/div>\n
Of course, not every defender of Authority-based moral education wants to turn us into unthinking automata blindly treading whatever path tradition lays down.<\/span>This is certainly true of Jonathan Sacks and Melanie Phillips, for example. It would be unfair to caricature them as wanting to transform us into lobotomized slaves of tradition.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Still, while hardly anyone is recommending complete, blind, unswerving loyalty to whatever tradition dictates, it is clear that Sacks, Phillips and many others believe the young should, in the first instance, adopt an attitude of deference to what they both call \u201cexternal authority\u201d on moral questions. Independent critical thought is only to be allowed when individuals have been fully and properly immersed within the tradition.<\/span><\/div>\n
Sacks, for example, says that before we can properly criticise a practice, we need to set foot within it, \u201cfinding our way round it from the inside\u201d. This, says Sacks,<\/span><\/div>\n
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presupposes distinctive attitudes: authority, obedience, discipline, persistence and self-control. \u2026There is a stage at which we put these rules to the test. We assert our independence, we challenge, ask for explanations, occasionally rebel and try other ways of doing things. Eventually we reach an equilibrium\u2026 For the most part\u2026we stay within the world as we have inherited it\u2026.capable now of self-critical reflection on its strengths and weaknesses, perhaps working to change it from within, but recognizing that its rules are not a constraint but the very possibility of shared experiences and relationship and communication\u2026 autonomy takes place <\/i>within<\/i> a tradition<\/i>.<\/a>[i]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/div>\n
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So Sacks acknowledges the importance, in a mature citizen, of a critical, reflective stance towards his or her own tradition. But he emphasizes that we must first be fully immersed in that tradition. And he stresses the importance of deference to Authority in the earlier stages of assimilation. He believes that<\/span><\/div>\n
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autonomy \u2013 the capacity to act and choose in the consciousness of alternatives \u2013 is a late stage in moral development\u2026 It is not where it begins<\/i>.<\/a>[ii]<\/span><\/sup> <\/span><\/div>\n
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What Sacks means by \u201ca late stage\u201d is unclear. At what point Sacks is willing to let individuals adopt a more reflective, critical stance towards their own tradition? At eleven? At fifteen? At twenty five? It\u2019s hard to say. In fact it\u2019s not at all obvious whether reflective, critical examination of the tradition in which you are brought up is something Sacks would at any stage be willing to encourage<\/i>. It\u2019s merely something he thinks will spontaneously happen at some \u201clate stage\u201d.<\/span><\/div>\n
So while Sacks is prepared to tolerate some freedom of thought and expression at some unspecified point in the individual\u2019s development, it\u2019s clear Sacks wants moral education to be much<\/i> more<\/i> Authority-based than it currently is (or at least as it is outside the more conservative religious schools). He believes more emphasis should be placed on more-or-less uncritical deference to Authority than it should on independent critical thought ( at least until some \u201clate stage\u201d). So, as we have defined Authoritarian with a capital \u201cA\u201d, Sacks is an Authoritarian (though it\u2019s possible to be far more Authoritarian than Sacks \u2013 Sacks may be on the Authoritarian side of the Liberal\/Authoritarian scale, but he\u2019s not at that extreme end of the scale). Sacks would oppose the highly Liberal approach to moral and religious education advocated in chapter three. He wants schools more like Authoritia High, less like Liberalia High.<\/span><\/div>\n
The question is: why is more-or-less blind, uncritical acceptance of the pronouncements of Authority required at any stage? Why does raising individuals \u201cwithin a tradition\u201d require that we begin by actively stifling their freedom to think and question?<\/span><\/div>\n
Sacks cites MacIntyre in support of his Authoritarian stance on moral and religious education. But MacIntyre\u2019s plausible point that reason is inevitably rooted in tradition \u2013 that it cannot be applied independently of any tradition \u2013 does not require that individuals should be discouraged from applying their own powers of reason once they are able<\/i>. And it is clear from the kind of studies looked at in chapter three that children are remarkably adept at applying their critical faculties to moral questions from very early on. Some immersion in a tradition may indeed be required before their critical faculties can be properly engaged. But once they are engaged, once the child is striving to engage them, once they are beginning actively to question and explore (which does come very naturally to them), what then is the case for actively suppressing their application to moral and religious belief? Particularly until, as Sacks puts it, some \u201clate stage\u201d? For if Sacks wants to restrict the child\u2019s ability to think and question until some \u201clate stage\u201d, he is going to have to actively suppress this natural tendency. In fact it\u2019s hard to see how Sacks is going to avoid having to relying pretty heavily on the kinds of psychological manipulation outlined back in chapter three.<\/span><\/div>\n
What Sacks tries to extract from MacIntyre\u2019s point about tradition looks suspiciously like an open-ended invitation for him to shut down the critical faculties of young people long enough to get them heavily religiously indoctrinated. Sacks leaves the door open for years and years<\/i> of religious programming at the hands of some moral Authority, sending new citizens out into the moral world intellectually armed with little more than a tokenistic, last-minute bit of critical reflection grudgingly tolerated at some \u201clate stage\u201d. <\/span><\/div>\n
If this is what Sacks is after \u2013 and I haven\u2019t yet found anything in his writings to suggest that it isn\u2019t \u2013 then he\u2019s going to need a much better argument to justify it. Certainly, MacIntyre\u2019s plausible point about the impossibility of applying reason independently of any tradition fails to support it.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Continuing with the Jonathan Sacks (the Chief Rabbi) vs Richard Dawkins theme, I have just been listening to Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, talking to Richard Dawkins on a TV programme (currently available here). Sacks says he thinks children should be raised to think and question. Sacks adds that in “Jewish tradition, the first duty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chief-rabbi","category-moral-education","category-richard-dawkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}