Askwith Forums - Michael Sandel: Civic Education Goes Global

good evening everyone welcome to this absolutely wonderful askwith forum my name is Bridget Terry long I am the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and it's wonderful to see your many great faces I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to host the Aunty and Robert impasse professor of government Michael Sandel I'll say a few words of introduction and then Michael will present for about 20 minutes afterwards I will join Michael and conversation and finally we will end with audience Q&A when we invited Michael to the ed school for forum we knew his work on justice and ethics and a democracy would be timely but this week with the midterm elections on the horizon civil discourse at a seeming all-time low violence breaking out in communities across the country and amid political upheaval around the world his work feels more relevant than ever as a faculty member at Harvard I had heard of Michael long before I had the pleasure of meeting him his course justice which is offered through FAS and online is one of the most popular courses at Harvard University he has been described as a rock star moralist by Newsweek and the most famous teacher philosophy in the world by the New Republic as most of you know Michael teaches and writes in the field of political philosophy his several books address some of the most important moral and civic questions of our time they include what money can't buy the moral limits of markets the case against perfection ethics in the age of genetic engineering in public philosophy as essays or morality and politics a true public intellectual Michael's BBC series the global philosopher convenes video linked discussions with participants all over the world on issues such as immigration climate change and his lecture to packed houses and stay around the world this might seem even a little more intimate to you HTC has a strong tradition in the study of civic immoral education that has engaged many students and faculty over the years for example our civic and moral engagement initiative led by Professor Mira Levinson prompts us to ask critical questions that are more important now than ever what does civic engagement look like among young people and how might marginalize young people become even more civically empowered how do we educate for moral competence how is character fostered in and out of school how can young people learn to manage controversial discussions and difficult moral and civic dilemmas today we are fortunate to have Michael here to help us grapple with these questions and many more as he takes on the topic of reimagining civic education and creating platforms for global and public discourse but like all rock stars Michael can only be properly introduced with a video trailer can we fire up the video please he has attracted an enormous following around the world for the best Socratic dialogues since Socrates he's a philosopher with the global profile of a rock star he's a Harvard professor who doesn't just lecture in halls but in stadiums one thing the world needs is a better way of conducting our political debates we need to rediscover the lost art of democratic argument tonight we have begun that debate even where we had strong disagreements people were listening to one another this gives me hope that we can elevate the terms of public discourse too often political parties and politicians it seems don't really address the questions that matter most about justice in the common good the role of markets and what it means to be a citizen tonight you have offered an impressive example of what reasoned challenging public discourse can be if that's true then we here together will have made a beginning toward renewing democratic citizenship itself so please join me both those present and those I know are watching online and welcoming professor Michaelson Dell thank you thank you very much Dean long for that generous introduction we gather at a time when politics is polarized and fractious it seems we've lost the ability to reason together - are you together with civility about big questions that matter including and especially questions about ethics and values we're not very good these days at arguing in public life about questions of justice debates about equality and inequality questions about what we owe one another is citizens if you look around the world today there's tremendous discontent with politicians with political parties and I think the reason for this is a widespread frustration with the empty terms of public discourse what passes for political discourse these days consists either of narrow managerial technocratic talk which inspires no one or when passion enters shouting matches on talk radio and cable television ideological food fights and the floors of Congress or of Parliament's so people are rightly frustrated with the hollowing out of public discourse now what's given rise to this I think a few things first in recent decades what with the growing prestige of market thinking and market values there's been a tendency to crowd out civic questions and civic debate we've come to think of ourselves increasingly more as consumers than of citizens and this drives debate about ethical and civic questions to the margins meanwhile politicians and political parties they're happy to avoid controversy especially uncontested moral questions and so they're all too ready to try to outsource moral argument and moral judgment to the seemingly neutral framework of market reasoning which is I think part of what has morally emptied public discourse of resonance and meaning and then of course there's social media which too often are echo chambers of tweets and taunts and sometimes hate social media too often lends itself more to rude epithets than to reasoned argument and then finally there are schools and institutions of higher education and I think in the face of these challenges we have not done enough to equip students to be citizens it seems to me that it's time for us to undertake a new project and that project is to reinvent civic education for a fractious polarized time and by civic education I don't just mean teaching students about how the institutions of government work or how a bill becomes the law or how many senators there are or even how to vote important though all those things are the civic education we need now is above all an education in reasoning and arguing about big ethical questions that matter justice the common good what it means to be a citizen and to do so with passion and conviction but also at the same time with civility and mutual respect so that's part of our project but given the power and influence of new technology I think reinventing civic education has to figure out a way instead of allowing technology to corrupt and to crowd out civic discourse how technology can be deployed to create platforms for public discourse in looting public discourse that reaches across cultures and even countries this seems to me a project for us for all of those concerned with education and with the quality of our civic life I want to describe some experiments that I've engaged in toward this end and then invite you to react and to share your thoughts about what reinventing civic education for our time might look like the experiments have been engaged in began when we decided to do an experiment with two justice course that Dean Long was describing we're here at Harvard eight hundred or a thousand students would gather each year in Sanders theater and debate big philosophical questions that connected to hard contemporary issues it's sometimes said that in universities these days it's not possible to discuss fraught moral questions we didn't find that to be true at all we took on questions such as affirmative action same-sex marriage and this was back in the day before a national consensus emerged on that question immigration free speech versus hate speech we did an experiment we filmed the course and with the permission of the students made it freely available online this was before the term MOOCs had been invented before EDX before any of these online companies we just wanted to see what would happen if we opened access freely to the Harvard classroom we never imagined that tens of millions of people would want to watch lectures about philosophy online and in different countries no less and that people would watch not only who are enrolled in courses in colleges and universities and in high schools but ordinary men in women who were interested in reflecting on the lives they lived one of the most gratifying responses came when a colleague came back once from a trip to China and reported that a taxi driver in Beijing asked him where he was from and he said from Massachusetts and the taxi drivers with that prompt alone said I'm taking a course a Harvard course on justice and my whole family is joining me in taking this well that for me made the project worthwhile because one of the aims was to show that higher education can be a public good not just a private privilege but there was a further ambition beyond access because this was after all a Civic project given the subject matter once it became clear that people in lots of places were interested in watching I wanted to see if we could use new technology to move beyond access to participation to enable people who were interested in these questions to talk back to give voice to their views and opinions and arguments so that we could learn from them and join in a fuller richer kind of dialogue than would be possible just in the immediate classroom and so I experimented with various forms of technology to try to enable a real-time discussions with people in different parts of the world and I would like to show you one such experiment which we did in a high-tech studio called HBx live here in Boston at WGBH a studio with a wall of 60 monitors that can be linked to people around the world and more than that others can watch online and send in comments for this we did this experiment with the help of the BBC for whom I'd been doing a series of programs they call it the global philosopher because of the global participation we took issues one episode was on immigration and refugees another was on climate change I'd like to show you an excerpt of a discussion we had on free speech and hate speech should there be a law this is the question that the participants respond to should they be a law preventing hate speech defined as speech that vilifies or demeans people in vulnerable groups so let's have a look and then we'll see what people think of this stage in the experiment all right let's bring back Frankie in Vancouver Canada what do you say to Emma express opinions and create dialogue but that's not what hate speech does when we're talking about things such as degrading people with certain sexualities degrading people of certain races degrading people of certain Heights as someone said earlier that is not helping political discourse that is not grasping at an opinion that is blatant disrespect and it harms people Emma I can understand what you're saying but I think I'm afraid that the people that think that way and aren't allowed to express it that I will express it in other words them and other things and words you're afraid of driving the hatred underground by banning its public expression is that it Emma yeah I can see you can compare it to for example not legalize drugs or not legalizing being from another sexuality that people will always maintain though kind of feelings or thoughts and they will express them otherwise in Croatia Martina as I think that freedom of speech is completely opposite to leads to violence Dores exactly those people you are speaking against so it's not only the problem of speaking against them hate speech really brings to violence okay now Martina has introduced another consideration here that hate speech may lead to violent acts emma has been opposing the hit speech laws is there someone else who opposes hate speech laws who would like to reply to Martinez argument that if you allow hate speech it may lead to violence against vulnerable groups in Mogadishu Mariana I actually want to argue that hate speech is a kind of violence as someone who's had to endure hate speech it's something that undermines your humanity attacking you based on things that are that you can't change and I think that are may be relevant to discourse I think since I mean as a student I know that there's a lot of like discussions around safe spaces and what should be allowed to be said in a classroom because when you have a diverse group of students and some are being oppressed because of what some others are trying to say you create this hostile environment where it's not an equal learning are bridge the opportunity to learn is not equal across the board all right Marion you said something interesting when you said that hate speech undermines the humanity of the person being targeted and this brings out two different kinds of arguments to two different objections to hate speech that have been running through this discussion some of the arguments for banning hate speech worry that hate speech will lead to violent act but Marian raised a different kind of argument which is the speech itself undermines humanity or expresses disrespect and inflicts I suppose you could say a kind of harm in and of itself intrinsically whether or not you could show evidence that hate speech actually leads to violent acts against those being targeted what about that young hey well I believe that Perdiccas gave offence to religion and science by challenging the position of discerning the earth Martin Luther King gave offense to us society ignores by challenging racism and women are giving offense to male dominating society by challenging inequality and when you say protection you assume that the people are weak and cannot defend themselves but shielding women from misogyny or Sheldon minorities from racism isn't that paternalistic rather than being progressive all right let's bring Frankie and Vancouver back to the screen to to reply to kill Nate I'm absolutely shocked because I feel that academic discussion gets in the way of reality and truth and if Marian is on a subway in Somalia and someone shouts at her for the head garment that she is wearing that is not helpful Kyung from South Korea that is not leading to her to feel empowered that is not discourse that is hate speech and that is disgusting do not say what Martin Luther King said when he was protesting for his rights was hate speech because what we are discussing if a person should be able to degrade someone on their ethnicity on their sexuality on the way that they look and I believe that what Marian chooses to wear because of the color of her skin should never be a reason to put hate speech against her okay but I believe that offensive speech can only be defeated by more free speech not limiting offensive speech therefore free speech should not be limited but rather expanded Marian I think we're confusing being offensive and like hate speech was just being disruptive if you have a controversial idea but you substantiate it really well that doesn't make it hate speech and that isn't something that we're arguing about the but when someone's being attacked on the basis of something they can't change and it's not contributing to a dialogue or actually furthering anything then that in itself is is damaging in hate speech alright I wanted to show you an extended clip because it seems to be the test of the of these technologies for purpose of civic education and public discourse depends not only on technical considerations how well can we hear them and see them and can they see and hear one another but whether it's possible despite the distance without actual physical presence to carry through a line of argument that is coherent and that the participants can identify and respond to so that's that's a version of distance learning though the project is to take the distance out of distance learning to the extent possible and I'll be interested to hear in the discussion to what extent you think this experiment succeeds or fails in that respect how much does it feel like a live classroom convened discussion how much do we sacrifice by the distance even as we gain the voices from around the world in order to make that comparison I want to show you one other example of an attempt at global public discourse that is low-tech we get and it's in person this is an excerpt on a different kind of ethical debate I'll tell you where we did it in a moment but first I want to get your views on this ethical debate it has to do with technology and AI and the question I put to a group of Millennials from in this case from various from the US and Europe in countries was about a hypothetical but not very hypothetical dating app that is so accurate that it can be used as a marriage prediction app and the question I put to them was if the algorithms get very good in AI so good that they can not only suggest possible people for you to date but can identify the three people in the world let's say who would make the best be ideal life partners for you whose advice would you trust more the advice of the app or remember this is a group of Millennials for your parents how many would say the the marriage prediction app how many would go with that it's because you said parents how many would go with their parents advice well a handful of people would still go with their parents I sure you say you go with the app he knows every character perspective of yourself you know as you will yeah so I think he can search for a better match than my parents who would see me at home or when I'm visiting them even though they raised me up there was a time that I left home and created my own life there's a life at home and a life outside of all I don't think they are totally capable I'm searching somebody who fits me in both situations but but the app doesn't have that that gut feeling and I want to connect with a woman on a spiritual level and the app can't feel that so we can it do trust me my mama my mom my mother trust me my mama knows this type of thing she knows me from the inside out so if I come home with a girl she would she would notice it like two seconds now it's not good I think the question is and being a mama boy as well I think the question is is there any space for a mistake even in in choosing a partner to marry is there any space for imperfection because this thing works very well it's not the algorithms that we have now finds the exact perfect match but don't we want to leave something out of that perfection for something as big as marriage well I don't know if you've ever been in a relationship but if you have a perfect match then the mistakes start happening right so there's plenty of room for mistakes if you if you have a good connection and that's what I'm saying like I I'm married and I don't know if perfect robot would have found exactly my wife she landed top three if it helps you find this is gonna sound very clinical but a list of potential partners that have a good match it helps it because it takes away a lot of the clutter of of finding somebody who you have a good connection with isn't that actual clutter that's part of what we call love bathing in the reaction of having an app do that for you the perfect girl the perfect boy or whoever would be rendered imperfect based on the fact that there wasn't that human element of oh man Ybarra my hands are clammy and the kind of the fluttering human experience of actually falling in love if you have an app provide you a perfect match it's imperfect because you don't have the dance of falling in love there are apps out there that already work and where many people you know don't have this hesitation of dating and having climbing hands just like picking somebody up from the bar same thing just that the date was set up by a partial or whatnot and there are people who are getting married already through that that you know what about the sexual but how will the Machine know if that's a click I mean I will your parents know no no but what I mean is is you there's got to be a personal connection I guess or some kind of thing because the machine will never know well we're pretty supposing that it does so so what they write about online dating now is that it actually doesn't matter as much if you like the same film you need a physical connection but we're presupposing I think that the app also connects you to people but I think sergel's question underlies if you take away all the foraging and the surging you take away a lot of human experience because you miss all the climb and mistakes and long dates and the wrong things so I might have actually switched back to something Sergio said I don't know whether this app with would have my partner in that top three so it makes me doubting right now you're changing your mind I don't know I'm really because of his arguments because I'm thinking I'm married would that machine pick this guy that I'm married to I don't know all right so here we have a second part second illustration of the experiment in kind of civic education across countries it's a more circumscribed cultures in this case than in the global philosopher one with the studio but this one involves immediate human presence we gathered this group actually it was in an ancient amphitheater just outside Athens to evoke the spirit of Socrates which which spirit hovers over really for me all of these experiments now Socrates began the tradition of philosophy in the Western philosophical tradition it's interesting to remember that not only did he lack access to technology but he didn't write in philosophy journals he didn't give lectures in philosophy he wandered the streets of Athens he went down to the port of Piraeus and he asked questions of ordinary citizens and as they tried to answer the questions before they knew it they were doing philosophy they were reasoning in arguing about the laws of the city and about the theories of justice and the common good underlying those laws and those practices so the reinvention of civic education that I think we need depends on drawing from that tradition of Socratic reasoning teaching through argument through the movement from concrete cases to broader principles it needs that element but also in the pluralist world in which we live those arguments those civic debates about the meaning of justice and the common good need to be enriched by finding ways through new technology it could affords them to enable to have these debates across familiar boundaries of culture and for that matter of country I think it's an open question just what forms of technology will best lend themselves to this project but my sense based on the various experiments in which I've been engaged is that there are three things that we need to aim at in order to bring off a reinvention of civic education for our time one of them is access the second is participation and the third might also be to combine whatever technology we use with presents with human presence which was so vividly on display in the last clip so maybe we need to find maybe the best doing this is to use technology and to make it more seamless as in the global philosopher clip that I showed you but somehow to allow the discussions to continue in the local settings in classrooms or communities so that the element of global conversation enabled by technology can be combined with the power of human presence where big questions are at stake so this is the project in which I'm engaged I would welcome your thoughts your criticisms of these versions of the experiment and your suggestions but the one thing I believe deeply as I undertake these experiments is that the boundary between the classroom and the city and by the city I mean public life that the kind of civic education we need is one that learns that boundary that breaks down the sharp distinction between the philosophizing and the arguments in the ethical debates that go on in classrooms formal classrooms and the ethical debates and civic contestations that go on in the city where citizens gather civic education after all is civic and that means it's sight it's situation has to I think somehow connect the classroom to the city just as Socrates connected philosophy to the world thank you very much and shall we talk about it wonderful so that was just a taste and now I have the absolute honor to start a conversation before I open it up for your questions so Michael I found the videos fascinating and I appreciate you sharing some of these with me ahead of time I think there are two themes here that we could talk about I'd love to touch upon upon each the first one is about civic engagement and the second is about technology and and our exchanges in terms of technology but just to start since you have grappled with these issues with so many students I'm curious what you've noticed or what surprised you about the conversations you have here in Cambridge with Cambridge higher Harvard students and those that you've had with students around the world and that was a really great video to see the voices or hear the voices from around the world Bridgette one of the things that I guess has struck me more than any other is that the conversations are not radically different and that's because what runs through them all is a hunger especially among young people but I think also among citizens generally to engage in recent public argument about big ethical questions that matter and this had fine everywhere I go and there are differences sometimes more nuanced than I would have guessed in the positions and opinions people expressed and we can talk about those you know I would love to hear some examples well one set of topics that I've tried out on different audiences around the world have been about in the more limits of markets what good should and should be up for sale right and so I put questions to the audience and they respond and and maybe not surprisingly the most market friendly moral intuitions that I have found and this is an unscientific survey but based on lots of travel well in the u.s. to be sure wouldn't probably wouldn't surprise anyone that in in European countries for the most part there's greater skepticism about letting markets decide everything than in the US there there is one place where the market intuitions Iran at least as deep herein I don't know anyone over China and that I think is in part because of the the market openings of recent decades the tremendous economic growth boost of GDP but what I also have found in China is all the enthusiasm of markets which is at least as great as in the u.s. far greater than in Europe or in Latin America or in Japan there's also a sense including among young people that GDP is emizner enough to give meaning to life and to hold the society together and so there's a searching and the searching is always what interests me most right well that's fascinating I you know I know as a longtime faculty member myself having a diverse group inside the classroom allows for much more rich and robust discussions yeah and so I can only imagine if I had the benefit of the technology to have people from all over the world in the classroom at the same time you know how much that how many interesting perspectives surprises might come but I'm curious and overall do you think how much do you think our views about civic engagement about ethics are grounded in contexts and our backgrounds versus just our individuality I think it's both because whatever generalizations one might make there are there are always in whatever country I visit or whatever country speaks up on one of these global classroom settings there are always disagreements within countries that are as powerful and far-reaching as any disagreements across cultures when we did an early version not with this studio but with a another kind of technology in Sanders theatre where we were able to link to four other countries we linked the actual classroom to - Brazil China Japan and India and the students I think were struck that the sharpest disagreements were within each group rather than across the groups so whether we're talking about distributive justice the relation of rich and poor equality and inequality the meaning of civic virtue or questions about the role of money and markets should commercial surrogacy permit be permitted for example there are fierce disagreements within every group more so than could be predicted between countries that's very interesting do we need to make a quick change here so while you're doing that yeah if we also think of it and bring technology into this so you know at first I was thinking from the perspective of the instructor yeah if I'm using technology am i able to duplicate what I'm doing face-to-face when I can read your body language and how you're reacting and who agrees and who's nodding yes who's tentative versus not yes although you had a wonderful you're able to use a wonderful studio that at least gave you pretty good headshots but the thing that I was struck in those exchanges is it wasn't what we're looking to replicate is not between the instructor and the participant but the cross the peer-to-peer interactions you want to talk a little bit about because it was it was interesting how they really jumped into each other's conversations they did even though they were on screens so in some cases tens of thousands of miles away from one another so that aspect of it worked now and I could see them but here's where it fell just a little bit short even though it worked in the way that you've described in person and this gets to the role of presence in teaching and in discourse you can not only see the people but you can read their reactions partly by listening to background noise I've noticed this I used to think that when people coughed that's an involuntary physical reaction to a cold but just teaching even before doing these experiments teaching in a in a classroom I've learned that when I hear a lot of people coughing or shuffling their feet that means I'm not really capturing their attention and I better do something about that mm-hmm and when they're riveted nobody coughs nobody needs to cough even people distracted and focused on you yeah so hearing is an important part of engaging and so so is interruption I wanted these when we did this experiment I asked the people who run the sound can't we keep everyone's microphone up so that they can jump in and interrupt if they feel passionately because that happens in a classroom right and so they did that for a while but since they were also using this to put a version of it on the radio they said people listening on the radio don't like to hear all that background noise so we have to keep it down so we had a tug-of-war I said can't we put keep it up just a little bit because the more you perfect the sound really hearing the one person who's speaking the more you cut off the possibility of interjection of interruption of laughter part of what worked so powerfully in the second in person thing in the Greek amphitheatre is the laughter helped animate the discussion and the debate and sometimes laughter is a reply as much as an articulated reason and so as I further explore this the high-tech version I'm very interested in seeing whether there are ways of preserving or capturing things like laughter and interruption which surprisingly are an important part I think of conversation and debate like I agree I also noticed that and I wondered if an important difference between the technology and the face-to-face right was there was a touch of kindness and the face-to-face where there was distance you know using the technology and I wonder about that so for those of you who are students those are your members of the GSE community I've sent out emails where I've emphasized again and again we are a community and not only reaching out to those you know but those you don't know because I think it's an important precursor to having uncomfortable conversations to feel like you can fail you can mess up you can ask stupid questions and no there's no wrong question to ask and we've been laying the groundwork for that for our year together to be able to meet each other within a community to have tough conversations you know with the technology though the gentleman from Vancouver could jump right in from the water you know to the woman in South Korean say I think you're absolutely wrong and I can't believe you said that yeah and the amphitheater you know they disagreed but there was some humor and there was kind of some reaching out and there were some smiles and there seemed like there was a they were looking to connect with each other even when they disagreed yeah so do you think with technology we can replicate that I think that's an open question Bridgette and a really important question because what it suggests and I agree completely is that the community is an important ingredient of education especially civic education and so that raises the question if technology like the kind we used here is to be a vehicle for civic education it provides a platform the reach of which we couldn't replicate in a room or in an amphitheater but the question is and here's where I want to continue to push the technology is whether it's possible to combine it with forms of community building so that the participants have some shared experience before or between the sessions the live sessions that we actually do and one way that I would like to try to do this would be to create lightly moderated online discussion forums between the actual live events so that the people would begin to know one another to anticipate the responses that this or that person gives to know when that person is changing her mind or his mind that that could flow into this so what I've not and we've not succeeded in doing yet with these experiments but I think is very important is to connect them the live events that are global with ongoing online discussion communities to see if community can be built that way and maybe also supplemented with local in-person gatherings where people will debate the free speech hate speech issue within their city or town or community and then bring that experience to the next version so how to connect community with technology that I think is the next frontier of this project and what it suggests is that those of us concerned with the content with the education with the civic argument need to work closely with those who are designing these technologies to say now here's what we need next that's what seems to me the exciting next area so I think that there's a lot of promise there and I know there are many of us at the ed school who could absolutely help think through that and participate in that project but let's step back because I love the point you made that you know civic engagement these discussions the lines blur between the classroom in the city or society yeah so so much of this is happening outside of our facilitation as instructors the repeated conversations you have with classmates and out in the real world do you think it's possible to use technologies as simple as social media to push forward and help people develop their civic engagement well I'm skeptical of social media based on its record so far in that regard I think who we all are and so I think that's that remains to be seen but but I'm pretty confident of is that social media left to its own devices will not be a valuable instrument for recent public discourse the only way that social media could contribute would be if we I mean by we those of us engaged in civic education and public discourse work with those who are designing these platforms to make them more amenable to structured moderated discussions of the kind that can feed into the classroom or to these kinds of global discussions so I think it has there has to be an ongoing project that brings together the the people who design the social media platforms to make them amenable to the ongoing discussions they don't just consist of hurling opinions that's what's destructive but where there is some continuing thread of argument and accountability among the participants accountability to one another I don't mean to a regulator to one another mm-hmm yes I think this is definitely a long-term issue that we've got to think about how to improve but I'm curious do you have any thoughts with the upcoming midterm elections and just the heated fervor right now which I don't think is I would call civic engagement in debate I might call it something completely different right but you know what are your perspectives and what do you think we can do to try to improve our even our discussions today in the short term even as we work toward this more ambitious project of of deploying technology for the sake of global public discourse in the short term I think the traditional media needs to do a lot better than it does at providing occasions for extended public discussion and debate among people who disagree I think for the most part network television and cable television does a very bad job of this they prize and reward shouting matches and hurling sound lights back and forth and very little of it contributes anything of value to civic discourse but it needn't be that way I think they're afraid that extended debate in a kind of moderated Town Hall setting with candidates or knowledgeable people of different views would be boring that's their fear and that they would lose ratings but and there are versions of it that are boring but it needn't be that way and I think that if I think that serious argument about big questions that people really do care about immigration or artificial intelligence or affirmative action there there are no shortage of such questions people care passionately about these questions and should be able to argue with one another including those with whom they disagree passionately but still with civility so in the short term the traditional media has to figure out a way to do this that's a very good good example to point if pointing to that institution they're not quite modeling the behavior we would love to see many of our other institutions are also not modeling that behavior right so one thing you said though earlier is using our tools and our resources at institutions like Harvard but also elsewhere to make sure people understand higher education as a public good yeah so if we think about our colleges and universities our schools as an institution that might be able to intervene what what do you think schools like Harvard can do beyond just how we're educating our own students who happen to be here well I'm reminded of a question that I was asked by some students before we did this experiment putting justice online and making it free we gathered together a group of students to consult with them and hear their views about whether they welcome this experiment or not and most did and I should say that in the classroom in Sanders theater we did not want to make they had to give their permission to be filmed and their their participation to be used and we didn't want to make their agreement can they're taking the class conditional on signing so what we did was we created a no film Zone in one area where anyone who did not want to participate but who wanted to take the class could sit and not be filmed and almost no one wanted to sit there so much so that the only people sitting there were people who showed up late to class so that was not a problem but when we asked a focus group of students for their opinions the one of the first questions one of the mass was if you're gonna give this course away free online to anyone who's interested what that mean that people like us won't pay all this tuition money to come to Harvard to take the class I've heard that question before I used to cover this in my own courses and I would ask the question what if I put all my lectures online how would you feel about that and the class would be very divided and and some would say well you can throw it online but they don't get access to you and our discussions in the classroom and others would say it's completely fine we should there's no problem well my answer to the student who asked that question was well I had two answers one of them was having this online will I predict make Harvard more appealing not less appealing for people to come secondly but it was the argument of principle which is what we do here in higher education should be a public good not just a private privilege and so what I think is that in all of the ventures in online learn that have cropped up since we did this experiment this is a continuing dilemma because companies and universities participating in online learning we want to monetize it as the phrase goes and or at least to provide a way of enabling it to continue I think that well the view I've taken with regard to the justice course which was sort of grandfathered because it was before this apparatus was in place was that it always be free and that's partly because of its subject matter if we're putting out courses that have to do with fundamental questions at the heart of our civic life then I think we should find a way to fund it affluent University should find a way to do that as a public service rather than to feel the need to raise money from the people who are watching and maybe some of you this is unrealistic but I think philanthropic support should be should enable us to keep at least some of these offerings free as part of our public responsibilities so I agree and I think I love the way you framed taking us from thinking of ourselves as consumers to thinking ourselves as citizens and changing the identity of how we think we interact with the world because so much of higher education is seen as this transaction for a credential is on the consumer yes and they're partly partly because it is so costly in time and so forth but what are our responsibilities as citizens and in particular being at the edge school where we met so many of us go into public service jobs I think that's important so I've done to me it's a one of the thing about that bridgid the I think this can be a point of pride for institutions like Harvard and others who are creating these courses I don't think it need to be seen as a grave sacrifice that we need to raise money to make these things free during cup years ago I was in Brazil in Rio de Janeiro and I went it's doing an event there but the day before I I went to a favela one of these massive hillside slums that are fraught with violence and poverty and I met with a group of community activists in a community center there and we had a discussion about justice and injustice and violence and some of them had seen had watched of course know that that they're watching this in a favela where they're struggling to figure out what citizenship means to them isn't that worth something for for big institutions like this one and just one other note about that conversation sharing that meeting was a guy close to my age who his name was Reginald Oh and he told me how he had become interested in philosophy irrational though learned to read at the age of 25 he grew up in this favela and he still lives there and he leads these discussions and he worked as a waste picker going to garbage cans picking out things of value and one day in relatively affluent neighborhoods one day he found a torn book in somebody's trash barrel and he started trying to figure it out and the guy who owned the house came out and asked him what he was doing it turned out the torn book was a part of Plato's texts on the trial of Socrates and the guy in the house was a retired philosophy professor who taught Reginaldo how to read and they began over the years to discuss this book of Plato and here is Reginaldo still living in the community acting as a kind of resident philosopher and leading these discussions and it occurred to me that that he and I really engaged in the the same calling and it's a calling that goes back to what Socrates did when he wandered the streets of Athens and engaged people in discussions about the life of the city and their conception of the good life and what made life worth living and here he is so why shouldn't affluent universities like this one contribute to making those kinds of experiences possible that's wonderful and load that example and before I open it up for questions on mindful of the time I want to build from that example that's my last question and that is that was one person who took the time to invest in another person and that's what educators do every day whether there are teachers if they're inside schools outside of schools our community has educators of all shapes and sizes what advice would you give to the educators in this community elsewhere those who may be watching online of one thing that they can do starting tomorrow to try to improve things to to begin by inviting their students to ask questions and that reflect critically on the world in which they live in the things they value and to connect that to our public life whether it's an election or whether it's a bit about immigration or about tax policy or the environment to find moments and occasions in the classroom or outside the classroom to invite that questioning in those discussions including the disagreements to which they will give rise and then to begin to teach people how to contend with those disagreements without fleeing from them that's wonderful and I have to give a shout out to my son's fifth grade teacher miss and Becky for doing just that and with that I'd like to open up for questions we have microphones here and I invite you to to walk and walk to the microphones to ask the question here please yes it does okay great thank you so much so while watching these experiments I just noticed two things and which these participants had in common my first think it was what they're respectful of each other have a second one but more or less we share the same background they were educated we spoke English even bowyer from different countries and and the third thing which they had in common they were open for debate and for me I think this is the most important even if we do have different opinions the fact that I'm like willing to engage if you envy debate that means that I'm already open for you to prove me wrong and my question is how do we deal with people first court is respectful and second the ones who don't want to engage in this debate because I think this is the most challenging like how do I even talk to someone who doesn't want to do it yes it's a great question thank you for that I think the best way to do it is to begin with questions and it's true there may be some people who are not interested in responding to the questions or to even a gentle conversation about moral and political views but I think there are such people but they are fewer than we are inclined to think I think it's a feature of our current cultural and political moment that we assume that a large swath of the electorate is not open to questioning and to debating and discussing and I think that's not true it's not been true in my experience one experiment among the various experiments I've been describing that I was asked to participate in was to bring together a group of shortly I think this is about six months after the election of 2016 to bring together a group of Trump supporters and Trump critics and we did this in a studio in New York and interestingly this is not CNN this was NHK which is Japan's National Public Television Network they were interested in finding out what Americans are thinking and how they're disagreeing so they gathered and I said you've got to get people the studio was in New York I said they can't just be you can't try to find some Trump supporters in New York State you need some from the Midwest from the Rust Belt from the south and they did and we had I think maybe it was about ten from in each camp sitting together in a studio and we taped a four-hour discussion about the toughest issues the wall immigration race what it means to make America great again what America first means and people they they didn't come to agree but the the degree of reasoned debate and disagreement it was pretty striking and I think we assume that we are all ships passing in the night before we really try and so this goes back to I think the failure of the media as well as the polarizing fragmenting effects of social media and I think we need to leave lean against those tendencies we might be surprised with what we would find I think you would have really great advice to offer to many who are about to go into the American Thanksgiving holiday try to read it with some of their family members who might feel differently like a little encouragement might go a long way yes they sometimes say when they advertise things on TV but don't try this at home so keeping on the theme of innovation in education one of the most fascinating topics I've been exposed to here is how there's this race to develop devices that can actually quantify the engagement students are experiencing in the classroom and it's a very cutting edge topic and as you can imagine our class has been having great debates on it I'd love to hear from your experience what kind of moral and ethical challenges you're seeing here and what kind of frameworks you would recommend to us to help us understand that this will seem like a very blunt answer I would not go in for that stuff I'm the big believer in technology as a way of promoting public discussion and making education accessible I think and and this may make me seem very stubborn and old-fashioned I think if a teacher in a classroom isn't capable of figuring out whether the students are engaged and absorbed or checked out then the teacher needs to well improve because I think one of the most important parts about effective teaching and I think this is true from primary and secondary education through university education is figuring out when you're connecting and when you're not and if you can't do that chances are there's something wrong with your lesson plan and so I would not look to technology to solve that problem I would deploy technology in these other ways but maybe you or others here would disagree let me guess you wouldn't have used the dating app dating well my reflexes no I wouldn't have used it but the more I listen to young people the more I think maybe maybe I have something to learn in that regard hi thank you for your time I actually just finished a paper on Socrates so I'd love your feedback you would bring the paper up okay my my main question is regarding your choice for the term civic education these would be why not moral education right at local education how'd you come to that decision yeah I take moral and civic education to be one in the same subject okay and I don't think you can teach the one without the other yeah now there are some who might disagree and say civic education is about the terms of civility and mutual respect and respected respecting pluralism and disagreement whereas moral education is more about virtue and the good life and how we should live our lives some would say there is that distinction but I don't think that those two topics can or should be kept apart and I think part of the emptiness in contemporary public discourse reflects too great an insistence on distinguishing moral from civic argument it's understandable because in pluralist societies we know that if we bring moral and ethical debate into politics people will disagree and so it might create tension it might create controversy and it might risk that the majority will impose their values on the minority that's the worry so there's the tendency to think civic education Civic discourse should stay away from disagreements about virtue the good life values that people bring to bear in their own lives but I think that this that too sharp a separation empties out the public square yeah it vacu AIT's moral meaning and the risk is that when the public squares empty of larger moral meaning it will be filled by narrow intolerant authoritarian and xenophobic sources attempts to reach for meaning and I think that's what we're witnessing today that those who have been to abstemious about bringing moral and ethical argument to bear in politics have opened the way for dangerous assertions of meaning of an authoritarian and xenophobic a kind and so that's why I would not keep moral and civic argument too far apart thank you thank you please it's very it's great to have you here today as you were delivering your presentation and with her discussion with Jane lon I keep having one question in mind I don't know you have every encountered the most extreme of thoughts when you were in other countries were in some other classrooms but in recent events and tragedies we've encountered people that would immediately jump to conspiracy theories from both both sides of the political arena I feel like it's it's hard to establish a common ground to base our discussions of Helen I was wondering if you have any ideas on that well conspiracy theories are one species of extreme views that seem to make Civic dialogue difficult if not impossible I don't think there's any single formula for contending with either conspiracy theories or extreme views in public discourse whether in any given case they are amenable to discussion and debate is something we can't know until we try so I would err on the side of giving it a try and sometimes we might find there's no headway to be made here we really are ships passing in the night that does happen but I think we can't know in advance what kind of position or what kind of opinion or what kind of political view will prove to be impermeable to dialog in that way and so I think being too overly cautious can lead us to shy away from fraught moral questions this one example though not one involving conspiracy theories I did an event that we recorded for one of the BBC programs but this was in person few years ago in India right in the aftermath of a horrific rape case that create create captured headlines around the world and prompted a whole social movement people in the streets protesting violence against women in India and we gathered a group of about a thousand people in an outdoor area and we had a debate about whether rape should be treated by the law is a special kind of crime or should it be treated on a par with other forms of violent physical assault and the debate and these were emotions were raw understandably so in the aftermath of this horrific crime but the debate was powerfully moving if people took strong views on both sides of that question many of the participants who spoke most powerfully on both sides were women many of them younger women and some who identified themselves as an older generation tried to correct what they saw the views toward feminism and violence against women of the people they heard it was one of the most moving such dialogues that I've been a part of and yet on the face of it it would seem could well seem like a subject just too heated too fraught emotionally and politically to touch so I think we should not be too cautious in and not too quick to steer away from what seem to be very hard political and ethical question thank you yes hi thank you again for coming my question is that as practitioner teaching students about ethics and civil discourse how much of in your reflection and probably something that's not quantifiable has the discussion moved from just a discourse to actual practice in terms of students going out then to increase their civic duty by participating in promoting justice inequity or does that discourse do you think has mostly stayed in the realm of academia and that it's hard to know for sure because it is hard to track the careers and life experiences of the students who who go out into the world so all I can go on anecdotally are the responses of students who my encounter or who write years afterwards and who may remember the course and describe their life experience I think that the students who have who report that they've been touched or moved or influenced by this way of thinking and by the debates they've had with their classmates they take up a wide range of careers in life projects some in communities some in teaching others in business others in politics others in finance and I don't consider any particular career that a student undertakes as a failure as an educational failure it all depends on the spirit they bring and the mission they bring to that career but it's hard to know it's hard to know in any systematic way what careers they characteristically take up thank you so I have a few more minutes so I'm gonna try to get in these questions if you try to keep it brief please thank you for sharing your work and bringing it to us to think about at the ed school I'm wondering if you can speak to the role your role as a moderator in these conversations I noticed especially in the global dialogue that you served as a hub between conversation and that was different in the live setting so I'm wondering what what what is the moderators role or other characteristics of the environment that would support a successful dialogue either in person or online in the two examples I showed as well as in the classroom I I consider myself more as a teacher than as a moderator even though there may be times when the students or the participants are addressing one another I think some of the best moments in a classroom occur when notwithstanding the role of the teacher the students the participants address one another so moderator suggests a more passive role than I think is required to generate generate these debates which sometimes involves provoking sometimes involves directing or redirecting but always involves inviting the participants or the students to join in a shared Enterprise of reasoning together arguing together listening to one another and articulating their disagreements so even when it seems as in the one clip that I was sort of standing by there there is the discussions that go best even that seemed to be motoring along and energy ones that the the someone and I would call that someone a teacher broadly conceived has invited shaped and maybe even directed that sometimes the art of teaching consists in hiding or concealing some of the elements of directions so that they're scarcely noticed very true thank you so much my question is similarly about your role as teacher or facilitator in terms of your preparation going into a discussion around a highly charged topic do you have any specific practices or frameworks that you want yes anticipate in here I would say facilitator doesn't quite describe it it's all of these roles are a kind of teacher role even in the public square but the preparation especially for highly controversial questions the best preparation is to anticipate in advance as best one can the different responses to the questions you posed and the counter-arguments that you hope will emerge and sometimes they will emerge as if by magic spontaneously and other times it may take more intervention and redirection but having in mind the range of responses you hope a question will prompt is the best preparation I find for this kind of of teaching try to get the last three questions yes hello so I have two questions that relate to each other um the first question is that so if you think of civic engagement as a construct what would be the core dimensions that comprise civic engagement and how would your the description change for civic engagement that might differ across developmental stage like important sixth-graders you mean civic engagement by contrast with civic education or do you take them to you you mean both together I actually don't really have the right understanding specific understanding of how that they took those two are different okay all right so you might think of civic engagement along the lines of the earlier question of people who go out and into the world as activists to enact this or that solution to a public problem whereas civic education would be the reflection and argument and questioning that enables people to figure out what they believe in why about this or that public question I think they're closely connected and need to be closely connected civic education and reflection on the one hand and civic engagement and activism on the other so I don't want to separate them entirely but I think in the classroom civic education consists in an invitation to students to reflect critically on the way public life is ordered what the laws are what whether the Society is just or unjust whether people properly understand their civic responsibilities and so on but to relate it to the world to the world in which we live to the dilemmas that the public life confronts at that moment and very often students who become engaged in that way want to go out and put their views into practice in the world and I think that's a very good thing but that's how I would conceive the relation between civic education and civic engagement thank you yes hi thanks for spending your evening with us um I have a question I've been really fortunate to be have an excellent education both here and and throughout my education and I've been kind of wandering throughout your presentation where are the places and more of the informal realms for these discussions and discourses can happen what are the organic spaces and right and and how do you do that if you don't have a facilitator I mean how do you dive into some of these topics and kind of a seemingly growing postback society you mean out in the world where you don't have a teacher or a moderator or a facilitator and and in a world that's becoming more fragmented and even thinking of Robert putnams work on the dissemination of community and how we're not spending as much time with each other anymore in the first place I think the only way to have civic dialogue and to have it spread throughout our public life is for for more people whether in the media or in civic life generally to take on the role of teachers moderators facilitators sponsors of hosts maybe hosts is the best word it's a kind of hospitality and and I've used the language of invitations so maybe hosts of forums and and occasions for public dialogue and debate now there are institutions whose job this is including the media and including schools and colleges and universities but ideally these discussions should take place throughout civil society and so congregations can be sites of these discussions trade unions historically have been sites of discussions like these civic associations so I think that but in all of those cases the discussion doesn't happen by accident it never does it requires some community and some leaders in that community to be the hosts or the conveners or the provocateurs which amount to the same thing and I think that really the the title of that role broadly is citizen I mean that's what citizens should be doing in convening and and it has to take place within civil society and we've been discussing tonight how technology can help but I don't think that even the best technology can substitute for the activity that takes place within civil society among citizens great last question yeah hi professor thank you for your thoughts this night I'm a visiting researcher from Brazil my question is focuses on that I think you for the example I completely understand that but we're having we're discussing now a pro gyroscope which is called a university or schools are part of no party because they're struggling during due to the elections struggling to discuss about the role of the professor's in the schools right not not only as a moderator or provoking the debate but as a part of the debate exposing his opinion to to the students even in secondary schools or schools so my question is which is in your opinion is the role of the professor if it should the professor should be not a part of the debate but just moderator or not if the professor should engage on the debate right that's a really important question thank you for that I would distinguish between this between partisan politics politics in the partisan sense and politics in the broader sense of having a concern with public life and with civic life and I think that teachers and professors can be much more effective in promoting civic education and in equipping students to become effective citizens if they the teachers of professors don't present their own personal partisan political views which is not to say that civic education is unrelated to politics it isn't because it takes as its material and is its occasion and as its provocation the public life we inhabit and so of course injustice or of course on ethics and new technologies or of course on money and markets which I'm teaching this semester of course is enriched and enlivened if it connects if it's connected to the world to actual political events and debates so I think civic education and moral education should be political in that broad sense which really has to do with connecting to the world and a public life but not in the purely partisan sense because that runs the risk of foreclosing debate rather than inviting it and at times that are so as polarized as our times are in Brazil just now yeah also in the US and in many other societies I think it's important for teachers of moral and civic education to retain the well if they're to be effective hosts they need not be neutral with regard to the moral questions that rise in the world we inhabit I don't think professors or teachers should try to hide their convictions but I think they better invite students to explore their own convictions to figure out what they believe and why if they retain a certain kind of openness with respect to the actual political choices we face day to day thank you and with that please join me in thanking Michael for his insights and

Channel: Harvard Graduate School of Education

Views: 18,236

Keywords: HGSE, Education, Harvard, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Id: na-_GXHtm-I

Length: 92min 48sec (5568 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 01 2018