Speech: The Epistemic Warrant of the Teacher
Speech delivered at the University of Greenwich, 13.11.2023
The Epistemic Warrant of the Teacher
In this presentation I am going to examine three related ideas: student voice and the associated ideal of student free speech within the classroom; indoctrination - what it is and why we should avoid it; and finally teacher authority - considering both its basis and its limits.
I will bring these three ideas together with the idea of the Teachers’ Warrant.
Speech within Education
Teachers are responsible for developing students’ knowledge and understanding. Developing students literacy is central to this task but equally teachers must also concentrate on developing students’ oracy.
Because speaking and speaking freely is one of the key ways in which students acquire knowledge and understanding, teachers design classroom activities that encourage students to speak both individually and collectively. Often we ask them to speak on moral and political topics that are contentious.
At the same time, teachers are the primary responsible agents within the classroom, so they must also keep classroom order, whilst ensuring that the speech of students serves an educational end.
Principally, student speech is directed by teachers so that it might serve education ends but it is of course also true that in cultivating student speech we are also preparing future citizens of our democracy.
However, the main reasons that teachers take oracy so seriously are educational: classroom debate is a method by which the acquisition of knowledge and development of understanding is driven, especially in those subjects which draw on the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Today, we live in a society in which there is a great deal of moral and political disagreement and very little consensus, yet at the same time we are also aware that students speaking freely is important. At the same time teachers need maintain order in their classrooms and it also true that teachers will often be offended by what students say. This can mean that students experience teacher authority on the matter of their speech in a contradictory form.
Often students will find themselves encouraged to speak freely by teachers, only to then be criticised for expressing ‘wrong’ or ‘deplorable’ viewpoints.
Today, sensible deplorables often just keep their mouths shut, crafty deplorables provoke teachers, precocious deplorables will point openly to the contradictions of teacher speech codes and some just throw chairs.
So by what principles should student speech within classrooms be rightly managed?
Should students simply have a right to free speech as they do in America?
Is it a contradiction to suggest that teachers should both encourage and control students’ speech?
And do teachers today need to make an effort to be more tolerant?
Having considered these questions, I will end this presentation by exploring a wider question: what values should govern education?
Student Free Speech within the Classroom
I first really started thinking about values within education when in 2014 the UK Coalition government introduced policy that required that teachers “actively promote” what are called British Values.
This was part of the government’s attempt to challenge terrorism through education as part of what is called the Prevent Strategy.
This strategy involved teachers being instructed to uphold the following:
Democracy
Rule of Law
Respect and Tolerance
Individual Liberty
To be clear, these are values that I myself value and we should note that they are essentially liberal democratic values.
At the time of their introduction, I remember Rania and I speaking about it and we were both concerned.
One of my thoughts was that whilst I politically approved of these values, and often argued for them as an adult citizen in the political sphere, I was uneasy with the idea that they should be “actively promoted” by teachers within education.
To me, this seemed to undermine what I take to be one of the primary purposes of education, which is to encourage students to think critically about all values. You can’t, I felt, both actively promote values and encourage their criticism as thier active promotion would seem to suggest that the values are themselves beyond criticism.
At the time, I also remember that Rania observed that the one important liberal democratic value that was missing from this list was free speech.
This got me thinking: should my students have a right to free speech?
More recently, the university level Office for Students has argued that higher education students such as yourself can “not have a high quality education if that education is not grounded in freedom of speech” and the UK government has recently passed the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act which aims to make this a reality.
In America all students, regardless of their age, have, since 1969 had a constitutional right to free speech, provided that it does not cause “substantial disruption”.
This right was introduced by the US Supreme Court when two anti-Vietnam protest students, who had been banned from expressing their opposition to this brutal war in college, took their complaint to the Supreme Court. It ruled that all students within America students had a right to freedom of speech, provided that it did not cause “substantial disruption”.
Similarly Article 13 of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the United Kingdom signed in 1990, states that “Every child must be free to express their thoughts and opinions and to access all kinds of information, as long as it is within the law.”
Likewise the Council of Europe, of which the UK is an active member, informs the children of its members that “you have the right to express yourself freely”.
These sentiments are echoed by the British Youth Council, whose latest manifesto for young people described “freedom of expression as a fundamental human right”.
In 2021 the Schools minister Nick Gibb was in fact asked in parliament what steps he was taking to promote free speech in schools.
For those who advocate a students’ right to free speech, Gibb’s answer may have ducked the issue. Gibb’s reply was that teachers were required to uphold British Values and that: “Freedom of speech is relevant to, and could be considered in, the context of all these values.”
So should the right to free speech be extended to students within compulsory education within England, or indeed students at any level?
Students Don’t have a Right to Free Speech within the Classroom
My view is that students, within the classroom at least, should not have a right to free speech.
As adults, outside the classroom, they ought to, in a liberal society, and as children, outside of the classroom, it is the responsibility of all adults to encourage the young to speak freely.
But within the classroom teachers at most tolerate the views of students and it is the teacher that gives the student permission to speak. They tolerate diverse viewpoints out of respect for students and because it creates an environment which helps to foster the development of collective understanding.
I will now try to justify this argument more fully through the idea of the Teachers’ Warrant.
The Teachers’ Warrant
Students, in my view, don’t have an absolute right to free speech, because classrooms are specialised social contexts in which particular epistemic rules apply.
Classrooms are places where the collective codes that govern both knowledge and knowledge acquisition supervene.
It is the teacher who knows best how these codes operate and are acquired and it is the teacher who is therefore responsible for controlling classroom discussions.
In other words, the teacher is warranted in restricting discussions to those that are useful in terms of the development of students’ knowledge and understanding.
But do teachers have a warrant to impose their own views on students?
Teacher Indoctrination
Teachers, in my view, don’t have a warrant to impose their views on students, or to indoctrinate, for the same reasons that they do have a right to control classroom discussions.
Indoctrination, as I see it, involves teaching that by intention or accident encourages students to hold beliefs, including true beliefs, uncritically.
This can only be bad for student understanding.
A critical appreciation of truth requires that we give voice to the Devil’s Advocate.
Teachers, I’d add, can indoctrinate by a variety of means, both witting, and often unwitting, which is why self awareness is such an important part of our craft.
Teachers can indoctrinate by omitting strong counter arguments, or by presenting weak or caricatured versions of them and they can also do so by less direct methods, such as the tone of their voice.
At best indoctrination constitutes a weak form of teaching in that it frustrates students’ knowledge acquisition and at worst it can represent a whole scale exploitation of education for non-educational purposes.
Given that students attend schools and colleges to learn, indoctrination at least constitutes a disrespect of learners as persons.
When we indoctrination, I argue, teaching tends to become a form of propaganda, with the teachers acting as a recruiting sergeants for their favoured cultural army.
Educators who indoctrinate, I add, are using education, and their position of power within the classroom the classroom, to exercise social control.
Whatever the method, pedagogic agents who indoctrinate undermine the social authority that is placed in teachers.
In doing so they undermine the Teachers’ Warrant, just as they do when they fail to maintain order, or to direct student speech towards educational goals.
So my opposition to indoctrination stems from my belief that education should be primarily conceived as a critical intellectual enterprise, one in which all ideas are open to evaluation and are presented in a form that leaves them open to testing through discussion.
It is my view classrooms should be havens of open but also disciplined critical thinking, places where students should, to paraphrase the great East End sociologist of education Basil Bernstein, think the unthinkable, without fear of reprimand, and on a really good day, the yet to be thought.
Looked at from this perspective, indoctrination, which by intention or accident seeks to stifle critical thought, and disrespects the intellectual, moral and political autonomy of pupils, and is a very serious educational problem indeed.
Yet in spite of the good reasons to oppose it, indoctrination appears to be a growing problem within English education, with accusation after accusation being levelled at teachers, with ever greater regularity and venom.
Sadly we don’t have time to today to explore why accusations of indoctrination within English education are growing.
Approaching Contested Issues within the Classroom
I'd like to end by briefly outlining some principles that teachers might employ to manage student speech.
I am not going to say in precise terms how teachers should teach about any particular issue, as teaching always requires that teachers make contextual judgements and these cannot be legislated for in advance.
Teachers are also responsible for judging if students are able to meaningfully debate ideas and they should of course only enter into discussions that are age appropriate.
Amongst other judgements, teachers must also make an assessment of students’ existing knowledge and sympathies.
In addition to this, teachers, I would argue, need to be sensitive to their own biases and sympathies, as well as the limits of the own knowledge, so as to avoid what is in my view the single most typical form of indoctrination within England, which is unwitting indoctrination.
Teaching must also be legal. There exists significant legislation in this country which governs what people are allowed and not allowed to say, particularly with regards to conflicts in other parts of the world and teachers have a duty to inform students of the law so that they don’t break it.
More specifically, teachers are legally required, and professionally bound, to avoid language that might incite acts of disorder, or discrimination, or violence, especially when this language is directed at particular groups.
Setting aside the law for a moment, teachers are also morally responsible for all students within their classrooms and for creating orderly environments in which every student can be educated. Classrooms must be hospitable as well as intellectually challenging places to be, but they can only be intellectually challenging if they are also emotionally hospitable.
Most importantly teachers must, if they are to avoid indoctrination, themselves offer a factual, and where appropriate conceptual and theoretically informed, as well as balanced, introduction to the debates that are being held within academia and society. Our job is to help students and future citizens to learn how to form their own opinions and to actively listen to the views of others.
In short, my argument today has been that teachers must operate within the limits of the Teachers’ Warrant.
Values Within and Beyond Education
I’d like to conclude by suggesting that when we discuss the question of values and education we might like to draw a distinction those that are internal and those that are external.
This distinction, I argue, is of critical significance.
It is of course true that values within and beyond education are related, but I introduce this distinction because I believe we should differentiate between those values that teachers need to defend, in order to do their job, and those values that teachers should not defend, or advocate, because in doing so they risk compromising the Teachers’ Warrant.
One role of the teacher is of course to teach about values, and the debates that are being held in society, but in my mind teachers should not seek to defend or advocate values that are unrelated to education itself.
A classroom, as I see it, is not a pulpit, or a soap box, and students are not voters or members of a religious congregation. They are in the classroom to learn.
However, in order that learners might learn, teachers do need to take a stand on those values that are central to the operation of education itself and the formation of the scholarly identities of students.
Those values that teachers must defend as teachers include, but are no exhausted, by the following:
a commitment to truth
a tolerance of intellectual diversity
a respect for the autonomy of persons
On these values teachers simply must take a stand against students, parents, other teachers and politicians when they seek to undermine them within education.
Politely, of course.