Liberal Education in American Political

¶ … Liberal Education

In American political lexicon, the phrases liberalism and conservatism have very specific connotations having to do with particular contemporary political issues like taxation, abortion, foreign policy, and different interpretations of various civil rights and constitutional protections and privileges. To a great degree, politically-oriented

Americans have adopted highly pejorative characterizations of one another in which they view either "liberalism" or "conservatism" as the embodiment of most of the nation's problems. However, in the more general sense of education, liberalism and conservatism have different connotations that, regardless of politically-oriented interpretations, with rather obvious implications.

In that realm, a conservative education implies intellectual rigidity, lack of critical analysis, and resistance to new ideas and values; meanwhile, a liberal education emphasizes intellectual flexibility, self-reflection, and a general openness to new concepts and analyses. Therefore, there is little doubt that a liberal education is preferable to a conservative education, primarily because the former promotes intellectual independence and psychological autonomy whereas the latter all but guarantees the repetition of past mistakes and militates against substantial social progress in human societies.

The Essential Benefits of Liberal Education:

A liberal education implies that students learn to think critically and in an environment that welcomes the continual critical evaluation of beliefs, values, and conclusions. The essential benefit of such an approach to education is that is promotes independent thought over rigid adherence to existing social values (Einstein, 1936 in Rooney, 2006; Feynman, 2005). In that respect, one need look no further than the relatively recent history of race relations in the United States to understand the comparative advantages of liberalism in education and social philosophy over the disadvantages of conservatism.

Until the middle of the 19th century, the entire economic base of the American

South relied upon the labor of African slaves. At that time, the conservative view supported the continuation of this atrocity while the more liberal perspective had begun to recognize the appalling nature inherent in the system of slave labor. Without the reconsideration of the moral issues associated with a system that had already been I place for more than two centuries, American slavery could conceivably have persisted into the present era (Einstein, 1953, in Rooney, 2006; Russell, 1959).

Likewise, a century later, conservative thinking opposed granting civil rights to the descendants of those once enslaved in the U.S. while liberal thinking recognized the degree to which prevailing social injustices affecting racial an ethnic minorities conflicted with fundamental American values, not to mention objective fairness and justice in human society. Aside from the specific flaws in reasoning and the retardation of social development attributable to any a-priori valuation of prevailing social values and beliefs, the conservative intellectual perspective has, in its effects, been responsible

for the contravention of some of the most fundamental constitutional principles that lie at the heart of American values and governmental oversight.

Much more recently the eight-year-long promotion of conservative social values through the presidential administration of George W. Bush resulted in the tremendously mistaken restriction of scientific research (Mooney, 2005). Specifically, it severely limited the beneficial development and applications of stem cell science that are virtually certain to provide the most dramatic increase in the ability of modern medicine to prevent and treat human disease since the introduction of antisepsis and the germ theory of disease toward the end of the 19th century and the discovery of antibiotics in the middle of the 20th century. The conservative objection to stem cell research are predicated in the rigid and unquestioning adherence to religious values that may once have represented tenable ideas, but that are patently ridiculous in the light of modern scientific understanding of human biology and genetics.

As a result, at least eight years of tremendously valuable medical research has been irretrievably lost to federal regulations that prohibited federal funding to the most important applications of stem cell research. During that time, many thousands of ailing

Americans suffered unnecessarily or died from ailments whose effective treatment are clearly capable of being advanced by stem cell research (Feldman, 2005; Mooney, 2005).

Similar applications of conservative thinking during this most recent dark era of American social thought resulted in the introduction of ludicrous notions such as

Intelligent Design motivated very transparently by the conservative approach to religious beliefs and the desire to circumvent Supreme Court decisions prohibiting the commingling of religious beliefs and public education (Feldman, 2005, Mooney, 2005;

Sagan, 1986, in Davidson, 1999).

Conceptually, the principal advantage of liberalism in education is simply that it does not preclude the consideration of alternate viewpoints, values, or strategies, because it prescribes no specific adherence to existing ideas. Conservatism, on the other hand, discourages the evolution of intellectual ideas and values and promotes rigid adherence to the status quo, even in the face of mounting objective evidence that existing perspectives are tremendously flawed and that they require reevaluation. Because the essential purpose of public education beyond elementary school is to teach students how to think more than it is to teach specific substantive information (Einstein, 1936, in Rooney, 2006;

Russell, 1961; Sagan, 1986, in Davidson, 1999), liberalism in education furthers the main purpose of modern education while conservatism in education achieves precisely the opposite.