Rural School Closure: Utilitarianism, Deontology, and Research Methods

Background: Kingston and the School Closure Decision

It is always difficult to make decisions that involve closing public services, most especially when those services concern public education. However, a fiscally responsible government must have guidelines and has promised to spend the public's dollars wisely. Our analysis revolves around Kingston, a small wheat belt town about 60 km from the nearest regional centre, Beeganup. Kingston is quite isolated but is able to communicate and receive regular transportation of freight, sundries, and other goods. The population is listed as just over 1,100, but almost half are residents on rural farms surrounding the township.

Unfortunately, the trend in Kingston reflects both a diaspora and a decline. The local weekly newspaper had to fold due to lack of funding, local residents travel to Beeganup for fresh produce, healthcare, and professional services, and farms are consolidating as young people move outside the community. Even with efforts at an entrepreneurial resurgence, it is clear the town is no longer self-sufficient and provides little more than a political centre for its residents.

The school is a district-based, all-encompassing organization serving children between the ages of 5 and 15. It has been operational since 1960, employs locals for assistance and maintenance, and has remained one of the central hubs of the community. The school currently serves 118 students, with only 22 in the upper levels. Most classes are grouped and handled by 12 primary and 7 secondary teachers. The administration has combined courses and teacher loads creatively to cater to the needs of the students. Based on statistics from 1995 to 1999, however, the decision was made to close the high school section of the school, allowing the pre-primary and primary sections to continue operating with current staff. Students in Years 8 to 10 will need to be bussed 60 km to Beeganup Senior High School, adding one to one-and-a-half hours to each leg of the day. This decision was vigorously protested but was upheld by the National and Regional Education Departments based on student-to-staff ratios and enrollment trends (see Appendix 1 for Kingston School enrollment data).

The community is naturally upset, believing they had not only been inadequately consulted, but that the school is so vital to community life that any decision potentially detrimental to the overall good would be tragic. Letters to the editor reflect a public ready to fight the closure by all possible means. Most community members see the decision as one made from a central government standpoint, purely for fiscal and political reasons (Sheedy, 1999).

Ethical Frameworks: Utilitarianism and Deontology

Even prior to the formalization of the terms utilitarianism and deontology, the core ideas of each have been debated for centuries. The Ancient Greeks argued over the needs of the individual as opposed to the needs of the state, and throughout history generals and heads of state have had to balance ends against means. At the center of this debate is the notion that many remain dissatisfied with the definition of "good" or "appropriate" being at the whim of a particular social order or ruling elite. This debate may be found in Aristotle, Socrates, and Aquinas, leading to more contemporary political notions from Locke, Kant, and even Martin Luther King, Jr.¹

Forming the core of the modern argument, Aquinas argued that there were certain universal behaviors ordained by the Divine as either right or wrong. Hobbes and Locke differed, putting forth the notion that there were natural rights — or "states of nature" — but disagreed on the controlling factors of those natural tendencies. Kant took this further and argued that a state or society must be organized according to laws and justice that are universally true, available, and, most importantly, justified by humanity. For Kant, these laws should respect the equality, freedom, and autonomy of citizens. In this way, Kant prescribed that basic rights were necessary for civil society, and his work becomes a rubric by which we may understand modern utilitarian principles and their interdependence with the concept of human rights (Haydn, 2001).

In general, utilitarianism is an ethical system most often attributed to John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, both nineteenth-century social philosophers commenting on conditions arising from the Industrial Revolution. Utilitarianism holds that the most ethical action is any action that will maximize happiness within an organization or society. Actions have quantitative outcomes, and the ethical choices that lead to the "greatest good for the greatest number" are the appropriate decisions, even if that means subsuming the rights of certain individuals (Troyer, 2003, pp. 256–62). It is considered a consequentialist outlook in the sense that, while outcomes cannot be predicted with certainty, the judgment of an action is based on its outcome — or, "the ends justify the means" (Groves, 2003).

Deontology is a compatible but alternative ethical system that has its roots in Ancient Greece yet is most often attributed to Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher writing approximately a century before Mill and Bentham. Where utilitarianism focuses on outcomes, deontology holds that the actions themselves must be ethical and moral, or the outcome is moot. Deontology argues that there are norms and truths universal to all humans; actions therefore have a predisposition toward right or wrong, moral or immoral. Kant believed that humans should act, at all times, as if their individual actions would have consequences for all of society. Morality, then, is based on rational thought and reflects the direction most humans innately desire. Roughly stated, deontology holds that "the means justify the ends" (Kamm, 2007).