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Mr. Brazier: The Minister's comments would carry more credibility if he could explain why it is necessary to raise the comparatively small sum of money by compromising DERA's neutrality, integrity and excellence.
Mr. Spellar: Those are entirely different issues: the work that we are undertaking on smart procurement and the critical mass at DERA. The hon. Gentleman often makes good points, but he rides his hobby horses almost into the ground. He refuses to acknowledge that, although in many other areas there are significant issues, they are
by no means the whole picture. Integrated project teams and smart procurement are already working. We will demonstrate that over coming months.
The hon. Member for Portsmouth, South made a good point about those who wish to set up homes. He will be aware that in the Royal Navy, for example, an advance loan scheme already exists to assist in that process.
The hon. Member for Solihull (Mr. Taylor) talked about the cadets. Indeed, we have put additional resources into the cadets, which has been welcomed. We should not only remember that they are excellent youngsters, many of whom go into the services and have good careers, but acknowledge the work of those who act as their officers and trainers.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Ms Drown) raised the question of under-18s in the armed forces. I shall clarify the position. The International Labour Organisation proposes to ban the forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict. United Kingdom recruitment is entirely different from the abusive, forced involvement of children as members of militias or paramilitary forces. We are talking about properly organised, properly supervised, voluntary recruitment into our armed forces, and the excellent future that it gives to many youngsters.
The hon. Member for Portsmouth, South raised a number of other issues, including nuclear test veterans, the Chinook and asbestos. He keeps asking for new inquiries. That is mainly due to the fact that he does not like the answers that the inquiries have already given. Other Members also raised the question of the Chinook. In both of the former cases--asbestos is different and is being reviewed--there has been careful study.
If people have better scientific evidence that negates the basis of those inquiries, they should come forward with it, but both radiological protection studies have stood their ground. We are funding an additional survey on one area--multiple myeloma--because there has been an increase in the problem among both groups: the veterans and the standard group.
The debate has allowed us to--
It being Seven o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.
Ordered,
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Hill.]
Mr. Tony McWalter (Hemel Hempstead):
I am grateful to the House for giving me the opportunity of raising in this forum the subject--perhaps the plight--of philosophy. I told some hon. Members the subject of the debate, and some of them exhibited a certain pleasure, whereas others demonstrated some perplexity. Those who viewed the subject askance expressed two rather negative views about the subject of philosophy and its role in education.
The first view was that philosophy is a trivial subject that is not worth bothering with. The second view was rather different--that philosophy is the most profound and complex subject in the universe, but that its atmosphere is so rarefied that only geniuses, such as Einstein, need bother with it. Some people hold those views at the same time--although they are contradictory, as something cannot be both trivial and profound. Either view can be used to support the idea that the subject should be marginal to the educational process.
How do people arrive at such strange views? On the trivial side of the argument, it might be said that most people have thoughts that are broadly philosophical in character--so why bother studying them? Children, for example, often ask questions that are broadly--but fundamentally--philosophical, such as: "How can I tell what is right and what is wrong? Why should I obey the law? What is the point of studying history? Are people naturally selfish? Is everything made up of something else?"; or even, "Does God cry?" Those are among the thousands of philosophical questions that children and teenagers ask.
Our education system should make provision not only for those questions to be answered, but for children and young people to learn that such questioning is of value and should be encouraged. Part of the value of such questioning is that, in our lives, whether adult or child, we have to find answers to at least some of those questions.
Education should assist that process. However, it does little to develop young people's capacity to take philosophical matters seriously. Moreover, much of the time, education treats such inquiries as not worthy of pursuit--as if to say, "Ha! That is a philosophical question", with the shrug of the shoulders. It is the Pontius Pilate system:
Secondly, by refusing to take seriously young people's philosophical questions, we neglect a very valuable educational tool. Young people have some provisional answers to some of their philosophical questions.
However, if they could be brought to realise that their answers were, for example, inconsistent or insufficiently argued, their grasp of matters of the first importance could be developed.
Much practical education provided to people starts not with an inquirer and a provisional answer, but with some authority who "knows" an answer and whose only interest in the process is in getting the other person to absorb it. That is the so-called "blotting paper" theory of education.
Philosophy has the power to deal with the questions about which young people--but not only young people--are really thinking. It treats their confusion not as something to be instantly eliminated, but with respect. People grow from a confused state. Indeed, Aristotle said that the sense of wonder is the source of all knowledge. The teacher of philosophy--who does not have the answers to those fundament questions, but perhaps has more adequate answers--is more like a facilitator of the pupil's thought process than the purveyor of truths. He is, in effect, a Socratic midwife to the pupil's process of learning.
There is some evidence that if one takes seriously the way in which young people think, some of those who are alienated from the education system because it does not address where they are at or what they are thinking might be more willing to stick around.
Thirdly, philosophy opposes what might be called the Gradgrind theory of education--that it is about "facts, facts, facts". Not all questions that human beings address have the character of a question in a pub quiz. Questions that have philosophical complexity are worth asking and addressing even though no single human being has a final answer to them. The answers that one generates to such questions are partial, provisional and hesitant and as a result they are often derided, but they have an interesting feature: other people may have a perspective that, once encountered, might make one's hesitant, provisional answer a great deal better. That makes a conversation with those who have other perspectives purposive. When we address philosophical questions, we recognise that our answers could well have been improved if only we had engaged in more conversations with people with different perspectives. A philosophical education can teach us intellectual humility and that the best available answer to a question is not necessarily a final answer. It can also produce equality and co-operation between the teacher as Socratic midwife and the pupil as inquirer, which Gradgrind would never have countenanced.
I have dealt at some length with what should be said in response to the claim that philosophy is trivial. I shall deal more summarily with the idea that it is not relevant to those of us who are more limited in our understanding because it requires the brain of Einstein to cope with it. Of course, every subject has pinnacles that are inaccessible to the beginner and in the case of philosophy one would not expect school students to tackle the "Critique of Pure Reason". However, philosophy can be taught at school level and I suggest that strong benefits could be obtained if the subject were less marginalised.
Antipathy to philosophy is strongly embedded in English culture as opposed to the culture of the Celtic fringe. I once worked in a bar where one of the regular customers found out that I was a student of philosophy. "Finking," he said, "is the curse of our age". Although I do not share that judgment, I recognise it as an unargued but potentially philosophical thesis.
Previous Governments have put into practice their view that thinking is to be discouraged. In 1983, the then Secretary of State for Education decided that those with a degree in philosophy would not be eligible to teach. I think that he subscribed to the Einstein view of philosophy rather than to the view that it was trivial. Although over the years the ferocity of that judgment has been attenuated, the immediate effect of that decision was that seven university departments of philosophy closed and most teachers in schools today have taken no course in philosophy, not even in the theory of education.
I hope that we can start to repair the damage that that decision caused. I have a personal axe to grind as my own interest in philosophy was sparked by two mathematics teachers, both of whom had degrees in philosophy and taught mathematics with considerable flair and a profound understanding. Because of the previous Government's hostility to philosophy, today's students have no Mr. Donovan or Mr. Coffey to show them why certain mathematical ideas are important. I should like the Government to make a commitment to re-establishing the older, wiser view that an education in philosophy is not something from which the young need to be shielded.
Damaging consequences result from the neglect of philosophy in our schools, a neglect that other cultures would find strange. I have time to mention only one problem--the difficulties that young people have with moral concepts. My short disquisition must therefore represent the many other arguments that I could marshal to show the intrinsic importance of philosophical debate.
Most children grow up trained in a moral system--as a father, I undertake such training myself--in which the first commandment is, "Thou shalt obey". Early in our lives, therefore, there are persons who are the accusatives of that obedientiary ethic--the people whom children obey, such as parents and teachers. In adolescence, an obedientiary ethic proves ineffective, and those whom the child had obeyed are increasingly--perhaps sadly--seen as fallible and limited.
How does our education system facilitate the transition from an obedientiary ethic to a set of moral beliefs founded on a more wide-ranging or synoptic basis? Our schools make little effort to address the problem. Some believers in religion maintain that only an obedientiary ethic can work, saying that God should replace parents as the accusative of the obedientiary prescription. However, even many religious thinkers feel that that argument is not compelling. In our society, a considerable number of young people do not have the belief in a God that could support an obedientiary ethic for adult life.
Young people are left in a moral void, even though all of us agree that what we most want from an education system is that graduates should have high moral standing. The result is confusion, with young people thinking of morality as a maze--I wanted to get in an aside about a well-known radio programme--as a matter of taste, as vacuous or as a mechanism by which the bourgeoisie suppress the proletariat. But those positions are held without any kind of critical analysis, an analysis that could happen only if teachers and pupils were equipped to handle it.
I was a university teacher of philosophy before I entered the House. In my experience, most students arrive holding a strong view that moral beliefs are subjective, simply a matter of taste. They hold the view that any
argument about such a topic would lead nowhere and would be a waste of time. The relatively few who did not subscribe to that belief held instead to a relatively primitive obedientiary ethic derived from childhood religion.
Morality has something to do with an obligation to respect others, but our education system is producing people who can provide no reason why others should be treated with respect. Virtually no attention has been given to the nature of morality. On the most important subject of all, our education system is silent. The miracle of our system is not that many people go off the rails, but that those who can give no good reason for behaving in a way that respects the rights of others nevertheless frequently do so.
The tendency of our system to produce ethical subjectivists is regrettable. Those who have studied philosophy usually reject ethical subjectivism as an incoherent position, partly because it offers little scope for distinguishing between what is in the realm of the ethical and moral, and what lies outside it. Would a taste be ethical, if, like Humpty Dumpty, my view of the moral realm was what I said it was?
To counteract subjectivism, those with no interest in philosophy often demand a reintroduction of ethics to the curriculum. However, these demands often amount--particularly from the Conservative party--to a demand to reintroduce an obedientiary ethic. They are often made by those who are "in charge" who ask those who are not "in charge" to conform to their imposed standards of behaviour. However, those "in charge" are sometimes wrong, and young people can cite examples to demonstrate the fact. The efforts to impose an obedientiary ethic are unlikely to succeed--unless, of course, we cease to be a democracy. The difficulty in replacing an emphasis on ethics by an emphasis on citizenship is that those who are good as citizens might be bad as people if the laws that they obey are inhumane--the example of apartheid can be mentioned in that vein.
In the meantime, we should be equipping young people to think seriously about moral matters. One feature of a moral person is that he or she has actually spent some time thinking about these things. "What will the repercussions on others be of my behaviour if I do this?" However, our education system does not provide the facilities for that extended process of reasoning or for that thought process.
I have submitted, using inadequately a single example of ethics, that the subject matter of philosophy is intrinsically important. I have submitted also that the teaching methods it engenders are beneficial: that in teaching it, we are required to respect the deeply held views of pupils and students; that it provides pupils and students with scope for developing independent thought; and that in addressing its questions, we become aware of what I can only call the majesty of the human intellect.
I ask the Government to signal clearly that they do not subscribe to the damaging view of philosophy held by the previous Government, who did not value the contribution that philosophy might make to our system of education and our system of teacher training. I ask the Government to confirm that they value that contribution, and that they will involve philosophers in the development of the curriculum in the areas of thinking skills and citizenship
and when they are reflecting on how best to equip school teachers to respond to the welcome, if searching, philosophical questions raised by their pupils.
That Mr. George Mudie be discharged from the Finance and Services Committee and Mr. Keith Bradley be added to the Committee.--[Mr. Keith Hill, on behalf of the Committee of Selection.]
1 Jul 1999 : Column 535
7 pm
"What is truth? . . . and would not stay for an answer."
It is a mistake to trivialise philosophy for many reasons, but I shall list only three. First, its subject matter is fundamentally important. Whatever else we want the education system to do, we want our children to grow up with a strong sense of right and wrong, and the strength of character both to live by their judgment and to develop as moral beings. It seems strange to expect to accomplish that goal by ignoring the subject that has most to offer in moral education.
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