Sides in Polarized Education Debate Reflect Different Moral Frames
George Lakoff is the cognitive linguist who has published a series of books (Don’t Think of an Elephant and Moral Politics, for example) about how people think about issues of public policy. People don’t form political opinions, according to Lakoff, by examining empirical evidence. They don’t evaluate how particular policies and programs are really operating in their communities or in the nation or the world. Instead they vote their core values as those values are incorporated into the meta-narratives—frames—by which they understand how the world works. Lakoff writes: “The debate is not a matter of objective, means-end rationality or cost-benefit analysis or effective public policy. It is not just a debate about the particular issue…. The debate is about the right form of morality….” (Moral Politics, p 169) If you want to speak to someone’s heart—and therefore that person’s vote—you must evoke the moral frame by which they understand how the world works.
On Monday, in her Washington Post Answer Sheet column, Valerie Strauss published a thoughtful piece along these lines from Arthur Camins, who examines the moral assumptions and values of those who promote creative disruption in education as the key to innovation. (This blog has considered the issues around education policy based on the theory of creative disruption here.) Camins wholeheartedly agrees with Lakoff about the role of values and morals in decisions that affect education policy: “It appears that the battles over what counts as better for education in the United States will be decided, not by the relative strength of evidentiary arguments, but instead by who most successfully claims the moral high ground. Public acceptance of policy prescriptions does not turn on technical determinations, but on values identification and moral judgments.”
Camins believes today’s school “reformers” value individual merit, hard work, and motivation via competition and filter their understanding of what’s possible and how to get there through this lens: “Success (defined as beating the competition), reformers appear to reason, is Sides in Polarized Education Debate Reflect Different Moral Frames | janresseger: