Symposium Introduction: Educating Responsible Believers

Abstract

A central aim of education, at the primary, secondary, and postsecondary levels, is to bring it about that students believe responsibly. We want students to form new beliefs, and revise existing beliefs, on the basis of the best available evidence, argument, and testimony. We do not want them to cling dogmatically to beliefs acquired in childhood, nor to be warily skeptical of new information, nor to lurch haphazardly from one set of beliefs to another. Responsible believers are willing to subject their beliefs to critical scrutiny, to give new candidates for belief a fair hearing, and to amend their convictions when there is reason to do so.

Where the truth is known, our aim as educators is to impart knowledge: to bring it about that students hold true beliefs and understand what justifies them. Sometimes this will be achieved by presenting the evidence or rehearsing the argument that provides the warrant for a belief. At other times it will be achieved by testifying to the existence of evidence or argument that cannot, for one reason or another, be presented or rehearsed in the classroom. The goal in those cases is to share with students such knowledge as is available in the various theoretical and practical domains for which we are preparing them.

Where the truth is not known, our aim is to assist students in thinking clearly and independently about what to believe. There are controversies and dilemmas in all domains of action and inquiry that students must learn to navigate with due regard for relevant epistemic and normative considerations. They must work out for themselves when to take a stand on an unsettled question — and what stand to take — and when to remain agnostic. As educators we cannot do this work for our students: our role is to guide and support them on the road to becoming responsible believers and decision-makers.

How might these educational aims be realized? What types of pedagogical intervention promote responsible belief and what types of intervention impede it? What skills and techniques, what habits and norms, what intellectual traits and virtues, do responsible believers need? What forms of psychological resistance and cognitive bias stand in the way of clear and independent thinking, and what can be done to overcome these? What are the external forces that militate against responsible belief, that push students in the direction of dogmatism and gullibility, that cloud their judgment and undermine their confidence, that reinforce their prejudices and trap them in echo chambers? And are there educational measures by which we can realistically hope to counter these forces?

These are the questions that animated the Educating Responsible Believers project, a collaboration between faculty and graduate researchers at the University of Birmingham (UK) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US). Generously funded by the Birmingham-Illinois Partnership for Discovery, Engagement and Education (BRIDGE), the project ran from September 2023 to August 2024. The project team — comprising Nicholas C. Burbules, Danielle Diver, Laura D'Olimpio, Michael Hand, Ben Kotzee, Seunghyun Lee, Martha Perez-Mugg, Jeff Standley, Nicolas Tanchuk, Rebecca Taylor, and Ruth Wareham — met first in Champaign in autumn 2023, then in Birmingham in spring 2024, to exchange ideas, explore common ground, and develop lines of argument. No attempt was made to force a single position shared by all: our intention was to create a community of critical friends with whom to think through and test out our individual responses to the problem of educating for responsible belief. It was a rich and rewarding collaboration for all involved. The ten papers collected here are the fruit of our endeavors.

The first article in the collection is by Nicholas C. Burbules, “The Communicative Dimensions of Social Epistemologies.”¹ Beginning with the idea of communicative practices, Burbules asks what virtues are needed to sustain such practices and how we might cultivate them. He emphasizes that these communicative virtues overlap and interact in various ways, but he singles out five virtues that strike him as particularly important: fallibilism, questioning group-think, open-mindedness, (self)disciplined thinking, and truthfulness.

Jeff Standley's “On the Special Epistemic Obligations of the Educator” raises the question of whether educators should be held to higher epistemic standards than others.² Standley identifies a number of features of the work of teachers that make special demands on their epistemic character. He concludes that, when one decides to become a teacher, one does indeed take on special epistemic responsibilities and should therefore be held to higher epistemic standards than the layperson.

The next two articles focus in on specific contemporary impediments to responsible belief: the phenomenon of vaccine refusal and the popular practice of “manifesting.” In “Should Teachers Promote Vaccination?,” Ruth Wareham asks whether, and how, we should try to persuade students (1) that vaccines are safe and effective, and (2) that there is a civic duty to be vaccinated.³ She examines the debate about directive and nondirective teaching and argues that, whichever criterion of controversiality one favors, the case for promoting both the safety of vaccines and the duty to be vaccinated is compelling. In “What's Wrong with Wishful Thinking? Manifesting as an Epistemic Vice,” Laura D'Olimpio diagnoses the problem with manifesting — “a form of wishful thinking that confuses thought with reality” — and proposes some educational remedies for it.⁴ She recommends drawing on the methods of Philosophy for Children (P4C) to teach students about epistemic virtues and vices and, in particular, about the difference between positive thinking and wishful thinking.

Next is Michael Hand's “Does Indoctrination Still Matter?”⁵ Hand begins by outlining what he calls the standard view of indoctrination, according to which (1) to indoctrinate someone is to impart beliefs to her in such a way that she comes to hold them non-rationally, and (2) indoctrination is a pernicious form of miseducation. He proceeds to defend the standard view against four objections found in the recent literature on indoctrination: the impossibility, unavoidability, desirability, and third-party objections.

There follow two articles on teaching the virtue of open-mindedness. “Teaching Open-Mindedness for Challenging Classrooms,” by Seunghyun Lee, explores the difficulty of cultivating epistemic virtues in inhospitable environments. Lee takes seriously the possibility that open-mindedness might actually be disadvantageous when an epistemic environment is “permeated by falsehoods, deception, or misdirection.”⁶ But he contends that open-mindedness is, at least, a student role virtue and considers ways of cultivating it in the classroom. “Educating Open-Mindedness through Philosophy in Schools,” by Danielle Diver, highlights the distinctive capacity of philosophy to foster open-mindedness in its practitioners.⁷ In part because of the close attention philosophers pay to arguments, reasons, logic, and validity, and in part because of the focus in P4C on listening, dialogue, and constructive criticism, Diver argues that teaching philosophy in schools would make a significant contribution to the enterprise of educating responsible believers.

The eighth article in the collection is Nicolas Tanchuk and Rebecca Taylor's “Personalized Learning with AI Tutors: Assessing and Advancing Epistemic Trustworthiness.” Tanchuk and Taylor raise the thorny issue of the trustworthiness of artificially intelligent (AI) tutors. They argue that, when presented with AI-generated information, students on their own cannot reasonably be expected to distinguish what is reliable from what is not. Instead, teachers, administrators, technologists, and policymakers must take on shared responsibility for ensuring that students can have confidence in their AI tutors — with policymakers having “an especially important role to play in incentivizing the creation of AI tutoring platforms aligned to the conditions of epistemic trust.”⁸

Martha Perez-Mugg's “Instruction in the Age of Misinformation: Pedagogical Implications for Educating Responsible Knowers” probes the connections between civic reasoning, digital literacy, and epistemic responsibility.⁹ Perez-Mugg shows how education in democracy and digital media depends in various ways on education for responsible belief. She goes on to identify four pedagogical principles for promoting epistemic responsibility in the context of civic education.

The final article is Ben Kotzee's “The Ethics of Belief Debate and the Norm of Teaching.” Kotzee's question is whether there is a norm of teaching that “will settle what teachers ought to teach the students in their classes in their role as professional educators.”¹⁰ He first surveys the philosophical literatures on norms of belief and norms of assertion, then considers four possible norms of teaching, which he terms pragmatic, truth, evidential, and knowledge. He concludes that the knowledge norm — “teach only what is known” — is the most defensible.

Given the scope of the questions that animated our project, our discussions of them are hardly exhaustive. But we are optimistic about having identified some promising avenues of inquiry, and hopeful that we have vindicated some significant preliminary claims, in an area of the first importance for educational theory and practice. The damage wrought by irresponsible belief — to our lives, our health, our relationships, and our democracies — is palpable and, arguably, worsening: attention to the task of educating responsible believers is as necessary now as it has ever been.