05 Higher Education Reading Group
Pritchard, D. (2020). Educating for intellectual humility and conviction. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(2), 398-409.
Humility as a virtue is nice. However, this does not acknowledge that virtues, are embodied action, and these are stress tested within systems that restrain the space for manoeuvrability of actions, and the manifestations of said virtues (if they indeed are manifestations, as coming to later on).
The whole essay felt very Scottish Enlightenment, in a Humean view of knowledge that very high hopes about the human nature and the success of reason over human fallibility and irrationality. It is not necessarily that the essay is wrong per se, but rather the assumptions that it makes about human nature, are applicable to only a pre-selected subset of humanity, one that is deeply meshed in Christian values and a European cultural context.
Here, intlectual humility, as he describes it, becomes almost like a “courtly predisposition”, that the individuals need to manifest, as to be able to participate at the kings court. However, by that very token, it is not self-evident and is ruthlessly enforced, as a survival mechanisms, instead of a virtue because it is so great.
The entire article, is in essence a very moralising argument, by the nature of talking about virtues. However, the possibility that he does not introduce, is what if this is a post-hoc self-rationalisation of casting its own will to power (henceforth the previous identification of Hume, which came before Nietzsche).
He talks about that people who have learned the codes, are not really embodying these values, because their spirit and heart are not in it. Which may or may not be correct, however, externally? How would one be able to tell the difference? All we have to go by, is people’s outward performances.
Likewise, the impetuous, the seed for knowledge creation, the seed for change, intellectual or otherwise, is always a manifestation of a form of selfishness. There is nothing humble about one individual wanting to do something in the world.
Likewise, he does not give enough credit to the behavioural rules of professed ignorance. In that as long as an individual acknowledges all the ways in which they cannot know, as long as they outline the limitations of their argument, as long as they invite others for correction, even if that is done performatively, it still allows for a manifestation of a intellectual humility, in a functional kind of way of both allowing a intellectual space for both research and education to manifest.
Decline and fall: how university education became infantilised
This is a paper that describes how the current pressures of universities have infantilised higher education, and a mere reference to cultivating intellectual humility, as an outcome cannot deal with these structural factors
