Harry Brighouse

This chapter aims to identify the distinctive contribution made by parent–child relationships to human well-being or flourishing, focusing particularly on the benefits to parents. It argues that such relationships are non-substitutable and make an extremely important contribution to the well-being of many adults. The relationship is distinctive, for example, in being asymmetrical, with the parent acting as fiduciary for the child’s interests, having extensive control over the child’s life, not having the right to exit the relationship, while also requiring spontaneity and involving an intimate sharing of self. The proposed “familial relationship goods” account is contrasted with rival accounts that assert a parental interest in “creative self-extension” and derive from that interest a weighty claim to parent a child to whom one is biologically connected.

We have learned from progress in the field of psychology that certain biases are baked into the human condition. However, the fact that we live and process information in real time, in a temporal order, is not a mistake. It affects what we end up thinking, so it is a bias in a way; yet it is not a mistake, and there is no way for human information processors to avoid it. Even so, open-mindedness pays dividends. Because each of us set out to defend children rather than to defend theories, in the course of our back-and-forth each of us ended up learning something about what serves that more or less common aim. In particular, we understand that one of society’s legitimate aspirations is to be a place of opportunity, and above all a place of opportunity for its least advantaged citizens. We also understand what this overarching aspiration leaves open. It does not determine the particular missions of more specialized institutions within society, including institutions of education. We leave that as a question for the reader, but we hope to have shed some light on how to think about it.

Chapter 1 will set out the assumptions behind the argument, and the theoretical framework within which it is made. Chapter 2 will set out and argue for a set of aims for an education system. Chapter 3 will outline the extent to which markets already, and unavoidably, play a role in the way educational opportunities are created and allocated. Chapter 4 provides first a theoretical argument that a fully marketized system is unlikely to further the aims outlined in chapter 2, and then an argument, grounded in careful consideration of the existing empirical research, that recent market reforms have not, in fact, furthered those aims. Chapter 5 outlines a sketch of some more promising reforms.

The evolution of educational institutions has been shaped by an uneasy mix of standards-based and market-based reforms. How we understand education’s outcomes for students and for society at large will shape how we think about the general idea of market-based reforms. Yet any given reform is a particular intervention in a particular time and place, so a responsible evaluation of reform ultimately must be an analysis of particular observations. General principles of philosophy and economics can illuminate, but real cases have a way of turning out to be special cases. So while this is a debate about the role of market-based reforms in education, we want to avoid engaging in a duel of rival theories and instead speak on behalf of real children, real parents, and real teachers.

Thought experiments and normative case studies can play different and complementary roles in moral and political philosophizing. Thought experiments help us to sculpt and refine normative concepts and alert us to contradictions between intuitive judgments and basic principles, or among intuitive judgments, thus informing our reflective equilibrium about what fundamentally matters. Normative case studies assist us in judging how to trade off conflicting values in specified circumstances. Engaging with a sufficient number of well-wrought normative case studies can thus inform our ultimate judgments about the relative weights of different values.

Advocates of tuition-free four-year public college make the argument for it too easy by asserting that it would be paid for out of taxes on the wealthy. Other uses of the revenues are possible. In this paper, Harry Brighouse and Kailey Mullane establish two criteria for comparing different uses of the revenues: the first criterion is, will the policy increase the overall level of educational goods?, and the second is, will the policy reduce inequalities of educational goods? Here, Brighouse and Mullane compare tuition-free four-year public college with two alternatives: (1) spending the revenues in pre-K and K-12, and (2) spending them on expanding the Pell Grant Program. Both alternatives are superior with respect to reducing inequalities, and spending in pre-K and K-12 is superior with respect to increasing the overall level of educational goods. While on some assumptions tuition-free four-year public college might prove better than expanding Pell Grants at increasing the overall level of educational goods, there are good reasons, nevertheless, to prefer expanding Pell Grants.

Perpetuating the discipline of philosophy is not the main educational responsibility of philosophers. Instead, it is to equip students with those distinctively philosophical intellectual resources that will serve students in serving the public good through participation in the economy (broadly conceived) and democratic life. Given this responsibility philosophers, individually and collectively, have a duty to take teaching and learning more seriously than they do. The paper offers some confident ideas about what this means when it comes to approaching training and professional development and some more tentative ideas about what it means, specifically, for the Philosophy curriculum and the pedagogical strategies philosophers should adopt in the classroom.