In our elitist academic community, while we support free speech
as a principle, we really don't believe that people whose opinions
are uninformed should be taken as seriously in matters scientific
or scholarly as those who are. We argue about just what kind of
information and experience are relevant, but we generally insist
on something specific to the topic under discussion.
Should parents/citizens who have never been in a Whole Language
classroom (or perhaps a phonics one either), who have no reasonable
basis for assessing what the general practice of these methods
is actually like, or their results, and who probably in most cases
could not characterize the principles either is based on, or the
most widely held arguments in favor or against either ... should
such persons have the _right_ to influence public policy on this
issue?
I am not saying that they should not have the right to participate
in public discussion and debate; they should. It's good for the
community as a whole, I think, to have all views aired, and for
all to participate and have a chance, at least, to change their
views, to learn, as well as to influence others. But should there
be no test whatsoever of who's opinions are grounded and whose
are not (in the sense detailed above)?
This is a fundamental question about democracy itself, about
its principles. If we take the extreme case, whether citizens
ignorant entirely of candidates, positions, parties, etc. should
have the right to walk into a voting booth and capriciously pull
levers at random ... while I'm skeptical, I can acknowledge that
they are at least equally vulnerable to the consequences of their
decisions with all the rest of us, and so have a moral right to
vote, and I can even see that at this level of generality one
might well get overall better decisions, or at least decisions
more ratified by more people, with universal suffrage.
But I do not think this applies to specific issues of policy
where NOT every citizen is equally vulnerable to the consequences
of bad decisions. In the case in point, while we all suffer
indirectly from the levels of literacy which educational methods
and policies contribute to in our communities, these specific
policies do affect some classes of people much more than others.
Beginning with the students themselves, and with teachers a far
second-place, and the students' parents and prospective employers
a very distant third, and the rest of us at some hazy edge of
the world. Should not those most affected by the decisions either
have disproportionate say in the decisions, or, by a related logic,
disproportionate say in determining the qualifications which
anyone must have to participate in making such decisions?
I know that the usual answer to this is that there is no fair
and abuse-free way to set qualifications to participate in
policy-making. But that is obviously not what we practice as
scientists and scholars. Nor is it clear to me that it is a
good reason not to try to develop better-than-nothing strategies.
If one imagines the democratic utopia of some people, in which
we can all vote over the internet from our TV sets and computers
and telephones, on every social issue, law, proposal, and policy
that comes up ... will we still believe that everybody should be
legally qualified to vote on everything? Of course most people
won't bother, and maybe many of us will refrain when our ignorance
seems a bar to our conscience, and many of us will want to
delegate our votes to those more expert than ourselves, provided
perhaps that they also share our interests, perspectives, and
social positioning. Quite a number of issues even for the notion
of a _representative_ democracy are then raised by the question
of whether anyone can represent anyone else, or whether representation
should ideally be proportional in some sense to gender, class, age,
(and perhaps on indefinitely, which may not in fact be entirely
impractical) as well as carrying a responsibility to be informed
on the issue.
One could imagine a post-democratic ideal perhaps in which the
qualified, and socially representative, electorate was a different
group of people on every issue. One could also imagine that many
issues do not need to have uniform decisions or policy imposed
on large aggregates (esp. geographically defined aggregates as
today) of people, but that the post-democratic ideal could also
be decentralized to a much greater degree than we presently
think possible.
If _your_ education, property, rights, or life were at stake,
what political ideal would you best trust? JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU