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The Tension Between Education and Freedom of Thought

-- By ColinONeal - 12 Mar 2017

Why Preserving Freedom of Thought Requires More than an Absence of Restrictions

Historical Challenges to Freedom of Thought

Throughout the vast majority of human history, the greatest barrier to freedom of thought has been restrictions on access to information. Dissenting opinions were silenced, and books were banned or burned. Even when there was no open hostility to non-traditional ideas, only a select few had the resources necessary to obtain books or hear others share their thoughts. Even with the advent of public libraries and open forums for spreading new forms of thinking, practical limitations prevented most from being able to take advantage of the nominally accessible avenues for encountering new thoughts.

Removing barriers to access is undeniably a crucial part of creating freedom of thought, and much human effort has been spent fighting those barriers. Many writers and thinkers have addressed the difficult question of how to effectively fight attempts to limit the freedom of individuals to read what they choose. This paper will not seek to address that challenge, but its opposite. A lack of overt restrictions alone, however, is not sufficient to guarantee free thinking.

Modern Difficulties

The global proliferation of access to the internet has shattered many restrictions on information. While limitations remain, one can practically access a substantial proportion of the written work of humanity. While it would be hyperbole to describe the internet as home to infinite ideas, when compared to the resources for learning available to the average person in any century but our own the magnitude of the difference defies our ability to truly grasp.

What does this mean for the future? Most people familiar with the legal system will have heard of the tactic of responding to discovery requests not with too little information, but with too much – a volume of information designed to overwhelm and render anything of value impossible or overly difficult to locate.

In other contexts, research has shown that an extremely high degree of choice actually harms our ability to decide between options effectively. The 1970 Future Shock spoke of “overchoice” and “information overload,” challenging the assumption that more options or information is always better. In 2004, The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less argued that, particularly in the consumer context, people could choose more effectively and be more satisfied with their decisions when presented with a narrower range of options.

There are those who have noticed a decline in the attention span of those growing up alongside the internet, and attributing those changes to the ever-escalating competition for their attention across the internet does not seem implausible. Regardless, people of all ages spend a significant amount of time consuming media, news, or games that do not require critical thought or offer much of intellectual value. While humanity has always found ways to waste time and enjoy itself, it would seem that the internet has made the problem more acute.

The Challenge of Meaningful Choice

The difficulties of fostering meaningful choice, and meaningful freedom of thought, are naturally more complex than simply being that beyond a certain point the number of choices hurts our ability to choose effectively. It is possible to alleviate what otherwise might be a fairly linear decline, past a certain point, in the effectiveness of choice as the number of choices increase.

Familiarity is the primary means by which this can be done. Exposing an individual to a variety of books and ideas will enable them to more quickly and effectively understand their future options for reading, and can support choices they both understand and are satisfied with even amongst a broad range of options. Public education in our society, and early involvement by parents and others, can expose children to a variety of sources and concepts, and in doing so provide a set of tools which will enable meaningful decisions between what might otherwise appear to be an incomprehensible range of options.

Relying on established preferences is another way that individuals cope with a broad range of available options. In terms of promoting meaningful choices, this is necessary, but can also be problematic. Preferences are, of course, at the root of autonomy, and play a critical role in shaping our consumption of everything, including literature. With the prevalence of polarization throughout modern society, however, and the increasing capacity of our sources of news and knowledge to shape themselves to be what they think we want to see, blind reliance on preferences alone can be a severe impediment to freedom of thought.

Reconciling Education and Freedom

Given the importance of establishing familiarity with a variety of ideas to enable meaningful choice in the context of the internet, as well as the risk of excessive reliance on established preferences, education takes on a role of increasing importance – both as a way to enhance our ability to understand and select from the wide variety of options available, and as a means to challenge established patterns of thinking and preferences through exposure to new ideas.

This, in turn, leads to a difficult tension – that to preserve effective freedom of thought, society requires a degree of restriction on autonomy through a compulsory education system; that to have meaningful choices, there must be some limitations on choice as well, at least in specific contexts. How we approach education will become ever more important, and requires a significantly greater emphasis than is currently found in our society. Principles of democratic self-governance will be critical in addressing the challenging question of how we educate, for the selection of mandatory books and ideas is a process open to abuse, and it constant tension with the idea of removing all restrictions on freedom of choice. Given the volume of choices available, however, it is almost paradoxically necessary that some choices be guided to a degree to facilitate meaningful and satisfying freedom of thought.

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