Should economics educators care about students ...

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Int. J. Pluralism and Economics Education, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, 2009

Should economics educators care about students’ academic freedom? Robert F. Garnett* and Michael R. Butler Department of Economics, Texas Christian University, Box 298510, Fort Worth, TX 76129, USA E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author Abstract: Is it the duty of economics educators to help their students achieve a threshold level of intellectual independence? Should the learning goals of the undergraduate economics major include the ability to think for oneself – to reach reasoned conclusions – in the face of analytical, empirical and normative uncertainties? The authors examine these ethical questions through the lens of academic freedom, specifically the academic freedom of students. They argue that academic freedom provides a robust rationale for extending the standard educational goal of ‘thinking like an economist’ to include the liberal art of reflective judgment. Keywords: economics education; economic education; academic freedom; academic rights; academic duties; intellectual freedom; liberal education; reflective judgment; critical thinking. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Garnett, R.F. and Butler, M.R. (2009) ‘Should economics educators care about students’ academic freedom?’, Int. J. Pluralism and Economics Education, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, pp.148–160. Biographical notes: Robert F. Garnett is Associate Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University, USA. His writings on the philosophy of economics and economics education have appeared in Rethinking Marxism, the Journal of Economic Issues, the Atlantic Economic Journal, the Review of Political Economy, the Review of Austrian Economics, the Review of Social Economy, the Journal of Markets and Morality, Studies in Philosophy and Education and the Post-Autistic Economics Review. His current projects focus on economics education as liberal education, the value and requirements of pluralism in economic inquiry, and the relationship between commercial and philanthropic forms of economic cooperation. Michael R. Butler is Associate Professor of Economics and Associate Dean of AddRan College of Liberal Arts at Texas Christian University, USA. His research has been published in the Atlantic Economic Journal, the Journal of Sports Economics, the International Review of Economics and Business, The American Economist, Economic Inquiry, the Review of Industrial Organization, and the Southern Economic Journal. His research interests include the teaching of economics, sports economics, and the economics of the European Union.

Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Should economics educators care about students’ academic freedom?

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Introduction

The cultivation of students’ intellectual freedom is a defining aim of liberal education (Nussbaum, 1997). Yet standard economics courses and curricula do not teach reflective judgment or critical thinking – the tools minimally required to achieve autonomy within a disciplinary discourse.1 This elision should not be surprising. Many economists assume that ‘the analytical nature of most economics courses inherently teaches students to think critically’ [Borg and Borg, (2001), p.20]. Others assume that economics students acquire their liberal arts skills from general education courses outside the major (Hansen, 1986). Still others recognise the need for economics curricula to include critical thinking but consider themselves unfit to teach it (Solow, 1990). As a result, economics instructors receive little professional guidance as to whether, how, or why they should help students become proficient in the liberal art of crafting reasoned arguments and conclusions in the face of analytical, empirical or normative uncertainties (Colander, 2001; Browne et al., 1995). In this paper, we employ the concept of academic freedom, specifically the academic freedom of students (AFS), to justify the inclusion of reflective judgment as a basic goal of undergraduate economics education. The academic freedom of students, as defined by the legal and cultural traditions of US higher education, includes both the negative freedom from improper coercion and the positive freedom to become an independent thinker (American Association of University Professors, 1915, 1967; US Supreme Court, 1919, 1957, 1967; Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2006). We argue that the positive dimension of students’ academic rights obliges economics instructors and departments to help their students achieve a threshold capacity for creative, critical thought. We further contend that principled commitments to students’ academic freedoms would likely enhance learning and would embody the epistemic and educational ideals of modern economics itself, as represented by the writings of Smith (1976 [1759]), Mill (1956 [1859]), Hayek (1948 [1945]), Shackle (1953), and Sen (1999).

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Academic freedom for students: concept and rationale

The idea of academic freedom – ‘the free search for truth and its free exposition’ within academic communities (AAUP, 1940) – has a long history, dating at least from Socrates, but most prominently from the 16th and 17th centuries when modern notions of religious tolerance and intellectual liberty began to take root across the East and West (Sen, 1997; Fellman, 2003).2 The academic freedom of university students became a contentious issue in the USA in the 1950s and 60s, through a series of legal battles over free speech rights. The US Supreme Court broadly defended students’ academic rights under the umbrella of free speech, most famously in Justice William Brennan’s 1967 declaration that ‘the classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas’’ and that ‘the nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues,’ (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection’ (US Supreme Court, 1967).3 Students’ academic rights had long been recognised by the AAUP as well. In 1915, the AAUP stipulated that the university teacher should not ‘provide his students with ready-made conclusions’ and must ‘guard against taking unfair advantage of the student’s

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immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has... sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own’ (AAUP, 1915). In addition, the AAUP enjoined faculty to ‘train (students) to think for themselves and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently’ (AAUP, 1915). In the illustrative words of the AAUP (1915) report: “The university teacher ... while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal verbiage ... should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue ... (including) the divergent opinions of other investigators.”

Of vital importance for the present discussion, the AAUP guidelines accord students positive as well as negative academic freedoms.4 Negative academic freedom (‘freedom from’) protects students from improper coercion by academic peers or superiors. It requires instructors to respect the autonomy of each student’s intellect and to provide learning environments in which students can question disciplinary assumptions and reasoning in academically appropriate ways without intimidation or ridicule from professors or fellow students, and in which students can have their work evaluated without prejudice. Positive academic freedom (‘freedom to’) requires faculty to ‘train (students) to think for themselves’ and to provide them ‘access to materials needed to think intelligently’. It requires instructors and departments to cultivate students’ ‘capacity for critical judgment’ (AAUP, 1967) – their ability to ‘assess the relative merits of different views, based on careful evaluation of assumptions, arguments and evidence’ [AAC&U, (2006), p.6]. This dual emphasis on the negative and positive dimensions of academic freedom is widely accepted in contemporary debates over students’ academic rights. Commentators as diverse as David Horowitz and the AAC&U acknowledge that ‘academic freedom is most likely to thrive in an environment of intellectual diversity that protects and fosters independence of thought and speech’ (Horowitz, 2002) and that ‘academic freedom implies not just freedom from constraint but also freedom for faculty and students to work within a scholarly community to develop the intellectual and personal qualities required of citizens in a vibrant democracy and participants in a vigorous economy’ [AAC&U, (2006), p.7; original emphasis]. It is even recognised by students themselves. At a 1998 conference on academic freedom, R. J. Kotwicki, then an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argued that students’ academic freedom requires more than non-indoctrination: “Undergraduate students need to feel safe in challenging methods or assumptions behind the facts as taught ... Beyond feeling protected from harm while reaching for academic freedom and autonomy, undergraduate students require encouragement from other students as well as from faculty in giving voice to their own ideas. ... Undergraduate students – vulnerable to the destructive forces of peer conformity, biased grading and academic ostracism – need to feel safe and encouraged to challenge the establishment and formulate new hypotheses.” [Kotwicki, (1998), pp.240-243]

Only when these multiple conditions are secured does ‘academic freedom [encourage] students to begin thinking for themselves’ [Kotwicki, (1998), p.240].


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2.1 Recent controversies Despite this broad consensus, considerable disagreement remains over the nature, value and legitimacy of students’ academic freedoms. The most contentious issues concern the roles and duties of faculty in securing students’ academic rights, namely: 1

Does AFS require faculty members to provide ‘intellectual diversity’ in every course or curriculum?

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Does AFS pertain to undergraduate students at all, in light of their general intellectual immaturity?

The first issue gained considerable attention in the wake of David Horowitz’s controversial ‘Academic Bill of Rights’ (Horowitz, 2002). Horowitz’s document declared that university faculties are obliged to provide ‘an environment of intellectual diversity that protects and fosters independence of thought and speech’. However, based on public perceptions of Horowitz as a crusader against ‘left-wing indoctrination’, his calls for diversity of thought in syllabi, curricula and faculty hiring decisions were seen by many observers as an improper insertion of political/ideological criteria into the academic realm. Stanley Fish (2008, p.120), for example, argues that intellectual diversity is neither an appropriate goal of academic activity nor a necessary part of the academic ‘pursuit of truth’. The ultimate goal of academic activity is truth, not pluralism. To make pluralism the goal, as Horowitz proposes, is to ‘substitute political goals for academic ones’ [Fish, (2008), p.124]. The second issue is more fundamental: do the privileges of academic freedom extend to novices as well as experts, despite the former’s unequal standing in the marketplace of ideas? [Saito, (2003), p.25; see also Nussbaum, (2003), pp.50–57] Fish (2008, p.123) says no, ‘Students do not have any rights except the right to competent instruction’. Kenneth Strike (1982), on the other hand, ventures a qualified yes. Strike (1982) acknowledges the inherent inequity of the faculty/student relationship. On these grounds, he rejects the US Supreme Court’s vision of the classroom as a marketplace of ideas: “The rights of students in schools are not simply the civil rights of adults in society. Civil liberties are rooted in a presumption of equality between the parties ... It is not a marketplace of ideas where truth emerges from a multitude of tongues. It is a place where the student strives to master a rational enterprise under the guidance of an expert.” [Strike, (1982), p.148]

Yet despite the academic inequality of students and teachers, Strike insists that they are equal in an important legal and moral sense. Both are autonomous, self-governing agents who bear moral responsibility ‘for what they choose and what they do’ [Strike, (1982), p.43, 148). In recognition of this equality, teachers are obliged ‘to give students reasons for what they are asked to believe, within students’ capacity to grasp them and to teach so as to expand the students’ capacity to comprehend and assess reasons’ [Strike, (1982), p.43]. In short, Strike concludes that university students are entitled to a liberal education, i.e., an education that brings ‘the student into a position of intellectual independence in that area’ [Strike, (1982), p.135].

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2.2 AFS defined Like Strike (1982), the AAUP, the AAC&U and the US Supreme Court, we believe that undergraduate students do possess academic rights, not despite but precisely because of their apprentice status. Specifically, we propose that all undergraduate students should enjoy two basic freedoms within their major course of study: •

The negative freedom from improper intellectual coercion: able to have their work evaluated without prejudice, and able to question disciplinary assumptions and reasoning in academically appropriate ways, without intimidation or ridicule from professors or fellow students.

•

The positive freedom to become an independent thinker: able to learn the art of critical thinking within their discipline, i.e., how to draw their own reasoned conclusions about the relative value of competing claims in the face of theoretical, empirical and normative uncertainties.

These provisions are uncontroversial, in principle (AAUP, 2007). Yet in most undergraduate degree programs, they exist as implicit norms or goals rather than as explicit learning outcomes. We devote the remainder of our discussion to the ‘positive freedom’ provision, both because it has received less attention in the national debate over students’ academic rights and because we see it as a potentially powerful catalyst for reform in undergraduate economics education. Thoughtful voices in the economics education community have long advocated critical thinking in precisely this vein.5 Our argument stands on their shoulders, as a fresh attempt to renew the liberal arts dimension of undergraduate economics. A principled respect for students’ positive academic freedom – the duty of instructors and departments to foster their students’ intellectual autonomy – could, if broadly supported, establish critical thinking and reflective judgment as essential tools for ‘thinking like an economist’.

2.3 Critical thinking as intellectual freedom Intellectual autonomy requires the development of what John Dewey (1933) called reflective or critical thinking: the art of reaching reasoned solutions to problems for which ‘there is no way to apply a formula to derive a correct solution and no way to prove definitively that a proposed solution is correct’ [King and Kitchener, (1994), p.6; see also Perry, 1970; Nelson, 1997; Paul, 1999]. Critical thinking, as defined by these authors, has three characteristics: 1

uncertainty about the truth value of one’s own arguments [Nelson, (1997), p.63]

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reflective judgment: ‘making judgments in the context of uncertainty’ [Borg and Borg, (2001), p.20] and, derivative of (1) and (2)

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reflexivity – a commitment to ‘question our own purposes, evidence, conclusions, implications and point of view with the same vigour as we question those of others’ [Paul and Elder, (2001), p.2], since ‘judgments derived from the reflective thinking process always remain open to further scrutiny, evaluation and reformulation’ [King and Kitchener, (1994), pp.7–8].


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This genre of critical thinking differs sharply from the ‘analytical thinking’ [Borg and Borg, (2001), p.21] and ‘complex correct thinking’ [Nelson, (1997), p.62] promoted by standard economics textbooks, namely: a method for solving problems that can be specified with high degrees of completeness and solved with high degrees of certainty using deductive or inductive logic.6 The general view of knowledge and learning in the critical thinking literature underscores ‘the ability and responsibility of individuals to make independent intellectual choices’ [Thoma, (1993), p.128]: to craft rationally defensible answers to questions that have no single correct answer. On the Perry/Nelson ladder of intellectual and ethical development, learners are propelled to each new stage by the realisation that ideas or evaluative criteria they previously regarded as certain are now uncertain. Each successive layer of uncertainty brings a new opportunity – and responsibility – to think for oneself. What curricular reform would be required to fulfil the positive academic freedom goal we propose? The principal change would be for each department to add a critical thinking or reflective judgment goal (or set of goals) to the list of foundational learning outcomes they aspire to achieve for their economics majors and, if necessary, to introduce curricular reforms to fulfil these objectives. In current curricula, economics majors are expected to acquire threshold proficiencies in micro- and macroeconomic principles, probability and statistics and certain forms of mathematics. These are the basic, transferable thinking skills that are supposed to enable students to understand, evaluate, construct and communicate economic arguments. The chief task of positive academic freedom reforms would be to expand this core skill set so that students are able ‘to engage differences of opinion, evaluate evidence and form their own grounded judgments about the relative value of competing perspectives’ AAC&U (2006). This is the crux of Hodgson’s (2002) proposal to add basic philosophical skills to all natural and social science curricula. ‘Just as the requirement of mathematics is now virtually universal, so too should be some philosophy and relevant parts of the history of ideas’ [Hodgson, (2002), p.132]. One advantage to defining these goals as learning outcomes rather than generic recipes is that each department would retain the right to craft its own recipe, depending on its unique capacities and constraints. For example, exposure to diverse schools of thought within or across courses may be an effective way for some instructors or departments to enhance their students’ academic freedom. But we can also imagine courses devoted mostly or exclusively to the one school of thought that could still promote AFS outcomes by giving students repeated opportunities to question, apply, discuss, explore and contextualise the course’s core ideas. Our general premise is that AFS reforms should focus more on how we teach economic ideas than on which ideas we teach [Fullbrook, (2003), p.151] since there is no single, correct way for instructors or departments to teach the liberal arts of critical thinking or reflective judgment.

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Why economics educators should care

Many economics educators accept critical thinking or reflective judgment as valued outcomes for students’ higher education yet see no reason for economics departments to devote additional curricular resources to the achievement of these goals. They wonder: ‘why is it our job to teach our students to think like liberally educated persons?’ Such

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questions are a bit ironic, given the prominent role of professional economists in the formation of the AAUP and its policies on academic freedom [Coats, (1998), pp.130–131]. But our sceptical colleagues are unlikely to be moved by these historic affiliations or by the academic freedom pronouncements of the US Supreme Court or the AAUP. In search of more compelling answers, we turn to three ‘in house’ reasons why intellectual autonomy deserves to be a distinct goal of the economics major.

3.1 It’s likely to enhance student learning One rationale for new critical thinking initiatives is the documented finding that even high-achieving economics majors have difficulty applying their theoretical knowledge to real-life personal, professional and public problems (Hansen et al., 2002; Katz and Becker, 1999; Salemi and Siegfried, 1999; Walstad and Allgood, 1999). This rationale is largely speculative, since no studies have yet demonstrated a causal link between higher levels of critical thinking and higher levels of student learning within the economics major. Intuitively, however, it seems plausible to assume that students’ ability to retain and apply economic concepts would be enhanced by courses and curricula that give them more ways to make creative, critical, personal connections to economic ideas. Craig Nelson’s study of critical thinking in college-level biology courses is quite suggestive in this regard (Nelson, 1989).

3.2 It’s our disciplinary heritage In addition to the contemporary literature on critical thinking in economics, major economic thinkers such as Smith (1976 [1759]), Mill (1956 [1859]), Hayek (1948 [1945]), Shackle (1953), and Sen (1999) have long recognised the epistemic and social value of intellectual freedom. Though none of these individuals is an education theorist and few speak of academic freedom per se, their commitments to human freedom in the realm of ideas are intimately bound to their conceptions of freedom in the economic domain. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976 [1759]), Smith describes intellectual and moral autonomy as a form of positive freedom: the capacity to judge one’s own conduct in dialogue with one’s impartial spectator (Harpham, 2000). ‘We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it’ [Smith, (1976 [1759]), p.110]. ‘It is only by consulting this judge within, that we can ever see what relates to ourselves in its proper shape and dimensions or that we can ever make any proper comparison between our own interests and those of other people’ [Smith, (1976 [1759]), p.134]. When Smith speaks of human autonomy, he envisions a socially embedded individual who gains the capacity to ‘think for himself’ via ongoing social interaction and moral dialogue ‘in the great school of self-command’ [Smith, (1976 [1759]), p.146]. Smith’s emphasis on human judgment is rare among modern moral philosophers [Griswold, (1999), p.180]. Philosopher Samuel Fleischacker (1999) suggests that Smith regarded the ‘freedom to judge’ as an elemental form of human freedom. Smith, according to Fleischacker (1999, p.4), ‘construes freedom above all as that which enables one to judge for oneself – unlike a child, who requires others to judge for her, who requires tutelage’.


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Smith’s emphasis on intellectual autonomy is characteristic of modern economics at large. Mill (1956 [1859], pp.26–78) highlights the intellectual liberty of the individual in his famous theory of public discourse as a marketplace of ideas. A similar theme is visible in Hayek’s (1948 [1945]) account of the individual learning as a subjective appropriation of information via ‘learned and skilful judgment’ (Lavoie, 1995; Boettke, 2002) and in Sen’s (1999) insistence that intellectual freedom – the substantive ability to exercise one’s reasoned agency as an autonomous thinker – ranks among the essential human capabilities. Shackle (1953, p.18) encapsulates many of these ideas in his eloquent account of the liberal educator’s mission: “The first task of the university teacher of any liberal art is surely to persuade his students that the most important things he will put before them are questions and not answers. He is going to put up for them scaffolding and leave them to build within it. He has to persuade them that they have not come to the university to learn as it were by heart things which are already hard-and-fast and cut-and-dried, but to watch and perhaps help in a process, the driving of a causeway which will be made gradually firmer by the traffic of many minds.”

3.3 It’s our job The venerable aims of liberal education offer a third line of defence. As argued above, the Socratic tradition of liberal education and the US tradition of academic freedom make it the duty of college-level educators to cultivate their students’ capacities for intellectual autonomy and judgment (Strike, 1982). The principal duty lies with undergraduate departments. The chief role of individual instructors is to teach the most important truths of their discipline as they perceive them. It thus becomes the duty of the department to ensure that the curricular whole is greater than the sum of its parts: to establish a framework of courses, policies, procedures and norms within which the decentralised pursuit of truth by individual teacher/scholars generates intellectual experiences that satisfy (among other things) the minimal standards of students’ academic freedom. Individual instructors may complement departmental efforts by promoting students’ academic freedom within their courses. In an introductory or an intermediate economics course, for example, the instructor can make the course more problem-centred rather than theory-centred (Diduch, 1999; Lewis, 1999). This method was proposed in the early 1970s by Fels (1974, p.405), who advocated case studies, even in introductory courses, so that “The student is given real-world problems [and] is expected to apply to these problems not only the theoretical knowledge he has acquired, but also the analytic methods characteristic of his field. Often there are no clearly right or wrong answers to the questions raised in a case: the object is to develop and to highlight the role which values and norms must play in the formulation of policy.”

The educational value of this approach derives in part from its decentring of standard textbooks (Myers, 1992). Recent trends in online publishing suggest that pedagogical innovations of this sort are becoming more feasible as textbook-driven courses ‘give way to online presentation of material and alternative methods of instruction’ [Colander, (2005), p.255]. A related strategy is to emphasise scholarly controversies: ‘competing views on recurring problems in economics’ (Raveaud, 2003). The introduction of multiple forms of

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economic thinking in connection with real-world problems and policies ‘helps students learn how to think critically and independently – the essence of a liberal undergraduate education. When there is no universally agreed-upon right answer to economic questions, students must learn to evaluate the logic of and evidence for contending theories and decide for themselves the relative merits of the different theories’ [Moseley et al., (1991), p.237; see also Barone (1991) and Ferber (1999)]. A third strategy is simply to know thyself and to employ this self-knowledge as a pedagogical tool. Nelson (1989) argues that our students’ capacity for higher-order thinking is greatly enhanced when they see their professor not as an inscrutable ‘sage on stage’ but as ‘an individual striving, like the students, to interpret a complex and uncertain world’: “Although lectures require much prior thinking, it may seem to the students as if professors spontaneously think the way we lecture, as if ‘real’ thinking is beyond the students’ reach. This impact can be softened by exploring new ideas as they emerge during class and by noting how our views have changed: the mistakes and other factors that led to changes, the alternatives we explored and rejected and the changes we are now considering.” [Nelson, (1989), p.24]

By candidly revealing the grounds and evolution of our own thinking – how we ourselves have combined theory, evidence, values (professional and personal) and other assumptions to reach reasoned conclusions about complex or controversial questions – we give students a concrete model of how to think critically within our discipline. Faculty too can benefit from this activity, especially instructors who find it difficult to ‘raise their assumptions to an explicit level for acknowledgement and examination’ or those who are ‘unaware of the values and beliefs that are implicit in their approach to a subject’ [Ehrlich and Colby, (2004), p.38].

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Conclusions

We believe that every economics department has a duty to make reflective judgment – the liberal art of ‘thinking for oneself’ – a learning goal for their undergraduate majors. Liberal education in the twenty-first century is likely to centre increasingly on the undergraduate major rather than the university core curriculum, due to the major’s comparative advantage in extended, in-depth critical inquiry (AAC&U, 2007). One of our principal challenges, going forward, will be to ensure that basic academic freedoms are afforded to every student who chooses to pursue an undergraduate economics degree. We recognise the rhetorical perils of endorsing ‘academic freedom for students’. To some ears, our position will sound pedagogically irresponsible: allowing our underdisciplined students even more license to think as they wish. To others it will sound like ideological capitulation: selling out the good names of critical thinking and liberal education to the agenda of a politically conservative ‘students for academic freedom’ movement. Yet our concept of AFS is clearly distinct from either of these extremes. As we envision it, students’ academic freedom is coextensive with the project of liberal education itself (AAC&U, 2006), education that aims to enable all students to ‘grapple successfully with uncertainty, complexity and conflicting perspectives and [to] still take stands that are based on evidence, analysis and compassion and are deeply centred in values’ [Nelson, (1997), p.71].


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By committing ourselves to this objective within our respective departments and degree programs, we improve our chances to increase student learning, to open up the economics major to a wider array of students (not just the mathematically inclined) and even to expand our own intellectual freedoms as economists and educators.

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Notes 1

2 3

Notable exceptions include Fels (1974, p.403) and Ferber (1999, p.136), both of whom identify ‘thinking for themselves’ as a central goal of undergraduate economics education. Siegfried et al. (1991, p.212, 199) and Shackelford (1992, p.522) also affirm ‘independent and critical thought’ and ‘creative, critical thinking skills’ as valuable outcomes of the undergraduate curriculum. Two excellent discussions of Socratic inquiry as a starting point for liberal education are Nussbaum (1997, pp.15–49) and Finkel (2000). Justice Brennan was not the first Supreme Court justice to invoke the ‘marketplace of ideas’ metaphor in defense of free speech rights. As early as 1919, Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis spoke of intellectual competition and ‘free trade in ideas’ in a similar vein (US Supreme Court, 1919). In Holmes’ words: “[W]hen men have realised that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.” (US Supreme Court, 1919)

4

5

6

Negative and positive liberty are terms coined by political philosopher Berlin (2002a [1958]). Berlin abhorred educational systems that undercut or override the intellectual freedom of the novice learner (Berlin, 2002a [1958]; and especially 2002b [1998]). Yet the subtlety of his thinking on these matters is not fully captured by popular translations of his negative/positive liberty distinction as ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. For our limited purposes here, however, the standard freedom from/freedom to distinction will suffice. See for example Becker (2007), Browne and Keeley (2007), Colander (2001), Colander and McGoldrick (2009), Earl (2000), Feiner (2003), Feiner and Roberts (1995), Fels (1974), Ferber (1999), Fullbrook (2003), Knoedler and Underwood (2003), Moseley et al. (1991), O’Donnell (forthcoming), Shackelford (1992) and Underwood (2004). Borg and Borg (2001, p.21) define analytical thinking as ‘technical problem solving’ through the ‘application of analytical models’. Nelson (1997, p.62) defines complex correct thinking as ‘the thinking required to solve problems where there is a single right answer and the teacher has taught the students ‘the way’ to find that answer’.