The cloud of inconsistency:

...You'd think, therefore, they'd panic at the prospective mushrooming of private school experiments and would do all in their power to preserve the near-monopoly the public schools currently possess along with the pedagogical, and curricular homogeneity this monopoly brings in its train...

...If it is, then of course liberals should support the aid proposal and are inconsistent in opposing it, while conservatives should oppose it and are inconsistent in supporting it...

...The consensus on which society rests, they believe, is being eroded, leading to disorder and conflict at the social level and feelings of alienation and anomie in individuals...

...One sometimes suspects that Leon Festinger, the social psychologist, didn't have the privilege of sufficient acquaintance with American liberals and conservatives when he formulated his celebrated theory of cognitive dissonance...

...Are liberals and conservatives really materialistic about schooling...

...JUST WHY this is so and whether these dualisms constitute further internal contradictions for each school are interesting questions, though too large to get into here...

...It may be that to think about these questions effectively, or at least more effectively than we've been doing for some time now, we'll have to put aside our economic conception of intellect and replace it with a somewhat more Aristotelian conception...

...which of course one never does) and negotiating with them through intermediaries (which one does with worldwide publicity...

...Both sides would agree that Aristotle's archaic opening sentence of the Metaphysics ought to be modernized to read thus: "All men desire by nature just so much knowledge as is needed to get them the job they want, but no more...

...They used to have a few reservations about this proposition insofar as it applied to the education of girls and young women, who were supposed to be getting prepared for something domestic...

...This may be all right for lesser nations, but not for a great power whose foreign policy often depends on exceedingly subtle distinctions that weak minds don't appreciate and attempt to dismiss as logic-chopping, e.g., the distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism or that even more subtle distinction between negotiating with the P.L.O...

...The disputes between the two camps never challenge this materialistic first premise, having to do instead with disagreements about the best means to this end and about the ideal shape of the economic system itself...

...Again, liberals are eager to protect the individual's right to read and say what he pleases, but are ready to limit and control the right of an employer to behave as he pleases to his employees...

...Conservatives are just the opposite: pro-control in the spiritual, pro-freedom in the material, realm...

...We can't have the Republic's two leading schools of political thought convicted of inconsistency...

...So let's begin again...

...In sum, liberals are pro-freedom in things of the spirit (i.e., moral, intellectual, and artistic affairs) but pro-control in regard to material affairs (i.e., business and industry...

...Conservatives, by contrast, so far from wanting more freedom and diversity, fear we have too much already...

...Q.E.D...

...A case in point is the postures liberals and conservatives have taken on President Reagan's proposal for tuition tax credits for families of students attending private schools...

...David R. carlin...

...Training the national intelligence for the workplace, and only for the workplace, may not be the ideal way of getting ourselves in shape for thinking about large social and political questions...

...COMMENTING on the opening sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics, "All men by nature desire to know," John Herman Randall, Jr., remarked:"Aristotle never had the privilege of teaching in an American university...

...According to the theory, we feel uncomfortable when we hold two conflicting beliefs, and we try to reduce this discomfort by modifying the beliefs in such a way as to bring them into harmony with one another...

...JR., a previous contributor, is a senator in the Rhode Island state legislature...

...But not, I fear, to our two most popular schools of political ideology, both of which are so thoroughly liberated from Emerson's hobgoblin of little minds that they positively thrive on inconsistency...

...This sounds plausible and may very well apply to normal people...

...Conservatives reverse this...

...But mainstream liberalism and conservatism, despite occasional lip service to these eccentric ideals, really do believe that schooling is essentially a preparation for the world of work...

...Let's try to redeem the logical honor of our liberals and conservatives by showing, despite appearances, that their respective stands on the aid-to-private-schools issue are, rightly understood, reconcilable with their general principles...

...Both have written Whim on the lintels of their doorposts, thereby refuting cognitive dissonance theory...

...or more generally, the positions both camps take regarding any scheme for underwriting private schools with public money...

...But this will never do...

...It becomes perfectly appropriate for conservatives, with their nostalgia for laissez-faire in business and industry, to endorse laissez-faire schooling...

...Do they regard it as essentially a preparation for and handmaiden to our system of business and industry...

...The inconsistency exists only on the premise that schooling is a spiritual thing...

...While liberals support individualism and even eccentricity in, e.g., sexual matters, they don't extend this tolerance to, e.g., industries which discharge effluents into rivers and streams...

...while conservatives worry more about damaging teen-age minds with disedifying books than damaging teen-age bodies with disedifying working conditions...

...But if we switch premises and assume instead that schooling is a material affair, both inconsistencies vanish...

...Yet however things stand with these larger questions, we now have found a way to get our liberals and conservatives off the inconsistency hook with regard to the aid-to-private-schools issues...

...If I may be forgiven for putting it this way, they're more concerned with the discharge of seminal fluids than industrial effluents...

...But is this fair...

...Should word get out that our nation's logical talents have fallen into a state of disrepair, our credibility will vanish...

...One man's dissonance is another man's soothing harmony...

...but for neither side is its position consistent with certain more general principles it proclaims...

...Yes...

...Though I'm pleased to have been able to dissipate the cloud of inconsistency hovering over our two great schools of political thought on the private school issue - to have been able, at least to that small extent, to do something to redeem their logical honor - I fear other clouds remain, not all of them quite so easily made to disappear, some of them in fact a permanent part of our ideological atmosphere...

...and it's equally appropriate for liberals, with their hankerings after a semi-socialist state of affairs in business and industry, to fight to preserve our quasi-socialist school system...

...Notice first of all that there are other areas besides schooling in which liberals forget their pro-freedom and conservatives their pro-control stances...

...You'd think, then, that public support for private schools would be right up their alley, since it would encourage the creation of schools having a wide variety of intellectual, moral, religious, political, ethnic, and social class orientations...

...Now and then, to be sure, one stumbles on an eccentric conservative who believes that knowledge, like beauty, is its own excuse for being, or an eccentric liberal who believes that schools ought to be operated in obedience to the categorical imperative inscribed at Delphi: Know thyself...

...But that's a discussion for another day.discussion for another day...

...Liberals, of course, oppose such schemes, while conservatives by and large support them...

...Instead we see the party of freedom standing four-square against diversity and in favor of order and uniformity, while the party of order stands four-square for freedom and against control...

...In passing it might be mentioned that it's possible a relationship exists between these fallacies and our materialistic view of schooling...

...But in recent years those last reservations have been swept away...

...Liberals, in the tradition of Mill's essay On Liberty, favor freedom and diversity in society: individual uniqueness and cultural pluralism...