Check Your Language! Political Correctness, Censorship, and Performativity in Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, the role and position of philosophical inquiry in the field of education were much discussed.In many North American faculties or schools of education, philosophy departments are shrinking or disappearing, and philosophers are asked to justify conceptual work in a time when "data-driven policy" requires applicable empirical research.Yet it is precisely because of the enormous trust placed in "scientific" research in education that philosophical inquiry, for instance into the conceptual bases or ethical implications of the research, is important today.The view that philosophy serves a function in the analysis and clarification of the concepts underpinning "scientific" research is not new, of course, and in past decades has been defended especially by analytic philosophers.In this essay, I take not an analytic but a poststructuralist philosophical perspective to argue that philosophical inquiry is valuable for a critical reading of and response to educational theorists' and researchers' claims said to be supported by research.In particular, I examine claims by the Canadian Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) and American educational historian Diane Ravitch, that restricting the language that can be used by educators and in educational materials constitutes unacceptable censorship. 1 Both the SAFS and Ravitch argue for freedom of language use in education, but neither grounds the research in an analysis of the central concept: language.A closer look reveals that both the SAFS's and Ravitch's claims are based on a representational conception of language.This view of language as neutral mirror and messenger does not do justice to the complex effects of language use and restrictions thereof.I propose that a discursive view of language offers a stronger framework for analyzing the problems of censorship of speech and writing in education.In particular the concept of performativity, as elaborated by J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, offers a nuanced way of understanding the force of linguistic acts, and the problems surrounding censorship.If speaking and writing are considered as acts, that is, if it is acknowledged that words do not just mean something, but also do something, the evidence solicited and presented by the SAFS and Ravitch does not unequivocally support their conclusions that attempts to prohibit or change certain language in education are misplaced. ACADEMIC FREEDOM: FREEDOM OF WHAT?In July 2003, the graduate students in my faculty received a disturbing email from the SAFS.The message read as follows:A major Canadian newspaper is considering an article or a sequence of articles on cases of indoctrination on Canadian university campuses.What they have in mind is to describe incidents where students have felt intimidated to adopt a particular ideological viewpoint
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".