Teaching Children How to Think: Rational Autonomy as an Aim of Liberal Education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Some philosophers think that fostering children's autonomy – in the sense of critical, rational reflection on our beliefs and goals – is an appropriate aim of public educational policy. Critics say that this amounts to championing an Enlightenment outlook over ways of life rooted in faith and tradition. The most common response to the critics is to assert that children have an interest in autonomy, not because autonomy is intrinsically worthwhile, but because it is instrumentally valuable in discovering how to lead a good life. Finding fault with this Instrumental Argument, I argue that the best case for autonomy is that critical, rational reflection is something we all already rely on in everyday life to figure out which beliefs are worthy of our assent and which goals are worthy of our pursuit. The question is not whether children will reason, but whether they will reason well or poorly. Teaching children how to think critically is, thus, best understood as helping them meet their own emerging standards of rationality. And, given that we have a duty to respect others as reasoning beings, we in turn have a collective duty to foster young people's capacity to distinguish good reasoning from bad.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it