Just a quick announcement for anyone inclined to attend the APA Eastern Division meeting this year. The Molinari Society is organizing a session, care of Roderick Long (Auburn University), on “False Alternatives in the Politics of Knowledge.” The session is G3A, on Wednesday, January 8, 2025, 4-5:50 pm (room TBA) with presentations by Cory Massimino (Center for a Stateless Society) and myself. The meeting is being held at the Sheraton New York Times Square, 811 7th Ave at 53rd St. Attendance, as usual, requires registration and payment of the registration fee. Cory’s presentation is called “Between Convergence and Conspiracy.” Mine is “Between Indoctrination and False Neutrality: Pedagogy Under Occupation,” a now unrecognizable version of this post from nine years ago. Roderick will be commenting.

An abstract-like sketch of my argument: The first part of my paper is an application, to philosophical pedagogy, of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. There is, I argue, a nameless mean in pedagogy between the twin extremes of indoctrination and false neutrality (both defined in the paper). Properly understood, the virtue expressed by this mean doesn’t just permit but encourages or even demands that an instructor engage in wholehearted advocacy of some of her considered beliefs in the classroom, with the explicit aim of convincing students of the truth of these beliefs. Advocacy that respects the conditions of epistemic justification in this way is, I argue, neither indoctrinative nor falsely neutral.

The second part of the paper describes a case study illustrating the preceding thesis, namely, the time I spent teaching political philosophy to Palestinian students at Al Quds University in the West Bank. Though focused on classic texts in the “Western” tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Marx, Mill), I had students read these texts with a view to understanding their own lived predicament, the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The structure of the course expressed my considered view that the texts had something valuable to teach students about the occupation, along with the defeasible belief that the occupation was itself unjust. Each class was structured by a lesson plan specifying this belief in some way.  Beyond that, I occasionally (and unapologetically) intervened in classroom discussions to offer arguments for my own views. The result, I argue, was neither indoctrinative nor falsely neutral, and at least approximated the pedagogical mean.