Free Will and Heutagogy

In this paper we argue that there are at least two conditions for the adequate realization of the capacity of free will – and thus of the realization of the right to freedom of education – that are missing from Matusov's account, and needed to be integrated with it in order to enable the successful implementation of the right to freedom of education principle. We will then offer a different typology of the field of education, a typology that is complementary, rather than contradictory, to Matusov's typology, and use this typology – especially the concept of heutagogy – to offer a way that optimizes freedom of will in education. Dr. Raz Shpeizer is a lecturer and pedagogical instructor at Kaye Academic College of Education, BeerSheva, Israel. Born in Tel-Aviv, he graduated with bachelor’s degree in Art and Philosophy and M.A degree in Philosophy from Tel-Aviv University. He then moved to Beer-Sheva in the south of Israel, to gain his PhD in Philosophy from Ben-Gurion University. He was appointed a lecturer at Kaye Academic College of Education in 2011, and since then teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as conducting researches. His fields of interest encompass general philosophy, philosophy of education, critical and creative thinking, project-based learning, and multiculturalism. He has published articles in various international and national journals, and a book about Henri Bergson and the problem of free will. Amnon Glassner is a Senior Lecturer and Pedagogical Guide in Kaye Academic College of Education. His main research and teaching interests are: heutagogy approach; creative and critical thinking in education; argumentation skills; meaningful learning; intelligent use of ICT for meaningful learning. His papers were published in journals such as: Acta Psychologica, Learning and Instruction, British Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Thinking Skills and Creativity, and Journal of Action Learning. His last book was written with Prof. Shlomo Back: Exploring Heutagogy in Higher Education: Academia Meets the Zeitgeist


Introduction
One of the main aspects of the subject of freedom is that of free will. The free will theme is one of the core themes of Western philosophy and keeps haunting it for many centuries. However, the debates concerning free will tend to be very abstract, and mostly deal with its metaphysical and logical conditions (as well as their consequences to the concepts of moral responsibility). In this paper we will focus on the more practical aspect of free will, that is, its execution in real-life situations, and we will assume that free will do exist, since it seems to us that free will is both a logical condition of the freedom of education thesis and presupposed by Matusov (2020) when dealing with this thesis.

SF81
Assuming that humans are endowed with the capacity of free will, and that this capacity is a necessary condition for the realization of the right to freedom of education, a question arises: Does the priority that Matusov gives to the principle of the right to freedom of education hinders in some way the full realization of this capacity? For if it does, it follows that this very right is being damaged.
In what follows, we will argue that there are at least two conditions for the adequate realization of the capacity of free will -and thus of the realization of the right to freedom of education -that are missing from Matusov's account, and needed to be integrated with it in order to enable the successful implementation of the right to freedom of education principle. We will then offer a different typology of the field of education, a typology that is complementary, rather than contradictory, to Matusov's typology, and use this typology -especially the concept of heutagogy -to offer a way that optimizes freedom of will in education.

Two views of free will
Beside views that deny the possibility of free will, and will not be dealt with here, there are two basic philosophical positions which suppose, and argue for its existence. These positions are compatibilism and libertarianism. The main difference between compatibilism and libertarianism is that the former holds that there is no contradiction between the concepts of determinism and free will, while the latter holds that for free will to be possible, indeterminism must be true. Thus, central to the libertarian views on free will is the principle of alternative possibilities (e.g., Ginet, 1996;Kane, 1996Kane, , 2005, which states that for every free action, there must be at least two possible actions that the agent can chose from, while compatibilists deny the necessity of this condition. Of course, there is much more to be said about the compatibilism-libertarianism debate, but this cannot be done here due to space limitation. It is important to notice, however, that both views agree that some conditions, such as external coercion or manipulation, and agent's ignorance, would hamper free will (Berofsky, 2009;Kane, 2005;Pereboom, 2014), and also, that in order for an action to be considered free, the agent must be, in some sense, the author, or the source of this action.
In his paper, Matusov does not explicate his position regarding free will. Nevertheless, it seems to us that he emphasizes the concept of choice (Matusov, 2020, pp. SF3, SF6, SF10, SF11, SF19, SF22), and hence his free will view is close to the libertarian view. Therefore, in what follows, we will assume this view, but most of our arguments can be adopted (with slight modifications) as to encompass the compatibilist view as well.

The argument from thinking skills
Suppose that John studies in a university. Before the beginning of the semester, he reads a syllabus of a course entitled "critical examination," and, impressed by its rational, he decides to take the course. Heading toward the class for the course's first lesson, he meets another student -Emily. They discuss the course syllabus and Emily claims that while the syllabus is well-constructed, John should not believe everything written in it because obviously, the professor who wrote the syllabus has an interest in promoting it and attract students, and furthermore, she never heard any student saying something positive about this course, "So it must be a poor course." Convinced by her claims, John decides to give up the course and take another one instead.
Was John decision a free decision, and was he executing is right to freedom of education? Many would notice that John's change of mind was a result of erroneous reasoning, since Emily's argument is SF82 based on two logical fallacies -the circumstantial ad hominem and the argument from ignorance. However, some may feel reluctant to conclude that that fact alone is sufficient to establish that John's decision and the action that followed it were not free. After all, it seems that he could have decided otherwise, he was not forced to take this course of action, so cannot his decision be considered a free decision?
But what we would have thought if we knew that Emily's conversation with John was a premeditated attempt to manipulate him and cause him to leave the course (maybe she had a quarrel with the course's professor and looked for revenge)? Many philosophers have given examples of external manipulation, showing that people who are being manipulated to think, decide or act on the manipulator will cannot be considered free agents. These examples may be classified according to the strength of the manipulationfrom neuroscientists who can manipulate human's brain states (Pereboom, 2014) to social engineers who manipulate people behavior (Kane, 2005), to governments indoctrination, and so forth. The point is, that both common people intuitions, as exemplified in the law system (e.g., Murray & Lombrozo, 2017), and philosophical considerations, lead to the conclusion that manipulated person is un-free, or at least less free -if the manipulation is understood as less forceful. The philosophical arguments for the impediment of free will in case of manipulation may vary according the philosophical orientation of the arguer. Thus, for compatibilists, the manipulee is less free because her manipulated act is less authentic, not expressing her deep self (Shoemaker, 2015), while for the libertarian, the loss of freedom is the outcome of the loss, or narrowing, of the range of possibilities, or, on other accounts, the loss of the ultimate authorship of the manipulee, who is no longer the source of her act (Kane, 1996(Kane, , 2005. In our example, John initial decision to take the course was his own, and if we think of Emily's move as a premeditated manipulative move, we will probably be more inclined to accept that John's decision was not free because he could not be considered the author or source of it. However, the most important point to be noticed is that John change of mind was due to an erroneous reasoning. This has nothing to do with any objective state of affairs in the outside worldbecause neither John nor Emily, or, for that matter, anybody else, could knew (based on Emily's argument) whether taking the course was good for John or not. It was wrong judgment, which is the outcome of poor reasoning, and this poor reasoning, whether it was caused by intentional manipulation or not -brought John to take a course of action that otherwise he would have not taken, and thus damaged his ability to choose what is good for him.
Thus, it seems that basic thinking skill, or, more precisely, basic critical thinking skills, are needed for students, and persons generally, in order to make choices that are both more suitable for them, and, in a broader sense, freer. These skills might be less needed for villagers who live simple life in remote places, but in our modern societies, with the mass media, fake news, aggressive advertising, and strong and manipulative political and economic powers, it seems as a necessary condition for the actualization of free will. Moreover, even beyond the ever-present tangible possibility of manipulation, it should be noted that cases like the above case has nothing to do with the agent's right to act foolishly, irrationally, and so forth, since the action taken by John was a result of ignorance, and not of his (free) will to act as he wishes. At the bottom line, this means that without the ability for "reflective and reasonable thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do" (Ennis, 1985, p. 45), people will be less free, and students' right to freedom of education will be impaired.
Lastly, it is important to point out that the demand for basic critical thinking skills is far more modest and less pretentious than the Kantian ambitious portrayal of an all-embracing, truth-discoverer and moraldiscoverer reason. There is no need to assume, and indeed most critical thinking scholars will not assume, that reason discloses the absolute truth or the absolute moral principle(s). Rather, reason, or rationality, as SF83 the ability to weigh reasons (Paul, 1993;Siegel, 1988), helps us to avoid mistakes and wrong judgements, to better understand ourselves and the world, without necessarily supposing neither that it can reveal the ultimate truth nor that it is the only guide for action.

The argument from lack of content
Let us imagine, for example, a student who studies to become a teacher in a teacher education institution. She studies in a program which adopts the guidelines of the principle of the right to freedom of education, and thus, among other things, gets "to decide what to learn" (Matusov, 2020, p. SF10). After visiting few schools and learning their educational practices, she decides that she wishes to focus her entire learning on the prevailing practices she has seen in these schools, which -she rightly supposes -are the common practices of the entire educational system (she might reason that both her future student and herself would benefit from her becoming an expert in the established way of teaching). Now, it seems to us that this student's freedom of choice, and thus her ability to act freely, is being damaged, rather than broadened, because she is not aware of other educational options, such as, if we adopt Matusov (2020) terminology, the practices of close and open socialization and of education as critical examination. Yes, she might acquire knowledge of these other practices from "her interaction with the teacher, peers, other people, texts, experiences, observations, activities…" (Matusov, 2020, p. SF11), but she also might not, especially if she is inclined to stick with her initial decision. To put it more generally, in order to exercise free will, an agent needs possibilities, and the less possibilities there are, the less possibilities the agent is aware of, the lesser is her freedom, and vice versa -the more possibilities the agent has, the more possibilities the agent is aware of, the freer she is. In our present context, a student who is not aware of, and even more -does not have basic understanding of -the major trends in the discipline or subject she wishes to study, cannot really execute her right to freedom of education, either because she hardly has option to choose from, or because her choice is a mere guess.

Pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy (PAH)
Following the above discussion about freedom of will as a precondition for freedom of education, and referring to Matusov (2020) differentiation between "training, close socialization, open socialization, and critical examination, along with the Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy" (p. SF3), we would like to present a complementary conceptual frame which expresses the different levels of learners' freedom of education, by identifying three major educational paradigms: pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy (PAH).
Pedagogy assumes that the "learner is, by definition a dependent one" (Knowles, 1980, p. 43). The teacher takes full responsibility of determining what, when, and how something is to be learned, and to evaluate it. In pedagogy, the freedom of education is very limited. In pedagogy, "what is to be learnt, and how, is both determined and directed by the teacher; in andragogy [i.e., adult learning], it is determined by the teacher and directed by the learner" (Anderson, 2006, cited by Luckin et al., 2010. Pedagogy and andragogy differ from heutagogy (self-determined learning), in which "both determination and direction shift to the learner" (Luckin et al., 2010). Heutagogy enables the students to experience high level of freedom of education. Knowles (1970) defines self-determined learning as "…the process in which individuals take the initiative…in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying resources for learning, choosing and implementing learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes" (p. 7).
Using our and others' experiences in teaching heutagogy courses, we believe that we do not have to wait until the "intrinsic education occurs when our civilization transitions from the exclusively necessitybased to a leisure-dominated hybrid" (Matusov,p. SF23). Implementation of heutagogy enhances such