ABSTRACT
Most enquiries into neutrality in education, like most recommendations for neutrality in education, have been concerned with neutral teaching, and this paper will follow this trend. No doubt to many people neutral teaching may seem a surprising topic for an inquiry, for they may think that the idea of the neutral teacher belongs to the same group of self-contradictory ideas as ‘married spinster’, ‘survivor of fatal injuries’ and, possibly, ‘straight gay’. Others with a more robust appreciation of what teaching can involve may see the idea of the neutral teacher as belonging to that group which includes such ideas as ‘pacifist army’ and ‘promiscuous celibate’, the group whose members, though not contradictory, nevertheless tax the imagination for a consistent reading. For my part, I neither regard the notions of neutral teaching or the neutral teacher as contradictory nor find them conceptually taxing, but what I do find and what I will argue for in this paper is that many of the cases for neutral teaching are flawed. In particular I want to argue that one of the most popular cases for teacher neutrality, this being what we can call the sceptical case, involves irreconcilable tensions. But more of this later. My immediate concern is to give some indication of the scope of our topic and this I will attempt to do by looking at different cases for neutrality in education. These, I will suggest, may be divided into the sceptical and the non-sceptical, though, as I will show, some which at first sight look to be non-sceptical cases, may be found to contain sceptical elements. Thereafter I will explore what teacher neutrality requires of the teacher before returning finally to the problem of the tensions that are housed within sceptical cases for neutral teaching.
