An Education for Deep Agency

Kant’s glorification of “autonomy” may have helped fertilize the prevalent contemporary educational focus on nurturing individual instrumental reasoning—which, it will be argued, diminishes autonomy, since the sort of “objective” reasoning of which Kant speaks requires the “bias-neutralizing” power of reasoning with others. Following an analysis of how the emergence of self-consciousness creates a space for a sense of freedom of choice and the drive to excel, it will be argued, referring to Kant’s pre-critical work, that self-creating self-legislation requires independence from both the determining force of our natural inclinations and our drive to excel, and that an education for this dual independence requires that educators shift the focus from trying to make individuals smart, to trying to create “smart spaces” of communal inquiry with the goal of anchoring the recognition that engaging in reasoned dialogue with those of differing viewpoints in the only route to “Deep Agency.”

Keywords: Autonomy, Community of Inquiry, Instrumental Reasoning, Objective Reasoning, Self-Creation, Agency.