Achieving Personal Autonomy through Education Dissertation - 1

Achieving Personal Autonomy through Education - Dissertation Example The concept of personal autonomy traces its roots to the ancient Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Both men proposed that the rational part of the soul is its most important part and the ideal for humanity is associated with self-sufficiency and being non-dependent on other people (Backus, 2003). Kant later developed the idea of moral autonomy as having authority over one’s actions and soon thereafter, the idea of autonomy in learning has become a part of a wide range of educational philosophies and has been identified recently in educational policy to be crucial to the development of learning (Honderich, 2005). Autonomy simply resided on morals in its early years, but then views about this began to change in the 21st century. For Dworkin ( 1988 ), the concept of autonomy includes one’s overall point of view towards how one lives one’s life. He points out that each individual, whether the most learned or the most carefree, conforms to his or her own personal view of what makes life valuable (Dworkin, 1988). Thus, Dworkin is actually saying that each person reveals how he or she conceives goodness or the good life through his or her behavior. For Raz (1988), the concept of personal autonomy is much more specific as he emphasizes that the individual is responsible for whatever happens to his or her life. As such, an individual with personal autonomy is identified not only by his actual choices in life but by the presence of choices themselves (Raz, 1988). Therefore, an individual can really just be autonomous if these choices are available and if the outcome of his or her life is based on the choices that he or she has made along the way. He adds that if the individual does not have these choices in the first place, then he or she cannot really be labeled as autonomous (Raz, 1988).