August/September 2019 ●Philosophy Now 25cate either our public or our leaders in the arts of politics and
citizenship. Indeed, it’s an astonishing fact of modern life that
no effort is made by public institutions to educate politicians in
the art of leadership. Alone among activities of consequence for
the public good, no opportunities exist for preparing people for
entry into practical politics. Political parties sometimes offer
some training for candidates prior to elections, and legislatures
typically offer basic training to newly-elected legislators, but
no standing institutions provide mentoring and coaching for
people who aspire to enter politics. Democracies trust amateurs
to run the most complex organizations in modern societies,
manage the largest budgets, and make decisions involving every-
thing from statutory rules to regulatory minutiae.
Why do we not train politicians?
One reason is the belief that politics can be learned but not
taught – that the learning happens on the job, not from read-
ing textbooks or studying.
It is certainly true that, like any practice, politics is acquired
through experience; but there are many such practices that are
also taught. Much of what politicians do on a day-to-day basis is
entirely teachable – including law-making and legislative analysis,
budgets, estimates, supply motions and money bills, parliamen-
tary procedures and rules, committee work, caucus work, the roles
and offices of the legislature, voting, constituency service, man-
aging a constituency office, political communications, relation-
ships with the civil service, lobbyists, and the media. Moreover,
professional schools provide many examples of ways in which prac-
tices can be honed through experiential learning, from moot courts
in law, to clerkships in medicine, to war games in the military.
A deeper objection is that even if the mechanics (so to speak)
of politics can be taught, it is not clear that aspiring politicians
can be taught to be good.
It must be conceded that people will be unlikely to learn
political virtue from a school of politics unless they enter with
at least some sense of calling to public service – for some people
enter politics for the wrong reasons, or lack the disposition to
become wise practitioners. Yet the same objection could be
directed at any other professional school, like a law school or a
school of business. The rationale for such schools is precisely
to inculcate good practice. A law school that did not cultivate
an appreciation for the rule of law, a business school that did
not encourage ethical business practices, or a medical school
that did not put care of patients at the center, would be regarded
as deficient by most practitioners.
Perhaps the most troubling objection people raise is that pol-
itics is incorrigibly unethical and irredeemably corrupt, and that
any ethical training of politicians would simply disarm them in
the face of Machiavellian adversaries.Aristotle with a Bust of Homer
Rembrandt, 1652