Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
This paper discusses the learning and teaching of reasoning and civility from the historical perspective of psychology as a discipline. Reasoning and civility are hardly a familiar couple. Indeed, they have been more frequently seen as competing educational goals rather than complementary purposes. It is our intention, however, to define reasoning and civility as two interacting dimensions of human action. We will argue that man must be both rational and civil, both a creature of reason and a cooperative social being. Moreover, not only are these two compatible human traits that are fully capable of pacific coexistence, human rationality is contingent upon human civility in certain fundamental ways. We do not use the term civility to connote some Western sense of civilized or even the traits of propriety, proper etiquette, or good classroom behavior, though the latter is an important concern in a society that defines classroom discipline as its most important problem of educational policy. Indeed, civility is the capacity to function as a citizen, as an active member of a group, in a way that benefits both the individual and the aggregate.
Shulman et al. (Sat,) studied this question.