The Routledge Education Studies Textbook

James Arthur, Ian Davies, James Arthur, Ian Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136035906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Routledge Education Studies Textbook is an academicallywide-ranging and appropriately challenging resource for students beyond the introductory stages of a degree programme in Education Studies. Written in a clear and engaging style, the chapters are divided into three sections that examine fundamental ideas and issues, explore educational contexts, and offer study and research guidance respectively.

To support the development of critical thinking, debates between contributors are interspersed within sections and address the following questions:

• Do private schools legitimise privilege?

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• Should the liberal state support religious schooling?

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• Are developments in post-14 education reducing the divide between the academic and the vocational?

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• Do schools contribute to social and community cohesion?

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• Do traditional and progressive teaching methods exist or are there only effective and ineffective methods?

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• Educational Research: a foundation for teacher professionalism?

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Each chapter opens with an overview of the rationale behind it and closes with a summary of the main points. At the end of every chapter key questions are posed, encouraging the student to critically reflect on the content, and suggestions for further reading are made.

The Routledge Education Studies Textbook is essential reading for students of Education Studies, especially duringsecond and third yearsof the undergraduate degree. It will be of interest to trainee teachers, including those working towards M Level.

Acompanion volume, The Routledge Education Studies Reader by the same editors, contains key classic and contemporary academicarticles and has been designed to beused alongside this Textbook.

Section 1Foundations of Education

• ■ philosophy ■ history ■ sociology ■ psychology
• 1 The goals of educationDavid Carr
• 2 Education and cultureMichael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut
• 3 Education and the state 1850 to the presentPaul Wakeling
• Debate 1 Do private schools legitimise privilege?Bernard Trafford and Rupert Tillyard
• 4 Gender and educationVanita Sundaram
• 5 Education and social classJon Davison
• 6 Citizenship education and black and minority ethnic communitiesBela Arora
• Debate 2 Should the liberal state support religious schooling?James C. Conroy and Tony Gallagher
• 7 Views of intelligenceJános Gordon-Győri and Márta Fülöp
• 8 How do people learn?Des Hewitt

Chapter 1The Goals of Education

David Carr

DOI: 10.4324/9780203609828-3

The rationale for this chapter is:

• ■ to provide a brief general account of past and more recent philosophical analyses of the meaning and aims of education;
• ■ to provide an account of recent ‘postmodern’ scepticism regarding such analyses;
• ■ to identify some of the conceptual confusions in such skeptical responses to philosophical

Introduction: The Normative Character of Education

One might naively (or pre-theoretically) suppose that the goals of education could simply be identified by drawing up a list of the sorts of things that are taught in schools as institutions generally charged with the social provision of education. The trouble with any such strategy, however, is that what is taught in schools is and has ever been subject to wide variation and there is also equally wide disagreement about whether much of this could or should be regarded as educational. At one extreme, recent history has seen Nazi schools in pre-war Germany, as well as schools in various contexts of ‘white supremacism’ (in apartheid South Africa or the southern USA), that have preached the racial inferiority of Jews or ‘people of colour’ in ways that may seem ‘indoctrinatory’ rather than educational. At another extreme, schools and other contexts of formation have often been sites of teaching and instruction that – however socially or humanly valuable – might still be regarded as falling short of education. Thus, whatever the social utility of nineteenth-century Victorian instruction of children of paupers in the skills of chimney sweeping, or even the specialist training of gifted youngsters in gymnastics skills as part of some national programme of ‘cultural development’, we might well have reservations about regarding such training – at any rate if focus on such skills excluded any and all other forms of learning – as ‘real’ education.

In short, knowledge or appreciation of the goals of education is not simply to be had by sociological or other social scientific study or survey but is unavoidably implicated in reflections or deliberations of a normative or evaluative kind that take us beyond mere data-gathering. Indeed, to recognise the evaluative character of the concept (or of concepts) of education – over which there is liable to be some human disagreement or controversy – is to regard theorising about education as implicated first and foremost in the kinds of enquiries into value in which philosophers have traditionally engaged – perhaps particularly to that branch of values enquiry usually known as ethics or moral philosophy. From this viewpoint, depending on what view one takes of the grounds or provenance of human moral claims, it would be one task of educational theory to try to identify or construct arguments designed to justify one conception of education over any rival or competing ones. But how might one begin to do this? According to one time-honoured approach to philosophy – developed and refined in modern times mainly by philosophers in Britain, Germany and the USA, but with roots going back to classical antiquity – the fundamental task of philosophy (and therefore one that must inevitably precede the construction of normative arguments) is that of determining, by so-called conceptual (or linguistic) analysis, the conditions under which we can meaningfully or coherently use such philosophically problematic terms as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’ or ‘education’. It was just this task that was first given clear and systematic direction by the founding father of Western (or at any rate ‘analytical’) philosophy, Socrates, who sought to discover the meaning of such philosophically vexed terms as ‘justice’, ‘virtue’ and ‘knowledge’ via the production of something like formal definitions.

Despite the undeniable interest in education and its social and political significance and implications on the part of many major past philosophers – not least Socrates’ own distinguished pupil Plato – it is arguable that serious philosophical analysis of the concept of education (as well as of other educationally related concepts such as teaching and learning) had to await relatively recent modern attention. To be sure, this may also have had much to do with some insulation (in Britain and most other countries) of educational policy making and professional teacher training from the academic contexts in which certain key modern developments in analytical philosophy occurred: indeed, it was not only that serious philosophising about education – beyond the most superficial acquaintance with the past speculations of Plato, Rousseau or Dewey – did not generally have much place in the non-university training of teachers, but that up until the post-World War II settlement academic philosophers had not generally been greatly interested in applying their analytical methods to the discourse of education. It was precisely this perceived shortfall that such academically trained philosophers as R. S. Peters (1966) in Britain and Israel Scheffler (1960) in the USA sought to address by exploiting recently developed modern philosophical approaches and techniques (to which we shall shortly return) for the clarification of the political and professional educational discourses that they regarded as all too often unclear or confused.

The Concept of Education in Post-War Philosophical Analysis

R. S. Peters's own main concern lay with the question of the meaning of education – precisely with a view to clarifying the goals or purposes of education. More precisely, Peters’ approach to this question took the form of a query about the ‘aims’ of education (Peters 1973). In this regard, Peters asks, when people invite us to specify the aims of education what should we reply? His answer to this question is also both simple and disarming: we should properly say that it has no aims. Peters's point is that whereas it is proper to enquire about the aims or purposes of a wide range of human activities, education is not an activity or enterprise of this kind. From this viewpoint, Peters maintained, it is particularly important not to confuse education with other processes of learning or knowledge acquisition such as training – with respect to which, of course, it is quite appropriate to ask to what particular purpose a given schedule of training is directed. People are precisely trained to be this, that or the other – to be, for example, joiners, nurses or airline pilots – but they are not, says Peters, ‘educated’ for any end distinct from or located beyond education itself. It therefore makes perfect sense for people to value (say) their university education, even though that education has failed to equip them for any specific or ‘useful’ employment. In short, education is not a means to an end, but something that has its own inherent or ‘ intrinsic’ worth.

Be that as it may, it is surely still reasonable to ask what exactly education is with a view to understanding better how we might further promote it. Peters (and others) have a fair amount to say about this, but we may confine ourselves here to five key points. First, it is integral to the value of education that it leads to the human improvement of those who undergo it: for Peters, the concept of education is evaluative or normative in much the same way as the term ‘reform’ – so that we could not say that a person had been educated but not made (in some sense) better. Second, if education is to be of intrinsic value, it must involve initiation into forms of learning or knowledge that are also inherently worthwhile: unlike (at least some of) the knowledge gained in the course of training, that may have no value beyond the extrinsic purposes it serves (such as, perhaps, computer keyboard skills), educationally valuable knowledge should be pursuable for its own sake. Third, however, education is also to be distinguished from forms of training insofar as it is not restricted to the development of some particular realm of expertise. For Peters and other liberal educationalists, education is a matter of broad initiation: we would not describe someone as ‘educated’ who had simply acquired expertise in a particular form of knowledge or skill, no matter how advanced or ‘sophisticated’ that expertise might be. Fourth, the knowledge that is acquired in the course of education should have depth as well as breadth; in particular it should involve some understanding of the ‘reason why’ of things and not simply be aimed at the retention of information. Fifth (for now), such educational learning should be conducted in a climate of open enquiry that precludes the thought control or coercion that might better be described as ‘indoctrination’ more than education; in short, it should conduce to the development of individual or personal rational freedom or autonomy.

The point of such analysis, according to Peters and other modern liberal educationalists, is precisely to distinguish education as a particular mode of formation from other processes with which it might be (or has often enough been) confused. In short, irrespective of looser applications of the term ‘education’ to any old processes of learning, it would seem that not all such processes of learning meet the rather strict criteria of education lately specified. Hence, as seen, though various kinds of training are clearly presupposed in education – a person's education as a mathematician or musician presumably depends at least partly upon the acquisition of basic arithmetical or musical performance skills – education is not obviously reducible to such training. Indeed, though some training in vocationally useful skills may well go on in the course of schooling – which, as radical educationalists (such as Goodman 1971, Illich 1973, Reimer 1971) have been keen to remind us, is also not identical with education – we may also succeed in producing first-rate plumbers, electricians or hairdressers, who (whatever their other valuable human virtues) we would not necessarily regard as educated persons. Again, education in this sense is not to be confused with wider or more general socialisation: thus, in early years and beyond, children have to master a variety of simple skills – such as doing up their buttons or tying their shoelaces – or various conventions of courtesy or etiquette that would also appear to fall short of education in Peters's more refined sense. Peters was also concerned to distinguish education in this more precise sense (as he suspected that some progressive educators – such as, perhaps, A. S. Neill (1968) – had failed to separate it) from any and all processes of quasi-psychological counselling or therapy. In this connection, he observes that ‘the teacher's job is to train and instruct, it is not to help and cure’ (Peters 1964). It was also claimed in further defence of this ‘special’ conception of education, that not only was it continuous with a long liberal educational tradition going back at least to the nineteenth century (for example, to Matthew Arnold: see Gribble 1967) – if not, as Paul Hirst (1974) claimed to classical Greece – but it was also in line with much received usage. But this now raises the awkward question: whose usage?

Objections to the Post-War Liberal Analysis

Criticisms of this modern analytical conception of liberal education were soon forthcoming, not only from quarters not especially friendly to either the liberal educational tradition or to modern conceptual analysis, but also from those broadly sympathetic to both these perspectives. As might be expected, the more modest ‘internal’ criticisms endorsed the overall liberal focus on the promotion of rational autonomy, but rejected some of the particular details of Peters's account of liberal education as broad initiation into forms of largely academic, theoretical or (as it was sometimes put) ‘propositional’ knowledge. More precisely, some ‘internal’ critics objected to the strongly implied liberal educational denigration of practical or technical activities or pursuits (Carr 1978); some criticised what they took to be an overdrawn distinction of ‘real’ or liberal education from vocational education or training (Pring 1995, 2005; Winch 2000, 2002); and some were even sceptical about any strong interpretation of the liberal idea of education as broad initiation (Warnock 1973, 1977).

These objections had also somewhat variable status and force. To be sure, to the extent that Peters's own analysis does appear to conflate the distinction between education and training with a rather different distinction between theory and practice, there is probably something to the first objection: there are many practical activities and pursuits – such as dance and even moral association – that would appear to have educational consequences and implications. On the other hand, the familiar point that the liberal account distinguished too sharply between education and vocational training is more contentious and probably much confused. If the idea here is that this account precludes any place for training of a vocationally relevant kind in schools then it is certainly misdirected; such criticism almost certainly rests on a confusion between education and schooling (see Carr 1996) – including the mistaken notion that it is the exclusive role of schools to educate – of which such post-war liberal educationa...