Philosophical Issues in Education

John Kleinig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315531434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

The philosophy of education is an important component of most education courses. The subject is often split into two traditions, one emphasising the use of analytic philosophy, the other engaging in radical social criticism. This book, first published in 1982, brings together the strengths of both traditions and takes stock of the debate. This study provides an interesting introduction to all the major philosophical issues in education which is different to many other works on the subject.

Chapter 1
Philosophy of Education

As with other forms of inquiry, it is impossible to provide a timelessly true account of the nature and scope of philosophy of education. Philosophy of education does not exist in a vacuum but within a particular socio-historical context, and what is regarded as its legitimate practice is conditioned by that context. This does not make the task of delimitation impossible, so much as provisional. There are continuities and discontinuities. We must make critical and creative use of what is presented to us in order that we may identify and engage in it; at the same time we must avoid being bound by it, lest what is historically given be taken as eternally settled. It is the peculiar temptation of philosophers and politicians to see themselves as gods.

Delimitation is doubly difficult in philosophy of education, for we need to be sensitive to the socio-historical dimensions not only of philosophy but also of its focus, education. In this chapter we will attempt to provide an account of philosophy of education which is not only clear but also at the same time flexible enough to allow for development.

What is philosophy?

Among the continuities that constitute philosophy a practice of considerable antiquity is its claim to be a reflective or critical activity. Whether our interest is in Plato, Aquinas, Marx or Wittgenstein, there is evident in what they are doing a professed unwillingness to pontificate or take things for granted; there is a preoccupation with the question, 'For what reason?' They engage in a serious and systematic attempt to subject the taken-for-granted of human life and experience to questioning. True, there may be serious doubts as to whether the particular philosophical methodologies they employ serve to further the critical function constitutive of their profession, but this does not negate the continuity of critical purpose. To what end is such critical questioning? For some philosophers, it has had no purpose beyond the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity; for others it has been generated by the psychological need for identity - for location within the universe; for most it has served other, more limited, practical ends. For philosophical reflection is an activity of active, productive beings, who are guided not by instinct but by thought, albeit thought conditioned by a particular socio-historical context.

The question, 'For what reason?' is deliberately ambiguous. Much recent philosophy has drawn attention to a distinction between explanatory and justificatory reasons, relegating concern with the former to the physical and social sciences, etc., and restricting the scope of philosophy to the latter and its preconditions (clarification, canons of validity, etc.). But earlier philosophers were not so tight-reined about the enterprise in which they were engaged. The gradual discrimination of philosophical, scientific, sociological and historical questions is largely a post-Renaissance phenomenon, a concomitant of the vast social and technological changes which have occurred during the past four centuries. The Enlightenment philosophy of progress made increasingly specialised demands on human intellectual and physical labour to the point where, for many, the differing forms of human inquiry now appear as autonomous, self-contained (and, in some cases, all-embracing) disciplines. Our contemporary tendency to understand philosophy as an autonomous enterprise with a distinctive and discrete focus does not therefore provide an historically unconditioned essence, but instead reveals a diversification of intellectual endeavour existing in mutual interplay with social and technological change. This is no reason for avoiding the attempt to construct a critically useful account of philosophical inquiry. But it does require that any such attempt acknowledge and respond to its historical parameters.

There is little doubt that intellectual, no less than vocational, diversification has gone too far. The search for certainty characteristic of western rationalism has in recent decades imprisoned much philosophy within the supposedly impervious cocoon of 'conceptual analysis'. In itself, the search for clarity and certainty through conceptual analysis is harmless enough - Plato's Forms are striking testimony to its longevity - but coupled with the view that there is no more to philosophy than conceptual analysis, it presages intellectually neuter and socially conservative offspring. However, the social and political upheavals of the sixties, the revival of interest in Marx, and the growing rapprochement of Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy, have begun to overtake such tendencies. The social and normative character of conceptualisation, and consequently of the subject matter and tools of conceptual analysis, has led to a reappraisal of the distinctness and distinctiveness of philosophical endeavour. The philosopher king no longer sits in splendid isolation on the seat of pure reason.

Philosophical reflection is frequently characterised as theoretical, rather than practical. This is innocuous if intended only to draw attention to the fact that in their work philosophers are not generally concerned to perform scientific experiments, conduct surveys, etc. Philosophical reflection may generate or be generated by such activities, it may be integral to them, but it is not identified in terms of them. The view of philosophy as theoretical becomes dangerous when it is taken to mean that the results of philosophical reflection can or do have no practical implications. No doubt some philosophical reflection is at such remove from other human activities that it wolud be futile to look for its practical application apart from the contribution it makes to the activity of philosophising though this is hardly a contribution of no consequence: badly designed tools may defeat the purposes for which they were constructed. Sometimes, however, philosophers have been tempted to see their activity as 'leaving everything as it is', as having no normative or practical implications. But this view, generally associated with certain writers in the logical positivist and analytic traditions, relies on an unsupportable asocial and ahistorical understanding of conceptualisation, and has in fact aligned philosophy with conservative practice rather than the neutral function these writers have often claimed for it.

Conceptual analysis

We can come at the preceding points more directly by considering in greater detail the perennial interest of philosophers in what has become known as 'conceptual analysis'. Though this is sometimes represented as a revolutionary innovation in philosophy, its roots are as deeply embedded in Plato and the western philosophical tradition as in contemporary circumstances.

The term 'conceptual analysis' is in some respects a felicitous one, for it focuses our attention not on words, the standard medium of conceptual representation, but on the ideas, concepts or practices, etc. represented by or conveyed through the medium of those words. Thus, when Socrates considers questions of the form 'What is x?', where x is piety, justice, virtue, knowledge or love, the question is more complex than the sort that can be settled by an appeal to the dictionary, though dictionaries are not necessarily useless. The question is not parallel to 'What is zymurgy?', where the term 'zymurgy' is likely to be unfamiliar to us. The terms 'piety', 'justice' etc. are in common employment, and what is sought in the Socratic question is some clearer delineation of the kind of activity, state of affairs, object, process, or relation represented in the use of the particular term. This will involve some consideration of its relations to other kinds of activity, etc., the presuppositions underlying its differentiation from those other kinds of activity, etc., and the implications of this conceptual differentiation for the questions which initially generated interest in it.

The formation and acquisition of the conceptual structures embedded in our language cannot be represented as an individualistic mirroring of 'reality'. whatever philosophical stories we might like to tell about 'the beginnings', the only legitimate context within which we can speak of such formation and acquisition is a social one. We are not born with a language, nor do we acquire one as a simple product of maturation. It is as initiates into and participants in an historical community that we learn to conceptualise the reality in which we are placed. We are of course not passive in this process. We have our own 'natures', but how those natures are developed and come to express themselves in the conceptual structuring of reality cannot be explained independently of a particular socio-historical context. The language we acquire is not a simple expression of private experience.

We can take this a bit further by switching our attention from the issue of individualism to that of mirroring. It is a common belief that our concepts represent reality somewhat as a mirror image or (slightly less misleadingly) a photograph. This seriously distorts the matter. When we come to reality we come with a set of needs and interests which influence the way in which it is perceived. Human beings are not cameras, though they may use them. The commonplace activities of description or identification, even when engaged in with unquestionable objectivity, involve a selection of features from the total available, in accordance with a range of interests. Where the objects of description are human activities, the role played by interests in selecting relevant features becomes very explicit.¹ Structuring reality by reference to human interests is a condition of its intelligibility for us. In itself, it does not distort reality. Distortion occurs when those interests have been conditioned by a theoretical framework in which the role played by them is no longer perspicuous.

Because conceptual structures are socially constituted in relation to interests, changes in those interests can be expected to manifest themselves in conceptual shifts. Changes in interests are most likely to occur in the wake of substantial changes in material and social circumstances. This is something Plato failed to acknowledge in his Theory of Forms. Forms - what we would most conveniently refer to as concepts - were for Plato timeless and changeless, able to be perceived by those who, through the exercise of reason, had succeeded in seeing beyond the mirage of sensed particulars to the reality which in some measure they reflected. Plato failed to recognise that 'reason' itself belongs to history and cannot be divorced from it. There is no such thing as 'reason' in the abstract: there is the human activity of thinking, an activity conducted in accordance or at variance with certain canons of rationality. As the history of philosophy amply illustrates, these canons have been the occasion of continuing controversy.²

In contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy, Plato's mistake has been repeated in the view that philosophy, or more specifically conceptual analysis, is neutral. It has sometimes been held that conceptual analysis involves no normative commitments, and that once completed, philosophical puzzles will be resolved (or dissolved). Philosophy, Wittgenstein argued, 'is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language'.³ Such bewitchment occurs 'when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work'.⁴ Conceptual analysis for Wittgenstein took the form of mapping language at work. However, he believed that such philosophising should 'in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it'.⁵ There was good point to these claims; but when they are made (as they were by his disciples) to delimit the proper scope of philosophical reflection, and this is insulated from the wider socio-historical context which informs not merely the content of such analyses, but also the very programme of philosophical inquiry which generates them, a quite misleading impression is given. Rather than constituting a neutral technique for the resolution of philosophical problems, this 'Wittgensteinian' prescription manifested the fragmentation of intellectual activity which has characterised twentieth century industrial society.⁶ In the course of this, it misrepresented philosophical problems as merely semantic, thus deflecting philosophers from their traditional normative role. In this sense, conceptual analysis tended to play a conservative social function. Since the sixties, however, we have begun to realise that the fragmentation of intellectual inquiry has had severe distorting effects, whatever redress it may have brought with it.

Philosophical puzzles are not simply the product of idling language, though no doubt such abstraction has sometimes exacerbated those problems. Conceptual analysis is best seen as one of a number of activities in which a philosopher might properly engage, a technique whereby the conceptual status quo may be clarified, a means whereby conceptual shifts may be identified, in order that the critical activity in which philosophy has traditionally engaged can proceed with some degree of precision. This does not mean that conceptual analysis is the foundation on which later philosophical reflection is built, for the identification of issues in relation to which the techniques of conceptual analysis are employed involves questions of considerable philosophical importance. Why, it might be asked, spend one's time analysing the concept of discipline as a preliminary to discussing the place of discipline in the classroom, when the important issue is the justifiability of schooling (as presently structured)? Philosophy, if it is to constitute a genuinely critical activity, must be able to reflect on and make use of what is now investigated separately and seen as belonging to 'independent' disciplines. The suggestion by some analytic philosophers, that empirical research has no bearing on philosophical questions, disclosed only how fragmented intellectual labour had become, a complete failure to appreciate the social structuring of philosophical inquiry. Equally, the exclusion from philosophical respectability of the construction of theoretical models and integrating schemata that earlier generations of philosophers had engaged in was self-deceptive, to say the least, for it presupposed its own unexamined theoretical model according to which the production of knowledge was structured by autonomous forms of inquiry.

Philosophy of education

In philosophy of education, the critical reflection which characterises philosophy generally is brought to bear on that range of experience titled 'education'. The development of such a specific field of inquiry is a product of contemporary specialisation, and until recently has displayed the same fragmented approach to intellectual activity that has been evident elsewhere. In the classical philosophers, what we would call specifically educational issues were not considered separately from moral and political questions, and problems in epistemology and philosophical psychology. It is important that these links not be severed, just as it is important that philosophical inquiry generally not be abstracted from the matrix of social practices of which it is a part.

Disputes about what constitutes philosophy of education have generally been disputes about the nature of philosophical inquiry. Perhaps they should equally have been disputes about the nature of education. However, so deeply entrenched has the identification of education and schooling become, that for many people the school and its teaching function have bounded the inquiry. Of course schools cannot be ignored, just because they claim to educate, bu...