Education and Philosophy

An Introduction

Ansgar Allen, Roy Goddard

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526421746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Philosophy is vital to the study of education, and a sound knowledge of different philosophical perspectives leads to a deeper engagement with the choices and commitments you make within your educational practice.

This introductory text provides a core understanding of key moments in the history of Western philosophy. By introducing key transition points in that history, it investigates the plight of present day education, a period in which the aims and purposes of education have become increasingly unclear, leaving education open to the rise of instrumentalism and the forces of capital.

Accessibly written, the book carefully analyses the common assumptions and conflicted history of education, provoking questioning about its nature and purposes. The authors argue vigorously that thinking critically about education from a philosophical perspective will give practicing and trainee teachers, as well as students on undergraduate Education and Masters-level coursesa fuller command of their ownrole and context.

1 Introduction

Why we wrote this book

In this book we explore how philosophical thought has construed the aims and the nature of education, how it has been brought to bear on matters of educational organisation, conduct and practice. In doing this we will consider thought which has directly addressed itself to educational matters, and also philosophical enquiry which has not directly dealt with education, but which, in our view, has significance for thinking and practising in the field of education. We believe that engagement with philosophical thinking can be useful to the practice of education, that it offers understandings which might enhance the professional lives of teachers and researchers at every level of the education system. However, this book is not intended to make its readers ‘smarter’ – more fluent and supple in managing and moving through the systems they operate within. We will not be offering ways of sprucing up teaching by way of the application of a few philosophical ideas or algorithms. In fact, we would not be unhappy if we made our readers more uncomfortable, more uncertain about their place within the structures of education. We hope to disturb what has been called the common sense of education, to encourage a questioning, even sceptical stance towards existing pieties concerning this vast national and international enterprise. We believe that such doubt and uncertainty are a necessary prelude to becoming more aware – aware of the histories and currents of thought that have shaped and continue to shape the social sphere of education and aware of the limitations that bear down upon practice and the possibilities available for change. It is our conviction that such informed understanding can illuminate and guide the choices about practice and commitments that present themselves to educational professionals. We think this is preferable to – comfortably, obligingly – not thinking too hard about such choices. Our over-riding concern is to persuade that such engagement might illuminate understanding of the policies and practices of education in relation to our present period, the era of mass compulsory schooling. However, to do this we consider the long history of educational thought and practice that has, for good or ill, shaped our current understandings of what education is for and how it should be organised.

We argue that philosophy, or the activity of reflective, deliberative thought, has mirrored and at times influenced the ways in which human beings have understood and sought to order their existence and that it continues to do so. We can come to a fuller understanding of the world we live in and the place we occupy within it, if we become aware of how it has been investigated and configured by philosophy. Whether we think of the practice of education as what it might once have been, a process of moral and intellectual cultivation conducted in a relationship between a master and a pupil, or as the latter day project of mass schooling aimed at shaping the kinds of individuals required by a modern society, it has, more than most spheres of social existence, been caught up in, buffeted and contoured by the currents and eddies of competing schools of thought. As a result, education, as idea and practice, has become – perhaps always was – a field of contestation and no little confusion. In this book we will attempt to bring some clarity to the varied purposes education has come to serve in modernity by examining how thinking about education, under pressure from social change and the elevation of the idea of the economy to the chief concern of government, has developed since the collapse of the medieval order.

Why philosophy?

Why, though, bother about philosophy and its relation to education? No one else does, except, of course, philosophers of education. The machinery of education trundles on without a moment’s thought being given to philosophy. The great majority of teachers in schools associate philosophising about education – along with all that other peripheral noise that surrounds teaching and learning in schools, the abstract theory and scholarship churned out by academia – as remote, obscure and irrelevant. In this view philosophy is laughably, pathetically, removed from the actualities of the school and of no usefulness to educators in their professional lives. In the university department of education, philosophy exists as a marginal presence, accommodated more for the cultural prestige it still just about retains and confers; it would perhaps seem a little philistine to jettison this last link with an old idea of education as having a civilising mission, with having something to do with moral enquiry. Students, or as government would have it, trainees, on the rapidly disappearing university teacher training courses or those in-school trainings which are becoming the main provider of initial teacher education, need have no contact with philosophical thinking, and little at all in the way of a theoretical perspective on their labours. You can, it appears, lead a life in education without having to bother about philosophy and what it might say about education. Education, as a system for equipping the population with the knowledges, the skills and the inclinations required for them to prosper and to contribute to the social good, carries on and will continue to do so without its workforce ever having to be troubled by a philosophical proposition or question. So, again, why bother?

Our answer to this question is one that rests squarely on personal experience. One of us, a comparatively new arrival in academia, has been struck by just how susceptible it is to the economic and political forces which are redefining the entire landscape of intellectual enquiry, turning academics into witting and unwitting accomplices of a system they may at times deplore, but nonetheless uphold. In this context, an engagement with philosophy has given him the opportunity to make some sense of the environment in which he works and consider ways of living differently within it. The other of us worked for many years in secondary education as a classroom teacher. During that time he would have found it impossible to continue in his role without constantly asking himself and discussing with others questions that seemed to bear vitally on what he was doing – questions such as these:

• What is education for?
• What values should it, or I, serve?
• What is the relationship between the teacher’s idea of how they should operate in the classroom and official recommendations and requirements?
• What, if any, relation does schooling have to educational change?
• How can education’s claim to develop critical thinking and to make people free be squared with its role in forming a responsible, morally observant citizenry?
• What should a teacher think (or do) about participating in systems of assessment and public examination that help structure inequality in society?

Many, perhaps most, teachers think in one way or another about questions of this sort at times in their careers. We argue here that such thinking can be extended and rendered more constructive in terms of the teacher’s work through contact with –which is to say, reading and critically responding to – philosophical thought. We believe that the same applies for students of education who seek not only to pass their exams and improve their career chances, but also to reflect carefully on the systems within which they are constrained to work and study. For both of us, reading philosophy has helped us get through the fraught experience of working in education in a period of rapid and disconcerting change. By ‘getting through’ we mean that our engagement with philosophy and theory has helped us explore how educational relations might be better negotiated.

It is widely accepted by observers of every political stripe that education is in crisis. The central question, as we see it, is whether education, as something that exists somewhere within the system of mass schooling, can be returned to – or newly grounded upon – principles that serve the ends of a democratic society. If we are to seriously ask this question, we must remain open to the possibility that education could be, essentially and inescapably, in the core of its being, a system that serves and seeks to perfect governmental control, a system that owes nothing to dreams of enlightenment and social justice and everything to the goals of the bureaucratic management of populations.

Disclaimers

This book is not about to offer a stout and vigorous defence of the philosophy of education or, indeed, of the ways in which philosophy has in the past interacted with systems of teaching and learning. For a start, its writers are –happily – not qualified to stage such a defence. Neither of us is what might be called a trained philosopher, in that neither of us pursued qualifications as philosophers at university. One of us has a higher education background in the sciences, the other in literature and cultural studies. We write as teachers and researchers who have come to see philosophical or theoretical thought as indispensable to our understanding of what we do as educators. It will be apparent that we do not come to bury philosophy, although we will be critical of many of the ways in which it has presented itself to (and in) education. We see these backgrounds as providing us with what is referred to as, in an idiom that will not feature prominently in the book, a unique selling point. We have never been inducted into the community of philosophers that occupies academia, and have not as a result acquired the kind of professional identity, or – less charitably – defensiveness, that feels obliged to persuade the unenlightened of the uniquely informative perspectives and insights afforded by the discipline. We are outsiders, two teachers who, as we have already said, have been attracted to philosophical thought because this has helped us understand more clearly our roles as educational practitioners and the possibilities available within those roles.

We are conscious that what we propose – educators finding time to reflect philosophically on their practice, and students of education engaging with philosophical ideas that extend far beyond their core curricula – may readily be seen as an unlikely prospect in the pressured, highly regulated context of present-day schooling and university life. What we propose is also at odds with the conditions of an Anglo-Saxon intellectual culture that has always prized practice and pragmatism above what it sees as ‘mere theory’. Ours is an intellectual culture that has for a long time been – there is no way of putting this politely – anti-intellectual.

We do not wish to suggest that without reading Plato and Nietzsche educational practitioners must inevitably become the dupes of a malign system. Clearly, educators, at every level or stage of education, are capable of thinking and speaking for themselves and will conduct their professional lives in accordance with values and understandings that they have developed during their time in education. We do, however, argue that the teacher, the researcher and the student will gain a fuller understanding of those roles and thus a surer command of the technical and moral practices that shape and constrain their activities, if they undertake the informed reflection we advocate. Of course, this is to make a big claim for a certain kind of thinking, and yet, we suggest, without such thinking educators and educated alike are more vulnerable to manipulation and recruitment to purposes and practices that they would not wish to support.

It will be clear that what we offer here is not a dispassionate account of the different schools of thought and social ideologies that have fed into the practice of education. We have sought to provide accurate accounts of philosophical (and non-philosophical) ideas that have, at various times, been recruited to consider the purposes and the practice of education, but as will become evident we present a particular view – our view – of their value.

Politics

It will probably already be clear that thinking philosophically is, for us, an urgently political activity, in that it requires us to address questions about the moral dimension and the social consequences of educational practice. Whether they actively choose to do so or not, those working and studying in education place themselves on a spectrum that indicates how they see themselves within the power relations that structure the domain. They may occupy positions in relation to authority that range from compliance, through degrees of adaptation, evasion, resistance and criticality, to more or less open revolt.

Compliant educators work at labours set for them by those in authority. They may adopt this stance because they see no reason to question, at a fundamental level, the ways in which power structures education or because they see no alternatives to compliance which would not be career-threatening. Educational compliance involves resigning oneself to authority’s definitions of one’s role and how it should be carried out, in accordance with whatever designs, objectives and justifications such authority might have determined. Such educational careers are possible and not, perhaps, unusual. They can, indeed, be carried out with dedicated industry and imagination. But another position is available towards the other end of the spectrum. The teacher or student may decide that she cannot in all conscience accept without much questioning the directions of authority, that she needs to understand and justify to herself what her role and practice might be, that she needs to explore the history of the institution in which she works and the moral resources that its traditions make available to her, and that if she is to have any sense of control and ease of mind about the practice of her craft, she needs to access the body of thought that has grown around the social domain she has entered. She will, typically, be concerned about the relationship between her professional ethic as a teacher, an ethic which will have been shaped and guided by the professional formation she has undergone at graduate and postgraduate levels and in her years as a practitioner, and the demands of those authorities who seek to order and control, to orientate and set limits to the ways in which she can work, within her workplace and beyond.

The latter individual – as teacher, as researcher, as student – may, of course, end up in a state of discontent, frustrated at the limitations imposed on what she now sees as the proper practice of education. She may well find herself coming into conflict with more senior figures within the educational hierarchy and with its wider bureaucratic machinery. This conflict may be conducted in a polite and civilised manner; it may not. However, at the very least her recognition of the difference between her actual role and the role she might fulfil – ought to fulfil, according to her best judgement – opens her to a more comprehensive awareness of the nature of the position she occupies, and therefore to a more faithful exercise of her educational practice. This is to say she may teach and study in a way that serves the educational values she has identified rather than working according to imported priorities which are intended to serve, let us say, bureaucratic or economic ends.

Impure thoughts

Thus, a life lived in education is essentially a life in which it is impossible to escape political engagement. To borrow (and slightly amend) something that Michel Foucault wrote, an educational politics may be seen as the art of not being governed so much or, we would add, not submitting to government in ways that contradict one’s professional ethic. Education is political in that it is intimately involved with the values and interests that government serves and the social ends it pursues. Indeed, as we will see in Chapter 11, mass or popular education has been characterised as in itself a form of government, an enterprise that seeks to influence the conduct of the individuals who are subject to it in order to produce the productive and morally responsible citizenry required by a complex modern society. For now, for the purposes of this introduction, we would simply wish to register the fact that education is a social domain which has historical, political and cultural dimensions, that it is, in the real world, an essentially impure, untidy, often improvised undertaking which, if we are able to gain any grasp of its nature and meanings, will require more than a purely philosophical analysis. It is also a domain, or field of enquiry and practice, which is subject to incessant and diverse social and political pressures. Education is a site of struggle between competing interests and ideologies, an unstable and always changing construct. It is clear, therefore, that any consideration of the systems and practices of education has to draw upon perspectives, upon configurations of the field that must strain and transgress the tightly drawn boundaries of any one discipline, including those of philosophy. Therefore, although our focus will be on thinkers who would pass inspection by the gate-keepers of professional philosophy, we will also touch upon the ideas of academics and non-academics whose conceptualisations of the education realm fall outside the canons of philosophy.

Outline of the book

In Chapter 2 we begin our critical survey of philosophy and education by investigating definitions of Western philosophy through the contrasting approaches of modern academic philosophy and ancient Greek practical philosophy. Each philosophical tradition entails its own conception of and relationship to education. Such an investigation into the joint histories of education and philosophy provides opportunities for thinking differently about how education and philosophy might be related. In Chapter 3 we investigate two distinct and ancient conceptions of education (as paideia and as praxis) that have been resurrected in modernity as offering potential ‘solutions’ to current educational problems. As we do so, we argue against a straightforward adoption of past educational traditions, noting that any adoption, or attempted resurrection, is always a deformation of what it seeks to reproduce. In Chapter 4 we explore what happened in the western European tradition after the decline of the philosophical schools of antiquity and the rise of medieval Christian thought. We investigate how Christian institutions revised and extended the educational project of ancient philosophy, while also seeking to contain or render more palatable to Christian thinking the more disruptive aspects of the Graeco-Roman inheritance. Chapter 5 deals with the extraordinary cultural efflorescence that gathered speed during the period of the High Middle Ages and achieved full expression during the Renaissance. The keynote, perhaps, of this period was the sense of man (and these philosophies were addressed to men) as an individual who could, to an extent, govern his own destiny, a growing sense of man’s moral and intellectual capacities and a tentative sense of his abilities to order his world. This nascent individualism strengthened and deepened the humanism that was at work in the medieval period and laid the foundations of what was to become modern liberal humanism. In this chapter we examin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Philosophical Schools
• 3 Ancient ‘Solutions’
• 4 Education and God
• 5 Education and Humanism
• 6 Enlightenment and Modernity: Descartes and Locke
• 7 Enlightenment and Modernity: Hume and Kant
• 8 Modernity and its Problems
• 9 Modernity and the Figure of ‘Man’
• 10 Critique, Emancipation and Education
• 11 Education and Government
• 12 Confined to the Present
• 13 Epilogue
• Further Readings
• Index