An Introduction to Philosophy of Education

Ronald Woods, Robin Barrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134178674
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This introductory text, now in its fourth edition, is a classic in its field. It shows, first and foremost, the importance of philosophy in educational debate and as a background to any practical activity such as teaching. What is involved in the idea of educating a person or the idea of educational success? What are the criteria for establishing the optimum balance between formal and informal teaching techniques? How trustworthy is educational research? In addition to these questions, which strike to the heart of the rationale for the educative process as a whole, the authors explore such concepts as culture, creativity, autonomy, indoctrination, needs, interests and learning by discovery.

In this new updated edition, the authors draw on the latest research in genetics to argue that education is uniquely human and is essentially what develops us as humans. Resisting modern tendencies to equate knowledge with opinion, and value judgements with taste, this book leads the reader into the business of philosophising and champions the cause of reason in education.

1 Thinking about education

All 12-year-olds at a comprehensive were told that homework is being scrapped . . . [The Headmaster] who has already scrapped subject teaching . . . told them that, to make their schooling more ‘relevant to life in the 21st century’, they are to be given responsibility for ‘managing their own learning’ . . . [The School] is testing a futuristic project . . . which rejects the notion that a teacher’s role is to transmit a body of knowledge to pupils. The project aims instead to encourage pupils to ‘love learning for its own sake.’

(Daily Telegraph 2005)

For those new to philosophy, the subject is likely to seem somewhat abstract and removed from day to day concerns at first, and I therefore want to begin by drawing attention to the quotation above. Here is an example of an actual policy decision: Students will no longer do homework (and apparently are no longer taught ‘subjects’). The decision is driven by a point of view or theory to the effect that schools should be relevant to contemporary life, that in order to achieve that students need to ‘manage their own learning’, and that the object of schooling is not to ‘transmit a body of knowledge’ but to encourage pupils to ‘love learning for its own sake’. I hope that most people will agree that, in broad terms, this is an interesting contention – something manifestly worth arguing about, and, particularly if you happen to have children at school, something that you might feel pretty strongly about, one way or the other. The kind of argument this decision might give rise to is decidedly not ‘airy-fairy’, ‘merely academic’, ‘purely theoretical’ or ‘irrelevant’ to practical matters.

Ultimately, it is dealing with claims and counterclaims such as this with which philosophy of education is concerned. But it does not go straight to the question of whether it is correct or incorrect, for example, to claim that ‘managing one’s own learning’ is necessary for a ‘relevant education’. It starts a step earlier. It tries to make sense of this ‘argument’. It asks, in particular, such questions as what is meant by ‘an education that is relevant to life’, by ‘managing one’s own learning’ and by ‘love of learning for its own sake’? It asks why there is a presumption that loving learning for its own sake is incompatible with learning subjects. It asks what is the argument for saying that the teacher’s job is not to transmit a body of knowledge. (It might also ask what scrapping homework is supposed to have to do with any of this.) Only by making sense of the argument, in particular understanding what some of the key words and phrases are supposed to mean, can we proceed to assess its merit or lack of it. And that is what philosophy is concerned with: making sense of arguments and ideas.

Philosophy is directly concerned with real live issues, but to learn to do the philosophical job we have to take it slowly. So I hope the reader will bear in mind that by the end of this book we should be in a better position to assess the coherence of this example and other similar arguments about education. But first we have to position ourselves.

The sphere of education

The sphere of education today is extensive and education is generally highly valued. In most countries, in addition to a developed system of state schooling, there is a rapidly expanding system of higher education, including institutions focused on such diverse things as art, computing, cooking, fashion design, and business, and a constant call for further qualification and accreditation in a variety of practices and pursuits, such as the hospitality industry, paralegal and paramedical services, mechanics, psychological services, accountancy, and horticulture. Alongside the state system a number of private education establishments at all levels, from primary to teacher training, has arisen. Self-education manuals and books are one of the more lucrative sides of publishing, and educational programs of one kind or another abound on television and the net. Governments, by and large, maintain or increase their spending on education regularly, and proclaim it to be one of their first priorities. Similarly, world organizations and authorities ceaselessly emphasize education as crucial to poor or troubled areas throughout the world. A great deal of money, too, is pumped into educational research of one kind or another, in addition to the enormous basic investment in educational establishments of all kinds. Education, in short, is widely pervasive, takes a good slice of our resources, and is fairly indiscriminately valued. It is very big business, although we seldom think of it in that way.

But do we have a common understanding of what this thing called ‘education’ is? Is your assumption about what educating yourself involves the same as your neighbour’s? Is studying the history of Greece ‘education’ in the same sense that learning how to cook is ‘education’? If we have different understandings of what education involves, are these various views all equally clear, and, if they are, are they all equally important or valuable? There is nothing necessarily wrong with our having some very general and vague idea of education, in the light of which we each have different particular educational ideals or focus on varying specific aspects of the educational enterprise. After all, we do something like that in the case of politics: it too is a general word covering a multitude of particular activities, some of which we, as individuals, variously approve or disapprove. The fact that fascism, Marxism, liberalism, and conservatism are all species of political theory, or the fact that there is a difference between politics as practiced by government and the politics of the local sports club, does not cause any particular problem. But then we don’t allot a substantial part of our tax revenue to something vaguely called ‘politics’; we don’t assume that politics is in itself a good thing, as we tend to do with education; we don’t seek to induct everybody into some form of politics.

Whatever the differences and similarities between politics and education, it is surely clear that in the case of the latter we do need to know what the word means. If we do not know what counts as being educated, how can we make judgements as to whether we are being more or less successful in our various attempts to educate people? If we are not clear what constitutes education, how can we assess whether a new course in health, a new programme on road safety, or a new college for aspiring comedians should be regarded as educational? Debate about whether physical education deserves more curriculum time than mathematics or chemistry, or whether we can reasonably forego teaching grammar in English classes, cannot coherently take place in the absence of a clear idea of what is involved in a successful education. And how on earth can we design research into such things as the most effective methods of teaching or classroom organization, let alone evaluate the significance of our findings, except in the light of some notion of educational success?

Whether we ultimately agree on a definition of education is not the primary concern. We can get along, understanding one another and even making reasonable accommodation to one another, provided that each of us can make clear to others what we presume educating people involves.
(There is, though, a strong case for saying that the more successfully we clarify our individual ideas, the more likelihood that we will recognize similarity in our views). But we must at least clarify our own idea or conception of education if we are going to do any further thinking about it. It is the primary, the crucial, question in educational thought; and if practice is going to be based on sound reasoning, then it follows that it is the fundamental question for any educationalist, whether he sees himself rather as a practicing teacher or as a theorist. If you cannot give an account of what you mean by a ‘well-educated person’, then we can make no sense of any claim you go on to make about education, such as that it matters, that it is well-provided in this school, that another isn’t really contributing to it at all, or that good teachers should proceed in this way rather than that.

I have deliberately used a variety of phrases as synonymous with ‘knowing what education means’: ‘knowing what it is to be educated’; ‘knowing what constitutes education’; ‘what education is’; ‘what we presume education involves’. For our purposes at the moment it is safe to regard these different phrases as interchangeable, along with some slightly more technical formulations such as: ‘recognizing the defining criteria of education’; ‘analyzing the concept of education’; ‘establishing the necessary and sufficient conditions of being educated’. All of these different ways of speaking have this in common: they refer to the need to define the word education, not in the way that the dictionary does it (which usually simply refers to some examples of the word’s use and provides a broadly equivalent synonym or synonymous phrase), but in the sense of establishing what is essential to its meaning. How do we distinguish education from other related but distinct concepts such as training, indoctrination, or socialization? To use my own preferred way of phrasing it: what precisely counts as being well-educated?

The funny thing is that raising and answering this question is the least common, and the least well carried out, aspect of all our thinking about education. Everyday, one can encounter people who will readily tell you that studying poetry is a waste of time, that in today’s schools we should focus on technical knowledge, that students should learn how to learn rather than learn particular subjects, that instruction doesn’t work, that this school is better than that, that this teacher is useless, another brilliant, that home-schooling is the way forward, that University is a waste of time, and so on. Yet these same people, as likely as not, cannot begin to explain, let alone justify, the idea of educational success that they have in mind in making such judgements. They know, apparently, that this is more effective than that at achieving or contributing to a result, but they have no clear idea of what result they are talking about. Nor is this simply a problem for the proverbial man in the street: equally commonly, we find educational researchers claiming to have demonstrated or proved that a particular method of teaching is or isn’t effective, without providing any explicit account of what we should be looking for in students who have been effectively taught, not simply in the sense of, say, being able to retain information, but in the sense of taught in such a way that they have become better educated.

My first premise, then, is that the first and one of the most important tasks for those who wish to understand and contribute to sound educational policy and practice is to analyse the concept of education; to give an account of the idea; to determine what precisely counts as being well-educated.

Training, socialization, and education

We refer to the ‘educational system’, but that organization of schools, colleges, and universities in fact does a number of other things besides educate. Conversely, education doesn’t only take place in some part of the system: people’s education may be advanced in all sorts of ways, through their friends, by travel, on the web, by reading, by experience, by parents, or by self-reflection, to name but a few. So, before we attempt to analyse the concept formally (see Chapter 3), it may be useful to distinguish between education and some related concepts which, though distinct, may also be the concern of the educational system.

A typical dictionary definition of education might refer to it as ‘upbringing’ or ‘acquiring knowledge’. In this sense practically anything one experiences, hears, or reads may be said to be part of one’s education whether sensible or silly, coherent or incoherent, true or false, and regardless of how one came by the knowledge. It is in this sense that we refer to the education system, implying no distinctions between various things that might be learnt or how they might be taught. The most telling aspect of this broad concept of the educational system is that it is value-free. By contrast the concept of education itself is evaluative; it is by definition a good thing; (it is what is technically sometimes called a normative term). Why it is necessarily desirable and what makes it so, will be examined when we analyse the concept fully, but for the moment we need only note the distinction between the value-free concept of the educational system and the normative concept of education itself.

Schools and other educational institutions have many purposes and do a number of things besides educate. Some of what they do may not be the result of anybody’s deliberate or conscious aim so much as a by-product of having a system of education at all. For instance, schools do as a matter of fact serve to some extent as child-minding facilities, regardless of whether that was either the community’s or the parents’ intention or wish. Similarly, at least in most systems, they play a part in categorizing and stereotyping individuals: schools just do tend to throw up the class clown, the computer geek, the sporting and the intellectual type, and they play a part in making individuals see themselves in particular lights, without anyone necessarily wanting to mould particular people into particular forms. More broadly, schools clearly contribute to classifying people as clever, dumb, hard working, lazy, etc. The educational system also makes a significant contribution to the immediate and often the long-term happiness, confidence, and character development of people. Many would argue that schools should be taking some active steps in regard to the emotional development of students, though it is usually the case that schooling has a far greater effect in this respect in ways that are not consciously controlled by educators than through deliberate interventions; but in either case, the business of emotional development needs to be distinguished from the business of educating.

But there are also purposes that we consciously expect the school or similar institution to serve and deliberately try to enhance. Emotional development may be one of these, as we have just noted; socialization, training, and character development are three more. Character development differs from emotional development, in that the latter is concerned with achieving a satisfactory emotional equilibrium: it is a personal internal matter to do with reacting in an appropriate way and to an appropriate degree to varying situations and events. One is emotionally developed, for example, insofar as one recognizes cause for but can nonetheless handle upset; one is emotionally undeveloped, if one is laid low by any disappointment or sent into a rage by the slightest obstruction. Character development refers to the cultivation of a wider range of habits and dispositions, such as being kind, truthful, or determined.

I am not at present trying to analyse these concepts or give a full account of what is involved in these notions. If I were, I could and should be criticized both for doing no more than giving examples, and for failing to address questions of value. You cannot define a term simply by giving an example of it: to say that ‘ being courageous’ is ‘to seek out and attack an intruder in one’s house’ is not to tell us anything about why this is courageous, which is what we need to know if we are to understand courage: what is it about ‘seeking out and attacking an intruder’ that is courageous, is the question. By the same token, any attempt to answer that question will have to tackle the implicit value question: courage is, by definition, a commendable quality, but is it actually commendable to seek out and attack an intruder in one’s home? (It may well be. My point here is simply to illustrate that to define a term or analyse a concept, you need to do more than give examples, you need to explain why they are examples and, if values are involved, you need to support the implied value judgements with reasoning). So, all I am doing at this juncture is drawing attention to some functions the school and similar institutions may perform, which can be distinguished from education and each other, without attempting to fully understand them.

Just as schools in most people’s view should be partly concerned with character development even though that is not the same thing as education, so it would be hard to deny that they both do and should train and socialize. To train is to perfect by practice, the most straightforward example being physical training, whereby the body is kept fit and develops various basic skills through repeated exercise. Indeed the change of name in educational writing from physical training (PT) to physical education (PE) in the last fifty years illustrates an aspect of the point. ‘Physical training’ was and probably still is a more appropriate phrase for much of what is actually taught, but those with an interest in the subject were quick to see that if ‘education’ and ‘training’were recognized as distinct, and the former being value loaded had more cachet, then what they did would have more prestige if known as ‘physical education’; to bolster the claim to education, in many cases the teaching changed to include study of more theoretical matters such as physiology, fitness, or sport itself. Be that as it may, some of what goes on in schools, particularly at the more junior levels, should more properly be seen as physical training than physical education.

Schools train students in a variety of basic skills, particularly at the elementary level. In teaching the young to tie their shoelaces, do press-ups, form letters, recognize numbers, raise their hand to ask a question, and in other cases where we attempt to inculcate a discrete or self-contained skill without necessarily involving explanation or understanding, we may be said to be training them. Even as adults, a great deal of our behaviour remains ‘trained’, as when we look both ways before crossing the road, clean our teeth for a minimum of two minutes, use a library reference system, keep our household accounts, sew on a button, greet people politely, or burn the garden rubbish.

Training can be more or less complex and relate to more or less important skills, and the line between educating and training is not always straightforwardly clear in practice: the good historian, for example, is partly a product of skill training (how to locate references in the library, how to present references) and partly a product of education (coming to understand history), and sometimes it is hard to disentangle the two (e.g., should we talk of training a person to use historical sources, or is that a part of educating them?). There is an important general lesson here: we must not make the mistake of thinking that, because there are border line cases when we don’t know whether to describe someone as bald or not, it follows that there is no distinction between baldness and hairiness. In the same way, while it may be difficult to classify some human abilities as being clearly the product of training or education, there is nonetheless a clear distinction to be made between perfecting particular self-contained practices by repeated exercise, and grasping or understanding patterns of reasoning. The former constitutes training, the latter provides us with an initial statement of what education involves.

Socialization might be said to be a species of training, but relating specifically to acceptable social behaviour. What is meant by socialization is the development of certain attitudes, habits, and behaviours that are regarded as an integral part of the culture or society in question, primarily by a process of example and expectation, without any particular attempt to provide understanding of or any reasoning to support such behaviour (other than along the lines of ‘this is how we do things’, or ‘you wouldn’t like people to do that to you’). No doubt a large part of who we are, judged in terms of how we behave, what we expect of ourselves and others, even what we think is right and wrong or true and false, is the product of socialization. Most people are socialized into the habit of being co-operative or polite long before they cultivate any views or arguments relating to the question of whether they should be or whether there is good reason to be. Once again, the basic distinction is between acquisition of attitudes and beliefs through the example and influence of the environment, and the acquisition of some degree of understanding relating to our assumptions, which characterizes education.

I am not suggesting that because some functions of school, such as childcare, training, and socialization, are distinct from education that they are unimportant. The value of some of them, such as categorization or stereotyping of individuals, might be debated, b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1: Thinking about education
• 2: What is it to be human?
• 3: The concept of education
• 4: Knowledge and the curriculum
• 5: Curriculum theory
• 6: Indoctrination
• 7: Rationality
• 8: Self-determination
• 9: The postmodern challenge
• 10: Needs, interests, and experience
• 11: Creativity
• 12: Culture
• 13: Research into teaching
• Bibliography