An Introduction to the Study of Education

David Matheson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136253942
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This fully updated, fourth edition of An Introduction to the Study of Education provides a comprehensive and reflective introduction to the study of education, inviting students to question what education is, who it is for and what purpose it serves. Taking the reader from the early years through to lifelong learning, it examines all forms of education and learning.

This new edition includes ten completely new chapters and a step-by-step guide to essay writing. There is also a companion website to accompany the book, featuring additional chapters which can be visited at www.routledge.com/cw/matheson.This fully updated, fourth edition provides:

• a full exploration of the historical, sociological, philosophical and psychological roots of education;
• a clear focus on the individual levels of education – preschool, compulsory, post-compulsory and lifelong learning;
• the latest debates within special educational needs;
• an in-depth examination of learning styles;
• insights into the historical development of education and the role of, and background to, research in education;
• a focus on current educational practice and diversity across the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Written in a clear and accessible style, this is the essential core text for all beginning students on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Education Studies and all those interested in education today, where it came from and where it is going.

CHAPTER

1
	What is education? David Matheson

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

Mark Twain

Introduction

There are some notions which most of us think we know what they are and assume that others share the same or similar ideas. These can include ideas such as fairness, equality and justice. They are terms which are easy to use and to feel that we understand what we mean by them, but notoriously difficult to explain to others, other than by appealing to common sense and asserting that ‘everyone’ knows what justice, fairness, equality and so on actually are. Some terms, such as professionalism, are even best described by their absence. To define professionalism per se is notoriously difficult, but unprofessional somehow appears easier, even if in reality unprofessional is more often exemplified than defined. In this morass of potential confusion, there are phenomena which we recognise when we see them but would be hard put to describe in anything even vaguely resembling objective terms.

Among these slippery concepts is that of education. Education is what might be termed an essentially contested concept (Winch and Gingell 1999). It is one with a vast range of definitions, none of which is totally satisfactory. For example, we have the common equation between education and school. In this case, what about higher education? Where does further education fit in? And, for that matter, where do we place things we teach ourselves? We can discuss education that includes all of these arenas for learning or we can exclude at least some of them. We may even do as Abbs (1979) does and claim that ‘education and school can refer, and often do refer, to antithetical activities’ (p. 90). Or we can go even further and align ourselves with Illich (1986) and assert that school is not only the antithesis of education but that its main function is to provide custodial day care for young people.

This chapter has its function to consider what education might be. I intend to do this by considering a well-known attempt at defining education. I will then consider some of the things that education can be for and, lastly, I will consider what it might mean to be educated before briefly considering Education Studies itself.

Defining education

The literature is replete with attempts at defining education and so, at most, I will succeed here in merely scratching the surface. First, there is what we might term the ‘elastic’ sense of education. This is one, in a manner akin to the manner in which Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty ascribes any meaning he wants to a word, where education means precisely what the speaker, though within limits unknown to Humpty, wants it to mean. This approach capitalises on the kudos attached to the term education and seeks to ascribe it to whatever the speaker wants to give it. The result is a very loose approach wherein terms like education and learning are used interchangeably and the whole notion of education gets diluted to vanishing point. Despite this, as Lawson (1975) says, to call an activity or process ‘educational’ is typically to vest it with considerable status.

It is a commonplace that humans are learning machines. As Malcolm Tight puts it, ‘Learning, like breathing, is something everyone does all of the time’ (Tight 1996: 21). A first step, then, in trying to get a definition of education that is worth the bother is to exclude some activities. Unfortunately this is exactly where the problems start. As soon as we exclude activities from the list of what constitutes education we have to exercise a value judgement and we have to find a good reason for doing so. Nonetheless, at least by going about it this way, if we do decide that education equals school – an all too common assumption – then we have hopefully begun with a definition of education into which school fits, rather than beginning with school and making our definition of education fit into it.

The synonymous use of school and education is, however, hardly surprising when we consider that most of us will have experienced in schools what is arguably the most important part of our formal education. After all, it is there that most of us will have learned to read, developed our skills in social interaction, encountered authority which does not derive from a parent and we will have been required to conform to sets of rules, some of which might have been explained, some of which might not. School leaves its mark on us and on our personal conception of education, but this risks rendering us at least myopic to other possibilities.

A popular approach to the definition of education, at least in Anglophone countries, is that proposed by Richard Peters. Peters’ (1966) contention is that ‘education implies that something worthwhile is being or has been intentionally transmitted in a morally acceptable manner’ (p. 25). He manages to encompass two significant components: there is not only the end product, there is also means adopted to achieve it.

Peters’ definition suggests several areas for exploration:

1. intentionality and the ‘something’;

2. the notion of transmission;

3. the criteria for ascertaining whether the something is worthwhile;

4. the basis upon which moral acceptability is to be judged.

Intentionality and the ‘something’

For Peters, education cannot come about by accident. In this he concurs with Hamm’s (1991) claim that ‘learning is an activity that one engages in with purpose and intention to come up to a certain standard’ (p. 91). This implies, inter alia, that those things which we learn incidentally cannot count and hence stands at odds with Tight’s contention that ‘Learning, like breathing, is something everyone does all of the time’ (1996: 21). Equally, it implies that the person fulfilling the function of teacher has some clear notion of what is to be transmitted to the learners.¹ This may take the form of some specific material to be learned or it may take the form of attitudes to be acquired and opinions to be formed. A question to be asked concerns whether we can ever separate what is being transmitted from the manner in which the transmission occurs. In other words, can the message stand alone from the medium that carries it? Or is it the case, as Marshall Mcluhan (1967) claimed, that the medium is the message?²

For Peters, the ‘something’ refers to knowledge and understanding (and this can reasonably be extended to include skills and attitudes).³ This, in turn, leads to several other questions, not least of which is to consider exactly what we mean by knowledge. Knowledge consists of several components. Most notably these consist in their turn of: knowing how to do things (procedural knowledge) and knowing that (prepositional knowledge) certain things exist or are true or have happened and so on. There is also the rather thorny question of how we know that we know something and just what knowledge is, but this is perhaps beyond the scope of this book.⁴

Understanding is important for Peters since this takes us beyond simply knowing and into the realms where we become better equipped to grasp underlying principles, are able to explain why things are the way they are or why they happen the way they do, and so on. The role of knowledge and understanding in defining education becomes even more crucial when one considers Peters’ view on what it means to be educated (see Barrow and Woods 1995: ch. 1). For Peters, becoming educated is an asymptotic process: we can move towards it but we can never fully attain it. For Peters, ‘this understanding should not be too narrowly specialised’ (1970: 4). Just how narrow is too narrow is open to speculation, but this is a point best dealt with later as we consider what it means to be educated.

Transmission

Transmission creates in the mind an image of something passing from one place to another. However, we have to take care to understand just what Peters means by the term. In an age dominated by broadcast media, there is a tendency to equate ‘broadcast’ with ‘transmission’; in other words, one may transmit but we never know who will receive or indeed exactly what they will receive. If Peters equates ‘transmission’ with ‘broadcast’ then he clearly is referring to teaching rather than to learning. On the other hand, if by transmission he actually means what we might nowadays term ‘successful transmission’ (i.e. when the message sent is equal to the message received), then he refers to both teaching and learning. Indeed, the etymology of ‘transmission’ would clearly indicate the latter. We need only look at the manner in which ‘transmission’ was employed in the days before our present media age (in terms, for example, of a vehicle’s transmission, which transfers movement from the engine to the wheels – which certainly brooks no ambiguity as to the ‘message’ sent being the same as the ‘message’ received, although there is energy lost along the way – in the case of mechanical devices most often as sound and/or heat) to see the justification for this claim. Nonetheless, we do live in a media age; transmission has adopted a range of meanings; and so, perhaps Peters’ definition might be better altered to use the term ‘successful transmission’.

In any case the need for transmission in Peters’ definition of education brings with it the idea that, first, one cannot educate oneself by means of discovery, although one can by means of educational materials such as books, since in this latter case it is the ideas of the writer of the book which are being transmitted via the book. Second, there is an implication of a deficiency model of education whereby the teacher has ‘something’ that the learner does not and hence the teacher’s task is, at least in part, to remedy deficiencies on the part of the learner.⁵ This is a view of education which stands at odds with Freire (1972) and Rogers and Freiberg (1993), who see personal growth from within as a central tenet of education and for whom ‘transmission’ of any ‘something’ is in effect anathema. For each of these writers, an educator may facilitate learning but nothing more.

Worthwhile and worthless knowledge

There are various criteria we might use to mark out educationally worthwhile or valuable knowledge from that which is worthless. We might do this in terms of need, but in doing so one must take care not to confuse needs with wants. What I want is not necessarily what I need and vice versa, and this goes for everything I could possibly want or need, including knowledge. Again, it is a matter of perspective and relative importance. With this in mind, needs can be defined in terms of societal needs or individual needs. The question arises as to whether the needs of society are necessarily compatible with the needs of the individual. The answer one gives is very much contingent on one’s view of the social goal of education and whether one views society as composed of individuals or whether one sees individuals subsumed into society.

There is also the cultural aspect of knowledge to consider. Whether we seek cultural replication, maintenance or renovation, or even replacement, will play a major role in one’s definition of educationally worthwhile knowledge. Our view, not only of the society we have now, but also of the society we want to have, is critical both in determining educationally worthwhile knowledge and in determining what counts as knowledge at all. This is exemplified, in all too many parts of the world, by the way in which some minority (and sometimes even majority⁶) languages have been proscribed in schools. This happened, for example, to Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Swiss and French patois, Breton and Catalan, to name but a few cases in Europe. These languages were effectively designated as educationally (and often politically) unacceptable knowledge in often vicious bids to extirpate them.

Moral acceptability

Peters contends that education must be con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1. What is education?
• 2. Ideology in education in the United Kingdom
• 3. Theories of learning: constructive experience
• 4. Thinking philosophically about education; thinking educationally about philosophy
• 5. Psychology in education
• 6. Learning styles: implications for teaching and learning
• 7. Assessment
• 8. Social and spatial disparity in the history of school provision in England from the 1750s to the 1950s
• 9. Schooling in Ireland: policy and practice from penal times to the present day
• 10. Education in Scotland
• 11. Education in Wales
• 12. Early childhood education and care in the UK
• 13. Compulsory education in the United Kingdom
• 14. Post-compulsory education (further and higher education)
• 15. Lifelong learning
• 16. Comparing educational systems
• 17. Education and development: the contribution of comparative education
• 18. Special educational needs in context: a historical overview
• 19. ‘Race’, ethnicity and education: the English experience
• 20. Schooling and social class
• 21. Gender in education
• 22. Debates in educational research
• 23. Research in professional contexts
• 24. Afterword: now that I have read about education, how do I write about it?
• Index