Philosophy of Lifelong Education

Kenneth Wain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315531076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book, first published in 1987, provides a rigorous philosophical analysis of lifelong education. The author presents his arguments simply and directly so that the book is accessible to students who are new to philosophy and adult education.

Chapter One
The Philosophical Paradigm

Background

A number of articles have appeared in recent years in different journals describing the history of philosophy of education since it established itself as a discipline in the 1950s when it was brought in line with mainstream analytic philosophy.[1] That beginning is frequently referred to as the 'revolution', since it took philosophy of education out of the 'undifferentiated mush' that currently passed for education theory into the light of day.[2] It was launched with unbounded optimism at the time, in the power of the new philosophy to improve practice considerably by virtue of its very academic rigour, but within less than two decades began to suffer an opposite reaction as different grounds for dissatisfaction with it both as a philosophical programme and as an aid or guide to educational practice began to be voiced. Both classes of complaints have also been extensively aired and do not call for any elaboration here.[3] As a matter of fact, the cracks in the analytic ediface had begun to appear long before Edel described its programme as being 'at the crossroads' in 1971.[4] Indeed the criticism of analytic philosophy in general began to manifest itself even before the new philosophy of education made it its dogma, which raises questions whether, looking back in hindsight, it was a wise choice to make even at the time. But the 'second revolution' in philosophy of education did not really get under way before the 1970s and then its aims were very straightforward ones; in true counter-revolutionary fashion, it sought to reverse the programme of the 'first revolution' and to return the philosopher to the 'cave' which his analytic colleague had scorned with such impunity and abandoned with such confidence.

What exactly had the philosophical programme of the new analytic philosophy of the first 'revolution' been? A succinct answer to the question is available in an article Israel Scheffler, one of its earliest pioneers, wrote in 1954 called 'Toward an Analytic Philosophy of Education'.[5] In it Scheffler outlined the analytic programme in terms of: (1) a greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry; (2) an attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigour, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and; (3) the use of the techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development in the previous fifty years. In sum, the intention was to bring to the study of education a 'union of scientific spirit and logical method applied towards the clarification of basic ideas'.[6] The horizons of analytic philosophy had been set by the early Wittgenstein; philosophy was 'to leave everything as it is'; it was to explain the world rather than to try to change it. It would therefore, 'have no truck with ideology'. Its interest would be in 'second-order' questions. It was also declared, not as an afterthought but as an article of faith, that everything else was not 'philosophy'.

With such a programme, as Mary Anne Raywid has emphasised, the decontextualizing of philosophy was more than a mere matter of emphasis; it was not simply the devaluing of context that it implied but the very denial that the context is pertinent.[7] She distinguishes two outstanding problems related to this strategy originally indicated, she says, by John Dewey. One, in Dewey's own words is that:

When the context is suppressed .... elements become absolute, for they have no limiting conditions. Results of inquiry valid within specifiable limits of context are ipso facto converted into sweeping metaphysical doctrine.

[8]

The other, in Raywid's own words this time, is that conceptual analysis 'serves up a kind of atomism ..... by denying empirical connection in the establishment of a concept'.[9]

The intention of the counter-revolutionaries was to reverse all these three trends; mainly to return the debate to the 'human circumstances' from which the analytic philosophers had so violently 'ripped' it in their anxious search for a 'scientific' detachment from the world that would enable them to pronounce truths about it that are value-neutral.[10]

The 'decontextualization of the spoken and written word' referred to by Raywid was the means by which they strove to achieve it. The counter-revolutionaries proposed to recontextualize the language of philosophy in the real world and to keep philosophy of education open to resolution into different paradigms according to the intentions and requirements of the philosopher. This latter pluralism was recently expressed by Robert Dearden who declared:

I do not myself think that philosophy of education stands in need of a single paradigm. Its patterns and strategies of argument should be tailored to the subject matter under discussion, which is normally certain general concepts, principles, positions or practices.

[11]

With the recontextualizing of philosophical debate, the context is what is pertinent. For a recontextualized philosophy it is within a particular spatia-temporal, or historical, situation that we define our concepts and choose the issues we want to discuss; it is by referring to and being related continuously to the context of their employment that concepts avoid 'atomism' or taking on a quasi-metaphysical status.

Analytic philosophy of education was from the beginning the chosen paradigm of liberal thought, and immediately became its domain. It held out to the liberal philosopher that promise of 'objectivity',of 'value-neutrality',that has always been the dream and ideal of liberal scholarship. And it was the discreditment of the notion of 'scientific objectivity' in philosophy of science, with the advance of the 'theory-ladenness thesis', that opened analytic philosophy itself to criticism from different quarters. Since the 'theory-ladenness thesis' denies the possibility of 'detachment', of adopting an a-theoretic standpoint with regards to the phenomena being investigated. If it is true, then there is no way of avoiding ideology; science is 'ideology'. The whole base of analytic philosophy therefore crumbles with this thesis, and the objections that were aimed against it as a result were not merely epistemological but political also, as Marxist philosophers have cashed in quickly by accusing their liberal counterparts of using the analytic paradigm to hide their real value commitments.

Nor is this criticism lost on the new post-analytic wave of philosophers. Brenda Cohen, in fact, reflects the sentiments of many when she urges her fellow liberal philosophers of education to abandon 'the unattainable idea of neutrality in the direction of more conscious commitment to values and ideals', thereby depriving Marxists of a facile political advantage.[12]

From the background of a recontextualized view of education emerges an important consequence for the way in which we come to define the concept itself. Thus, within this paradigm, the appropriate question to ask is not the generic one, 'What is education?', but the contextualized one; 'What ought education to mean given conditions X?', if what is required is a normative or philosophical statement, 'What does education actually mean in conditions X?', if what is required is a descriptive, or sociological statement. This is a vital point I am making, as such it merits further elaboration and emphasis, for the form that any educational programme takes is determined largely by the way we define education itself initially. For the manner of the question will indicate the form of response required and, further, what directions the inquiry that will answer it will take and how that answer will be justified. From this point of view philosophers of education have been right in insisting all along that the question of what we mean by education has logical priority over other subsidiary questions, though they have not always been in accord with this suggestion about how it can be answered.

The context with and within which philosophy of education will work, the 'cave', is the world of educational practice. This could mean that a recontextualized philosophy of education reverts to the Deweyian thesis that education must be for some particular kind of society, which is itself the context for educational activity. Since the openness to different paradigms it implies amounts to the concession that there are different ways into the 'cave' and different ways of describing it.

Liberal philosophers of education in general, however, not simply the early analytic ones, have tended to assume that education occurs in schools and is the business of teachers, and have granted education no other context. And this is true also of orthodox Marxist philosophers of education, like Matthews and Harris for example,[13] who are mainly concerned with a critical analysis from their own ideological viewpoint of the practice of schooling in liberal-democracies, the objections they raise are often presented as negative evaluations against 'education'. To the extent that Harris, for instance, whose book illustrates this point perfectly, writes of the need to oppose 'education' with 'anti-education' in these societies. In short Marxist philosophers tend to assume, in their criticism of liberal philosophy of education, the same equivalence of education with schooling as do liberal philosophers. What they tend to object to, besides the ideology that guides the liberal theory of schooling and that is supportive of the general political order which they evidently oppose, is the disguised function of analytic philosophy itself as 'supportive rhetoric' for that ideology and order, and the status analytic philosophers claim for their conclusions, which they project as the definition of education. A standard example of the Marxist argument is presented by Anthony Skillen, where he makes the point in the following manner:

Conceptual deference is not of course peculiar to politics, higher entities abound in all areas of thought: theology has 'God', psychology has 'self' and sociology has 'society' and philosophy of education treats the state school as the one locus of education. Like the state and unlike God and the immortal soul, the school is real enough. What is mythical is its presentation as, essentially and specifically, that-which-educates. It becomes difficult, then, for a student even to entertain the proposition that such institutions, far from solving the problem of freedom and reason in society, are themselves an important part of political and educational problems. If, as Peters says, it is only in a stretched sense that a visit to a brothel can be said to be 'an educa

tion' (Ethics and Education) it is certainly only in a cramped sense that an education is gained from the schools so dutifully rationalized in contemporary 'philosophy of education'.

[14]

The sensitivity of post-analytic liberal philosophers of education to this and other criticism of the same kind has provoked some sharp reactions not merely to the analytic programme in general, as was stated earlier, but also to the employment of conceptual analysis itself as a tool of definition. Few however can be described as sharper, in this respect, than John White's:

Let me stipulate that education is simply upbringing .... Objectors may want to pick a bone over the term 'upbringing', some arguing that it is broader in application than education, others, bearing such things as adult education in mind, that it is narrower. But I have lost whatever passion I may have had in the past for conceptual joustings of this kind. At an opposite pole from those who cannot stay to examine their implicit beliefs about aims in their haste to worry away at their concepts, I am anxious - some might say too anxious - to leave concept analysis behind me and proceed to my main business as soon as possible.

[15]

White is, of course, only interested in that aspect of 'upbringing' that concerns schooling for, from his point of view, it is only that that counts for education. And since this standard assumption within philosophy of education that education and schooling refer to one and the same thing is a crucial one as far as we are concerned, much more will need to be said about it in a further chapter where we will also need to return to this statement and others about lifelong education that White makes in his book.[16]

There are some comments however that need to be made immediately about his attitude toward his definition of education as 'upbringing' because this is relevant to the present chapter. Thus one feels sympathetic with his feelings about 'concept analysis', which are substantially those of all the post-analytic philosophers, but his polar reaction is an unjustified one; mainly for the reasons that he himself anticipates in the passage, namely that others with different conceptions of education to his own, such as the one that is the subject of this book, will want to contest his definition. Nor is his excuse for it acceptable, for it is not clear that a defence of his definition need involve him in 'conceptual joustings', unless his opponents are analytic philosophers, and even then, he need not consent to fight them on their own ground. In cavalier manner he says, by way of explaining his choice of definition, that it is enough for him that 'upbringing' is how parents, teachers and citizens look at education since it is the upbringing of their young that interests them most. And there can, of course, be no objection to this; there is no doubt that he has the right to set his own programme. If it is the upbringing of children that he is mainly interested in, then this is what he should write about, and it is only right that, if he does, he should address himself to the interested parties. But he has also written a philosophical book, and as such he is also inevitably addressing himself to philosophers besides the people he mentions. This being the case he cannot, therefore, ignore whatever predictable criticism he may anticipate from this quarter and decline to defend his view against it.

One can go further and say that his attitude towards definition is not only unacceptable to philosophers, it cannot be of much help to the people he mentions either. This is because they will also be addressed by other philosophers and theorists besides himself with alternative proposals, and for those of them who are reflective (if they are not, they are not going to be interested in educational theor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PARADIGM
• 2. LIFELONG EDUCATION
• 3. HUMANISM
• 4. HUMANISM IN CURRENT EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND LIFELONG EDUCATION
• 5. LIFELONG EDUCATION AND LIBERAL PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
• 6. LIFELONG EDUCATION AND JOHN DEWEY
• 7. THE LEARNING SOCIETY
• POSTSCRIPT
• BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
• NAME INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX