Education and the Common Good

Essays in Honor of Robin Barrow

John Gingell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317962007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Robin Barrow has been one of the leading philosophers of education for more than forty years. This book is a critical but appreciative examination of his work by some of the leading philosophers of education at work today, with responses from Professor Barrow. It will focus on his work on curriculum, the analytic tradition in philosophy, education and schooling, and his use of Greek philosophy to enrich current debates in the subject. This work will be of interest to all those who have been influenced by his contributions to educational and philosophical debate.

1 The Philosopher and the Writer

Richard Smith

ARGUMENT AND STYLE

In philosophy the matter of the language which is its vehicle—which is a clumsy way of putting it, and immediately sets up a distinction which I want to question—is central in a way that would not be the case to the same extent in other disciplines. There is first of all the question of whether philosophy is best carried out through speech or in writing: a question to which Plato is often supposed to have given a definitive answer, both in the legend of the origins of writing in the Phaedrus (274b5ff.) and in his choice of the dialogue form. From this can be traced many elements of philosophy as it has been practiced in Anglophone countries in modern times. There is for instance the idea that philosophy is most nearly itself in live argument and disputation, in which one interlocutor (a revealing term: one who takes part in a conversation) defends a claim while another attempts to reveal its flaws. This can be traced all the way to the traditional Oxford tutorial, where the undergraduate student reads aloud the essay that he or she has written and then attempts to justify its arguments against the criticisms of the tutor. Its influence lingers in the practice of submitting a conference paper (a paper, we call it) and then summarising it orally (which we call speaking to it) in the live conference session. Before going any further we might note that, in what may seem a contrast to this tradition, Plato’s dialogues are written, and that they are carefully, even artfully, constructed; a point which is often conveniently forgotten.

This prejudice in favour of the oral is closely connected with a preference for, or commitment to, the analytic style of philosophy as against what is usually called the ‘Continental’ style, that is to say the style favoured by non-Anglophone philosophers from Continental Europe and those influenced by them. I say more about this distinction below. Here it is enough perhaps to characterise the analytic tradition as emerging from the logical positivism of the 1930s and 1940s, especially as mediated through such Anglophone philosophers as A. J. Ayer, and as constituting the standard approach to academic philosophy in the Anglophone countries for the last half century. Its practitioners see themselves as bringing clarity to replace muddle and confusion, and they aspire to clarity in their own writing and lecturing. Their prose style is by intention plain and unadorned. They may not always notice that this is a distinctive style, but it is not stylistically neutral. It has much in common with the style of ordinary conversation, and for the most part its devotees see themselves as eschewing the figurative and the poetic. These latter ways of writing, they might say, are often the source of philosophical confusion. It is thus related to their prose style that they are quick to spot common fallacies, such as an undistributed middle (all terriers are dogs, everyone in this room owns a dog, so everyone in this room owns a terrier) or a category mistake (such as supposing that all talk of the mind must be the same as talk of the brain). When philosophy of education started to establish itself as a subject area (or subdiscipline of philosophy: not much turns on the distinctions here, in my view) in the UK in the 1960s under the leadership of such figures as Richard Peters, Paul Hirst, and Robert Dearden, it was analytic philosophy that it took as its model.

Robin Barrow of course places himself squarely in this tradition, as the title of one of his papers reminds us: ‘The Need for Philosophical Analysis in a Postmodern Era’ (1999). Here he argues for the importance of ‘a specific understanding of philosophical analysis’ (p. 415, my emphasis), but there is nothing, I think, in his understanding of it that other prominent followers of that tradition, whether in philosophy of education or in philosophy more widely, would take substantial issue with. Since I shall offer below some criticisms of philosophy practiced exclusively in this tradition I begin by acknowledging some of its many strengths; and since many of those are displayed to virtuoso effect by Robin Barrow himself it is hard to do better than quote him at sufficient length to display some of the central features of his style. When in 2006 as founding editor of the journal Ethics and Education I sought to establish that this was to be a journal of some quality, Barrow was one of the people I approached to contribute to the first issue. His article is called ‘Moral Education’s Modest Agenda’, and it was everything I hoped it would be. Here he is towards the end of the article making the classical move of distinguishing moral education from various practices which sometimes make false claims to the title.

The main task in moral education is to clear the ground of all the irrelevant and inappropriate practices and ideas that have hitherto been wished upon us. We have to throw out systems of behaviour modification, because to condition people to behave in certain ways is not to educate them and does not allow them to act freely nor, therefore, morally. We have to fight against the indoctrination that is still prevalent throughout the world, not least in fundamentalist Christian communities, which closes people’s minds around an impoverished set of unprovable and exclusionary rules that, again, are not themselves moral and that prevent the development of a moral understanding. We have to chase values clarification, and all other programs that similarly suggest that the important things are being sincere and articulating one’s views rather than holding coherent and rationally justifiable views, out of the schools. We have to challenge the contemporary tendency to impose remedies, such as therapy, drugs and counselling, on people, rather than tackling the causes of the problems. Moralizing, whether directly or indirectly by means, for example, of carefully censored texts, is anathema to a true moral education. Developmental theories, which are still a staple part of teacher education in North America, continue to contribute to a wholly misleading picture of what morality is and how one should morally educate the young, essentially because they treat people as physical entities with brains but without minds, and because they treat moral education as a matter of seizing upon and reinforcing allegedly natural stages of development. Similarly, one cannot overestimate the harm that has been and to some extent still is being done to the spread of true moral understanding by the insidious influence of political and moral correctness. (Barrow 2006, pp. 12–13)

There is much to admire here. First, not to be underestimated and certainly not to be taken for granted on the part of academics working in the field of education, is the irreproachable grammar. Varied in its structures and with a fluency suggestive of speech, its qualities include a number of rhetorical devices (this by no means constitutes a criticism: I return to this below). We might note the simplicity and forcefulness of the opening sentence, which commands the reader’s assent partly by suggesting that reader and writer will be at one in what they identify as ‘inappropriate practices and ideas’. The second sentence is more complex, and just as the complexity builds towards the end it is cut short by the brevity of the assertion that not to act freely is to act non-morally. Something similar occurs in the fourth sentence, which ends ‘out of the schools’. The next sentence contains a near-classic tricolon, ‘therapy, drugs and counselling’, any sense of glibness counteracted by avoiding the common device of having the terms increase in number of syllables (such as ‘friends, Romans, countrymen’). The long sentence beginning ‘Developmental theories’ makes sophisticated points almost in passing: for example that it makes no sense to think of human beings as purely physical beings (‘with brains but without minds’), and that the supposedly ‘natural stages of development’ are not natural and are therefore not inevitable at all. The reader is here treated with respect, as one on whom these sketches of important theoretical ideas will not be wasted, and for whom the long and fairly demanding sentence in which they are set will not present an obstacle. The final sentence, when read aloud or vocalised internally, invites the inclusion of pauses, of an almost Churchillian nature, depending on just how Churchillian one can be without parody: after ‘Similarly’, at various points up to and including ‘being done’, after ‘true moral understanding’ and ‘insidious influence’. Thus the paragraph concludes with a sentence of steady and magisterial force. I do not mean to imply that the rhetorical qualities here are contrived, or even deliberate. Rather they are, I would say, simply the way language naturally falls from the pen of someone with a traditional, literary, and linguistic as well as philosophical (and in Barrow’s case classical) education.

Admirable too, I would say, is the unmistakeable presence here of argument. I say ‘unmistakeable’, yet I have come across readers of philosophy written in this style who complain that they are being presented with mere assertion—readers who thus miss both the compression of complex arguments at various points (such as the distinction Barrow makes between minds and brains) and the implicit invitation here to join in the discussion, to respond, to argue back. How different this is from what one might call the standard academic journal article on any aspect of education, where the writer cannot make the most banal point without supporting it with a string of citations. Barrow offers no detailed citations (although Kant, Hume, and Mill are mentioned in passing, and Plato makes several appearances), and there is thus no list of references at the end. It is interesting to imagine the reaction of those refereeing for a standard academic journal. Barrow—would they perceive this?—has the courage to speak for himself, and we readers are implicitly invited to lay aside the devices by which we insulate ourselves from the uncomfortable business of engaging face-to- face, as it were, with an intelligent human being in argument about things that matter, and speak for ourselves in turn. We encounter someone with a profound concern for education, and stand to be educated by him.

This point about the absence of citation and reference is worth developing a little. Nicholas Burbules (2012, np) and others have argued that the academic conventions of citation carry particular and substantial implications for how we think of knowledge. For example, one of the standard functions of citation is to refer to an empirical study that sets out certain facts or at least what are claimed to be facts. If, say, in writing an article on equality in education I were to note that more equal societies do better for all their citizens on a range of indicators (better educational outcomes, less crime, greater mutual trust …), it would be natural to cite Wilkinson and Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level (2009). However particular styles of citation, notably APA (American Psychological Association), which employ name of author(s) and date, ‘become in standard use the documentation of a fact …such usage reinforces the idea that research is about the examination and testing of empirical claims, and that citation is a process of buttressing those claims through referencing supporting studies’ (Burbules). The citation of name and date even becomes identified with the familiar claim or fact that it is supposed to support, as is the case with Wilkinson and Pickett above. When we also see that the APA manual sets out how a research article should be formatted (Literature Review, Methods, Results, Discussion) it is clear that research which follows these conventions is being conceived essentially as empirical, even quasi-psychological, rather than as philosophical, conceptual, or, as I want to say, argumentative and thoughtful. The discovery and reporting of facts and correlations has become hegemonic.

Thus Barrow’s style here (and in a good deal of his other published writings) is not a side issue. It is of a piece with his commitment to thoughtful argument. It constitutes an act of resistance to the increasing assumption that educational research that is not empirical is not really research. That assumption is steadily making itself at home, both in Anglophone universities and elsewhere. A colleague in a British university (not my own), a philosopher of education, heard his specialism described by his head of department at a departmental meeting as ‘Alchemy, or whatever it is you do.’ Another colleague in a different university was told by one of his department’s ‘managers’ that his philosophical research was ‘hobby research’. From a third university again, this time not a philosopher of education but a philosophically inclined social scientist, being interviewed for a professorship, was asked by the chair of the Appointing Committee: ‘You have told us all about your ideas and theories. Now what about actual research?’ No doubt there are other factors at work here: for instance it is rare for philosophical research to attract external funding, while this is relatively easy for even the most banal empirically based educational research projects. Funding can be measured and becomes a proxy for quality. Psychology always looks as if it is bound to be at least relevant, and probably important, to education, even if its claims do not always survive critical scrutiny. Much more could be said about all this. Barrow himself has of course developed some of these points in his 1984 book, Giving Teaching Back to Teachers.

Finally, in the extract above I admire Barrow’s steady assertion that there is such a thing as ‘true moral understanding’, which I read less as part of a strategy to discover some Platonic Form, valid for all time, than as the insistence that for the things we value—education, justice, equality, and friendship, for example—it is an endless and vital undertaking to distinguish the true from the false, the genuine from the fake, the false from the spurious. I called this above a ‘classical’ move, in the context of Barrow’s distinction between true moral education and practices which only pretend or seem to be that. In the Gorgias Plato has Socrates investigate what Holland (1980, pp. 33–34) calls ‘the problem of spurious semblances, of the difference between worthwhile pursuits and their time-serving substitutes’. For Plato (or Socrates: certainly for the ‘Socrates’ of the Gorgias) the difference is between dialektiké, which is, roughly, philosophy understood as an educational practice, and mere rhetoric, or persuasive speech making. The latter is nothing more than snake oil, an appeal—like certain forms of cookery—to what people like or can be got to like rather than to what is good for them.

The reason why rhetoric could not be a form of education was that it had nothing to do with knowledge, and the reason why it had nothing to do with knowledge was that it involved no criticism of received opinions, no putting of statements to the test, no insistence that an account be given of the nature of anything, no sifting the true from the false or distinguishing reality from appearance. Instead, success was its sole concern and efficacy its standard of excellence. (ibid., p. 19)

This seems to me to catch the philosophical spirit of Robin Barrow as it runs through everything he has written. And how we need this kind of philosophical spirit in our time, as we always need it! The mark of a good school now, it seems, is that the children pass the tests and the school passes its inspection: success and efficacy are the sole standard of excellence, which is understood mainly or entirely as what moves it up the league tables. Undergraduate students of education and other students of social science in their first year are generally astonished—and usually delighted—to discover in my classes that education has from time to time been theorised in more exalted terms, as the widening of horizons, as the expanding of the mind, as learning to speak the Oakeshottian ‘conversations of mankind’. Even as they learn this, however, their degree courses are being rewritten to reduce the demand that students acquire knowledge or criticise received opinions (to echo Holland’s words above), including their own existing opinions: this is being done to make their courses easier, in the hope of better results in the National Student Satisfaction Survey. Universities in England are now becoming funded according to market principles, and accordingly sell themselves with videos in which young people leer at each other as they stroll across the thoroughly modern campus—just a little ivy and Georgian brickwork to add a touch of class—between coffee shops and up-to-the-minute IT facilities. In the market appearance is reality if it brings in the consumers, since the market admits no other criterion of quality than what appeals and can be sold. And since they are now consumers students must naturally be given what they want rather than what is good for them, their received opinions pandered to and flattered. This is to be the fate of the university. We should pause to register this extraordinary development. The university, generally until now thought of as a place dedicated to the pursuit and testing of knowledge, of ‘putting of statements to the test’ (Holland’s words again), and still in the view of many one of the few places left among the beleaguered public services of England dedicated to ‘sifting the true from the false or distinguishing reality from appearance’, is apparently to give its customers what they want, as if it was just one more commercial outlet dealing in boutique clothing or electronic gadgets.

This is one reason why philosophy, and Barrow’s way of doing philosophy, still matter.

CLARITY AND OTHER VIRTUES

The purpose of this second section is not to offer substantial criticisms of Barrow’s way of doing philosophy, as if to balance the appreciation expressed in the first section. What is admirable in it is still to be admired. The purpose is rather to ask if the strengths of analytic philosophy, both in general and in the case of Robin’s preferred version of it, cannot be achieved without drawbacks and limitations, just as there cannot be light without shadow. We might start with the idea of clarity. The demand for clarity is one corollary of the analytic philosopher’s commitment to doing away with muddle, and Barrow names clarity as first among ‘the criteria that govern the quality of a concept’ (1999, p. 427), and thus by implication as foremost among the aims of conceptual analysis. I can see nothing to be said for muddle. However the idea of clarity is not as straightforward as it may seem, and repays investigation (repays philosophical analysis, one might say).

First, it is not always noticed that talk of clarity is metaphorical. In the case of water, from which the metaphor appears to derive, clarity consists in the fact that you can see through the water to rocks and fish below the surface, or to the coral beneath the surface of the sea. Thus clear language enables you to see down to the realities beneath. The clarity of the sentence ‘the earth goes round the sun’ lies in the way it allows you access to the truth that the earth does indeed go round the sun, that of the sentence ‘Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963’ similarly (though the reality of assassination as opposed to, say, simple murder makes for complications). Things become more difficult, though, with ‘Today is Monday’. There is no such thing as a Monday, lurking beneath the limpid water. That today is Monday seems instead to be a matter of it being neither Sunday nor Tuesday nor any other of the days of the week. This simple point lies behind the idea that the meaning of langua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Very Short Introduction
• 1 The Philosopher and the Writer
• 2 Barrow, Utilitarianism and Education
• 3 Ethical Theory, Utilitarianism and Anti-Theory
• 4 In Defence of Virtue Teaching
• 5 Understanding Educational Theory: Reflections on the Work of Robin Barrow and John Darling
• 6 Robin Barrow on the Aims of Education
• 7 Is Barrow Nearly Right about Philosophy of Education
• 8 Some Reflections Arising from Jonathan on Barrow
• 9 Robin Barrow’s Account of Skills
• 10 Barrow on Liberal Education and Schooling
• 11 Swansong: The Price of Everything …
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index