To help focus discussion, I take the important background question to be how we could ever know whether any of these pronouncements are warranted. The epistemological question is important because the approaches to philosophy of education I shall be considering offer different answers. Moreover, differences over epistemology will signal more systematic differences over philosophy of education in general. Before the rise of APE in the late 1950s, it was fashionable among philosophers of education to attempt to deduce educational claims from philosophical premises.
As the 1942 and 1955 National Society for the Study of Education yearbooks indicate, philosophy of education was something of a smorgasbord, with characteristic educational positions being associated with particular philosophical ‘isms’, such as empiricism, existentialism, rationalism, pragmatism, and so on (Brubacher, 1942, 1955). Waiving the matter of defending one ism over another, success was construed as establishing the existence of educational implications.
Ismism, as it was unkindly termed, fell on hard times in the mid 1950s after a vigorous ‘implications’ debate, conducted largely in Educational Theory and the Harvard Educational Review, prompted a consensus that the quest for educational implications had failed and that the enterprise was mistaken. (The main papers can be found in Lucas, 1969.) Although technical worries over the nature of implication were extensively canvassed, the most important determinant of the new consensus, and its subsequent development, was a new view of the nature of philosophy.
For arising out of the so-called linguistic revolution in philosophy, particularly the Ordinary Language variety associated with Oxford philosophy, came the view that philosophy should be construed as an activity rather than a body of claims from which deductions might be made. The philosophical activity most characteristic of APE, early and late, is the analysis of concepts, although latter day examples are mostly in disguise, often as exegesis of some theorist (e.g. White, 1990, on Aristotle) or some established educational practice (e.g. Wenham, 1991, on teaching).
For example, in his influential paper ‘Towards an Analytic Philosophy of Education’ Scheffler (1954: 9) recommends construing philosophy of education as ‘the rigorous logical analysis of key concepts related to the practice of education’. In answering his own question about the main concerns of philosophy of education, Peters (1966: 18) remarks: ‘There is, first of all, the analysis of concepts specific to education – such as “education”, “teaching”, “training”, and “university”, and “school”’.
And, despite subsequent criticisms of the methods of conceptual analysis, a quick check of recent papers in the field’s journals shows Barrow (1991) analysing ‘critical thinking’, Gaden (1990) analysing ‘responsibility’, McLaughlin (1990) analysing ‘belief’, and Harvey (1990) analysing ‘stereotype’, to mention just a few of the fairly conspicuous examples. Construed modestly, conceptual analysis serves the always important and useful function of distinguishing uses of terms, sorting out ambiguities, and in general clarifying what is being claimed.
Often associated with an anti-essentialist interpretation of the later Wittgenstein, it captures the idea of philosophy as linguistic therapy (see Strawson, 1992: 3–14). Except where educational theory falls into a chronic ambiguity of expression and sloppiness of usage, the impact of modest analysis has been, as one might expect, modest. Construed more ambitiously (by using the tools of modest analysis) two related approaches to conceptual analysis have been employed in APE to justify substantive educational claims. The first sees the analysis of concepts as a quest for logically necessary and sufficient conditions of usage or, where these are difficult to obtain, at least logically necessary conditions.
Thus, if an analysis of usage suggests that we would not say of someone that they were being educated unless they were learning something worthwhile, then ‘Education involves the learning of something worthwhile’ expresses a conceptual truth (see e.g. Hirst and Peters, 1970: 2–28). The aim of such a philosophy of education is to produce a comprehensive set of conceptual truths about education. These conceptual truths are meant to provide a kind of intellectual scaffolding for educational theory, around which empirical claims are added. The APE developed by Richard Peters, Paul Hirst, and other philosophers of education who plied their trade at the London Institute of Education during the 1960s and beyond, clearly displays this version of analysis. (For recent booklength versions see e.g. Barrow and Woods, 1988; Callan, 1988; and Hamm, 1989.)
The second ambitious view of analytic methodology sees analysis as a quest for the basic presuppositions of knowledge. Applied to education, this methodology looks for what substantive educational claims might be presupposed by any educational theorising. And once again it was the London Institute philosophers of education who led the way in employing the methodology most systematically and to greatest effect. Thus Hirst’s influential forms of knowledge thesis owes much to an analysis of what is presupposed in having a mind.
For example, ‘the phrase, to have “a rational mind” certainly implies experience structured under some form of conceptual scheme’ (Hirst, 1965: this volume, p. 254). Similarly, Peters’s view of what to choose as worthwhile activities in education is based on an analysis of the logical presuppositions of rational, disinterested choice (Peters, 1966: 151–66). The above ambitious versions of analysis are related, in the first instance, according to how ‘presupposition’ is construed.
Interpreting the ambiguous expression ‘S entails S’ as ‘S is a necessary condition for the truth of S’, ‘presupposition’ may mean no more than ‘is a necessary condition for the truth of S’, in which case the two become one. On Strawson’s (1952: 175) usage, ‘presupposition’ means ‘is a necessary condition for the truth or falsity of S’. Further permutations are possible according to how ‘entails’ is understood, though ironically, any further taxonomy risks outrunning the actual conduct of analysis in the literature.
In any case, it is clear that claims to have established conceptual truths about education, or to have discovered the logical presuppositions of an inclusive range of educational discourse, can (and did) exert considerable purchase on substantive educational theorising. The rewards of success were the familiar ones: acknowledged standing as a separate branch of educational studies, akin to history or sociology of education, the proliferation of professional journals, and the establishment of learned societies.
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