Such reflective questions are always worth asking, but they are not always worth dwelling extensively upon. In academic pursuits, as in personal life, self-reflection can be a necessary distraction, an absorbing diversion, but, at the limit, an entirely incapacitating preoccupation. We tend, in general, to exaggerate the features of our own circumstances and to underestimate those of other situations and periods. Sometimes this tendency issues in intellectual triumphalism, as witness to which consider the ‘now we’re getting somewhere’ attitude of current cognitive psychology.
At other times, however, this form of egocentrism expresses itself in sustained pessimism about contemporary thinking; hence the ‘now we’re in the doldrums’ way of thinking. Having acknowledged these exaggerative tendencies it would be as well to correct them and to set aside self-examination for attention to the problems that remain to be treated. To this advice, however, someone might well reply that the introspective turn occurs, here as elsewhere, precisely when it seems that the old problems have disappeared or lost their interest. Hence, in these circumstances, there is nothing to which one might return.
Accordingly, the subject has a future only if there can be a discovery of new problems or of new methods of enquiry. This conditional proposition can, of course, be run through from two directions, and it would be an interesting, though essentially trivial, task to divide current commentators on the state of the subject into optimists and pessimists according as to whether they affirm the antecedent and detach the consequent, or contrapose to conclude that philosophy of education is moribund.
However, my interest is in an assumption of the reply from which the conditional was derived. It is no doubt true, I think, that when an intellectual enquiry goes stale what is sometimes needed is for a new voice to speak out – not to propound new solutions to old difficulties but to set novel problems. This, though, requires genius of a sort which occurs less often than do the periodic feelings of staleness or loss of confidence. Another and more realistic prospect is that one might try to revitalise oneself by looking again at the old problems and reconsidering old solutions to them which have previously come to be forgotten, or to be rejected as incoherent or as resting on unacceptable assumptions.
Most of the questions with which recent philosophers of education have been concerned only arise in certain sorts of social context, most especially ones in which there are organised schools. Thus, questions about neutrality, equality of access and provision, curriculum design, assessment, competition, discipline, pupils’ rights, etc. are largely confined to what might be termed the philosophy of schooling. But there are also important questions, the terms of which find application wherever there are social groups however small or simple in organisation.
One of these is the epistemological question: ‘how is teaching possible?’ Another is the teleological one: ‘what is education for?’ Both questions were taken very seriously by Plato and Aristotle and again by the philosophers of the Middle Ages who followed in their footsteps. In the modern period, however, most philosophical issues were subordinated to epistemology and most epistemological issues were referred to the general enquiry into the origins of understanding, conceived of largely as an investigation into the nature and source of our concepts.
That task continues now, often under the title cognitive psychology. But while I find it interesting and important, I do not believe that, as things stand, there is any reason to think that philosophers of education are likely to make useful progress in it. More promising from this point of view is the other question: ‘what is education for?’ In keeping with the philosophical character of our interests any adequate answer will have to be fully general. But in saying this I have already made contact with an important philosophical issue.
For why should an account of the purposes of education be general? and how general should it be? As regards the former of these questions, two points are relevant. First, in asking what education is for, we are seeking an answer that is at one and the same time descriptive and normative, explanatory and justificatory. We want to know what its point is and how achieving that result is a ‘pointful’ goal of activity, i.e. something worth doing. Hence sociological reports on the educational practices of particular communities can have only limited value. I am not assuming that pure conceptual analysis is the proper way of answering the question. Indeed, I shall be emphasising the philosophical importance of the empirical constitution of those involved in education. All the same, we need to ascend from the level of particular practices in identified populations to a general account of the aim of education as such.
The second relevant point is that made by Aristotle in connection with all theoretical enquiries, namely that particulars are only intelligible as instances of general natures,4 which is to say that in looking at any given case of education the appropriate question is: ‘why is this a case of education?’ Turning from the argument for generality as such to the matter of its scope, I want now to bring in the empirical element mentioned a moment ago. Concentrating hard on the word ‘education’ is an unappealing and unproductive activity if one so sets the task that any reference to the nature of those undergoing education is excluded. There is an old methodological principle, owing to Aristotle but more extensively employed by his scholastic successors, which holds that natures are differentiated by their proper powers, powers are known by their acts and acts as specified by their objects.
This is a form of functionalism, the application of which in the present context suggests two important ideas. First, although education is logically prior to the achievement of its aims, one can only understand what education is by seeing what its characteristic objects are. So in the order of enquiry (ordo inveniendi) the investigation of aims precedes any final account of the nature of education. Secondly, in characterising its purposes one needs to look at the products of this process, that is to say at the educated, and to see what their present state is and how it differs from earlier states. Here, then, some restriction on the scope of any enquiry into the proper aims of education presents itself. If you want to know what education is for, then you had better have an understanding of the nature of those involved.
These various considerations amount to a case for generalising the scope of enquiry up to but not beyond the level of the human as such. Clearly, education involves the cultivation of intellectual powers through rational processes, but this should not encourage anyone to think that an account of human education in these respects will just be an application of a general theory of rational education equally applicable to Jupiterians and Angels. Intellectual powers and rational processes as we know them are incarnate in complex social animals – ourselves – and nothing, or precious little, may follow from descriptions of human rationality about the forms of mindedness that may yet be found in other beings.
In the following pages I shall not be concerned to argue in detail for a particular account of the nature and purpose of education but rather to defend one ancient way of determining the content of such an account against a range of modern objections to it. The view I favour, and wish to defend, is an implication of a more general philosophical position which is a form of Naturalism, combining a realist epistemology and metaphysics and an objectivist theory of value. Before outlining the view, however, let me say something about how approaching educational issues in this way both resembles and differs from another more recent approach which also goes under the title of Philosophical Naturalism.
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