Even “pure” philosophy—metaphysics and logic—is implicitly pedagogical. It is meant to correct the myopia of the past and the immediate. Philosophical reflection on education from Plato to Dewey has therefore naturally been directed to the education of rulers, to those who are presumed to preserve and transmit—or to redirect and transform—the culture of society, its knowledge and its values.
Every historical era is marked by a struggle for power, as it may be the authority of tradition or of manifest power, that of philosophic, spiritual, or scientific knowledge, that of artistic creativity, mercantile or technological productivity. It is only quite late in the history of liberal democracies that educational policy was formulated for, and directed to presumptively autonomous individuals, determining their own ends, structuring their own lives.
Nowhere is the philosophy of education more important, nowhere is education itself more crucial—and nowhere is it more neglected—than in a liberal participatory democracy whose egalitarian commitments make every individual both legislator and subject. The disputes at the heart of contemporary discussion of educational policy (What are the directions and limits of public education in a liberal pluralist society? How can we best assure an equitable distribution of educational opportunity? Should the quality of education be supervised by national standards and tests? Should public schools undertake moral and religious education?) reenact the controversies that mark the history of philosophy from Plato to social epistemology.
Fruitful and responsible discussions of educational policy inevitably move to the larger philosophic questions that prompt and inform them: those issues are most acutely articulated and examined in moral and political theory, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. What are the proper aims of education? (Preserving the harmony of civic life? Individual salvation? Artistic creativity? Scientific progress? Empowering individuals to choose wisely? Preparing citizens to enter a productive labor force?)
Who should bear the primary responsibility for formulating educational policy? (Philosophers, religious authority, rulers, a scientific elite, psychologists, parents, or local councils?) Who should be educated? (Everyone equally? Everyone according to his potential? Each according to his need?) How does the structure of knowledge affect the structure and sequence of learning? (Should practical experience, or mathematics or history provide the model for learning?) What interests should guide the choice of a curriculum? (The achievement of a competitive advantage on the international economic market? Religious, political and ethnic representation? The formation of a cosmopolitan sensibility?)
How should the intellectual, spiritual, civic and moral, artistic, physical and technical dimensions of education be related to one another? Because we are the inheritors of the history of conceptions of the proper aims and directions of education, that history remains actively embedded and expressed in our beliefs and practices. It provides the clearest understanding of the issues that presently concern and divide us.
Most theories of knowledge—certainly those of Descartes and Locke—were (among other things) intended to reform pedagogical practices. Most ethical theories—certainly those of Hume, Rousseau and Kant—were meant to redirect moral education. The practical import of political theories—those of Hobbes, Mill and Marx—is not only directed to the structure of institutions, but to the education of citizens.
Comprehensive metaphysical systems—those of Leibniz, Spinoza and Hegel—provide models for inquiry; and thus implicitly set directions and standards for the education of the enlightened. Some philosophers—Locke, Rousseau, Bentham and Mill, for example—made their educational programs a central feature of their philosophical systems. Others—Descartes, Spinoza and Hume—had good reasons for not making the educational import of their systems explicit.
If educational policy is blind without the guidance of philosophy, philosophy rings hollow without critical attention to its educational import. A vital and robust philosophy of education inevitably incorporates virtually the whole of philosophy; and the study of the history of philosophy mandates reflection on its implications for education. The full force of the Cartesian and Leibnizian revolution emerges in its consequences on the role of mathematics in education of scientists; the point of Locke’s and the Encyclopedists’ views on epistemology is expressed in their insistence that successful learning begins in experience and practice; the full impact of Hume’s and Rousseau’s views on the imagination is revealed in the role they assign to the imagination in forming habits of mind and action.
Hegel’s transformation of philosophy marks the study of history, widely conceived, as an essential part of education. Since educational policy is formulated by those who counsel the rulers who apply and implement it, the philosophy of education is typically addressed to rulers and their counselors. We can usefully reconstruct the features of the dramatis personae of this history: the continuing battle between the claims of (varieties of) civic legislators on the one hand (Plato and Aristotle) and (varieties of) spiritual directors on the other (Augustine and Loyola); the arts of Renaissance statecraft (Machiavelli and Castiglione); the assertion of spiritual self-determination (Luther and Erasmus); the early Enlightenment focus on (varieties of) scientific and technological knowledge (Descartes, Locke and Diderot); later Enlightenment reflections about the priority of developing social sentiments or strengthening an autonomous rational will (Hume and Kant); reflections on the civic and humane benefits of universal education (Adam Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, Mill); Romanticism’s emphasis on the poet’s aesthetic sensibility as the ultimate legislator of the world (Goethe and Schiller); the education of individuals as free citizens (Rousseau and Dewey).
In other philosophic traditions, the Shi‘ite focus on the education of a Mullah as an interpreter of the Koran and a traditional Yeshiva’s education of interpreters of the Torah and the Talmud. Although they rarely mention historical figures, contemporary theories of education carry on the tradition: Goldman considers the effects of social epistemology on educational policy; and Galston addresses the principled issues that arise in a pluralist liberal state.
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