THE RULING HISTORY OF EDUCATION

Philosophers have always intended to transform the way we see and think, act and interact; they have always taken themselves to be the ultimate educators of mankind. Even when they believed that philosophy leaves everything as it is, even when they did not present philosophy as the exemplary human activity, they thought that interpreting the world aright—understanding it and our place in it—would free us from illusion, direct us to those activities (civic life, contemplation of the divine order, scientific progress or artistic creativity) that best suit us.

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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What is philosophy?

Philosophy is an activity which is distinguished by its concern with certain types of second-order questions, with questions of a reflective sort which arise when activities like science, painting pictures, worshipping, and making moral judgments are going concerns. Not all reflective, second-order questions, of course, are philosophical. A teacher, for instance, can reflect about what prompts people to paint pictures or about the connection, if any, between painting pictures and social class.

These are reflective questions in that they presuppose that the activity of painting pictures is a going concern. But they are not philosophical questions. Indeed they are part of the domain of two other types of enquiry which are also important contributors to educational theory, namely the sciences of psychology and sociology. What, then, distinguishes philosophy from other forms of reflective enquiry?

Let us take an example; for one of the cardinal points in philosophical method is to show points by means of examples. Supposing one teacher says to another: ‘You should not punish children by keeping the whole class in’ and another says ‘That’s not really punishing them; and how do you know you shouldn’t do this anyway?’ The second teacher is dealing philosophically with the moral judgment made by the first teacher.

What makes his reply philosophical? What sort of reflection does it exemplify? It involves reflection about the concept of ‘punishment’ and about the sort of grounds which are good grounds for making a judgment of this sort. Philosophy, in brief, is concerned with questions about the analysis of concepts and with questions about the grounds of knowledge, belief, actions and activities.

This rather bald assertion should give rise to a host of questions. But two connected questions would obviously present themselves to the practically minded. The first question concerns the nature of conceptual analysis itself. Is it, for instance, a matter of defining terms carefully? The second question is how going into the meaning of terms, or probing into the grounds of knowledge, helps anyone to tackle the type of question which sets the enquiry off.

Maybe at the finish one’s head is a bit clearer than at the start. But whether or not keeping the whole class in is to be called punishing the children, the question still has to be faced of whether they ought to be kept in or not. Can philosophizing about the situation shed any light on this very practical problem?
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The philosophy of education

It is possible to make a rough and ready distinction between philosophers who are interested in the most general questions about the nature of the world, together with our grounds for knowledge in general, and those who are interested in the concepts, truth-criteria and methodologies of particular forms of thought and activity such as science (including social science and psychology), history, morality, mathematics, art and politics.

It is therefore possible, roughly speaking, to distinguish the highly general enquiries of metaphysics, together with logic and theory of knowledge (epistemology) from the more particularized philosophies of differentiated forms of enquiry, appraisal and action, such as the philosophy of science, history, mathematics and religion, together with ethics, aesthetics and social philosophy. Manifestly the philosophy of education is of the latter type. But it is not a separate branch of philosophy in addition to them; for ‘educating’ is a very hybrid type of activity.

Philosophy of education, therefore, draws on established branches of philosophy and brings together those segments of them that are relevant to the solution of educational problems. There are philosophers of the former sort who sometimes illustrate some general theme by reference to educational concepts. A good example is Gilbert Ryle, who deals with concepts like those of ‘training’ and ‘drill’ in the course of defending a general metaphysical thesis about the nature of mind.

Generally speaking, however, philosophers of education are specifically interested in educational matters and philosophize in order to get clearer about how things are and about what should be done in this particular realm. In order, however, to philosophize, the philosopher of education can seldom turn to just one branch of philosophy. If he is interested, for instance, in problems of teaching and learning from a theoretical point of view, because he is simply puzzled about why some children learn and others do not, he will be drawn into philosophical psychology which deals with theories of human development, with types of learning and their relationship to teaching, and with theories of motivation and concept formation.

He may also be led into the philosophy of history, mathematics and science in order to get clearer about what is distinctive of these particular forms of thinking. He is more likely, however, to be practically interested as well, in that he is also actively concerned with questions about what ought to be done in education. In this case he will have also to study ethics and social philosophy in order to arrive at clearer answers to questions about what should be put on the curriculum, about teaching methods, and about how children should be treated.

Assuming that the philosopher of education has both a theoretical and a practical interest in education, it can easily be shown in a more formal way what branches of philosophy will be of central interest to him. Educating people suggests developing in them states of mind which are valuable and which involve some degree of knowledge and understanding. It is obvious, therefore, that the philosopher of education will have to go into ethics in order to deal with the valuations and into theory of knowledge in order to get clearer about the distinction between concepts such as ‘knowledge’, ‘belief’ and ‘understanding’.

 As knowledge is divided up on a curriculum into branches such as science, mathematics and history he will also have to reflect upon what is distinctive of these different branches of knowledge. Educating people is not done by instant fiat. It takes time, and a variety of different processes of learning and teaching are involved in it. The philosopher of education will therefore have to study philosophical psychology in order to get clearer about the nature of human development and about differences between processes such as instruction, indoctrination, conditioning and learning by experience.

Questions about processes, however, are not purely psychological; there are also questions about how much freedom children should be allowed, about whether or not they should be punished, about the authority of the teacher and the rights of students. The philosopher of education will have to go into social philosophy in order to deal adequately with questions of this sort. In setting out what is central to the philosophy of education in this schematic way we are, of course, fastening on certain features of the concept of education which seem to us to be of particular significance – especially its connection with knowledge and understanding.

We do this here simply to indicate, however briefly, the range of philosophical issues with which the subject is concerned. Such a conception of education must impose its stamp on the curriculum, teaching, relationships with pupils, and authority structure of the school or college community. The hope is that philosophical study as here set out will do something to deepen our understanding of how we are placed as educators and make more explicit the dimensions in which decisions have to be made.
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Metaphysics In The Philosophy Of Education

Contemporary philosophers of education, at any rate in the English-speaking world, are now much concerned with questions about the very nature of their subject, about its relation to other subjects and to other branches of philosophy and about its future. Indeed, in recent years a number of well-known authors have surveyed the current state of the subject, raised doubts about its condition and proceeded to pose the question: ‘whither philosophy of education?’

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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Analytic philosophy of education

Philosophers of education are given to making pronouncements on a range of substantive educational issues: the nature of education, teaching, and learning; curriculum content and worthwhile knowledge; moral education; cognitive development; school organisation and administration; educational policy; and educational research methodology, to name just some of the major themes.

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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