Philosophy of Education

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That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not Hollis If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure.

Edited by Harvey Siegel

If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions.

Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship Satz ; Anderson This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work Dworkin The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over e. Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred.

In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture.

Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications.

Introduction: Philosophy of Education and Philosophy

How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question cf. Callan ; Clayton ; Bull Other philosophers besides Rawls in the s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective.

As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics e. Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care Noddings ; Gilligan One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated.

The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they like Rawls believe to be integral to citizenship.

Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content.

Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as diversely morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively.

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The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories.

There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle Burnyeat ; Peters But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists.

The papers collected in Kotzee and Baehr highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.

Philosophy of Education - By Branch / Doctrine - The Basics of Philosophy

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee , summarized in Siegel , and helpfully analyzed in Watson A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief? For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them.

For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education for further discussion see Goldberg ; Siegel , A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination: How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching?

Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable.

But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination which is always bad and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.

In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent Siegel Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief: Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility: All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance.

But these two might seem at odds. If Jones fully believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory.

For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies.

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It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on.

This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: Kvernbekk for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures. As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry.

Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here for another sampling see A. Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy. The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer update of this entry.

Problems in Delineating the Field 2. Analytic Philosophy of Education and Its Influence 3. Areas of Contemporary Activity 3. Analytic Philosophy of Education and Its Influence Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field.

Richards made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket: Areas of Contemporary Activity As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. Concluding Remarks As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry.

Bibliography Adler, Jonathan E. An Introduction , New York: Pergamon, second edition, pp. University of California Press, pp. Callan, Eamonn, , Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. London School of Economics and Political Science.

An Encyclopedia , New York: Phillips, , Visions of Childhood: An Anthology , Oxford: University of Chicago Press. Gilligan, Carol, , In a Different Voice: Gutmann, Amy and Dennis F. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Teachers College Bureau of Publications. Hirst, Paul and R. It was originally religious in nature, and it was only much later that a theory of secular perennialism developed. During the Renaissance , the French skeptic Michel de Montaigne - was one of the first to critically look at education.

Unusually for his time, Montaigne was willing to question the conventional wisdom of the period, calling into question the whole edifice of the educational system , and the implicit assumption that university-educated philosophers were necessarily wiser than uneducated farm workers, for example. In the late 17th Century, John Locke produced his influential "Some Thoughts Concerning Education" , in which he claimed that a child's mind is a tabula rasa or "blank slate" and does not contain any innate ideas.

According to Locke , the mind is to be educated by a three-pronged approach: He maintained that a person is to a large extent a product of his education, and also pointed out that knowledge and attitudes acquired in a child's early formative years are disproportionately influential and have important and lasting consequences. Jean-Jacques Rousseau , in the 18th Century, held that there is one developmental process , common to all humans, driven by natural curiosity which drives the child to learn and adapt to its surroundings.

He believed that all children are born ready to learn from their surroundings so as to grow into virtuous adults, but due to the malign influence of corrupt society , they often fail to do so. To counter this, he advocated removing the child from society during education.

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He also believed that human nature could be infinitely developed through a well-thought pedagogy. John Dewey was an important progressive educational reformer in the early part of the 20th Century. For Dewey , it was vitally important that education should not be the teaching of mere dead fact , but that the skills and knowledge which students learn be integrated fully into their lives as persons, citizens and human beings, hence his advocacy of "learning-by-doing" and the incorporation of the student's past experiences into the classroom.

Rudolf Steiner was another very influential educational reformer, and his Waldorf Education model emphasizes a balance of developing the intellect or head , feeling and artistic life or heart and practical skills or hands , with a view to producing free individuals who would in turn bring about a new, freer social order. Other important philosophers of education during the 20th Century include the Italian Maria Montessori - , the Swiss Jean Piaget - and the American Neil Postman - A huge subject broken down into manageable chunks. Random Quote of the Day: