I
This essay is a contribution to a Special Issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education (JOPE) on educational policy. That there is such a Special Issue may well not seem remarkable, no more remarkable than the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain's creation of the policy-orientated Impact series in 1999. The last three Special Issues have been on a range of subjects: methods of philosophising about education, the ethics of teaching, philosophy for children. Educational policy may seem to be a topic on all fours with these: that is, no more than a specialised interest that some, but not others, in our community share.
1960â1985
In earlier decades, the idea that educational policy could be a minority interest within our field would have made far less sense. To see this, we have to go back to the 1960s. My account is about the UK, but may have resonance in other countries.
The pioneering work of Richard Peters and Paul Hirst took place against a government-led upgrading and expansion of teacher education after the Robbins Report of 1963 and the election of a Labour government in 1964 committed to comprehensive schooling. Part of the thinking was that teachers in training should have wider and deeper intellectual horizons. The very term âteacher trainingâ was transmuted into âteacher educationâ. The Bachelor of Education degree was introduced as a step towards an all-graduate profession.
It was widely agreed that teachers, at both pre-service and in-service levels, needed the broader horizons on their work that the disciplines of education provided. Philosophy of education was prominent among these. PGCE students at the London Institute of Education had weekly lectures in the major disciplines, including our own, each lecture followed by a seminar. Those who wanted to go further could also take an option course in the subject. Similar work was taking place in the new BEd courses in teacher education colleges.
All this activity required staffing. Not only did new teachers need inducting into our discipline: so did college lecturers already in post, as well as new lecturers plucked out of school teaching to cope with the great expansion of the workforce. Newly created part- or full-time in-service courses in philosophy of education, at Diploma, MA, or MPhil/PhD level, acted as conversion courses for these groups, as well as providing for teachers already in post, who became caught up in the intellectual excitement of the time. In addition to making abundant money available for this work, the Labour government, concerned about a shortage of BEd lecturers, asked Peters to run a tailor-made, one-year, full-time Diploma in Philosophy of Educationâand funded the Institute to do so.
I have gone into these details to throw light on the early links between philosophy of education and policy. Those involved in the subject at every levelâas student-teachers, serving teachers, college lecturers, teachers of college lecturersâwere instruments of policy. All were aware of the transformation in education that was taking place and most, perhaps, saw themselves as willing participants in it. The idea that policy might be a minority interest within the field would have made scant sense at that time.
This is also true for a related reason. So far, I have been talking about government policies. But the scope of these was not so extensive as it is today. In particular, pre-1988 governments were not responsible for the content of the school curriculum. Decision-making about aims and curricula was left to schools themselves. Each had its own policy on this. This had weaknesses as well as strengths, but I am not concerned here to attack or defend this autonomy. My only point is that from the mid-1960s philosophy of education had abundant opportunities to influence policy decisions simply through its plethora of courses in teacher education at every level, as well as via their content. Many students were or became senior teachers, headteachers and inspectors, and face-to-face influence apart, there was the huge impactâon local authorities, the inspectorate and the civil service, as well as schools and teacher education institutionsâthat Peters, Hirst, Dearden and others had through their writings.
In an age when policy-making was far more widely dispersed than now across the system, much of the work published was written with policy in mind. The word âpolicyâ scarcely came up in this connection: it is more that philosophers of education took it as a large part of their job to help schools and their staff to gain a clearer and better-grounded understanding of what they should be about. Since schools were responsible for their own aims, curricula and teaching arrangements, it is not surprising that much of this early work in our subject was in these areas. It is against this background that we should view, for example, Peters' writings on the nature of education and on moral education; Hirst's account of a curriculum based on âthe forms of knowledgeâ; Dearden's critique of the âchild-centredâ theories then rife in the preparation of primary school teachers, and his alternative vision of good primary practice; Elliott's essays on aesthetic dimensions of education; as well as critiques of intelligence testing, arguments for civic education, discussions of classroom discipline and concept-learning, and much else besides.
Influencing practice was not the only motive. The reality was, as always, complex. Richard Peters, in particular, had other things in mind, although their bearing on his practical âmissionâ perhaps seemed clearer to him then than it has seemed to many subsequently. He had come from general philosophy and was eager to establish philosophy of education as a respectable branch of philosophy, on a par with such areas as philosophy of religion or philosophy of law, revolving, like these, around its own field-specific concepts. In his case, these were concepts like education itself, teaching, learning, indoctrination, socialisation.1
I am not writing about a âgolden ageâ. There were many downsides as well as many upsides of our activities in this period. My key point is that it was then taken for granted that philosophy of education was by and large concerned with helping schools to improve their practices. One exception has to do with philosophical problems about learning emerging within general philosophy itself, not least from Wittgenstein's interest in language learning in Philosophical Investigations. David Hamlyn (1978) was a notable contributor to this kind of philosophy of education, beginning a tradition that has been brought into our new century by general philosophers like Michael Luntley.
As well as their writings with and for teachers, earlier philosophers of education were also sometimes involved in policy-related work as we would understand this term today, that is, to do with matters of national significance. A notable example is found in Peters' and Dearden's critiques of the Plowden Report on primary education in Peters, 1969.
1985 Onwards
Things were very different in our field by the mid-1980s. Two factors stand out. The first is an understandable recoil in the late 1970s against the heavily theory-laden pre-service courses in teacher education, notably the one-year PGCE. It was widely felt that whatever role there was for philosophy of education, as well as other educational disciplines, at in-service level, a short course like the PGCE should have more practical priorities. As a result, philosophical lectures and seminars became rare events, although students were still sometimes exposed to philosophical ideas when philosophy of education staff participated in school-focused discussions about such things as mixed-ability teaching or multi-cultural classrooms.
This notwithstanding, until 1985 philosophy of education retained its links to the world of school practice and policy through its still thriving in-service Diploma, MA and MPhil/PhD courses. Butâand this brings me to the second factorâin that year the Thatcher government abolished what had been called âthe Poolâ. This consisted in central government funds given to all teachers on in-service courses to cover their fees. Henceforward, teachers had to rely on their own moneyâor rare outside fundingâso as to study our subject. Numbers plummeted. Staff were thinned out. The future looked black.
Prospects brightened in the 1990s with the new emphasis on research productivity in universities. Philosophers of education still in post found that they could now earn much of their keep by writing books and journal articles. Our own journal, like others in the field, coped with the spate of criteria-attaining pieces now flowing its way by increasing its number of issues per year, in JOPE's case from two, to three, and then four.
What happened after the mid-1980s to the field's involvement in policy? The decimation of in-service teaching cut our day-to-day connections with the world of school policy-making almost to zero. This world shrank, in any case, after 1988, when the arrival of the highly prescriptive National Curriculum began to move policy-making upwards from school to central government level, with teachers increasingly becoming implementers of decisions made elsewhere rather than policy-makers in their own right.
Some philosophers of education, not least those used to working in a policy-relevant way, continued their involvement as best they could. The new, post-1988, regime of state-controlled curricula, testing and assessment, accountability and school effectiveness, provided them with plenty of material for philosophical critique, as did the tighter control of universities by the state. Since the main type of policy on which they could now comment was national policy, one unexpected consequence was that policy-making circles at national level began to take more notice of our work than they had probably ever done, even in the 1960s.
With more money available to schools to use for their own purposes after 1988 under the Local Management of Schools (LMS) regime, there was still some room for school policy-making, but within the more stringent system of control just described. Many schools were attracted by agencies offering courses and consultancy on such things as brain-based learning, learning styles, multiple intelligences and philosophy for children. These raised all kinds of philosophical questions and provided another source of work in the policy area.
Given these developments at national and school levels, the field was now wide open for these philosophers of education to pursue their policy-related interests along a gamut stretching from newspaper articles at the one end; through essays on topical subjects in journals and outlets like Impact; to work on core philosophical topics in the background to policyâon knowledge and understanding (in relation to curriculum and assessment), personal well-being and morality (aims of education, PSHE, religious education), democracy and civic virtues (Citizenship), aspects of philosophy of mind (Gifted and Talented programmes, SEALâSocial and Emotional Aspects of Learning, multiple intelligences), equality (the erosion of the comprehensive system).
Not all philosophers of education, by any means, were drawn towards policy. Most, perhaps, not least among those who took up the subject after 1980, when the policy relevance of our work was less and less taken for granted, had other interests. It is indeed over this period that the idea, mentioned earlier, has taken root that policy involvement is a minority activity among us.
A major factor in this has been the internationalisation of our subject, promoted not least by the companies that produce our journals in their desire to expand their markets globally, and fuelled by the extra revenues gained from those same companies that have enabled scholars across the world to have regular meetings with each other. Again, this is not the place to debate all the pros and cons of this development of the last two decades. My interest here is only in its impact on policy involvement. Policies are proposed ways forward for organisations. This chapter so far has been about the policies of UK governments and of educational institutions. The government and school systems of particular jurisdictions may well diverge widely from those of other countries in the problems they face and proposals for overcoming them. The greater the pressure to publish work of trans-national interest, the less room there is likely to be for policy-related work, except where this relates to internationally shared experience. One such area concerns the policies of the global publishing organisations that market our work through journals like this one. I have not yet seen any discussion of these from the standpoint of philosophy of education, although recent interest in ethical issues around open-access publishing may well spark off policy-related work in this field.
A survivor from the 1960s, habituated to working in a policy-relevant environment, I find it hard to understand what philosophy of education could otherwise be like, and am not attracted by the inward-looking tendencies of much recent work in the field. I look forward to the day when teachers are given more time and resources for their own professional education, as well as more freedom and power to help shape what their schools offer. Philosophy of education will then, at last, resume its former role.
II
As an example of contemporary policy critique, I turn to a discussion of The Framework for the National Curriculum: A Report by the Expert Panel for the National Curriculum Review (DfE, 2011).
Although at the time of writing (May 2012) the Coalition has still not indicated its policy on the National Curriculum, the stance it is likely to take seems clear. Everything that ministers Gove and Gibb have said on the topic since before the general election of 2010 has been about the virtues of a traditional grammar-school curriculum.
Their recent English Baccalaureate proposals for a 16+ qualification are not about the National Curriculum as such, but will certainly, if carried through, influence the content of secondary schooling. They, too, have put traditional fare first. Like the London University Matriculation regulations of 1858, they demand English, mathematics and science, as well as a foreign language (to which the earlier version added Latin and Greek). The main difference between the two awards is that in 1858 history and geography were both compulsory, whereas now they are alternatives.
The Coalition has not as yet responded to the Expert Panel's Report The Framework for the National Curriculum, although its recommendations are in line with the Gove-Gibb predilection for curricular staples from the 19th century and wariness of newcomers like Citizenship and Design and Technology.
As shown in its Terms of Reference for the Expert Panel, the Coalition seems to understand curriculum learning in terms of âessential knowledge (e.g. facts, concepts, principles and fundamental operations)â. A piece of essential knowledge it has overlooked is that there is no way of confining the curriculum within the epistemological domain. Do we teach children English literature only to give them knowledge? What about food for the imagination, and encouraging moral and aesthetic sensitivities?
And what, after all, is essential knowledge essential for? Let's take Gove's own preferred ai...
