Thinking Philosophically about Education

The Selected Works of Richard Pring

Richard Pring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138325739
• eBook ISBN: 9780429833182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field.

Thinking Philosophically about Education highlights several key writings from Richard Pring's international career in education, providing a historical perspective in relation to current debates about philosophy of education in the UK and internationally, drawing attention to issues of current concern.

The text explores key themes such as critical realism, teachers as researchers and a way forward for policy through carefully selected examples from Richard Pring's writings. A short introduction is provided for each chapter to help readers to understand the significance of what is presented and how this relates to other chapters in the book.

Comprehensible and articulate, this selection displays the knowledge and rigor that has made Richard Pring one of the world's most respected and eminent scholars of the field of philosophy and education. Comprising Richard Pring's personal selection of what he considers to be his influential writing from book chapters and journal articles throughout his career, it will be of interest to all followers of his work and any reader interested in the development of philosophy and education in the UK and internationally.

Part I

Philosophy of education: meaning and importance

1 ‘From disguised nonsense to recognition of patent nonsense’

Thinking philosophically about education

This paper was an invited presentation to the academic staff and research students of the Education Department of Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, Madrid, in 2014. The title borrows (rather freely) from Wittgenstein’s (1958 , p. 464) Philosophical Investigations.

Introduction: the ‘analytic tradition’ of philosophy

Few university departments of education now offer courses in the philosophy of education despite the fact that philosophical problems permeate the educational questions which we need to address. Political answers to educational problems are too often muddled because they have not addressed questions about, for example, what is worth learning, the nature and division of knowledge, the relation of theory to practice, or who should control learning. Such questions have always been the province of philosophy, namely ethics (that is, exploring what is good and worthwhile), epistemology (that is, theory of knowledge) and political philosophy (that is, the exploration, for example, of what we mean by justice and the relation of the individual to the political power).

Of course, we think we know what is meant by ‘education’ or ‘having learnt something’, or what is meant by ‘high standards of achievement’, as in the political responses to the four-yearly Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which compares and provides a league table of ‘standards’ of countries across the world. But it is the traditional job of philosophy, from Plato onwards, to scratch beneath the surface of ‘agreed meanings’ and to show that what was thought to be clear is in fact very muddled, leading to unacceptable consequences. Language, as Wittgenstein (1958, Part 1, p. 109) demonstrated, can so easily bewitch the intelligence by the misuse of words, thereby leading to the belief that life is much less complicated than it really is. A major task of philosophy is to make people – especially those who think they have the right answer – puzzled, unsure that they really are right, recognising the need to think more clearly.

An example of this is provided by Plato (1974) in the Republic (Part I, p. 338). The rather arrogant Thrasymachus defines ‘justice or right’ as ‘what is in the interest of the stronger party’. Socrates sees a problem in that definition. What is meant by ‘in the interest of’?

Socrates enlarges on his puzzlement.

For instance, Polydamas the athlete is stronger than us, and it’s in his interest to eat beef to keep fit; we are weaker than him, but you can’t mean that the same diet is in our interest and so right for us?

Thrasymachus now gets irritated as he refines his original definition to embrace the state or government as the stronger party. In other words, those in power are the ones who define ‘right’ and ‘just’ – which, in fact, would often seem to be the case in the organisation of our educational system. Socrates presses on with the possible objections to this definition, providing counter examples. Eventually, Thrasymachus exits in a fit of temper. What seemed straightforward had been proved not to have been so.

Typical of what is referred to as ‘socratic dialogue’ is the constant questioning of ‘what do you mean?’ Behind the apparent clarity of the words used there are different ‘usages’ conveying important differences of meaning. But Plato (or Socrates) was not simply going through the mechanical motions of asking ‘what do you mean?’ whenever someone said something he disagreed with. In most everyday conversations, there is no ambiguity and no significant disagreement about meaning. It would be odd indeed if, when someone asked you to sit on that chair, you responded by asking ‘what do you mean by “sit” or “chair”?’ However, the meaning of many words is ‘contested’. That is, beneath superficial agreement there are deeper disagreements, too often not recognised in disputations. The world of education is full of them, as I shall illustrate in what follows – for example, what it means to be educated, or what counts as having understood a scientific explanation, or ‘what do you mean by “skill training”’?

Much philosophy of education (within what is often referred to as ‘analytic philosophy’ or ‘linguistic analysis’) is within the tradition of Plato as exemplified in the socratic dialogues. Plato was aware of ambiguity in words which played a pivotal role in the other person’s argument. A lot hung on a particular and contestable interpretation. By giving counter-examples, he was able to bring this out – and (as in the example above) revealed the distinctively moral nature of the discourse on justice. Moreover, that verbal probing led to deeper questions about the nature of the State and its relations to the individual members of the State – indeed, to the constitution of the Republic and to the form of education appropriate to the future citizens of the Republic. There is an interconnection of ‘meanings’ through which we understand the social world and act intelligently within it. One task of the philosopher, and of the philosopher of education in particular, is to examine critically the understandings embodied in the language of the social world which affect the policy and practice of education.

It is within such a tradition that Wittgenstein (1958, Part 1, p. 464) declared:

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

Hence, the title of this paper.

There is a lot of disguised nonsense in what educational policy makers say and in what educational researchers write. This I shall illustrate though the importance attached to such policies as the need: first, to produce a more skilled workforce; second, to distinguish between academic and vocational courses; third, to raise standards, especially in the light of the PISA international comparisons; fourth, to improve the quality of teaching.

Working through examples

Promoting a ‘skilled workforce’

In Britain, as no doubt in most countries, there is deep concern about the need for a more skilled workforce if the country is to compete successfully in the ‘global economy’. Too many leave school without qualifications and try to enter employment without the necessary skills. For this reason, a report was commissioned by the government to find out what skills were needed in the future, how many skilled workers there were currently, and what must be done to close the gap. Therefore, the consequent Leitch Review (2006), Prosperity for All in the Global Economy: World Class Skills (much quoted), argued that the economy by 2020 would require only 600,000 unskilled workers as opposed to the 7,000,000 today. Hence, the sense of crisis. However, other research contradicts this, suggesting that there will remain the 7,000,000 jobs requiring workers without skills. Who is correct?

However, the problem of deciding who is correct is partly a conceptual one. Is the word ‘skill’ being used in the same way? It would surely have to be so if one is to add up the number of non-skilled workers to 600,000 or to 7,000,000. So, what do we mean by a ‘skill’? We talk of a person being a skilled orator (even though what he or she has to say is superficial), a skilled carpenter, a skilled ballet dancer; we even talk of skilled thinkers amongst whom one would need to include Plato’s Sophists (and there are now courses in ‘thinking skills’).

There are, indeed, overlapping meanings. But assimilating these uses from different contexts leads to the wrong belief that there is more in common than there really is. For example, assumptions are made about ‘transfer of learning skills’ which permeate different kinds of thinking. Policies are promoted for the development of skills as such in order to overcome the predicted shortage. Is this not a case of being deceived by the assimilation of meanings through the shared use of a word? As Wittgenstein (1958, Part 1, p. 10) pointed out, ‘assimilating the descriptions of the uses of words in this way cannot make the uses themselves any more like one another. For, as we see, they are absolutely unlike’. Therefore, whether or not the economy will need only 600,000 unskilled workers by 2020 is not a purely empirical matter (for example, adding up the number of skills), but a conceptual one. It all depends on what one means by ‘skill’, and there will be as many differences of meaning as there are contexts in which the word ‘skill’ is applied.

Let us take, for an example, the task of cleaning, in which many are occupied but on very low wages. Is cleaning a skilled job or not? And if it is classified as a skilled job, is that because it requires one skill or several – sweeping up the dirt, removing stains, polishing the furniture? If these are separate skills, do they need separate training courses (as well as experience) for the cleaner to be a good cleaner? It is not clear whether ‘cleaning’ is or is not included in the Leitch Report’s enumeration of the skilled workforce required by 2020. It all depends on what one means.

Distinguishing between academic and vocational

The distinction is constantly made between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ subjects. The former is identified with the acquisition of knowledge and understanding, which can be written down and thereby assessed. The latter is associated with the training of skills (howsoever difficult it is, upon reflection, to define a skill) useful for doing a job effectively. The former is seen as part of a general education, with all the social associations of that. The latter is often used synonymously with practical learning – training in a specific skill as a preparation for specific employment. As a result of this distinction, so-called vocational studies are provided for the ‘less academic’, and the ‘academically able’ learners do not touch the ‘vocational’. Indeed, the new bench-mark of educational success in England (the EBacc or English Baccalaureate) is a six-subject academic award.

But what does one mean by ‘academic’? It would seem that it refers to those studies which are essentially book-based and can be examined through written work. But what of the arts (for example, painting, dance or drama)? These are neither academic in that sense nor vocational in the sense of training in a set of skills useful for employment. Furthermore, ‘design and technology’ neither fits the academic model nor is vocational in this narrow sense. Hence, the dualism between academic and vocational, when examined, does not make sense. It is part of the ‘disguised nonsense’, resulting, first, in the demotion of the arts and design and technology from general education for all; second, in the failure to see the kind of intelligence and the practical knowledge which are embodied within demanding practical activities; and third, in the perpetuation of the distinction between what are seen to be two radically different kinds of learners.

All this has implications for when we come to answer the question: ‘what do we mean by an educated person?’ Should our view of the ‘educated person’ include the capacity to engage intelligently in practical matters without the theoretical insight that, no doubt, a more ‘academic’ learning might have brought about? And should that idea of ‘the educated person’ exclude the person who is good at theorising, but fails to relate that theory to the practical issues and problems which confront us? Many were the highly intelligent economists whose theoretical knowledge did not prepare them for the universal recession and thus for the practical problems of running an economy.

The philosopher John Dewey saw ‘false dualisms’ in the way we think about the world and the problems we face (for example, between the mind and the body, between traditional and progressive education, between education and training, between knowledge and experience, between academic and vocational) as a significant barrier to thinking properly about education – a matter of language ‘bewitching the intelligence’. Thus, he saw ‘vocational’ to refer to

a direction of life activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person because of the consequences they accomplish. … The opposite of a career is neither leisure nor culture [another false dualism], but aimlessness … the absence of cumulative achievements in experience (Dewey, 1916, p. 307).

In other words, the poverty of the dualistic contrast between the academic education and vocational training is revealed when a deeper examination is given of the aims of education.

Pursuit of higher standards

Every four years, the OECD reports on the comparative standards of 15-year-olds in reading, writing and science across 63 countries in what is called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). These are taken very seriously by governments – either confirming that their policies are right (when they come out on top of the international league tables) or indicating that much more needs to be done if they are to move up the table. Pursuit of higher standards is at the top of the political agenda. Economic difficulties are blamed in part on ‘poor standards’ in schools. That pursuit of higher standards is translated into the setting of targets within what is called ‘total quality management’ or TQM.

TQM requires precise definition of standards in terms of targets (the attainment of which can be measured) and of the conditions which spur teachers to reach those targets, in particular accountability with high status testing and parental choice made in the light of the publication of test scores. However, one needs to ask what one means by ‘high standards’. What is lacking in this reduction of standards to the language of TQM is any sense of vision of what education is for, or of the logical connection between the language of measurable performances and that of educational values and quality of learning.

The consequence is that standards are identified with the targets, which are increasingly narrowed so that they can be more easily measured. To improve standards, one needs to spell these out in detailed specifications of ‘can dos’, teach more effectively to these targets, measure the outcomes, evaluate the programme in the light of the results, and possibly change the targets or means of getting them in the light of the evaluation. Research by Mansell (2007) demonstrates clearly the ‘gaming’ which such a politically inspired testing regime encourages. The ‘games’ which teachers play in order to hit the targets have nothing to do with the quality of learning.

It is necessary, therefore, to think critically about what we mean by standards, about their identification with performance indicators, and about their absorption into the language of TQM with all its consequences for policy.

Standards are the bench-marks by which we assess whether the aims of an activity have been met, and thus they depend on the nature of the activity. The standards by which we assess whether someone is a competent driver depend on what one means by ‘good driving’. That would no doubt include not only the ability to use the gears and brakes appropriately but also the values concerned with driving safely. Similarly, high standards in education depend logically upon the aims of education – what one means by an educated person. Does ‘hitting the targets’ in reading constitute ‘high standards’ when the student gains no interest in reading literature – indeed, might well be put off by the training to pass the tests?

The logical problem with the testing industry, which now dominates student learning in so many countries, is that the indicators, which can be measured, are not the same thing as the states of mind which they are indicators of. There is confusion between the aims on the one hand and, on the other, the indicators by which one assesses that the aims have been reached – between the quality of learning and the finite and limited modes of evidence for the quality of learning.

Moreover, standards cannot logically be the sort of thing that go up or down. If that were the case, then that ‘going up or down’ could be assessed only by reference to a higher-level ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Philosophy of education: meaning and importance
• PART II: Aims of education
• PART III: Teaching and research
• PART IV: Context of education
• Author index
• Subject index