A History of Western Educational Ideas

Professor Peter Gordon, Professor Denis Lawton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317827535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Geschichte der Pädagogik

It is important that all those concerned with education - parents, teachers, administrators and policymakers - should have a reasonable understanding of the present system and how it has developed, sometimes over a period of many years. This work traces the development of Western educational ideas from the Greek society of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, to the ideas and ideologies behind some of the controversial issues in education today.
This book discusses the continuous development of educational thought over three millennia. The focus upon the history of ideas in this volume is partly an attempt to move history of education away from an approach based on 'great men' to technological, economic and political influences on ideas and beliefs. It reviews many issues, ranging from the purposes of education from the earliest times, to the challenge of postmodernism in the present century. The authors provide an accessible and thought-provoking guide to the educational ideas that underlie practice.

1
Introduction: A History of Western Educational Ideas

Introduction

Our focus upon the history of ideas in this book is partly an attempt to move history of education away from an approach based on 'great men' to technological, economic, social and political influences on ideas and beliefs. In our view many books on the history of education have moved all too easily from one famous writer to another without sufficient regard for the general historical context of the ideas.

The history of education has, in the past, not only concentrated too much on the story of great thinkers but also on the history of institutions, for example, on topics such as 'The Rise of the University' rather than examining the changes in society which gave rise to those institutions or to changes in them. In reality the twelfth-century universities of Paris and Oxford had very little in common with twentieth-century higher education. One of our purposes will be to explore the reasons for change without ignoring the contributions made by individuals.

We have specified 'Western' in the title because it is not the intention of this book to try to cover aspects of oriental philosophy and education. The Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese traditions are very rich, but beyond the scope of a single volume and beyond our expertise. We will make some reference to Islamic education though mainly to the influence of those ideas on Western education, which were considerable, but do not take us outside the general narrative of this book. Islamic culture shared many aspects of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and benefited from the writings of authors such as Aristotle.

Many historians have suggested that if an individual is ignorant of the history of his or her own country, he or she is rather like someone without a memory: we need the past in order to make sense of the present, or at least to know how we arrived at this point. The same is true for anyone involved in education: there are many aspects of an education system that only make sense if we know how that system has developed over time. Part of that development is the story of how institutions (schools, colleges and universities) have changed, but it is also important to understand how ideas in education have developed.

The Development of Education

All societies have the problem of bringing up their young in such a way that they will become the kind of people who will be wanted and accepted in that society. In simple, pre-literate societies this process is usually in the hands of the family, probably the extended family. Parents and other close adults can pass on all the skills, knowledge and values that are needed. This is sometimes referred to as 'informal education'. In pre-literate societies there is usually little discussion about education or the purpose of education: it is taken for granted that the young need to be brought up in certain ways and that the elders know best.

As societies become more complex, and especially when writing is adopted or invented, it may become necessary for some specialist teachers to be employed, often in institutions called schools or universities. It is at this point that ideas about education begin to be developed and discussed. Prior to this, the upbringing of children would have been regarded as commonsense and taken for granted; but when schools exist, those involved in teaching the young, and those who want to criticise the failures of the system, begin to theorise about teaching methods, about the curriculum, about the purpose of education and possibly even about the education of teachers. Different societies, at different times, throw up all kinds of ideas about education and training. It is interesting to relate these ideas to the social conditions and events that have generated them, and also to see how ideas develop and change over time.

The approach taken in this book is not to attempt the history of education over a period of about 2,500 years, but to concentrate on educational ideas, how these ideas have emerged from certain social conditions and how they have developed and influenced each other. We shall not be looking at the history of schools and other institutions in any great detail: we will be more concerned with educational thinking.

Cultural Change and Educational Ideas

It should be clear from later chapters of this book that the purpose as well as the practice of education differs from time to time and place to place. This variation is partly due to the kind of society it is - agrarian societies have different priorities from industrial ones, for example. However, some differences in priorities are also due to different ideas about knowledge and truth: you will find that Plato thought that mathematics was the key to truth, but his pupil Aristotle believed that science was more important. Later on, the Jews, Christians and Muslims believed that they possessed sacred books which provided the Truth. By the end of the sixteenth century most people thought that there was one answer, and many believed that they knew what it was. In more recent centuries, social scientists and educationists have tended to believe that each culture provides its own solution to these eternal problems of knowledge and truth. We have the benefit of hindsight in as much as we can look at Greece and Rome, for example, from a distance. When we do this we should be careful, though, not to be judgmental - that is, to apply twentieth-century knowledge and values to cultures that were very different from our own. We shall see, however, that it is difficult for educationists not to believe in some principles which are timeless and universal.

What is history?

In writing this book we became increasingly conscious of the fact that over the centuries there have been vigorous, sometimes acrimonious, debates about the nature of history, but rather less discussion about the nature of the history of education. We have in mind two aspects of that debate. First, the specific question of the extent to which historians and history books are themselves a product of their time, reflecting current attitudes and values. Or can historians really establish a degree of objective truth? The second aspect of the debate is an extension of the first. It deals with the more general attack on history by various postmodernist writers, particularly over the last 20 years.

Many writers, including Richard Evans,¹ begin by contrasting the two approaches represented by E.H. Carr² and Geoffrey Elton.³ Carr adopted a moderate sociological, even relativist, approach, advising students of history to 'study the historian'. In other words, historians could not be expected to be totally unbiased but inevitably represented some kind of viewpoint. Elton, on the other hand, saw the historian as a trained seeker for objective truth; history would always have a backbone of political events and historians should focus on documentary records as their evidence. Both Carr and Elton believed in historical truth and objectivity but interpreted those terms differently.

Evans in his book felt it necessary to take the argument some way beyond the Carr-Elton contrast because, especially since the 1980s, some postmodernist writers have questioned whether history was any use at all. One of the problems with using a word like postmodernism is that it is not only extremely vague, but those who describe themselves, or are referred to as postmodernist adopt more or less extreme points on the spectrum of postmodernism.

Modernism, High Modernism, Postmodernism

Modernism began as a description of architectural style, often also applied to art and music. It was a description of attempts to reject the traditional and invent something new. Modernism was sometimes a self-conscious expression of the functional and a demonstration of control over the environment (Le Corbusier is often quoted as an example). In the world of intellectual ideas, modernity and modernism began to be identified with the questioning of traditional beliefs and values which, as we shall see in later chapters, can be associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the elevation of scientific rationality as the highest possible authority. Modernity was not an event but a gradual process; modernism was a belief in modern styles and a rejection of the old.

In the twentieth century there was a realisation that science did not provide all the answers, that human beings were characterised by limited rationality, and that emotions and the unconscious mind had to be taken into account. This was accompanied by work in the social sciences, particularly social anthropology, which described cultures with beliefs and values very different from those in Western industrial capitalist societies. At first, Christian missionaries had tried to convert such peoples to their 'superior' way of life, but social anthropologists preached the doctrine of respect for other cultures. This simple expression of social science being 'value-free' led to the equally simple belief in moral and cultural relativism: we should not talk of inferiority/superiority but of cultural differences. For some social scientists this developed into the belief that there were no absolute values or principles: everything was relative, including truth itself.

The debate sometimes focused on the interpretation of the concept of cultural relativism which could be held in moderate or very extreme forms. Moderate relativists, including perhaps a majority of scientists and social scientists, accepted relativism as applied to other societies but would draw the line at tolerating cannibalism or female circumcision. All cultures should be respected, but a high modernist⁴ might well assert the technological superiority of science over witchcraft in such practical matters as landing on the moon. Other late modernists might accept the general idea of tolerating and respecting cultural differences but retain some absolute or near absolute values, such as respect for persons, which would not tolerate genocide or individual offences against others' 'rights'.

Clearly, one of the characteristics of high modernity is that views stretch right across the relativist spectrum, and at the extreme end are those who deny all absolutes, and even refuse to accept rationality itself as anything more than part of liberal bourgeois ideology. It would be convenient if those at the extreme end of relativism could be called postmodernist whilst those in more moderate position could be safely referred to as high modernists. Unfortunately, the terminology is confused by some of quite moderate views preferring to call themselves postmodernist.⁵ Postmodernist views usually include all or some of the following: a disbelief in absolute values, a questioning attitude to scientific rationality, progress and truth. They tend to dislike general theories or 'grand narratives' preferring local explanations of reality. Many postmodernists have thus questioned the validity of history as an intellectual discipline. We shall return to the debate about postmodernism and history later in this chapter.

Meanwhile, what cannot be ignored in a book like ours is that over the period covered, the nature or theory of history has changed, and yet we still rely, to some extent, on what historians like Thucydides and Livy tell us. 'To some extent' is a reasonable qualifier only if we go a little further in specifying the criteria by which we decide what to accept and what to reject. One useful rule is certainly to accept Carr's advice and to be aware of the purpose or intention of the historian in question. We will discuss other 'rules' in the course of this chapter. One of the additional complexities is that not only is the historian influenced by the society in which he lives, but also by what history is thought to be.

A Note on Changes in Historiography

In Greece and Rome, history was generally not distinguished from literature: it was telling a story about the past. Those who told a good story, dramatically and with style, were admired. Many Greeks (more than 1,000) wrote about past events but we would not regard them as historians. Only a few writers showed a concern to distinguish between factual events and legends. One exception was Herodotus (484-424 BC) who was regarded by Cicero as the 'father of history'. Herodotus was influenced by the Ionian philosophers who wanted to understand the universe by means of reason, and made a distinction between myths and truly historical accounts. Herodotus wrote about his studies as 'enquiry' or historia. The Ionian approach contrasted with earlier attitudes to the past (including the Babylonian and Egyptian accounts) where the writing was intended to preserve and glorify heroic deeds, an expression of nationalism which we might now classify as propaganda.

Some of the well-known Roman historians, for example, Livy (59 BC - AD 17) regressed to some extent by using historical accounts for 'moral' and nationalistic purposes. Livy also frequently failed to distinguish between history and legend. However, Julius Caesar, despite a tendency always to present himself in a good light, generally provides an accurate record. One way in which the Greek and Roman historians were later criticised was for their failure systematically to quote their documentary sources. They did, however, see the need to doubt the accuracy of their sources and to check them against other evidence wherever possible. Perhaps for this reason many Greek and Roman writers usually preferred to keep close to their own times.

The Jews were interested in writing history because it was seen as the story of the gradual unfolding of God's plan for humanity. This view was carried over from the Old Testament to the New Testament by Christians, but the historical accuracy of the Gospels is, to say the least, open to question. We can assume that whoever wrote the Gospels were more concerned with the moral messages of Christianity than with accuracy about historical detail; and since part of the story was depicting the life of Christ as a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies it would be surprising if some distortions did not creep in.

Eusebius (AD 264-340), a bishop who wrote a history of the church, despite his difficult task of handling the role of divine providence in establishing Christianity within the Roman Empire, provided valuable accounts of the early church and also developed techniques for checking one source against others wherever possible. However, he did not always exclude what we would now regard as fiction. Medieval Christian 'history' was based on very definite assumptions about the relation between God and the world created by Him: divine intervention was a legitimate 'explanation' of events. The early centuries of Christianity were not a high point of historical accuracy.

Later, the Venerable Bede (AD 673-735) was, however, notable for carefully checking sources, particularly in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He is regarded as one of the greatest historians of the Middle Ages. The influence of Bede and other Anglo-Saxons who carefully quoted sources in historical writings also affected the revival of learning on the continent where scholars in Charlemagne's court became conscious of the need for historical accuracy, and this tradition survived despite frequent lapses when history was sacrificed to propaganda.

Renaissance historians consciously moved away from using divine intervention as an explanation and tended to move back to the pagan world. They also had an interest in social change and were aware of the fact that medieval writers operated in a different social context and world view from the Greeks and pre-Christian Romans: they valued accuracy of detail and looked critically at source material; they even began to write about the Bible as a text that might need to be interpreted and corrected in the light of studies of earlier (Greek) versions. It would not be an exaggeration to say that humanist historians rewrote much of the history of Europe on the basis of new translations of Greek and Latin texts and a more 'historical' attitude to past events.

With the Reformation came a period of disputed interpretation of historical texts based sometimes on revisions of the Bible. Eventually the history of Christianity was rewritten by Protestant scholars. The existence of two versions of historical reality, Protestant and Catholic, stimulated more critical views of texts and textual analysis, but impartiality was difficult to sustain and two rival versions of history tended to develop.

From the sixteenth century onwards history grew in popularity as a university subject and began to be seen as an essential aspect of high culture for the educated man. Stone⁶ suggested three reasons for this: apart from history being a so...