The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophies and Theories of Early Childhood Education and Care

Tricia David, Kathy Goouch, Sacha Powell, Tricia David, Kathy Goouch, Sacha Powell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138022812
• eBook ISBN: 9781317392781
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophies and Theories of Early Childhood Education and Care brings together leading writers in the field to provide a much-needed, authoritative guide to the major philosophies and theories which have shaped approaches to Early Childhood Education and Care.

Providing a detailed overview of key concepts, debates and practical challenges, the handbook combines theoretical acumen with specific examples to show how philosophies and theories have evolved over the centuries and their impact on policy and society. It examines the ways in which societies define and make sense of childhood and the factors that influence the development of philosophies about young children and their learning.

The collection offers an insight into the key theorists and considers how the economics and politics of their time and personal ideology influenced their ideas about childhood. It looks at curricula and provision which have proved inspirational and how these have impacted on policy and practice in different parts of the world. The handbook also explores alternative and perhaps less familiar philosophies and ideas about babies and young children, their place in society and the ways in which it might be appropriate to educate them

Bringing together specially commissioned pieces by a range of international authors, this handbook will enable academics, research students, practitioners and policy-makers to reflect on their own understandings and approaches, as well as the assumptions made in their own and other societies.

1 Introduction Challenging ideas

Tricia David and Sacha Powell

DOI: 10.4324/9781315678979-1

Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.

(Traveller, there is no path, the path must be forged as you walk.)

(Spanish poet Antonio Machado)

Could the poet be right if we apply his message to the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)? Has no one already forged a path? Do governments tell us which paths to take because they know the right paths or do they choose paths which they think will provide them with a populace who will grow up meek and biddable, or enterprising and industrial, or happy, fulfilled and thoughtful? Have the pioneers on whose legacies we reflect left us with models, ideas, philosophies and theories which continue to be appropriate and helpful?

In this book we provide a collection of writing by eminent scholars in our field, in which we asked them to engage with the thoughts of many of the philosophers and theorists who have influenced thinking and practice about young children and their care and education. Some readers may feel their favourite philosopher or theorist has been omitted or been given little space but we do not claim the Handbook is comprehensive – there is always more to say, more to write about. Further, it would be impossible to provide a real introduction to the vast and exciting discipline of Philosophy, which includes a number of different areas of study: Ethics, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Ontology, Logic, Axiology, Epistemology, as well as Philosophy of Mind, of Education, of Religion, of Science, of Language, and of Politics, for example.

Early Childhood Education and Care, the study of children from birth to age eight years and their experiences with those who share their lives, has been relatively neglected as an area of serious research in its own right (David et al. 2003). For many years its practitioners and policy makers have depended upon the theories about babies and young children proposed by developmental psychologists. However, Philosophy, which has a much longer history than Developmental Psychology as a discipline, has given us ideas about this early phase of life for many centuries. In this book we explore both Philosophy and Theory and their influences on the field in relation to policy, practice and research.

The term ‘early childhood education’ refers to the theory and practice of educating young children. It also incorporates the education of adults about young children, particularly in the field of teacher education … Increasing numbers of children enrolled in early childhood education programmes might be interpreted merely in terms of changing employment patterns in Western economies. However, intensified government involvement in educational institutions and increasing standardisation of curricula suggest that education during early childhood has taken on a new social and political significance.

(Farquhar and Fitzsimons 2008: 3)

We have added ‘care’ to our term of reference – not simply to incorporate consideration of provision for children of working parents – and this insistence is reflected in many of the chapters that follow.

Philosophy and theory in ECEC courses

The field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) has been influenced by a number of relatively recent philosophers and theorists, and we have tried to include in this book discussion of the philosophers and theorists, as well as their philosophies and theories.

Although Philosophy of Education was removed from university courses for teachers in England in the 1980s because the (then) government had ruled that teachers do not need to study Philosophy, the discipline is currently enjoying a phenomenal public revival, with a number of websites encouraging debate and lectures, such as the exciting ‘Philosophy in Pubs’ movement to be found in at least twenty Liverpool ale houses; the superb lectures by Professor Michael Sandel, of Harvard University, available on the internet as well as others from Oxford University; Jules Evans’s London Philosophy Club (see www.thephilosophyhub.com); groups for the retired under the auspices of the University of the Third Age (U3A – do-it-yourself study groups for retired people); and Philosophy for children in some schools (see Chapter 29).

Undergraduate teacher education courses included Philosophy of Education in order to examine aspects of life with children and young people which can arise in the everyday interactions in early years and school settings. Occasionally such incidents may prove challenging and they often require a teacher to act immediately – for example, if a child behaves unkindly or violently to another child. Other situations which require the deep thinking and discussion afforded by philosophy and reflection on theories, over and above everyday planning relating to how babies and young children learn, include the how and why of implementing government policies, while bearing in mind the particular children in one’s care. So in order to ensure that new teachers had dwelt on and debated the reasons why they would make certain decisions, sometimes on the spur of the moment, often exploring their own assumptions and histories in the process, the philosophical debate which was included in courses in the past was important. Further, Evans (2013) argues that:

schools, universities and adult education should offer some guidance to people … for life at its best and worst. That’s what the teachers … in the School of Athens once provided: they taught their students how to transform their emotions, how to cope with adversity, how to live the best possible lives.

So philosophy could help us think not only about how we work with young children but how we live as adults who are educators.

Similarly, exploring the theories which have shaped understandings of babies’ and children’s development and learning should cause us to reflect, not least because the theories we derive from Developmental Psychology, while useful, have often ‘chopped up’ aspects of children’s lives, with research often focusing on physical, emotional, cognitive and social areas separately, despite the fact that they are at best clearly synergistic and development holistic (see Chapter 24).

So what is philosophy?

Philosophy is commonly understood in the West to have begun in Ancient Greece. Philosophy is interpreted as ‘love of wisdom’ and it requires one to think hard and deeply about different topics, particularly those which raise issues or dilemmas of life. However, as we shall see, in other areas of the world, the practice of thinking deeply was also influencing life in general, the government of peoples and the education of children.

The history of Western philosophy, as far as is known, began with those labelled as the ‘pre-Socratics’ – about a dozen early Greek thinkers who tried to define the nature of reality and the make-up of the world. They included: Thales, Democritus, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Zeno and Anaximander. They all attempted to describe the nature of the sun, moon, stars and planets. They are considered to be philosophers because they sought to explain the world in rational terms.

Socrates (469–399 BCE) himself has been very influential in education systems because many educators still use the ‘Socratic method’ of asking questions to help pupils clarify their thoughts. He also believed humans achieved goodness through reason. It is from Plato (427–347 BCE), his pupil and friend, that we learn of Socrates’ ideas and reasons for them, because Plato not only recorded his own ideas but also those of Socrates. Plato’s Republic (Hamilton and Cairns 1961) indicates that he himself was most concerned about rational moral understanding and that this could be fostered through culture – the arts and literature – and he emphasized mathematics and philosophy, although he did not think it appropriate to try to engage pupils in rational moral understanding until they were older. Plato has been criticized as elitist in his views about those suitable for such education but he did at least argue that women of appropriate ability should be educated like the men.

One of Plato’s pupils, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) believed young children to be capable of learning despite being ‘hardly different from an animal’. Much of Aristotle’s works have been lost though some were found in the thirteenth century and subsequently exerted a strong influence in Western Europe. Aristotle claimed that one learns by being part of a community and practising and debating. He thought of the world as dynamic, with everything continually evolving (perhaps this was the result of his meticulous study of living creatures, the foundation of scientific research) and so he argued that the aim of education is to foster each child’s potentialities.

External influences on these philosophies would have come over land from the East via the Silk Roads as well as via the maritime trade routes through the Mediterranean Sea to the west of the British Isles. So it is difficult to be sure whether early ideas arose in China, India or Africa and were simply absorbed into Western thinking without acknowledgement, or perhaps even knowledge, of their origins. Such influences are difficult to extricate, because the ideas have become embedded in the thoughts and writing of particular philosophers.

During the late sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries, most notably Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci, began to bring Confucian ideas to Europe and Confucian texts were translated into Latin. But the intention of these travellers was to understand Chinese beliefs and values so that they might better pursue their missions by using Confucian concepts to convey Christian messages. Nevertheless, the translated works influenced Western thinkers such as Voltaire (Boston College 2015) and through his reading of these Jesuit texts on China, he reconfigured universal histories, which ‘created a teleological schema that led from Egypt to modern Christendom, completely ignoring all other parts of the world’ by giving status to Chinese civilization and beliefs (Tsien 2013: 1). A key epistemological basis for Chinese philosophy concerns the conflation of heart and mind (xin) and so the belief in the inseparable nature of the concepts of affect (feelings) and cognition (reasoning) (Rošker 2014). This epistemology can be traced to several Chinese belief systems, including Confucianism with origins dating from the sixth century BCE (but also Mohism, Legalism and Taoism). But philosophical debates about the relative in/commensurability of concepts from one cultural tradition to another have led to methodological arguments about the possibilities for comprehending and so comparing philosophies (Wong 2014). Therefore, the concept of ‘xin’, for example, can be viewed anywhere from impossible to possible to comprehend and from totally incommensurate to commensurate, depending on the philosopher’s origins and position regarding incommensurability. These philosophical positions may have been influential in objecting to the importation to Europe of Chinese beliefs systems, but it seems likely that religious and political will and power would have exerted a strong authority to restrict the effects of Confucian and other East Asian philosophical concepts and values.

Later it was Arabic thinkers such as Avicenna (980–1037), Ibn Tufayl (1106–1185, often referred to as Averroes) and Al-Ghazzali (1058–1111), who had a profound influence on philosophy. While Avicenna, a Persian doctor and philosopher, brought together the tenets of Islam and the works of Plato and Aristotle, and was largely concerned with metaphysics, Al-Ghazzali thought education should encourage pupils to develop sound value-systems in every aspect of their lives – the physical, intellectual, spiritual, and social. He also promoted the idea that each child is an individual whose capabilities should be encouraged. Ibn Tufayl wrote a novel to illustrate his ideas about human learning through growing up in a ‘state of nature’ (Ibn Tufayl 1984). While this work may have influenced later philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see Chapter 2), Ibn Tufayl’s philosophy is said to be a ‘highly integrative one, in which a place is found for mystical experience as much as for ordinary sensory experience’ (Steitieh 2001: 35) and we will see in this chapter and later in the book how this idea was followed by other philosophers, poets and theorists.

What about religion?

Religion, of one form or another, was an accepted part of life in the centuries when the philosophers mentioned above were developing their ideas, so it is not surprising that their mental explorations included thinking and questions related to how the earth came into being, how one should live ‘the good life’, and so on. Devotees of a religion joined or were born into an organized group who believed in and worshipped a particular god or gods. Within the tenets of that religion, some would express ideas about how children should be educated and/or cared for, so, for example, Jesus of Nazareth (c.4 BCE–29) taught people of all ages through simple narratives and he urged kindness, love, care for the poor and gentleness to children. This gentleness was reiterated by Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670). He wanted learners of every age and their teachers to enjoy the process.

Meanwhile...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editors and contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Challenging ideas—Tricia David and Sacha Powell
• Part I Philosophers and their philosophies of early childhood education and care
• Part II Theorists and their theories
• Part III Influences of philosophies and theories on research, policy and practice
• Part IV Inspirations: philosophies and theories in action
• Index