Philosophy and the Study of Education

New Perspectives on a Complex Relationship

Tom Feldges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138583757
• eBook ISBN: 9780429014604
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Combining contributions from international academics and practitioners, this new text develops students' ability to philosophise as well as learn about philosophy and education. It considers issues concerned with the interface between education and wider society but goes beyond this to explore education and philosophy at a micro level: the teacher–learner relationship. It challenges and empowers students to use philosophy as a tool within education, as a set of theories to understand education and as a potential means to develop solutions to problems as they occur within practice.

Assuming no pre-existing philosophical background, Philosophy and the Study of Education explores complex topics including:

• encouraging young people to criticise and challenge all authority;

• the limits of a religious-based education;

• the desire for 'alternative facts' or 'truths';

• the second-class status of vocational pursuits;

• the inherent struggle in the teacher–student relationship;

• the relationship between emotion, morality and autonomy in teaching.

Including discussion questions and further recommended reading, this thought-providing book will support and inspire all those on Education Studies, Childhood Studies and Youth Studies courses in developing a critical perspective and understanding the true value of philosophy within education.

1Introduction

Philosophy and education

Tom Feldges

Introduction

As the title reveals, this book is about philosophy and the study of education. However, instead of a comprehensive story about what philosophers had to say about education over the past 2,500 years, the book invites the readers to engage with philosophical thought about education for themselves. That might sound rather too ambitious a project. At the end of the day, what would the average student who enrolled on one of the many educational programmes have to say that could possibly ever match the importance of what the great philosophers had to say about education? It is exactly this sort of question that poses a real danger of putting a premature and unwarranted end to any aspiring educationalist’s attempt to engage in philosophising about education. That would be a shame as philosophy is too valuable a tool merely to be treated as a stock of knowledge that every student of education has to learn and reiterate. Philosophy is much more a way of thinking and a way of engaging with the world and with our place within this world. It provides a set of tools that allows us to think more clearly about the problems we want to engage with. In that respect philosophy can be done by everyone and education provides a good number of problems, well worthy of a philosophising approach. Nevertheless, a word of caution is needed here: this is not to say that anyone who says something presumably ‘deep’ about education is actually contributing to the field of the philosophy of education. But it equally does not mean that philosophical thought about education could only count if it came from one of the usually recognised great philosophers of education.

This is where an important distinction appears: a) we could learn about the ideas of the great philosophers regarding educational matters, or b) we could try to develop an individual ability to engage in philosophical thought about education. It is our own choice regarding how we want to engage with the pairing of philosophy and education.

An initial thought about philosophy and education

The engagement with the philosophy of education is not only a list of historic facts to be learned in the form of an intellectual history. Philosophy of education should be an active engagement with current and future problems in a philosophical way. This nevertheless needs to be done alongside one’s awareness of what has been said or written by the great philosophers.

It is this distinction between a descriptive engagement with the philosophy of education and our own experience of engaging in philosophical thought that the first section of this introduction aims to develop. Yet, while making this demarcation between describing what kind of philosophies of education are available and our own experience of engaging with philosophical thought about education, another important differentiation becomes apparent. This is:

a)the mere provision of some description of an object or situation; and

b)our own individual experience of encountering this object or matter of fact.

While the first section of this introduction will develop the doing philosophy aspect further, the second section focuses upon this second differentiation between scientific descriptions and individual experience.

Unpacking the problem

It is probably the time now to make clear that, in getting more clarity about the subject matter of this book – philosophy and education – we are already philosophising. We have revealed the learning about and the doing approaches to philosophy and we have, in a second step, revealed a further distinction between descriptive and experiential accounts. This is what philosophers call ‘unpacking an issue or problem’, i.e., developing some clarity about what sort of potential dimensions a problem has. Every kind of philosophical engagement should start with such a conceptual clarification.

Learning about philosophy vs. doing philosophy

Undoubtedly it is possible to provide a narrative capturing all the worthwhile educational-related philosophical thought that has survived over time and is still available to us. These narratives, as a written or spoken account of what has been achieved before, provide a good first approach to the philosophy of education. They enable us to know what has been thought and what has been argued before and thus save us from having to start from scratch. These descriptive accounts regarding the intellectual history of the philosophy of education allow us, as Sir Isaac Newton is reported to have said, to stand on the shoulders of the giants who lived before us. Approaching the philosophy of education in this way provides us with the ability to utilise our philosophical predecessors’ knowledge and insight. This gives us a vantage point from which to see further while utilising existing insight to apply it to current problems. Nevertheless, in doing so, we have left the field of merely learning about philosophy and we have started to do philosophy.

The philosophy of education is a difficult area to engage with. This is not necessarily because the topic is especially complex or complicated. It is more that there is a certain fuzziness in the concept of the ‘philosophy of education’. There is some debate around the question of who is supposed to be qualified to do this sort of philosophy. Should it be left to trained and qualified philosophers only, or rather be a field for trained and qualified educationalists, or should one be trained in both subjects, or does one not need any formal training at all?

For a discussion of these questions and a good overview on the philosophy of education it is worth to have a look at Philips and Siegel (2013). (See the recommended reading suggestions at the end of this chapter.)

However, we leave this question of the academic division out of our focus, while remaining with the earlier statement about the fuzziness of the ‘philosophy of education’. This fuzziness is often the reason why rather fruitless debates are carried out in the most controversial manner. Quite often it appears as if the participants in these debates have no shared definition of the concepts that should form the basis of their ensuing debate. To make this point a little bit clearer, it is probably best to explain it with recourse to the concept of ‘education’ itself.

• ‘Education’ can be understood as an attempt to transfer knowledge and skills from an instructor to a learner on a merely individual basis. The learner gains knowledge or skills if the teacher has been successful in establishing such a transformative relationship. Hence, education, and with that the philosophy of education, could concern itself with the transformative relationship between both of them.
• ‘Education’ could equally be understood as the sum total of a society’s efforts to engender knowledge and skills in its children and young people. Hence, education as an institutionalised effort, taking place in schools, workplaces and universities, aiming to secure the ‘social continuity of life’ (Dewey, 1942 [1916]: 3).

It is possible to ignore the individual aspect of the knowledge transfer and leave it to psychological experimentation and theorising and/or educational practice. Within this section we focus upon the social aspect of education and we thus remain – currently –oblivious to all the recent developments as they are currently discussed in the philosophy of the mind; therefore we need to come back to this individual focus. Nevertheless, there are more questions for us. If education is about the transfer of knowledge and skill, then the need arises to define what exactly would or should qualify as knowledge or as a desirable skill in the first place. And if education is about preparing young people to lead successful lives in their societies, then it is equally necessary to develop a clear differentiation between education, enculturation and indoctrination.

In order to develop our distinction between learning about philosophy and doing philosophy, it is probably best to examine Dewey’s notion of the social continuity of life. Utilising Dewey as an example here is appropriate because he is a widely recognised philosopher of education. His 1916 book Democracy and Education is a standard work of educational philosophy. Undoubtedly, anyone wanting to study education seriously should have read it or at least be familiar with its main claims; hence one should have learned about Dewey’s philosophy of education.

When Dewey (1942 [1916]: 3) developed his educational philosophy he did so against the background of the ‘social continuity of life’: he made the point that, although societies are formed by individuals who are born and eventually bound to die, ‘the life of the group goes on’. The title of Dewey’s book, Democracy and Education, is testament to the fact that he saw this group or society as a democratic one. When looking at the institution of ‘education’ within a society, it is important to understand that education does not just happen. Education comes at a cost to any society, and to justify the allocation of societal resources in the form of time or money towards educational efforts, education itself has to offer some return to society. Institutionalised education, on a societal plane, is thus a goal-orientated endeavour: it serves a social function to bring about a benefit to the society that engages in such efforts. Education contributes to something that society wants to achieve or wants the learners to be able to contribute to this society. On realising this, the first step towards a philosophising engagement with Dewey’s educational philosophy has successfully been made. We are no longer the passive recipients, taking Dewey’s writing at face value, but we gained the ability to start developing our own thoughts in relation to Dewey by beginning to think, with him and/or against him about current issues.

Against this conceptualisation of educational practice as a goal-orientated, functional process, Dewey (1942 [1916]) claims that education should aim to bring about the development of autonomous individuals. These individuals should be able to think for themselves and to engage critically in debates to challenge existing rules and regulations of society. Hence, and in relation to Dewey’s idea of democratic societies, education should serve democratic societies by educating the young to develop into engaged, democratic citizens. The function of Dewey’s education is thus the safeguarding of a society’s democratic continuation by initiating the young to democratic values.

On a more general level

It is important to realise that these functions, supposed to serve a specific goal, are processes guided by the end that they aim to achieve. Philosophers call these ‘teleological’ processes and they are to be accounted for by their intended purpose, rather than by their cause.

However, care is needed here. On encountering the notion of ‘inherent purposes’, as in Dewey’s conceptualisation of education, it is necessary to critically question who defined or set this specific goal and with what sort of justifications. It is not good enough, just because Dewey’s claims about democracy and our feelings are the same, to assume that everything is fine and no critical engagement would be required or even possible. An example will help to make this clearer.

History has shown that totalitarian regimes often utilise education for other purposes than educating a critical and autonomous individual. In many of these societies the individual is given only a limited critical-intellectual space to think and reason. Education is often reduced to the transmission of a specific worldview or the doctrines of such societies. Education is turned into a system-stabilising indoctrination of learners to serve the society they were born into. But is that really so fundamentally different from what happens in democratic societies? When it comes to the functional nature of education as a social endeavour that aims to achieve a goal, then both educational processes – Dewey’s ‘pure’ education and the indoctrination of totalitarian regimes – are working along the same lines. Both forms of education strive to achieve something for their surrounding society, i.e., to yield a stabilising effect to maintain a society’s continuation. However, following our line of thought, this something manifests itself as the opposing ends of a spectrum that reaches from Dewey’s presumably legitimate educational efforts at one end towards the supposedly sinister totalitarian educational indoctrination on the other. Nevertheless, the functional mechanisms striving towards this society-maintaining something are the same: they are functional processes.

The functional similarity of societal educational efforts opens up the puzzle of having to decide where to draw the line between legitimate educational efforts and illegitimate indoctrination. In both cases we have functional processes that are only different in terms of the positive value usually attached to one goal, and the negative value commonly attached to the other. This is not good news, because these arbitrary value judgements emerge in relation to the surrounding culture which makes such judgements. Hence, democratic societies will appreciate the critical engagement of its citizens in an open communicative exchange in which the better argument prevails; whereas totalitarian societies will rate positively their citizens’ conformity to enable the flourishing of their society. But who is to say which one of these purposes holds moral superiority and should thus be endorsed? Even more so, it must remain questionable as to whether it could be possible to draw a clear dividing line between these opposing standpoints. That is, to answer to the question at which point one is about to leave one of these goals behind, striving too far towards the opposite. This is important as, in the absence of the necessary clarity, one cannot form a definite idea of which educational practice belongs to which sort of value. So how could one ever be sure that the learners are not already being indoctrinated while teaching them to become critical thinkers? The question of what constitutes suitable knowledge and desirable skill in any society is thus a genuinely philosophical one. To highlight this point, consider the issue of ‘environmental awareness’ as an example here. The question of a school/university-facilitated awareness of the problems with environmental and ecological issues exemplifies the problem of having to decide what sort of knowledge should be passed on to the learners and what should be left out of the curriculum. Whatever the answer to this question is, it will invariably reflect our own values. One might opt for an education that encourages resource-preserving restraint for the sake of future human beings. Alternatively, one could perceive such an environme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series editor’s preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Philosophy and education
• 2 Socrates for teachers
• 3 Philosophy with Children and self-determination in education
• 4 Philosophy in Islam and its limit on teaching reason in humanities
• 5 Children’s epistemic rights and hermeneutical marginalisation in schools
• 6 Consciousness, physicalism and vocational education
• 7 Emotion and effective learning
• 8 The social, the natural and the educational
• 9 The teacher–student relationship: An existential approach
• 10 Educational phenomenology: Is there a need and space for such a pursuit?
• 11 Making sense of it all?A concluding attempt
• Index