Making Sense of Education

An Introduction to the Philosophy and Theory of Education and Teaching

David Carr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134478132
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Making Sense of Education provides a contemporary introduction to the key issues in educational philosophy and theory. Exploring major past and present conceptions of education, teaching and learning, this book makes philosophy of education relevant to the professional practice of teachers and student teachers, as well of interest to those studying education as an academic subject.
The book is divided into three parts:

• education, teaching and professional practice: issues concerning education, the role of the teacher, the relationship of educational theory to practice and the wider moral dimensions of pedagogy
• learning, knowledge and curriculum: issues concerning behaviourist and cognitive theories of learning, knowledge and meaning, curriculum aims and content and evaluation and assessment
• schooling, society and culture: issues of the wider social and political context of education concerning liberalism and communitarianism, justice and equality, differentiation, authority and discipline.

This timely and up-to-date introduction assists all those studying and/or working in education to appreciate the main philosophical sources of and influences on present day thinking about education, teaching and learning

Part I Education, teaching and professional practice

Chapter 1 Education, persons and schooling

DOI: 10.4324/9780203994702-1

The concept of education

It has often been claimed that the concept of education is essentially contested.¹ On this view, different socio-cultural consituencies and interest groups are inclined to endorse or canvass their own distinctive conceptions of education, and one may not expect to find any generally agreed definition of the term ‘education’. To whatever extent this is so, it is also reasonable to suppose that our best educational efforts depend upon some rationally coherent and defensible interpretation of the term, and that insofar as some educational endeavours are less rationally defensible than others, not all rival perspectives can be of equal value. From this viewpoint, one basic problem for any rational account of education is that of holding together two separately plausible ideas that appear nevertheless to be in some tension. The first is the professionally important point that there are different (often opposed) ideas about education, and that the prospects of professional development and progress stand to be enhanced by an educated appreciation of a range of diverse and perhaps logically incompatible educational possibilities. Hence, one key task of professional education and training is to shake the established educational prejudices of trainee teachers — to help them see that the way in which education has been hitherto or conventionally conceived is not necessarily either the only or the best way of operating. However, real educational progress also depends upon recognising that coherent practice is ultimately answerable to certain rational criteria that professional practitioners ignore only at their peril: that therefore not all rival conceptions of education are equally worthy of serious rational consideration. In short, any sensible account of education needs to steer a course between reasonable pluralism and indiscriminate relativism. Following some exploration of the reasons for supposing that education cannot but be a contested concept, this chapter will nevertheless proceed to indicate some of the groundfloor conceptual considerations and distinctions that might nevertheless be said to underlie any and all coherent conceptions of educational practice.

Educational philosophers and theorists have adopted a variety of approaches to understanding the concept of education. For example, one time-honoured strategy has been to examine possible etymological derivations of ‘education’ from such Latin terms as ‘educere’ and ‘educare’. Eschewing such well-worn and not notably promising leads, however, I shall here and elsewhere in this work try to see what basic light might be shed on the nature of education by exploring its links with some other closely associated notions. First, there is a clear enough relationship between education and learning: whatever is learned in the course of education or related enterprises could hardly be other than a matter of the acquisition of skills, capacities, dispositions or qualities not previously possessed — although it may also be a matter of the development of already given (innate) qualities or potentialities. Secondly, and consequently, any learning surely presupposes learners: thus, insofar as there have to be subjects of education as well as education in subjects (or whatever), it seems worth asking what kinds of agencies these are, and what benefits we would expect them to derive from education. Thirdly, there are apparent links between education, learning and teaching: learning is often assumed (rightly or wrongly) to be a causal or other consequence of teaching, and the terms ‘education’ and ‘teaching’ are sometimes used interchangeably. Fourthly, there is a fairly common association between education and schooling: indeed, there is a significant tendency, not least in modern civil societies, to associate education with the sort of institutions in which education is held to occur — though the very idea of schools as sites of education has also been seriously questioned in recent times (in my view, coherently if not necessarily justifiably).² Since a large portion of part I of this work is devoted to different aspects of teaching, and the issue of learning and its educational significance will occupy most of part II, I shall not say much more about these issues in the present chapter. However, some preliminary examination in this first chapter of the learner or subject of learning, and of the vexed relationship between education and schooling, should serve to provide significant insights into the basic formal character of education as a human practice.

Education and persons

Let us therefore begin with a brief examination of the learner as the subject or recipient of education. In this connection, we should first observe that the class of educated or educable agencies is not obviously coextensive with that of those who can learn. Since most biologically constituted forms of life — for example, bats, rats, cats and amoebas — are capable of some degree of learning, the category of learners is obviously larger than that of educated or educable beings: whereas we may speak perfectly coherently of teaching dogs to do things, or of their learning this or that, it seems absurd or solecistic to speak of educated mice or of educating rabbits. Should we only then talk of educating human beings? In fact, I think that insofar as humans are themselves only a biological species — a kind of animal — there is probably something also rather inexact or misleading about regarding humans as the subjects of education. A rather different uptake on any inquiry about who or what qualifies for education might reflect the consideration that education concerns the initiation of human agents into the rational capacities, values and virtues that warrant our ascription to them of the status of persons. This, in turn, presupposes an important distinction between human beings and persons. Human beings conceived as evolutionarily continuous with other animal species may be the objects of biological or anthropological study. Persons, however, are not primarily objects of scientific study, but subjects of criminal prosecutions, parties to marriage contracts, members of clubs and associations, actors on stages, characters in novels, and so on. From this viewpoint, we should also note that (biological) humanity might not be necessary for personhood: non-human extra-terrestrial or alien intelligent life forms might well be regarded as persons (as hence as educable) — and, of course, many religious believers regard gods, angels and demons as non-human persons. More controversially, however, there may be some case for denying (at least complete) personhood to some human beings: we do not readily regard — other than in a somewhat courtesy sense — newborn infants as (more than potential) persons, and we may also be inclined to deny the status of person to those in irretrievable comas whose mental life no longer exceeds bare sentience.³

In short, the idea of person — as distinct from human being — is more or less that of a bearer of rational and practical capacities, values and traits of character, which are themselves inconceivable apart from complex networks of interpersonal association and/or social institution. To this extent, there seems to be a large grain of truth in the famous (or notorious) doctrine of the great French founding father of modern philosophy, René Descartes,⁴ known as Cartesian dualism — basically the idea that minds or souls are non-physical or immaterial entities or substances that are metaphysically or ontologically distinct from the physical bodies with which they are associated (as well as separable from them, in principle, upon death). The significant truth in this idea is that human persons are indeed not identical with the biologically constituted bodies of human beings, and that features of human personality, character and value do seem resistant to explanation and understanding in the natural scientific terms of physics, chemistry or biology. At this point, to be sure, one might well insist that there are something like natural sciences of persons as well as of human being: do not such statistical sciences as sociology, psychology and economics take persons as their objects, as those of biology and anthropology take human beings as objects? But this is in itself to beg, in a peculiarly post-Cartesian way, a question that this work is concerned to raise — not least in part II. The key point here is that it is in fact an open question whether it is appropriate to regard psychology as a statistical science in the manner of physics or chemistry: as we shall see, there may be reasons for doubting whether different forms of empirical psychology can afford insight into those features of personal agency of particular interest to educationalists. To be sure, to raise questions about the status of psychology as an empirical science is not to say that it cannot be regarded as a valid form of human inquiry; it is rather to say that if someone is intent upon understanding the minds of other people, he or she might do better to study history, biography or the works of Shakespeare than ‘scientific’ psychology. From this viewpoint, there may be reasons to be sympathetic to Descartes's denial of any complete reduction of ‘soul’, mind, biography or history to the causal and statistical discourses and categories of natural science.

The real trouble with Descartes's mind–body dualism, of course, follows from his conclusion that the minds or souls not liable for such scientific reduction are individual and ‘inner’ ghostly entities, inaccessible to observation, and in principle detachable from their corporeal vehicles.⁵ First, if many of the psychological characteristics we attribute to persons have inherently public and practical features and associations, it is difficult to see how these might be properties of anything even potentially disembodied: how could I be described as a courageous person or a talented pianist apart from the contexts of embodied agency and skill that give substance to such attributes? Thus, some form of embodiment — terrestrial or other — seems presupposed to many if not most personal attributes. Secondly, if the mentality of personhood cannot be defined apart from certain public institutions and practices, then it can hardly be possessed by essentially disassociated individuals: how, for example, can I attribute criminal responsibility to a person in the absence of socially constituted legal institutions? None the less, it is the Cartesian idea of a person as an inner, private and dissociated psychological entity that continues to haunt Descartes's rationalist and empiricist heirs — Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume and others — well into the twentieth century. It even survives in Kant's heroic attempt to reconcile the basic insights of empiricism and rationalism in his great Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason.⁶ Indeed, a particularly virulent form of Cartesianism seems deeply implicated in Kant's idea of the moral agent as a non-empirical subject of an other-worldly moral law. For Kant there can be no genuine person-hood without the freedom of rational autonomy or self-determination — but, in turn, no such self-determination apart from the rational disinterest and impartiality that characterises the moral law: hence, the real personhood of pure practical reason has to be significantly independent of the world of familiar self-referenced (if not self-interested) drives and motives. For Kant the real person is not the empirical self of familiar everyday association, but rather the metaphysical noumenal self of transcendent practical rationality.

At all events, two important consequences may be observed to follow from this brief exploration of the conceptual relationship between education and personhood — from, indeed, the suggestion that education primarily concerns the promotion of personhood. The first is that ideas of person and education are essentially normative notions: from this viewpoint, personhood is best understood as a function of the initiation via education and other processes of socialisation into the values, habits, practices, customs and institutions constitutive of peculiarly human culture. What may be considered peculiar about human culture, of course, is that it is the free creation or product of rational agents who are able to plan and direct their lives in the light of reasons not entirely (if at all) explicable in the statistical terms of natural science: there is the problematic gap, noted by philosophers from the time of Plato, between causal and normative explanation and understanding.⁷ However, although modern educational philosophers have sometimes expressed much this point by claiming that education is about the development of mind, we have seen that this way of putting things is also liable to misconstrual if the mind is conceived in Cartesian terms as something purely subjective or exclusively ‘inner’. On the contrary, regarding personhood as a function of educational initiation into the norms of human culture enables us to appreciate more clearly the essentially practical, public and social character of human mental or spiritual life: this has the significant consequence of leaving open the possibility — a bone of contention in modern educational philosophy — that the values and practices into which persons may be initiated in the name of education are at least as much practical as theoretical.

All the same, the claim that education is a matter of initiation into the values, habits, practices, customs and institutions of (human) culture does not yet get us very far. For a start, the term ‘culture’ is notoriously ambiguous. With respect to the ‘sociological’ sense of culture, which means the entire sum of customs and practices that characterise a given social constituency, it should be clear enough that education could not concern itself with all of these: aside from the fact that any such comprehensive initiation must be (logistically) beyond the scope of education, it is also clear that many human practices are morally or otherwise unsuitable for educational consumption. However, a narrower evaluative conception of culture as what is most humanly worthwhile — in the famous words of Matthew Arnold, ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’⁸ — confronts us with the central educational question of deciding which of the numerous forms of learning encountered in human culture(s) are to be considered crucial for the personal development of young people. This, of course, is a large question upon which much ink has been spilt in educational philosophy — and which will, in one way or another, concern us throughout the rest of this work. For the rest of this chapter, however, we shall try to prepare the ground for subsequent inquiries by focusing on a number of fairly elementary (albeit not unproblematic) distinctions.

Education, culture and value

How then should we reasonably conceive the overall aims and content of education and schooling? A rather unhelpful response in line with the story so far is that the main task of education is to prepare young people for adult personal and social functioning: a little more precisely, to equip individuals with the knowledge, understanding and skills apt for a personally satisfying, socially responsible and economically productive life. Once again, however, the trouble is that it is not obvious where these banalities — the kind of rhetorical flourishes that often find their way into party political speeches about education (education, education⁹) — precisely get us in any useful practical terms. Indeed, it is not obvious that all of these alleged educational goals would always sit comfortably together. On the one hand, a life given over to tedious factory routine might well be considered economically productive, but it is not obviously personally satisfying; on the other, the life of drug abuse and sexual promiscuity that this person finds personally satisfying could hardly be thought socially responsible. Thus, at the very least, such generalities require considerable further specification in the interests of some resolution of potential tensions. Indeed, it may well be thought that some of these tensions are actually irresolvable. Some such suspicion may be reinforced by those public disputes between so-called ‘educational traditionalists’ and proponents of so-called ‘progressive’ or ‘child-centred’ education — or (a different distinction) between those who emphasise the responsibilities of education to economic goals and those who stress its importance for personal growth and fulfilment — which may seem (literally) interminable. More profoundly, however, such suspicion also seems supported by the kind of reflection about the normativity of ideas of person, education and culture on which we have already briefly touched: given the diverse purposes of knowledge, and the different ways in which it can be valued in human life and experience, it ought not to occasion much surprise that there is serious disagreement about educational aims and goals.

Furthermore, on an even superficial view, the standard school curriculum seems to contain forms of knowledge, understanding and skill of rather diverse human significance and value. First, many of the subjects and skills that have found their way into past and present schools would appear to have been included on grounds of simple usefulness. Some subjects may have been included because they were considered personally useful for post-school individual functioning — for example, the home economics and woodwork that used to figure prominently (and usually respectively) in the education of British secondary school girls and boys. Others may have been included as indispensible to the vocational training of certain types (again often defined by ability) of learner — for example, auto-repair techniques or (especially in pre-information and communication technology eras) secretarial skills. However, it is usually possible to discover many other activities and skills in school curricula that are not in any of these senses useful — for example, the skills and activities of physical education and dance that feature on most school curricula. Of course, it is often insisted that such activites are instrumentally useful insofar as they can claim to be conducive to the general level of health and fitness of those who pursue them. But since the time allocated to physical education in most school curricula is seldom sufficient to improve health and fitness significantly, and it is anyway unclear why physical educationalists would not choose more fitness-efficient activities than hockey and ballet if that was all they were interested in, such arguments are not especially persuasive. The truth is that people often live long and full lives without engaging in physical activity of any kind (indeed, sport and games may actually damage the health) and that the main reason why people dance or play games is that they find them personally fulfilling — or, less pretentiously, just fun.

Just as clearly, however, educational curricula are bristling with subjects that are not only of little direct practical utility, but also not just matters of personal bent or predilection (nor even, for that matter, much fun). To be sure, some of these may be pursued as personal interests or passions in much the same way as sport or dance: just as some people may want to spend their leisure time, or even their entire lives, playing golf or engaging in creative dance, so others may dev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• PART I Education, teaching and professional practice
• PART II Learning, knowledge and curriculum
• PART III Schooling, society and culture
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index