Philosophy of Education: The Key Concepts

John Gingell, Christopher Winch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134109654
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This new edition of Philosophy of Education: The Key Concepts is an easy to use A-Z guide summarizing all the key terms, ideas and issues central to the study of educational theory today. Fully updated, the book is cross-referenced throughout and contains pointers to further reading, as well as new entries on such topics as:

Citizenship and Civic Education

Liberalism

Capability

Well-being

Patriotism

Globalisation

Open-mindedness

Creationism and Intelligent Design.

Comprehensive and authoritative this highly accessible guide provides all that a student, teacher or policy-maker needs to know about the latest thinking on education in the 21st century.'

PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

The Key Concepts

AESTHETIC/ARTISTIC EDUCATION

On surveying the titles of books and articles within philosophy of education concerned with the topic of aesthetic or artistic education there seems to be, initially, a large body of work dealing with this area. There is a series of books by Best (1978, 1985, 1992), a substantial literature on creativity and important articles by Hepburn (1960, 1972). However, closer scrutiny of this material shows that very little of it has to do with either aesthetic or artistic education. Rather, it has to do with using the arts as a way of educating something else. Thus, Hepburn argues (1972) that the arts — and especially literature — are of importance in the education of the emotions. Best holds that the value of the arts is in their contribution to our understanding of ‘the human condition and other aspects of life’ (1985: 186). The literature concerning creativity, although it may touch upon aesthetic or artistic appreciation, only does so in the context of teaching people to produce works of art. What we have in this literature is either an emphasis on practice or the embodiment of a tradition that goes back at least to Plato which insists that the significance of the arts must be cognitive or moral. And these attitudes are reflected in the curriculum in schools. So, for instance, music education is essentially about learning to play an instrument or to sing. Literature functions as a part of learning a language and tends to be approached as if it was essentially didactic, and art history has trouble finding any place on a curriculum. (Before the introduction of the National Curriculum in England and Wales in 1988 there was little, if any, art history taught before children were 16. At present there is some concern to see that children appreciate, say paintings, but it is a concern that looks like vanishing almost before it has been established and it stops far short of offering art history as a distinct subject on the pre-A level curriculum.)

But all of this is terribly odd! Whilst it may be perfectly true that lessons for life may be learned from art — if you want to understand human beings, then reading Jane Austen or Henry James is a better bet than perusing the latest behaviourist textbook—it is also true that Austen and James are novelists not psychologists and have to be appreciated as such and that the vast majority of art simply does not have this kind of cognitive or moral loading. It is difficult, for instance, to see what moral messages music is supposed to deliver and the notion that it functions as an articulation of human feelings has been much criticised (Beardsley 1958; Dickie 1997). To see art as simply instructive both makes mysterious our approach to it—the person listening with rapt attention to a Mozart concerto for the hundredth time must be seriously stupid if they have yet to get the message — and trivialises it — because it treats works of art as if they are simply containers for something else. If we think that the value of Monet is that he enables us to look at the countryside in a different way then we are doing a grave disservice to both Monet in particular and painting in general.

This is not to endorse either a purely formalist view of art — which seems just as open to criticism as a purely expressive or mimetic view of art (see Beardsley 1958; Dickie 1997) — or to hold that art is merely entertainment. It is to insist that art is, in and for itself, serious (so serious that many people can spend their lives concerned with it in various ways) but its seriousness is not as a means to other (e.g. educational) ends, but rather as an end in itself. Artistic achievement is one of the great forms of human achievement — perhaps the greatest and it is as such that it ought to be studied.

ACCOUNTABILITY

‘Accountability’ refers to a moral relationship created when someone gives to someone else an undertaking to do something. This second party is either someone in authority who trusts the first party or someone who has committed resources for the act to be carried out. Education, whether carried out by the state or privately, fundamentally involves accountability relationships. Resources are committed to build schools, large amounts of time and energy are committed by children and teachers, and promises and contracts are made to provide educational goods and to strive to achieve them. However, unravelling the nature of accountability relationships in education is more difficult than merely stating that they exist.

One problem is the number and variety of interested and involved parties or stakeholders. The other is the long-term nature of most educational projects and the consequent difficulty in ascertaining when a promise made has in fact been kept. The difficulty becomes particularly acute in relation to publicly funded education because the stakeholders include: children (who commit trust, time and energy); parents (who are the primary custodians of childrens’ interests); taxpayers both private and corporate (who commit resources); governments (who deploy resources raised from taxation); and teachers (who commit time and energy). It is generally accepted that there is a moral obligation on the part of teachers to be accountable to the various elements of society who have a stake in education, but there is far less agreement as to how that obligation is to be discharged. One extreme view, advocated by Chubb and Moe (1990) and Tooley (1995, 2001) is that market relationships, largely unmediated by the state, can do this job. However, for those for whom this is not an option there are large problems. Partly these consist of the fact that it is difficult to be against accountability, as such, even if you are against some of the present implementations of accountability procedures (Blacker 2003; Biesta 2004). But partly, it is because what some see in almost entirely negative terms, e.g. the audited self-review associated with the British Quality Assurance Agency; others see as the way forward for schools (Davis and White 2001).

Beyond this large dispute there are other issues that publicly funded education systems have to deal with, in ensuring accountability. The first is that of ensuring that the mix of aims adopted by the system is actually met and, if so, to what extent. The second is the question of whether one seeks to assess the effectiveness of the system as a whole or whether one seeks to assess individual units of educational activity, like schools and teachers. Answers to the first question will be compromised if there are no clear aims for the system, or if the stated aims do not reflect the wishes of some of the stakeholders. Different answers to this latter question will lead to different forms of assessment. Pure market-led systems of accountability will mean that the impersonal forces of supply and demand will determine whether schools remain in business. Even market systems need indicators of effectiveness and there is not much consensus as to which are the best. The major alternatives are customer satisfaction (raising the question as to who exactly are the customers); assessment results (raising issues about whether results reflect effectiveness); value-added measures (which have their own epistemic problems); and inspection (which poses issues about subjectivity).

ACHIEVEMENT

The outcomes of education are usually characterised as the achievements of those who have been educated. These may be expressed in terms of whether or not the aims of education were fulfilled in relation to those individuals and to what degree. In order to find out what has been achieved one requires some form of assessment. Most non-educators tend to think of educational achievement in terms of scores achieved in tests or examinations and, maybe, they wish to compare educational achievement against educational standards. Some have argued (e.g. Pring 1992) that, although achievements can be compared, standards cannot. The distinction between the two rests on the observation that in comparing achievements, or in assessing them, one is sometimes comparing them against a standard. Thus, if a student achieves 50 per cent in a test and 50 per cent is the score needed for grade C then that student meets the standard for the award of C.

However, low raw achievement does not necessarily imply a lack of educational success. A student may transform himself educationally to a great extent by starting from a low base and moving to a high one compared to where he was before but a low one compared with, say, national norms. Such a student has, in a real sense, achieved much. It is, however, much easier to assess achievement through the calibration of a test score than it is through a measure of transformation (see effectiveness) and measures of transformation are logically dependent on measures of achievement since they measure the gap between two measures of achievement. However, if testing is not adequate then the possibility of assessing achievement is also compromised. The main threat to adequate measures of achievement lies in their providing adequate validity. While this may seem like a technical problem in relation to some subjects like mathematics (but see Davis 1995, 1996) there are more daunting difficulties in measuring the achievement of other, less easily quantifiable, aims, such as spiritual awareness. There are further questions concerning the long-term achievements realised by education. Should one, for example, measure pre-school achievement in terms of adult social success and can this be done with any degree of accuracy (Schweinhart and Weikart 1980)?

Other issues arise concerning what is meant by achieving high standards. Is it better to eliminate low achievement than to raise high achievement? If one opts for high achievement does one mean by this that the achievement of some students should meet high standards, or that it is enough that one student meets very high absolute standards (see Cooper 1980; Winch 1996). Or again, does high achievement mean high rates of transformation for the most able students or for all? Is it worthwhile measuring achievement in terms of transformation or should one be more bothered about whether indigenous achievement meets standards accepted internationally? These questions suggest that simply claiming that an education system is achievement-oriented is not claiming very much. Questions about how achievement is to be conceptualised and which conceptualisation is to be given most weight when evaluating educational activities are not only philosophical matters but political problems of some complexity.

ACTION RESEARCH

It is argued that teachers need research that tells them how to improve their classroom practice. Large-scale projects carried out in contexts remote from their own will not help them. In addition, the invidious model of teacher as practitioner and researcher as dispenser-of-advice deprives teachers of professional autonomy. The solution is to empower the teacher as a researcher in her own right (Stenhouse 1975). This entails, not just that teachers carry out research according to the suggestions of others, but that they set the research agenda and determine the methodology. In this way they are fully autonomous in directing the research process towards the resolution of their own professional concerns.

The action researcher will identify an issue that needs to be resolved. She will design an intervention and record the effects of its implementation, review the outcome and disseminate her results. She will carry out her research in her classroom, integrating it into her everyday work. The advantages can be seen in the enhancement of professional power that it gives to teachers together with control over the research agenda. In this respect, teachers are emulating the practice of higher-prestige professions such as medicine.

Potential disadvantages concern possible lack of expertise of the teacher-researcher, the limited validity and reliability of results obtained in such conditions, together with a possible waste of resources. However, a powerful coalition is building up over the years against the perceived irrelevance of much academic educational research (Hargreaves 1996), and some form of action research offers a way of addressing practical concerns.

ADVISING

There are some areas of academic concern which say as much about the context in which they originate as they do about the issues they address. Such is a short paper by Douglas Stewart ‘An Analysis of Advising’ (1978) which defends the giving of advice — in the particular contexts of counselling, moral education and professional guidance but the list could be much extended — against the charge that advisers are seeking to control, dominate or manipulate the person being offered the advice or striving to decide, speak for or get such a person to do something. Stewart’s analysis owes much to the analytical tradition of Austin and Searle (Austin 1962; Searle 1964) and his solution to the problem turns upon arguing that in giving advice I am aiming for an ‘illocutionary’ effect, i.e. to have the person being advised recognise and understand what is being said to him, rather than a ‘perlocutionary’ effect, i.e. having him actually do what he is advised to do. Unfortunately this distinction does not seem to do the trick. When we advise our students, in their own best interests, to read book X we want, if we are sincere, not merely that they recognise what is being said to them but that they, in their own best interests, actually do read X.

However, the success or failure of the analysis is by the way. Such a defence of such an everyday practice — even when such a practice is extended into professional spheres — is only apposite in a world partly gone mad! Without the giving and taking of advice such practices as child-rearing, education, friendship, training, medicine and much of the everyday commerce between human beings, e.g. ‘My sink leaks …’ — ‘Ah, what you need for that…’, would become impossible. Therefore, any rejection or resentment of such a practice — in terms of ‘personal space’, autonomy or what have you, shows a dangerous alienation from the realities of human life. If we have reached a situation in which some people are prepared to countenance such a rejection or harbour such a resentment we have reached a sorry state indeed.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

A strong version of the notion of equality of opportunity maintains that it does not obtain unless outcomes of educational processes are roughly the same for all groups. This condition will not obtain so long as they are denied equality of treatment. In order to ensure commensurate treatment it is necessary to change entry conditions so that some groups receive a comparative advantage. Only in this way will historic injustices be righted. Affirmative action could be seen as a group-oriented version of Nozick’s (1974) idea of rectificatory justice. In addition, it has the advantage of encouraging people to avail themselves of opportunities who would not otherwise have done so, even if they had the potential.

Unfortunately people regard procedural justice as applying to individuals rather than groups and they see affirmative action programmes as a violation of procedural justice (see Flew 1981). There are also problems with the links between equality of opportunity and outcome. There is no guarantee that equality of treatment will guarantee equality of outcome, given uneven distributions of interest, motivation and ability among individuals. If equality of outcome cannot be secured through changes to entry conditions then there is a temptation to intervene to produce inequalities of treatment within the educational process, in order to secure desired outcomes. But this strategy is likely to provoke further opposition as it can be argued that procedural justice is being further violated. Rectification for past wrongs to groups cannot be settled administratively, as educational outcomes are crucially tied to individual effort and talent.

AIMS OF EDUCATION

The aims of any system of education tell us what it is for. Since they embody the fundamental purposes of education, they determine the character of everything else: institutions, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. To get clear about the aims of education is, therefore, to begin to clarify the rest. Just because aims are not written down, it does not mean that they do not exist. They can be implicit as well as explicit, and can be embodied in the everyday practices of teachers and students, as well as in government documents. Indeed, the printing of aims in a document is neither necessary nor sufficient for education to have aims, since documents can be ignored.

Society consists of different interest groups such as the government, the state apparatus, various groupings of citizens, businesses, children and educational professionals themselves, all of which may have influence over education. Accordingly, aims can be set by different groups within society acting in concert, in conflict, or in a spirit of compromise. The more there is agreement, the more likely that a consensus over aims is likely to be achieved. The less likely there is to be agreement, the more likely it is that aims will either be directly imposed by a powerful group such as the state, or they will in practice be set by those most directly concerned with education, namely teachers.

Education can have ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• List of key concepts
• Introduction
• Key concepts
• Bibliography