Philosophy and Educational Policy

A Critical Introduction

John Gingell, Christopher Winch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134201983
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What are the concepts and theories behind current debates about education?
This comprehensive introduction to philosophy of education discusses issues that are of current public interest and debate. It locates education at the heart of questions concerned with culture, ethics, politics, economics and shows how key educational issues have to be approached in a contextual way.
Written in a clear and accessible manner with current issues in mind the book covers:

• the curriculum
• teaching and learning
• educational research
• assessment
• moral, personal and civic education
• autonomy and multicultural issues in a liberal society
• education and work
• privatisation and markets

This book will be particularly useful to students on Education Studies courses, to those preparing for a career in teaching, to students of politics and to serving teachers undertaking further study in education.

Chapter 1
Values, aims and society

This chapter introduces the framework through which we will discuss the central issues in education. We begin with a discussion of the importance of values in society and go on to examine how societies can deal with different and conflicting values. Education is introduced as central to the concerns of a plural society as it is concerned with the preparation for adult life of new generations. What values should then inform education? The chapter goes on to discuss the role of values in an education system and the role of the school system in promoting them. The issue of how potentially conflicting aims can be addressed in education is then considered. We then go on to consider these questions in the context of post-compulsory, in particular, vocational education, pointing out the relationship between worthwhile lives, paid employment and education. Finally, we take an overview of three broad approaches to the development of educational policy in a liberal plural society: elitism, democracy and the use of markets.

Values in education

Values are an essential part of what people think makes their lives worthwhile. Individuals, groups or whole societies can hold them. They take the form of beliefs and attitudes, which can usually be spelled out. One’s moral and religious beliefs, together with other beliefs about the kinds of things that make life worthwhile, such as friendship, satisfaction at work, family life, love of one’s country, all constitute our values. Different groups may share some values, but may also differ in some. Sometimes these values may be incompatible. One cannot, for example, believe in religious freedom and hold that only one form of religion is to be permitted.

But we cannot ask people to give up what they believe makes life worth living, since these beliefs constitute part of their own identity, they make people what they are, through shaping their lives. But if people cannot give up their values, how can they live with those who hold contradictory values? How can religious believers, for example, live with atheists? One possibility is that they cannot. In this case, they either fight or agree to live apart. Another possibility is that they try to find common ground on those parts of their different beliefs that they do not mind implementing and keep private those parts of their beliefs that they cannot agree should be part of public policy. For example, atheists might suggest that religious people should be able to have optional religious services for their own children at schools that are, in other respects, non-religious. Religious believers might suggest that atheists have separate, non-religious schools. They might arrive at a compromise by agreeing to set up both kinds of school, leaving it up to parents which they send their children to. Education policy issues cannot be appreciated without understanding the central role that values play in education. But if it is difficult to reconcile different sets of values, then it is also difficult to construct education policies based on such attempts at reconciliation.

Education is a preparation for life

The concept of education refers to the human activity of preparation for life. It primarily concerns children and young people, but since one can be prepared for different phases of life, it also concerns adults who wish to re-orient the direction of their lives. However, to say that education is concerned with preparation for life is to give the concept very little content. First, there are different aspects of life, for example, work, leisure and family. Second, different individuals and groups will have different views about what are the most valuable aspects of life. What they think is valuable about an aspect of life is closely connected with the values that they hold. For example, someone who values family life may do so for, among other reasons, because they believe that the intimacy, interdependence and spontaneity of family life are essential constituents of a worthwhile existence. It is, however, particularly useful to distinguish between three aspects of the preparation for life. These are: liberal, civic and vocational. The liberal aspect of education concerns the preparation of someone as a person with their own potential in life, able to appreciate the culture of the community into which they are growing up and to make choices about the direction in which they wish their life to go. The civic aspect involves people as citizens of their society, who vote, take part in politics, voluntary or charitable activities. The vocational aspect involves people as agents of economic activity, for instance, as a paid employee, or as self-employed.

It is hardly surprising that there are also different views concerning the kind of individual, civic or vocational education that people should receive. The ways in which different aspects of education are played out yield different con ceptions of education. Conceptions of education differ from the concept of education in the following way. The concept of education refers to preparation for life. A particular conception of education, however, refers to a particular kind of preparation for life. We would expect conceptions of education to be far richer in content and in what they prescribe than the concept of education itself. How different conceptions of education are related to the culture of the society and how they are put into effect in the curriculum will be one of the topics of Chapter 2.

One of the issues that immediately arises when a conception of education is developed is that differences within a society about what is a worthwhile preparation for life begin to emerge. Some, for example, might think that vocational preparation is unimportant, while others think that it is all-important, to the exclusion of practically anything else. To make matters more complicated, some groups within a society may favour a particular conception of education for themselves and a different one for other people. Finally, particular conceptions of education almost always reflect the values of the groups or individuals putting them forward. Beliefs about what constitutes a worthwhile life inevitably affect views about what is the most suitable preparation for a worthwhile life. When these values are wholly or partially incompatible with each other, then the question about which conception of education a society needs to articulate, can be difficult to resolve. We should note that individual people often belong to groups which have apparently opposing interests. Parents, for example, may be torn between a desire for more vocational education to develop the economy and a desire for a liberal education for their own child.

Someone who thinks that equality is the most important value will have a particular conception of education in mind for developing the maximum amount of equality. On the other hand, someone who attaches most importance to the value of liberty will seek to develop a conception of education that maximises liberty. The problem then, as many have observed, is that one cannot pursue the maximum degree of liberty and at the same time pursue the maximum degree of equality, since increasing equality may mean restricting someone’s liberty to become, say, richer than other people. To take another example, someone may think that the most valuable kind of life involves leisured contemplation, while someone else may think that only a life spent in useful employment is valuable. Once again, it is difficult to see how one can seriously pursue both these goals for the same individual at the same time.

It would be easy to construct an ideal model of how such issues are settled in a democratic society. One would expect, for example, that different interest groups would attempt to find common ground. They would seek to establish where conflicts arise in relation to the same individual (e.g. as both parent and employee) with a view to establishing priorities and, where this is not possible, to seek compromises about which values were to be implemented and to what degree. The history of the development of state education systems suggests that a very different sort of process has occurred in many cases. First, because modern education systems were not usually set up under completely democratic conditions and, second, because it is at least arguable that democratic government is a government by an elite or competing elites, rather than depending on genuine popular debate (Green 1990; Schumpeter 1976). The United States is, perhaps, the closest example one can find of a society that set up its education system as a result of democratic debate and action. Elsewhere, in, for example, Prussia and France, the education system was designed and set up by political elites concerned to develop their respective countries into modern industrial powers. In England and Wales, the elites, suspicious about state action, enshrined the traditional education of the gentry as the preferred form of education for the few relatively well-off members of the population, and a system of basic literacy and numeracy for the mass of people, in line with the suggestions of the political economist, Adam Smith (1776). It is arguable therefore, that one is likely to get a ‘default norm’ or a solution that goes with the grain of the influence and wishes of politically dominant elites rather than reflecting the priorities of the rest of the population. The arguable persistence of default norms into the democratic era suggests a continuing elitist pattern of policymaking.

Aims of education

The relationship between the values on which an education system is built and its aims is very close. This is hardly surprising, since the aims express the values. It is important to realise that an education system can have aims even when these are not formally codified. Just as one can infer someone’s intentions by what they do over a period of time, often in spite of what they claim that they are doing, so one can infer the aims of an education system by the way in which it is operated over a period of time, whether or not it has explicit aims. Sometimes explicit aims will be a useful guide to what the system is trying to do, sometimes they will not be helpful. In those cases where there are no explicit aims, one has to look at the conduct of the system and interpret that conduct in terms of the preferences of the elites that have most influence over it.

Schools

The British education system is a good case in point. Until 1999 it had no explicitly formulated aims. It has been possible, however, to see from the beginning what its main purposes were. These were: to provide a basic mass education for the future working population, one that would combine basic literacy and numeracy with a supportive attitude to the existing social and political order (Green 1990). Those destined for higher levels of work had access to the grammar schools, which provided a variant of the traditional education of the gentry as a foundation for entry into higher education and occupations that required more than an absolutely basic level of literacy and numeracy. Finally, a small sector of secondary education was deliberately isolated from the mass education system. This ‘public school’ system had, as its aims, the maintenance of a political elite with the skills, attitudes and character to run the British Empire. It could be maintained that the English education system had quite clear aims that related to the development of the society as a whole and that it allowed for liberal aims for those few who were fortunate enough to receive a public or grammar school education. Even this latter claim needs to be treated with some caution, as there is considerable evidence that the most common type of public school education was designed precisely to stamp out individuality and to mould the type of character who could function instinctively as a member of a ruling class, as the first priority, and as a member of a leisured ruling elite secondarily. Curiously, this system also allowed for the development of ‘rebels’, capable of carrying out special tasks for the Empire (see, for example, the description by Rudyard Kipling in his public school story, Stalky and Co). Strictly speaking, liberal education in this system was something largely enjoyed by those fortunate enough to gain entry to higher education.

This perhaps makes it clearer why some societies might be reluctant to be too explicit about the aims according to which they operated their education systems. The English system, rigidly hierarchical and exclusionary as it was, together with a very strong commitment to racial superiority and the dominance of other ‘lesser’ peoples, was understandably reluctant to advertise what it was about.

Problems with formulating aims

If, as we saw, different groups within a society have different values, then it is not always clear how those values are going to be realised in any particular education system. The problem is most acute when values are incompatible with each other. Sometimes the problem can be avoided through the adoption of ‘thin’ values that express the common content of two otherwise conflicting systems of belief. For example, moral injunctions and virtues common to both Christians and Muslims could constitute a common set of values, in virtue of the partially overlapping character of the two systems of belief. This common set of values could then form the basis for a set of aims of moral education that both Christians and Muslims could agree to.

However, the proposed solution does not show how to deal with nonoverlapping beliefs, for example, concerning sexual morality. The problem is made worse when we consider that a society may consist of further groups whose values may not overlap at all with those of others. The threat arises that there may be insufficient consensus in the society about values to allow for any common set of aims. There is a possible solution to this problem. First, one may abandon any attempt to put moral values in the curriculum, apart from those that do have an overlapping consensus. The aims of education directly relevant to morality would be those allowing procedures for settling differences, such as cultivation of the virtue of tolerance and the ability to compromise (Gray 1995). The remainder of educational aims would be made up of relatively innocuous aspirations, for example, literacy and numeracy, the cultivation of conscientious citizens and workers, and so on.

The danger, however, is that such a statement of aims would please no one and be of little practical use in the construction of the curriculum. Another solution would be to construct a thin set of common aims to apply to all schools, but allow individual schools to cater for more restricted common sets of values. There would thus be Catholic, Jewish and Muslim schools as well as common schools. One solution to these problems, favoured by many liberal thinkers, is that the only schools supported by the state should be secular (non-religious) schools, open to all. Some would maintain that only such schools should be legal. This thinking adopts the following lines. One of the main aims of education should be autonomy, or the ability to choose the direction of one’s life. In order to be able to do this, one should not have one’s choices predetermined at an age when one is not yet ready to make such choices. To educate someone into a religious value system would be to predetermine their choices. Predetermined choices preclude autonomy. But autonomy is the principal aim of the education system. Therefore, religious schools contradict the aims of the school curriculum. Therefore they should not be allowed.

This is the argument against religious schools. What is the argument in favour of secular common schools? It goes something like this. For someone to become autonomous they must be presented with a range of meaningful life-choices and must have the rational capacity to make a choice that suits their interests, values and abilities. It follows that they should not, in the period when they are not yet capable of autonomy, be brought up into a life that they can only with difficulty abandon later. They should, therefore, receive adequate information about the range of possible lives available to them and they should also develop the critical capacity to assess each of these in the light of their values, interests and abilities. Only in these conditions will they be able to make an unconstrained choice. Therefore, the state school should have as its aims the provision of enough information with which students can make a choice, and the development of powers of critical rationality so that these students are capable of making such a choice. Consideration of these issues in greater detail leads us on to the nature of the learning that takes place in schools and colleges and to the issue of whether or not it is possible to teach in a way that develops, rather than stifles, autonomy. This complex range of issues will receive more attention in Chapters 3 and 4.

The broader policy issues of the values and aims required to fill out different conceptions of education will concern us in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7, but some brief points are relevant here. First, the assumption of the liberal argument is that secular liberalism itself is not subject to the criticisms it levels against religious forms of upbringing. In other words, it assumes that secular liberalism is a way of life and a system of values that does not constrain later choice. This claim can itself be disputed. If, for example, it could be shown that a secular liberal upbringing made it difficult to autonomously choose certain worthwhile ways of living, then one of its central claims would be undermined. Yet some have argued that a secular liberal upbringing makes it very difficult to autonomously choose to lead a religious life. Secular liberalism also makes the assumption that autonomy is the supreme value to which individuals should aspire. Not everyone will agree with this. Some religiously minded educators would suggest, for example, that it is far more important to be pious and good than it is to be free to determine the course of one’s life. We think that there is a liberal reply to this move, which we explore in Chapter 10.

Compulsory and non-compulsory phases of education

It is easy to forget that an important part of education for many people in developed countries takes place after they have left compulsory schooling. Much of this education, particularly in the ‘higher’ or university and college sector, is liberal, designed primarily to promote personal development and secondarily to develop workplace skills and the economic strength of the country. But a lot of it is explicitly designed to develop the ability to acquire workplace skills and knowledge with a view to preparing people for the labour market. It is important to remember that historically the state intervened in education and set up public education systems in Europe and other parts of the world not just to develop its citizens but also to develop the skills and knowledge considered to be essential to economic development (Green 1990). Philosophers often neglect this area of education but it is extremely important in a broader policy context and raises difficult problems for educators, as it obliges them to engage with the aims of economic activity, as well as with the aims of education. Let us explain.

There is a relationship between how a country runs its education system and the way it runs its economy. But what exactly is the nature of this relationship? We have already indicated that the aims of education are important in determining how an education system is run. Is the same true of a country’s economy? This may seem an odd question since it seems obvious that economies exist so that goods and services are produced which people can then use or consume. But, it is in a sense obvious that education is about preparing young people for life. This does not stop philosophers and policy-makers arguing about the aims of education. The reason why is that ‘preparation for life’ is a very non-specific educational aim. Some might argue that the most important part of life that people should be prepared for is individual self-fulfilment, others might argue for civic participation, and others for paid work. Suppose one were to say that one of the aims of education was to develop a strong economy. This seems clear enough until one asks what a strong economy looks like. There seem to be a number of possible answers. One could say that a strong economy allowed a country to exist on its own resources, or that it allowed a country to become militarily and politically strong or that it was one in which many goods and services were traded and produced. So there are different possible answers to this question. However, even if the answer was to do with the trading of goods and s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Values, Aims and Society
• Chapter 2: Culture and the Curriculum
• Chapter 3: Teaching and Learning
• Chapter 4: Pedagogy, Good Practice and Educational Research
• Chapter 5: Standards, Performance and Assessment
• Chapter 6: Moral, Personal and Civic Education
• Chapter 7: Autonomy and Liberal Education
• Chapter 8: Vocationalism, Training and Economics
• Chapter 9: Markets, Politics and Education
• Chapter 10: Education and Multi-Culturalism
• Notes
• Select Bibliography