Education, Philosophy and Well-being

New perspectives on the work of John White

Judith Suissa, Carrie Winstanley, Roger Marples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317694656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

John White is one of the leading philosophers of education currently working in the Anglophone world. Since first joining the London Institute of Education in 1965, he has made significant contributions to the landscape of the discipline through his teaching, research and numerous publications. His academic work encompasses a broad range of rich philosophical issues, ranging from questions surrounding the child's mind, through the moral and pedagogical obligations of teachers and schools, to local and national questions of educational policy.

In this volume, international contributors address key issues in the philosophy of education, touching on significant contemporary concerns and demonstrating the breadth and influence of John White's work. Each chapter critically examines, builds on, and pays tribute to John White's unique contribution, considering how his work has impacted on the discipline of education as we know it today.

Topics covered include:

• policy and the role of philosophy of education
• liberal education
• the aims of education
• moral education
• leadership.

Education, Philosophy and Wellbeing will appeal to postgraduate students and academics in the fields of history, policy, education studies, and philosophy, as well as to policy-makers, educational administrators and teachers.

Chapter 1

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Liberal education and its aims

Richard Pring

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Context: a bit of history

The 1960s were a revolutionary period in Britain for the philosophy of education, spearheaded by the creation of the four-year BEd degree and the transformation of training colleges into colleges of education. That revolution was signalled by the address given by Richard Peters in the 1964 ATCDE-DES conference in Hull when he argued that there was a need to get rid of the ‘mush’ from educational theory. There was a new dawn – profoundly influenced by the analytic tradition within mainstream philosophy.

Why was this thought to be necessary? The change from ‘training colleges’ to ‘colleges of education’ offering university degrees in ‘educational studies’ required greater ‘academic respectability’. Usually that meant a ‘three plus one’ structure – the first three years focusing predominantly on the professional and practical needs of teaching and the final year providing the academic and theoretical depth provided by the major disciplines of education, namely philosophy, sociology, psychology and history.

The dominant mover in this (and the key to its rapid and successful development) was the Institute of Education of London University. The Institute had within its responsibility about thirty training colleges, now colleges of education, each of which was offering the BEd degree validated by the Institute. There was a need for a national staff development programme, and this was provided at the Institute by diploma courses within the respective educational disciplines. Richard Peters, who succeeded Louis Arnaud Reid as Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Institute in 1963, set the tone with his inaugural lecture ‘Education as Initiation’ (1964) and with his edited book The Concept of Education in 1967, to which John White contributed a paper on ‘Indoctrination’.

What Peters did was to create a powerful group of philosophers around him – Paul Hirst, Robert Dearden, John and Patricia White, Joan Cooper and later Ray Elliott, who together provided the influential books and papers within the analytic tradition of philosophy which were to shape the course of academic educational studies.

The need for such a tradition was manifest in the respective critiques of the major report on primary education, namely the Plowden Report, Children and Their Primary Schools (Central Advisory Council for Education 1967). A certain toughness of language was required in the use of such concepts, central to the Report, as ‘growth’, ‘needs’, ‘happiness’, ‘creativity’, ‘educational aims’ and ‘curriculum’. It was here that the Institute philosophers led the way, not least through John White’s closely argued paper, ‘Creativity and Education’, published in the British Journal of Educational Studies (1968). This together with the papers by Dearden on ‘happiness’, Peters on ‘growth’, Hirst on ‘liberal education’ and Patricia White on ‘socialisation’ were published in the collection learning’ in R. S. Peters (ed.), The Concept of Development of Reason (1972).

Meanwhile, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain was established with an annual meeting. The proceedings of these annual meetings, from 1967 onwards, have provided a continuous record of philosophy of education thinking arising from the early work of Richard Peters and his colleagues at the Institute. The proceedings demonstrate both the continuity of the interests initially established and yet their inevitable expansion and deeper analysis. Perhaps the analytic tradition is not quite so dominant, but it remains, ploughing its furrow through the undergrowth of policies and practices, sharpening the thinking (one hopes) of policy-makers, lecturers, teachers and students, recalling the programme set by Wittgenstein: ‘My aim is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense’ (Wittgenstein 1958: I.464).

It is within that expanding tradition that one needs to see the power and value of John White’s contribution to educational thinking over a period of 50 years.

Liberal education and its aims

At the centre of the philosophical deliberations about education in the period referred to above, and in which John White played a significant part, was the meaning of ‘education’ itself – or, more precisely, the question ‘What counts as an educated person?’ (See, for example, Richard Peters’ paper ‘Education and the Educated Man’ in the 1972 collection edited by Dearden et al. already referred to.) We know, of course, what is meant when a person asks ‘Where were you educated?’ One answers by giving them the name of the school or the university. But it would be perfectly intelligible then to receive the reply: ‘but that surely was not an education’. Rather, in the words of John Dewey, it might be better described as a ‘mis-education’; one ended up bored, ignorant, never wanting to read a book again, put off learning.

From observations such as these, it was clear that one needs to distinguish between education as a purely descriptive word (the learning which takes place, or the place where it is pursued) and education as an evaluative word (that sort of learning which, in certain respects, makes one a better person). In that latter evaluative sense, ‘education’ was likened to ‘reform’. A reformed person is one who has changed for the better – for example, shed his or her criminal activity and is now living an honest life. Similarly, the educated person is, in certain particular respects, now a better person. Indeed, it would seem that the descriptive sense is derivative from the evaluative, such that, in noting the failure to nurture the qualities which would make the learners more educated, one might wish to withdraw the description of school or university as a place of education.

As Richard Peters argued, such conceptual analysis, in one sense, leaves everything as it is, but it opens up significant lines of enquiry and criticism. If the person judged to be educated is thereby understood to be a better person, what are the distinctively human qualities by which he or she is judged to be better? This line of questioning does, of course, take us into ethics, and one might therefore see education and its aims as a branch of ethics. ‘What makes us human?’ asked Jerome Bruner (1966). ‘How did he become so?’ ‘How can he become more so?’

‘Educated’ might not readily capture all the qualities which we want to associate with the ‘fully developed’ human being, and that is important when we consider later the limitations of the process of educating. But ‘educated’ captures crucial ones, namely the development of knowledge and understanding – the wherewithal by which persons might operate intelligently within the physical, social and moral worlds they inhabit. It would seem to be contradictory to say of someone that he or she was highly educated yet profoundly ignorant. It was appropriate therefore that the major collection of essays, to which Peters contributed ‘Education and the Educated Man’, was entitled Education and the Development of Reason, in which Paul Hirst’s most influential paper, ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’ was reprinted. If educated persons are those who have developed the capacity to think and act intelligently, to reason appropriately, to understand and make sense of the physical and social and moral worlds they have inherited, then they need to be initiated into the different forms of knowledge and understanding. It is no good talking about general mental capacities (such as creativity, sound judgment, effective thinking, communication skills, discrimination) without reference to the logical characteristics specific to the successful creation of this or that, or to the kind of thinking one is engaged in, or to the nature of that within which one is being asked to discriminate. There are logical as well as psychological aspects of creating, thinking, valuing and discriminating. (See Hamlyn (1967) in the collection of papers, edited by Peters, in which John White’s ‘Indoctrination’ was first published.)

A general education, therefore, would enable the learners to master these logical features of reasoning, knowing and understanding – the key concepts through which experience and thinking are organised in particular ways, the distinctive modes of enquiring, and the different ways in which the truth of statements is tested and verified. Educated persons need to be able to think like scientists, like historians, like mathematicians, at least to a certain level – to have the foundations, at least, for an intelligent grasp of the complex world in which they live and have to act, and to be able to progress to more specialist understanding and active engagement should they so choose.

John White’s paper, ‘Creativity and Education: A Philosophical Analysis’ (in the 1972 volume referred to) both drew upon this general analysis of ‘the educated person’ and contributed significantly to it, especially as teaching children to be creative was at the time (and remains) a rhetorical cry of so-called progressive and child-centred education (what White referred to as ‘the cult of creativity … adopted by teachers in Colleges of Education and elsewhere’ (p. 132). However, to be creative is to produce something of value, seen as such because it meets the logical characteristics for doing that sort of thing well. To be a creative physicist is to be original – but in the context of what it means to do physics.

A creative thinker is one whose thinking leads to a result which conforms to criteria of value in one domain or another.

(Ibid.: 135)

To be educated, therefore, in this evaluative sense, is to have learnt how to think and reason, to have been initiated therefore into the different and distinctive forms of knowledge through which we make sense of the world and of the social and personal contexts of our lives. As Michael Oakeshott argues in the same collection of essays,

Education … is the transaction between the generations in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world which they are to inhabit. This is a world of understandings, imaginings, meanings . states of mind in which the human condition is to be discerned . To be initiated into this world is learning to become human.

(Ibid.: 47)

Learning to be human, human flourishing and the aims of education

There needs here, however, to be a warning shot across the bows. Cannot a person be initiated into the world of understandings and meanings, enabled to employ the language of science, of history, of philosophy, of poetry, and yet not live a distinctively human life? The principal of the American High School (one of the Just Community Schools working with Lawrence Kohlberg), having seen in the concentration camp ‘what no man should witness – gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians’, was ‘suspicious of education’. Hence:

My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans. Reading, writing, arithmetic are important but only if they serve to make our children more human.

(Strom 1981)

There would, it seems, be more to becoming human than the development of reason in its different forms and than the engagement with what Oakeshott described as ‘the conversation between the generations of mankind’, although that would seem to be an essential component. Much of John White’s subsequent writing has, therefore, been to widen the debate both theoretically and practically in his engagement with policy makers. To that end, he has emphasised and explored the related ideas of ‘human flourishing’, ‘the good life’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘personal well-being’.

Too often, it would seem, the educational programme of schools starts off with ‘the given’ – the traditional subjects which make up the curriculum, especially in the secondary school, and which are enshrined within England and Wales’ National Curriculum, established through Act of Parliament in 1988. These subjects looked remarkably like Hirst’s eight ‘forms of knowledge’ with geography added on, although the equation of the forms of knowledge with subjects was not made by Hirst. None the less, given that there are different ways of thinking, reasoning, appreciating and problem-solving shaped by logically different forms, then it makes good sense to focus for at least part of the curriculum upon these distinctive concepts and methodological approaches, distinguishing different modes of testing the truth of the claims made. And, indeed, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate’s publication A View of the Curriculum (1980), though not equated with subjects as such, drew upon the ‘forms of knowledge’ to argue for the different areas which the curriculum should cover in one way or another – a sort of checklist. To understand key concepts in physics, for example, such as ‘force’ or ‘gravity’ (let alone more abstract ones such as ‘atom’ or ‘electron’) required systematic initiation, starting with modes of understanding at an elementary level and, through what Bruner (1960) referred to as a ‘spiral curriculum’, reaching more abstract and theoretical levels.

However, in thus starting with ‘the given’ (in part reflecting historical and therefore socially originated conditions), there can so easily be a failure to provide an education appropriate for young people in this day and age – in the social and economic conditions in which young people are helped to enter adulthood and lead what White refers to as ‘flourishing lives’. He has argued, therefore, since his inaugural lecture in 1975 entitled ‘Education and Personal Well-being in a Secular Society’, reprinted in The Curriculum and the Child (2005), for a prior and explicit consideration of the aims of education. What are we trying to do in compelling all young people to undertake full-time education, especially one which is so rigidly timetabled into totally distinct subjects? And he observes how little, if any, attention is given to this question in all the curriculum developments led by the government since their interventions from 1988 onwards.

Such an explicit and public consideration of aims would seem to be crucial. As White argues, such macro-decisions about school aims cannot be left totally to the individual teacher, since such aims go beyond personal preferences to issues about the kind of society we should be promoting. Those with long memories will remember the problems at the William Tyndale school in the 1960s and the verdict of the Auld Report (1976). As White argues in Rethinking the School Curriculum, ‘they are political decisions touching on the good life for individuals and society’ (p. 21). They therefore require political rather than professional control.

There are three issues here which require further and close examination: first, the meaning of ‘human flourishing’ as an aim of education; second, the political framework and process within which such aims might be thrashed out and made a requirement for all schools; and, third, the role of the teacher in all this.

Human flourishing

A key premise in White’s continuing argument has been that to be human is to be able to become ‘autonomous’, able to make up one’s own mind as to what is the life worth living, as opposed to having such a life determined by others. Such a life would be one which caused pleasure, met one’s desires, gave life meaning. And such a life might be found in many ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Editorial preface
• John White – biography
• 1 Liberal education and its aims
• 2 From philosophy to history: some turning points
• 3 The curriculum and subject knowledge
• 4 Is good school leadership 'visionary'?
• 5 Democratic fellowship and the practice of human possibility
• 6 On intelligence
• 7 Well-being and education
• 8 Beyond moral education?
• 9 John White on the aims of education
• 10 Philosophy, educational research and educational policy
• 11 Education, justice and the limits of statism
• 12 Integration as stealth assimilation
• John White – publications
• Index