The Aims of Education

Roger Marples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415157391
• eBook ISBN: 9781134728244
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Here international philosophers of education explore and question diverse strains of the liberal tradition, discussing not only autonomy but other key issues such as: * social justice * national identity * curriculum * critical thinking * social practices. The contributors write from a variety of standpoints, offering many interpretations of what liberalism might mean in educational terms.

Aims! Whose Aims?

Kevin Harris

DOI: 10.4324/9780203003985-1

There is a common belief, significantly shared by many beginning formal tertiary studies in education, that ‘education’ has a fixed meaning, and distinct aims, which can be unveiled either by turning up a dictionary or by consulting a favoured authority. So, in the very first lecture of every course I give, I stress that ‘education’ is a changing, contested and often highly personalised, historically and politically constructed concept.To illustrate this I read a few dictionary definitions of ‘education’, as well as a selected set of stated ‘aims of education’.When students hear that D. H. Lawrence claimed education should aim to ‘lead out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness’, that for Rousseau the aim of education was ‘to come into accord with the teaching of nature’, that R. M. Hutchins saw the aim of education as ‘cultivation of the intellect’, that A. S. Neill believed the aim of education should be to ‘make people happier, more secure, less neurotic, less prejudiced’, and that John Locke claimed ‘education must aim at virtue and teach man to deny his desires, inclinations and appetite, and follow as reason directs’; hopefully the penny has dropped. Just in case it hasn’t I add in that while Pope Pius XI was declaring that the aim of education was to ‘cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian’, Sergei Shapovalenko insisted that education should aim ‘to inculcate the materialist outlook and communist mentality’.That usually does the trick.

What I have done in this exercise is to display a small selection of what R. S. Peters called ‘high level directives for education’. Providing such directives, and arguing over their substance, was once a staple activity of philosophers and philosophers of education; but much of that changed when philosophy of education entered its analytic phase in the 1960s. At that time Peters wrote (1966: 15) that ‘Few professional philosophers would now think that it is their function to provide … high-level directives for education or for life; indeed one of their main preoccupations has been to lay bare such aristocratic pronouncements under the analytic guillotine’.

The preoccupation Peters spoke of is clearly evident in L. M. Brown’s 1970 volume, Aims of Education, which Jonas Soltis prefaced and praised thus:

it provides an organised way to intelligently examine the many types of aims which have been or yet may be advanced seriously as the proper ends for education… . No single answer to what we should aim at is advocated, but the basis for thinking intelligently about this central educational issue in today’s complex world is put within the reach of the thoughtful reader.

Brown, in a manner largely characteristic of the philosophy of education dominant at the time, argues a Wittgensteinian preference for considering not ‘aims’ per se but rather ‘members of the aim-family’, and he devises the term ‘ends-in-view’ to include three members of the ‘aim family’ – namely, ‘ideals’, ‘objectives’ and ‘goals’, which are themselves subjected to further analysis and distinction.

Peters too had followed this analytic approach – both more often and more stringently. In the overall process substantive pronouncements and judgements tended to disappear from the scene as the meta-language was increasingly subjected to analysis. ‘Aims’ were differentiated from ‘goals’ and ‘objectives’, and even whether educators should have aims was debated long and seriously. Peters (1973: 11–28) fuelled this particular debate by raising the question as to whether education had, or could possibly have, aims extrinsic to itself.

Interestingly, this approach was also underpinned, originally, by the notion that ‘education’ had a fixed, or central meaning – which could be revealed by conceptual analysis. So, while ‘aims’ were differentiated from ‘goals’ and so on, many philosophers simultaneously also sought to reveal the necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept of ‘education’, and thus ostensibly display more clearly the aims of education.Thankfully, this practice itself was guillotined, and by 1970 even Hirst and Peters, who had been so instrumental in attempting to fix a concept of ‘education’, had come to recognise the ‘fluid’ and historical nature of their object of analysis (Hirst and Peters 1970: 25). Hirst and Peters insisted, however, that ‘education’ was always a normative concept, from which they concluded: ‘That is why there is a lot of talk about the aims of education: for in formulating aims of education we are attempting to specify more precisely what qualities … we think it most desirable to develop’ (1970: 16).

I suspect they might be right. But what they did not address is who was being referred to by the twice-used, encompassing ‘we’. I shall argue in this chapter that concentrating on that question can provide philosophers of education with an alternative, and more profitable, approach to consideration of the aims of education.

Locating the Aims of Education

When analytic philosophers claimed that ‘in formulating aims of education we are attempting to specify more precisely what qualities we think it most desirable to develop’, ‘we’ tended to be either self-referential, possibly to include other acceptable wise, rational and disinterested people, or to suggest a public consensual mode.As was so often the case, reality went missing.

Just as ‘education’ is a changing and often personalised, historically and politically constructed concept (with no absolute correct meaning to retreat to), so too is it a historically and politically constructed changing social practice. This elementary recognition has far-reaching implications for considering the aims of education. It indicates, to begin with, that the aims of education, like both the concept and the process of education, are social, historical, ephemeral and changing. But such simplicity conceals an inner complexity.

At any time and place many people and many institutions proclaim different, often competing aims for education.Aims, like all matters of policy, are contextual, political, normative, dynamic and contested. But the dynamic contest is also continually resolved, or momentarily settled, in that policy does become manifested in distinct and definite practices. The trick is to recognise how such settlements come about. Thus there is point in investigating who has a voice in formulating aims of education, whose aims are legitimated, whose destination and ends are taken as desirable, and whose aims are pursued in the formulation of educational policy and practice – and why.

To begin to illustrate this I shall now recount an instance in which holders of conflicting aims of education engaged in a bitter ideological and political struggle for control of educational policy and practice – namely, the infamous case regarding two social science courses – Man:A Course of Study (MACOS) and Social Education Materials Project (SEMP) – in Queensland,Australia. I do not claim my account (which is necessarily selective) to be neutral, let alone theory-free. I also acknowledge that in telling the story I am drawing largely from primary data collected by John Freeland (1979a, 1979b), and Richard Smith and John Knight (1978).¹

A Case Study: Macos and Semp in Queensland

In the late 1970s the Queensland government engaged in a number of significant interventions in education. In 1976 secondary punitive procedures were invoked when four teachers were sacked following convictions on minor drug offences. In 1977 a homosexual teacher was dismissed. In the same year an English resource book by the somewhat unconventional but generally well-respected educator, Henry Schoenheimer, was banned. And then, on 17 January 1978, the Queensland Cabinet banned the use of MACOS in schools, and followed this up by banning SEMP on 22 February.

MACOS is a social studies course for 11-year-old primary school pupils. It was conceived largely by Jerome Bruner, and first appeared in American schools in the early 1960s. Bruner was honoured by the American Education Research Association and the American Educational Publishers’ Institute for his role in the MACOS project, which was referred to as ‘“… one of the most important efforts of our time” to relate research and theory in educational psychology to instructional materials’ (Smith and Knight 1978: 227). It was brought to Australia in 1973 for trialling in all six state education systems, with its trial in fifteen Queensland schools having the full support of the Queensland Department of Education.

The Queensland trial, however, was met by a small but well-organised network of Christian fundamentalist moral crusaders, who engaged in a concerted campaign of ideological challenge and political lobbying.

MACOS had faced a similar campaign a decade earlier in the USA, falling foul of the Moral Majority and other conservative and fundamentalist organisations. Much of the material used to attack MACOS in Australia came from the USA, having found its way into the hands of a momentarily influential Christian fundamentalist, Rona Joyner.

After a long period in the political wilderness, Joyner, known as a distributor of John Birch Society publications, had gradually built up credence in right-wing provincial organisations, and eventually she developed national and international connections. By 1977 she headed two organisations: the Society to Outlaw Pornography (STOP) and the Committee against Regressive Education (CARE). Joyner regarded the Bible as the single repository of truth and law. She thus held to the Biblical view of creation and to the notion of original sin, she stood as a champion for traditional Christian ‘family values’, and consequently she opposed the teaching of evolution and anything that bore a humanist trait. She did not regard herself and her followers as a minority, but rather proclaimed that she was ‘one with God’ and that ‘one with God is a majority’.

Joyner opposed MACOS because it displayed alternatives to nuclear family life,² and to fundamental textual Christian knowledge. Labelling it as a threat to ‘the light of Christianity’, she organised mass STOP and CARE letter-writing campaigns to metropolitan and regional newspapers. In the course of these campaigns Queensland parliamentarians received carefully, orchestrated propaganda about MACOS, as well as significant mail, particularly from country areas, opposing MACOS.

CARE and STOP, along with the larger and longer-established Festival of Light,³ also invited Norma Gabler, a Texan who listed her occupation as ‘text book watcher’, and who had campaigned against MACOS in America, to visit Queensland in July 1977. She met Department of Education executives, professional educators and publishers, where she spoke out against MACOS. When criticised she walked out of one meeting and fell silent in the other (Smith and Knight 1978: 228). More significantly, however, she was guest speaker at a morning tea hosted by Flo Bjelke-Petersen, the Premier’s wife.

Attacks on MACOS were also made by other conservative, religious and fundamentalist groups, such as the Queensland Conservative Club, the Festival of Light, the Community Standards Organisation, Parents of Tertiary Students, the Christian Mission to the Communist World, the Catholic Women’s League, the League of Nations, the National Civic Council, the Committee on Morals and Education, Parents Campaigning for Responsible Education, and one organisation with a delicately contrived acronym – Ladies in Line against Communism. Queensland’s ruling National Party took serious heed of the attacks, and on 17 January 1978 Cabinet banned the use of MACOS in Queensland schools.

Not surprisingly, many teachers, parents and academics protested; the Executive of the Queensland Teachers Union expressed concern at ‘Government intervention based on vocal minority pressure’; and the media became heavily involved. The Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, responded with public assurances that his ‘Ministers are in 100 per cent agreement that MACOS goes’, adding that ‘Teachers will comply’ (Courier-Mail 1–2–78); while Rona Joyner welcomed the ban with the hope that the decision would become a yardstick for the removal of other unsuitable material from school courses. STOP and CARE sent letters of congratulation to Cabinet ministers.

The banning was not, however, universally welcomed by the Christian church. Many church leaders, like the Anglican Church of Queensland’s Director of Christian Education, the Reverend Father Riordan, castigated the government for giving in to a small minority despite what he termed the ‘good advice’ it had received from educators. The Uniting Church publicly rejected the inference that MACOS was ‘anti-Christian’.And across the border in New South Wales, Catholic schools continued to teach MACOS with barely a hiccup.

Meanwhile, buoyed with success, Joyner turned her attack to the SEMP programme being developed for secondary school use by the Canberra-based Curriculum Development Centre with the full cooperation and participation of all six state education departments and the Church-dominated private schools’ Head Masters’ Conference of New South Wales. Although the programme was by no means complete, Joyner saw it as ‘worse than MACOS because SEMP is dealing with things right here in our own society … we will try to have something done about this, but I hope it doesn’t take as long as it did with MACOS’ (Courier-Mail 2–2–78).

She put together small, decontextualised extracts from the SEMP Teachers Handbook. She then wrote a STOP and CARE newsletter linking SEMP with MACOS, which she distributed widely, encouraging recipients to write letters of outrage to newspapers, their local members, Cabinet ministers, the Minister for Education and the Premier. She sent her extracts from SEMP, along with copies of her propaganda material, to all Cabinet ministers.

In response, Cabinet, as it had done with MACOS, convened during the parliamentary recess. It then overruled the advice of national and state educational bodies and authorities, and banned the use of any part of SEMP products in Queensland state high schools. The Premier, unfazed by the bypassing of normal parliamentary procedures, or by the fact that the only SEMP material actually seen by Cabinet ministers was the selection of outof-context samples forwarded to them by Rona Joyner, declared: ‘If you could see some of the stuff in SEMP, I bet you would not want your kids to wade through it … it is the moral aspect of the course that we object to’ (Courier-Mail 23–2–78).

At this point the tide tu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Aims! Whose Aims?
• 2 ‘Or What's a Heaven For?' The Importance of Aims in Education
• 3 The Aims of Education and the Philosophy of Education The Pathology of an Argument
• 4 Education Without Aims?
• 5 Liberalism, Citizenship and the Private Interest in Schooling
• 6 Liberalism and Critical Thinking On the Relation Between a Political Ideal and an Aim of Education
• 7 Autonomy as an Educational Aim
• 8 Critical Thinking as an Aim of Education
• 9 The Place of National Identity in the Aims of Education
• 10 Self-Determination As an Educational Aim
• 11 The Nature of Educational Aims
• 12 Well-Being As an Aim of Education
• 13 Aiming for a Fair Education What Use Is Philosophy?
• 14 Neglected Educational Aims Moral Seriousness and Social Commitment
• 15 Rational Curriculum Planning In Pursuit of an Illusion
• 16 In Defence of Liberal Aims in Education
• Bibliography
• Index