Education, Values and Mind (International Library of the Philosophy of Education Volume 6)

Essays for R. S. Peters

David Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135171230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

R. S. Peters has not only been the major philosopher of education in Britain during second half of the twentieth century, but by common consent, he has transformed the subject and brought it into the mainstream of contemporary philosophy. The ten essays in this book attest to his influence whether by critical examination of his ideas or by original treatment of topics in which has has inspired a new interest.

Richard Peters’s contribution to the philosophy of education

Paul H.Hirst

When Richard Peters began his outstanding work in philosophy of education the subject barely existed in Britain as a distinct academic and professional area. No philosopher of any distinction had begun to make effective use of contemporary philosophical methods or their exciting achievements for the development of educational ideas and principles. The work being taught in colleges and universities was out of touch with all that was happening in the parent discipline and had become little more than a historical study of the contribution to educational thought of a selection of philosophers, from Plato to Dewey. It was also largely dissociated from contemporary educational policy and practice, there being little by way of any systematic critique of current developments in curricula, teaching methods or the organisation of the school system. But with hindsight one can see that the scene was set for someone with the necessary philosophical expertise, the necessary insight into and understanding of education, and the necessary commitment to the enterprise, to give new life to the subject and to re-characterise philosophy of education as a major intellectual enterprise of practical significance. On the one hand philosophers such as Ryle and Hare were giving very strong leads as to the educational issues raised by their own work. On the other hand the controversy surrounding new educational practices in primary and comprehensive secondary schools was itself throwing up philosophical questions that manifestly required systematic attention. In this situation Richard Peters proved to be the right man in the right place at the right time. He was a first-class philosopher with both the range and depth of philosophical experience required for the task. He was knowledgeable about, and intensely concerned about, the development of education in schools. But he revealed too the personal qualities that made him able to respond to the challenge and devote himself unstintingly to the task in hand. He thereby not only redefined British philosophy of education but set its programme for some twenty years and has been its dominating creative thinker throughout that period.

Philosophy of education and philosophical analysis

In his most detailed statement about the philosophy of education, written relatively early in his involvement in this work,¹ Peters insisted that the subject should be seen as fundamentally philosophical in character concerned to do that job which trained philosophers can do, bringing to bear on the issue of education their distinctive skills and the distinctive achievements of philosophy. This paper repeatedly indicates the pressing need for philosophical work to be done both to help sort out current educational debates and to critically reassess current educational practices. To this end he thought it important to underline the distinction then gaining acknowledgment between the task of the philosopher in relation to educational issues and the task of formulating, discovering and passing on practical educational principles.

It is important to realise that the philosopher, qua philosopher, cannot formulate such principles…any more than he can formulate principles of medicine or politics. Such principles are logical hybrids…. This does not mean, of course, that there is no place for principles of education in educational research or in the training of teachers. Quite the reverse…. All it means is that the formulation, discussion and passing on of such principles cannot be the peculiar function of the philosopher of education.²

He distinguished too the development of philosophy of education from a concern with the history of educational ideas and its use in illuminating contemporary educational ideas. Again it is to be noted that he was not decrying a proper attention to such ideas. It is just that such a concern for educational principles, even when they have been propounded by distinguished philosophers, is no substitute for engaging systematically in seeking to answer the strictly philosophical questions that educational issues raise. A careful reading of this paper, as well as even a superficial reading of much of his own philosophical work shows that Peters was seeking to demarcate the philosophy of education from the pursuit of education principles, contemporary or historical, and not at all wishing, as has been suggested, to separate contemporary philosophy of education from historical work of the same character.³

When it comes to a positive account of the nature of philosophy, Professor Peters has confined himself to certain general indicative statements, recognising that philosophy, like other theoretical pursuits, develops in character with the introduction of new methods and areas of enquiry. He has on the whole preferred to engage in major philosophical work and let his method speak for itself rather than devote time to self-consciously analysing the nature of this pursuit. His clearest statement of his position occurs in his first article ‘The Philosophy of Education’ and in the Introduction to his major work Ethics and Education.⁴ There he outlined the ‘second-order’ concern of philosophy with forms of thought and argument expressed in Socrates’ questions, ‘What do you mean?’ and ‘How do you know?’, and Kant’s questions about what is presupposed by our forms of thought and awareness.⁵ This means that the philosopher is engaged in

the disciplined demarcation of concepts, the patient explication of the grounds of knowledge and of the presuppositions of different forms of discourse. Philosophers make explicit the conceptual schemes which (competing) beliefs and standards presuppose; they examine their consistency and search for criteria for their justification. This does not imply that philosophers can only produce an abstract rationale of what is in existence, like a high-level projection of the plan of a house. For enquiry at this level can develop with some degree of autonomy. Presuppositions can be drastically criticized and revised; grounds for belief can be challenged and new ones suggested; conceptual schemes can be shown to be radically inconsistent or inapplicable; new categorizations can be constructed. The philosopher is not entirely the prisoner of the presuppositions of his age.⁶

Peters then goes on to distinguish between those brands of philosophy which are concerned with the analysis and justification of answers to theoretical questions about what is the case, why and when, and that branch concerned with practical questions, questions about what ought to be the case and with reasons for action. Educational issues he sees as necessarily raising both types of questions before they can be settled and the philosopher’s task in this area as therefore being to apply to educational concerns analyses of concepts and theories of justification that have been developed in other branches of philosophy—especially in ethics, social philosophy, epistemology and philosophical psychology. He suggested four main areas of work.

(i) The analysis of concepts specific to education, an area which can be seen as falling under philosophical psychology and social philosophy.

(ii) The application of ethics and social philosophy to assump tions about the desirable content and procedures of education.

(iii) Examination of the conceptual schemes and assumptions used by educational psychologists about educational processes.

(iv) Examination of the philosophical character of the content and organisation of the curriculum and related questions about learning.⁷

In this outline, and indeed throughout his philosophical work, it is clear not only that Peters values the developments of the postwar ‘revolution in philosophy’ but that he sees the continuity of recent work with the historic roots of philosophy. There is a characteristic refusal to be dogmatic about the nature of philosophical arguments and, in particular, about the nature of current forms of philosophical analysis. His approach, though contemporary in its emphasis, has always been eclectic and open-ended, drawing on a variety of traditions for both philosophical techniques and doctrines. What is more, in his return from time to time to a number of topics of central concern to him, especially the analysis of the concept of education and the justification of the content of education, Peters can be seen to be willing to change his mind not only about the validity of particular arguments but also about the validity of certain kinds of argument. This refusal to be doctrinaire about the nature of philosophy is no doubt in part the result of his very considerable studies in classical philosophy, the history of modern philosophy—especially social philosophy and the British empiricists—and the history of psychology. It is no doubt also in part the result of the many different contemporary influences on him during his formative years, influences ranging from the work of Moore, Ryle and Wittgenstein to the personal impact of study and collaboration with Popper, A.C.Mace, Oakeshott, Hamlyn and Phillips Griffiths.

The central features of Peters’s philosophical position were thus being formed when new and distinctive types of philosophical analysis were being developed—and hotly disputed. Not surprisingly, therefore, he came to attach considerable importance to the mapping of conceptual relations through the examination of linguistic usage and his application of analytical techniques to educational concepts is rightly seen as one of his most important contributions to philosophy of education. But he constantly reiterated his own uncertainties about the character of this technique and the precise significance of its results. He repeatedly insists that conceptual analysis alone in its endless exploration of distinctions is ‘scholastic’ or a major philosophical sin that is avoided only when analysis is linked with some other issue such as the justification of beliefs.⁷ This being his approach, it is surely not only unsympathetic, but seriously misleading to critically assess his analytical work as if it were undertaken independently of its value for educational issues. And it is equally misleading to seek to assess his procedures in terms of strict adherence to forms of analysis to which he was in no way committed.⁸ There is, for instance, no reason whatever to suppose that Peters saw himself as providing ordinary language analysis on the assumption that ordinary language in general provides any unassailable final court of appeal in seeking to understand education, its processes or institutions.⁹ Indeed, there is much evidence to the contrary in his concern for the understanding available to educationists in psychology and sociology and the importance of philosophers working in constant association with such specialists in the development of educational theory. Further, he considered it necessary for there to be, and himself sought to provide, arguments setting out the place of the conceptual schemes of commonsense within psychological research.¹⁰ What he sought to do in education was to examine the language educationists use, whether everyday or technical, so as to explore the concepts underlying this for their coherence and applicability, and thus their significance in educational argument.

There is perhaps much more justification for seeing Peters as at times committed to the belief that an adequate analysis will reveal the ‘essential’ meaning of a statement and he seems to believe that by examining our use of a term like ‘education’ we could eventually sort out what all those coherently employing it must mean, no matter what their social or other context might be. And if there is such a universal unit of meaning it is because it picks out something of fundamental significance in human experience. This charge of ‘essentialism’ is, I suggest, both true and false. It reflects uncertainty in Peters’s mind at times as to what exactly analysis can achieve. But a careful and sympathetic reading of his work suggests a coherent position that is not as readily dismissed as certain critics consider. It seems to me quite false to argue that for Peters analysis is in any way tied to an essentialist theory of meaning, if by that is meant either that analysis is searching out Russell-type fundamental linguistic atoms of meaning or even that there are ‘central uses’ to terms that can be shown to be necessary to all coherent discourse. He has, I suggest, espoused no particular theory of meaning either explicitly or implicitly. He has certainly sought to map conceptual usage often hunting for necessary and sufficient conditions to set out the relations between concept...