An Introduction to Philosophy of Education

Robin Barrow, Ronald Woods

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000396096
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This introductory text, now in its fifth edition, is a classic in its field. It shows, first and foremost, the importance of philosophy in educational debate and as a background to any practical activity such as teaching. What is involved in the idea of educating a person or the idea of educational success? What are the criteria for establishing the optimum balance between formal and informal teaching techniques? How trustworthy is educational research? In addition to these questions, which strike to the heart of the rationale for the educative process as a whole, the authors explore such concepts as culture, creativity, autonomy, indoctrination, needs, interests, and learning by discovery. Updates to this edition include new chapters on religious education and moral education, as well as questions for reflection at the end of each chapter.

1 On Reading This Book

DOI: 10.4324/9781003120476-1

This book is intended as an introduction to philosophy of education for students in colleges and university departments of education who have had little or no previous instruction in philosophical methods and techniques. We shall therefore be at pains to explain any technical or semi-technical terms we introduce. There will not be many such terms, and readers need have no fear that we shall blind them with jargon. Anyone with a modicum of common sense who is prepared to exercise thought should find no great difficulty in understanding what we have to say, always provided that he or she comes to the book with an open mind. Terms that may be regarded as technical or semi-technical will be printed in italics when they are first introduced. (Italics are also used for emphasis, for the titles of books, and for the occasional foreign phrase such as a priori.)

Objectives

Our main objectives in writing this book are:

1. To develop understanding of the nature of analytic philosophy

There are various different uses of the word ‘philosophy’ and associated terms such as ‘philosophical’ and ‘philosophically’, as, for example, ‘she took the news philosophically’ meaning ‘calmly’, and ‘his philosophy of life is to take what he can’ meaning that that is his ‘view of life’. There are also different schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and Existentialism, different emphases as between, say, Continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy, and different branches of philosophy such as philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. None of that need concern us; the focus here is on analytic philosophy in the context of education.

2. To enable readers to recognize and appreciate its practical value

There is a common assumption that philosophy may be all very well in its way, but that it is an abstract, theoretical activity for dreamers, which has little bearing on practical questions such as how to get children to behave. It is true that philosophy is an abstract and theoretical activity, but we hope to convince the reader that it is nonetheless of great practical value, indeed indispensable, if we are to base our actions on sound reasoning.

3. To provide an argument for a particular view of the educational enterprise overall

While a certain amount of philosophical work is critical in the sense that it exposes weaknesses and flaws in other people’s arguments, it is ultimately as concerned as any other discipline to get at the truth and arrive at positive conclusions. Though we do not necessarily expect to convince all readers of our conclusions about education, and though we stress that our prime objective is to get readers to philosophize for themselves, we nonetheless argue for specific conclusions on the various educational questions we raise.

Concepts

We take philosophy to mean ‘inquiry into the meaning of concepts and the logic and coherence of arguments’; philosophy of education thus becomes inquiry into the coherence of concepts and arguments in respect of education.

Some critics of philosophy argue that it is really just about words. This is mistaken. Words and concepts are not the same thing. One may be familiar with the word ‘zygote’, but, not being a biologist, have no idea what it means, which is to say one lacks any conception of a zygote. If we look up the word ‘zygote’ in the dictionary, we find this definition: ‘the cell resulting from the union of an ovum and a spermatozoon.’ Providing we have some grasp of the meaning of the words in this definition, we have a basic understanding of the concept. But to get a real grasp of the concept we will need to study biology. The concept of a zygote, in other words, is the fully articulated account of the idea to which the word refers. We sometimes refer to the meaning of words in this book, but our ultimate interest as philosophers is in concepts, not words. Furthermore, as philosophers, we are not in fact interested in a concept such as zygote, which, as indicated, is best understood by engaging in biological research. Philosophy is primarily interested in concepts of abstract ideas as opposed to concepts of physical objects, and in concepts that are not central to some other specialized discipline like biology.

In this book, when we refer to a word it is placed in single quotation marks (as in ‘zygote’ has six letters); when we are concerned with the concept no quotation marks are used. (We should add that we use “double” quotation marks when quoting another author or introducing an imaginary remark or statement.)

Educational discussion is full of concepts (including education itself) that are by no means clear or fully articulated. English language speakers know what the word ‘gifted’ means in some sense, but most of them would be unable to provide an account of the idea that makes it quite clear what we are saying when we refer to someone as gifted. They cannot provide the criteria that have necessarily to be met for a person to count as gifted, nor the set of criteria that are sufficient to establish that a person is gifted. Does a truly gifted person have to achieve something, for example? If so, does it matter what kind of achievement? The distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions, our first piece of semi-technical terminology, is basic to analysis, for ideally we seek to establish the set of conditions or criteria that are necessary to something being an instance of the concept in question and that taken together are sufficient to conclude that we have such an instance. Note that we say ‘ideally’; the ideal is not always attainable.

Further Features of Philosophy

The focus on fully understanding concepts of important abstract ideas is one key feature of philosophy. Another is that it is not an empirical form of inquiry. Biology and the other branches of science invest heavily in testing or establishing conclusions by experiment and observation. And most other subjects, such as history, sociology, business studies and psychology, also involve a certain amount of empirical work. Philosophy does not. Philosophers of education may refer to empirical claims such as that children can only perform certain mental operations at certain stages of development, and make use of these claims in building an argument; but to carry out any type of empirical inquiry is not in itself to engage in philosophy.

Many people think of philosophy as being concerned with big questions such as ‘What is the meaning of life?’ and they are not entirely wrong. Philosophy is concerned to explore such questions. But you will be disappointed if you expect this or any other philosophy book to provide unequivocal answers to many such questions. What philosophy does, generally speaking, is clarify such questions and indicate what can be safely concluded in relation to them and what cannot. In the case of this example probably the first thing that a philosopher would do is point out that it is not clear what the question is actually asking for, and proceed to discriminate or distinguish between various different senses that the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ might have. But, generally speaking, the philosophical consensus would be that such dramatic and bold questions as ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Does God exist?’ and ‘What is the moral truth?’ cannot be said to have received a clear and certain answer in the way that leading questions in various other disciplines have. However, far from this being a failing or shortcoming inherent in philosophy, this is one of its most important achievements. For what philosophy is telling us is that such questions cannot be answered definitively, and we need to recognize and face up to that fact. And, of course, to acknowledge that we cannot prove the existence of God, for example, is not to say that there are no particular philosophical claims and arguments concerning religion that can be satisfactorily resolved, as we shall see in Chapter 9. What philosophy can do is ensure that the discussion around religion is clear, coherent, and to the point.

So, there will be plenty of answers to educational questions in this book, and some of them will be indisputable; but it depends upon the question, since some questions, as philosophy will reveal, are by their nature unanswerable, some will yield answers that are the most reasonable we can come up with rather than demonstrably true, and some will yield the conclusion that there is no truth to be found on the matter, only opinion, as for example on the question of whether something is amusing. One thing philosophy teaches us is that we have to learn to live with a degree of uncertainty, because many things, including some things that we tend to be most passionate about, just are areas of uncertainty. For that reason alone, open-mindedness, tolerance and freedom are to be valued.

Philosophy in Action

The aim of this book is not to provide readers with information on a set of topics for regurgitation in an examination, but rather to attempt to show philosophy in action. Of course we believe in what we have to say positively; but the stress is on how to do philosophy. Hence we have not attempted to review the literature in the field, and the topics chosen for discussion are in a sense simply vehicles for the exercise of philosophizing. One of our main objects will have been achieved if we can help readers to become more skillful at philosophical debate, which is to say able to think about and discuss issues in a philosophic manner. Philosophy is not to be thought of as a fixed body of information waiting to be digested, but as an activity through the exercise of which men and women can think things through, in concert with others, for themselves.

Different Types of Meaning

The importance and centrality to philosophy of conceptual analysis is to be emphasized. It is not simply a recent fad or phenomenon in the subject. It has always been a part of philosophizing, at least as far as the Western world is concerned (and here it should be acknowledged that, though available to all, the kind of philosophy that we are engaged in is particularly associated with Western thought.) Thus, consider this passage from Plato’s Republic:

“What you say, Cephalus, is excellent,” I said. “But as to this justice, can we quite without qualification define it as ‘truthfulness and repayment of anything we have received’; or are these very actions sometimes just and sometimes unjust? For example, if we have been given weapons by a friend and he went mad and reclaimed them, it would surely be universally admitted that it would not be right to give them back. Anyone who did so, and was prepared to tell the whole truth to a man in that state, would not be just.” “You are right,” he said. Then this – speaking the truth and restoring what we have received – is not the definition of justice.¹

This passage makes it clear that one of the things Plato was up to in the Republic was to get at the meaning of justice, and this concern on his part links him directly with a great many contemporary philosophers, for as Gilbert Ryle observes, “the story of twentieth-century philosophy is very largely the story of this notion of sense or meaning”.² There are three different kinds of meaning which it would be well to distinguish at the outset.

Consider the seemingly fact-stating statement “Education consists of molding individuals into obedient members of the state”. Despite appearances, this might not be a statement of fact but an evaluation on the part of the person making it, meaning that “Education ought to consist of…” We need, then, to distinguish fact-stating language, which we shall refer to as the descriptive use of language, from the evaluative use of language.

Descriptive meaning is concerned with supplying information. For example, “The book is on the table” or “Snow is white”. Note that the information concerned does not have to be true: “Santa Claus is coming tonight” is equally an example of descriptive use of language. We can get a little clearer about the nature of descriptive meaning by comparing it with emotive meaning. If a speaker says that a certain film lasts for an hour and a half, then this would be correctly classified as a descriptive remark, regardless of whether it is true or false. But if he says of the same film “it was sickening and disgusting”, he is giving vent to his feelings; he was disgusted and sickened by it. Because he is expressing his emotional reaction rather than describing anything about the film, this utterance is classified as an instance of the emotive use of language. But now suppose that he says, “It was not a particularly good film.” This is not an emotive use of language, for he says nothing about his emotional reaction to it; it is a judgment about the quality of the film, which we classify as an evaluative expression. Finally, we may note that the question “Why do you say that?” which is generally a perfectly reasonable and sensible question to raise in the context of an evaluative statement, is not appropriate in the case of a descriptive statement. For example, “Why do you say that?” in response to the descriptive statement that the book is on the table is puzzling. The book just is on the table, and that is obviously why it was said. The same is not true of “Why do you say that?” in respect of the evaluative statement that it was a good film. All that ‘Why?’ does here is ask for the reasons for rating the film as good, and that is not at all puzzling.

Many words can be used both descriptively and evaluatively (not to mention emotively), as for instance ‘natural’ can be. If I claim that aggression is ‘natural’ in humans, it is not clear whether I mean simply that it is part of our nature, whether I mean to imply that it is morally acceptable, or both (see Chapter 4). But certain words logically or necessarily imply evaluation, whether positive or negative. Thus, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ all obviously and inescapably involve evaluation. We may disagree as to what is beautiful, but we cannot get round the fact that in calling something beautiful we are commending it or giving a positive evaluation. Such terms as necessarily imply evaluation are frequently referred to as normative (because they imply standards or norms).

The distinction between descriptive, evaluative, and emotive meaning, and the ability to recognize normative terms, is important in philosophy generally, and particularly so in the philosophy of education. This is because education is shot through with questions of value. As Max Black puts it, “All serious discussion of educational problems, no matter how specific, soon leads to a consideration of educational aims, and becomes a conversa...