James R. Muir - The History of Educational Ideas and the Credibility of Philosophy of Education (1998)

Educational Philosophy and

The0

y,

Vol.

30,

No.

I,

1998

7

The History

of

Educational Ideas and theCredibility

of

Philosophy

of

Education

JAMES

R.

MUIR

King’s

College,

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

B3H

2A1

Introduction

A

number of educationists has recently advocated a return to the history

of

educational ideas, in part as a necessary component of educational philosophy(Kaminsky, 1986, pp.

42-47;

Darling, 1993, pp. 36-38; Jonathan, 1993,pp. 171-178). The prerequisite

of

a credible return to the history of educationalideas is some awareness of who and what constitute that history. The generalintention of this paper is to argue that (to use John Darling’s apt phrase) ‘themarginalization of the historical’ (Darling, 1993, p.

36)

has been

so

extreme withineducational studies that even this minimal awareness is no longer available.The specific intention of this paper is to demonstrate how serious the marginal-ization of the history of educational philosophy has been, with reference to Isocrates.The Isocratic heritage reveals three important aspects of this marginalization, thefirst two of which are the particular concerns of this paper. First, and of primaryimportance, the case of Isocrates illustrates how wholly inaccurate accounts of thehistory of educational ideas have come to be universally accepted within educationalstudies. Second, the reasons for such inaccuracies, and for the failure to detect them,are to be found in the exclusivity of methodological doctrines which systematicallydistort the history

of

educational thought. Educationists then re-invent ideas whichare (outside educational studies) familiar features of that history. Finally, suchdistorted accounts and re-inventions remain unchallenged because educationalstudies has been, and remains, isolated from the recovery of the history of edu-cational thought by classicists and political philosophers. These three problems haveclear implications for the intellectual credibility, and institutional prospects, ofeducational studies in the future.

An

Illustrative Preamble: from Rousseau to Isocrates

It is instructive that Darling’s advocacy of

a

return to historical study illustratesprecisely these problems. Turning to the isolation of educational studies, Darlingasserts that ‘little work in the history of philosophy of education has been done’ inrecent decades, and that his own historical work therefore represents a departurefrom the ‘dominant trend’ in educational thought (Darling, 1993, p.

27).

Yet if welook outside of educational studies, to the work of the classicists and political

00

13- 1857/98/0 10007-20

0

998

PhilosophyofEducation Society

of

Australasia

8

J. R.

Muir

philosophers who (it must be remembered) now account for most philosophy ofeducation, we see that a return to the history of educational philosophy and ideashas been a defining feature of the subject for more than a century, and especially inthe past five decades (e.g. Freeman, 1922; Burk, 1923; Nettleship, 1935; Jaeger,1947; Marrou, 1948; Beck, 1964; Gwynn, 1964; Finley, 1975; Brann, 1979; Lord,1982; Tarcov, 1984; Grafion

&

Jardine, 1986; Kimball, 1986; Proctor, 1988;Romilly,

1988;

Strauss, 1989a,b; Pangle, 1992; Pangle

&

Pangle, 1993). This is veryclear in the case of the educational philosopher with whom Darling was mostconcerned, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.According to Darling, educational thinkers such as Rousseauhave been effectively marginalized by a conception of philosophy of edu-cation which sidelines the historical. Consequently we lack a rich traditionof writing about these thinkers within which philosophers

of

education canwork. (Darling, 1993, p. 27. Cf. pp. 36-38)Yet ‘we’ do not at all lack a rich tradition of writing about the educational thoughtof Rousseau, who has been marginalized only within (English-language) educationalstudies. One such tradition originates with Ernst Cassirer’s

The Question

of

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

(1954), and was perpetuated through Cassirer’s students.Cassirer’s historical study of Rousseau’s educational ideas was developed by Gay,Barzun, and Trilling. Cassirer’s philosophical study of Rousseau was developed byhis eminent student Leo Strauss, and by several of Strauss’s students (Strauss, 1953;Gay 1966; Trilling, 1971; Bloom, 1978; Gilden, 1983; Schwartz, 1984). Theproblem is not

that

educationists lack

a

rich tradition of writing about Rousseau’seducational ideas. The areal problem is that they are unaware of its existence as aresult of their isolation from the

educational

scholarship being done outside edu-cational studies (cf. Muir, 1996a,b).One of the inevitable products of such isolation is the often elementary inaccuracy

of

historical descriptions, and the consequent superficiality of philosophical evalu-ations, of the development of educational thought. For example, the title ofRousseau’s best-known educational work, the

Emile,

was taken from Plutarch’s

(c.

46-120

A.D.)

historical biography, the

Life

of

AemiZius Paulaus.

As

Rousseauhimself emphasizes, Plutarch’s

Lives,

in Latin translation, was his favourite readingduring his youth, and the single most important influence on the development of hischaracter and taste

(Confessions,

Book

1,

17 19-1 723). Rousseau’s educational ideas,particularly as expressed in

the

crucial-yet generally ignored-fourth chapter of‘The Government of Poland’, show clearly the influence of Plutarch’s famoustreatise on education. Plutarch, in turn, was the product of the Isocratic school ofhistorical biography (Barnes, 1962, p. 35). If we allow ourselves to be guided to thehistorical antecedents of Rousseau’s educational ideas, as they are identified by hisown references to them, we very soon find that any attempt to understand Rousseaucompels us to return to the educational ideas of Isocrates. While political philoso-phers have done this, neither Darling, nor any other educationist in this century, hasdone the same, for reasons which we must

try

to understand.

Histo

y

of

Educational Ideas

9

The

Legacy

of

Isocrates

in

Non-educationist Educational Scholarship

Before turning to an examination of some central features of the Isocratic heritage,we must remind ourselves of just how influential that heritage has been. Classicistshave argued that Isocrates is ‘the educator of Europe’ (Newman, 1975, p. 358), ‘thefather of modern liberal education’ (Proussis, 1965, p. 74), and ‘one of the greatesteducationalists of history’ (Knowles, 1962, p. 60). As long ago as 1926, in a bookstill regarded as ‘the basic work’ on Roman education (Marrou, 1984, p. 201),Aubrey Gwynn argued that, in comparison to Plato or Aristotlethe educational program of Isocrates demands closer attention: partly forits intrinsic interest, partly because of its immense and abiding influence onGreco-Roman education. (Gwynn, 1964, p. 46. Cf. Bolgar, 1954, p. 28;Kennedy, 1980, p. 31)The distinguished classicist historian of education, Henri-Irene Marrou, also argued,on the basis of a meticulous analysis of the original sources, that Isocrates’ theory

of

education overcame the opposing theory offered by the Socratic philosophers.The importance of this fact must be emphasized from the beginning. Onthe level of history Plato had been defeated: he had failed to impose hiseducational ideal on posterity.

It

was Isocrates who defeated him, and whobecame the educator first

of

Greece, and subsequently of the whole of theancient world. (Marrou, 1948,

I,

p. 292. Cf.

p.

128)While our conception of philosophy derives from Plato and the Socratics, ourconception of

education

derives from Isocrates. We shall return to this point below,with reference to P.

H.

Hirst’s history of liberal education.The educational ideas and practices of the medieval period also derived fromIsocrates. In his indispensable work,

European Literature

in

the Latin Middle Ages,

Curtius reminds us thatDespite sporadic theoretical opposition, Isocrates’ standpoint remainedauthoritative in practice for the whole of antiquity. (Curtius, 1953,pp. 36-37)Or, in the words of medievalist David KnowlesGreat and permanent, even in this field, as was the influence of the twophilosophers [Plato and Aristotle], the victory and the future lay withIsocrates. (Knowles, 1962, p. 61)As Finley has confirmed, the Isocratic version of liberal education, ‘passed from theancient Greeks

to

the Byzantine world, from the Romans to the Latin West’ (Finley,1975, p. 199. Cf. Marrou, 1948, p. 128; Hadas, 1962, p. 172; Clarke, 1971, p. 2),where

it

continued to dominate medieval education. The fifteenth-century recovery

of

the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle initiated a renewal of the classical conflictin educational thought between the Socratic philosophers and the Isocratic rhetors