PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

by: Pricilliano T. Bauzon

SUMMARY:

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The word education is used sometimes to signify the activity, process, or enterprise of
educating or being educated and sometimes to signify the discipline or field of study
taught in schools of education that concerns itself with this activity, process, or
enterprise. As an activity or process, education may be formal or informal, private or
public, individual or social, but it always consists in cultivating dispositions (abilities,
skills, knowledge’s, beliefs, attitudes, values, and character traits) by certain methods.
As a discipline, education studies or reflects on the activity or enterprise by asking
questions about its aims, methods, effects, forms, history, costs, value, and relations to
society.

Definition

The philosophy of education may be either the philosophy of the process of education
or the philosophy of the discipline of education. That is, it may be part of the discipline
in the sense of being concerned with the aims, forms, methods, or results of the
process of educating or being educated; or it may be meta-disciplinary in the sense of
being concerned with the concepts, aims, and methods of the discipline. However, even
in the latter case it may be thought of as part of the discipline, just as meta-philosophy
is thought of as a part of philosophy, although the philosophy of science is not regarded
as a part of science. Historically, philosophies of education have usually taken the first
form, but under the influence of analytical philosophy, they have sometimes taken the
second.

In the first form, philosophy of education was traditionally developed by philosophers–

for example, Aristotle, Augustine, and John Locke–as part of their philosophical
systems, in the context of their ethical theories. However, in the twentieth century
philosophy of education tended to be developed in schools of education in the context
of what is called foundations of education, thus linking it with other parts of the
discipline of education–educational history, psychology, and sociology–rather than with
other parts of philosophy. It was also developed by writers such as Paul Goodman and
Robert M. Hutchins who were neither professional philosophers nor members of schools
of education.

Types

As there are many kinds of philosophy, many philosophies, and many ways of
philosophizing, so there are many kinds of educational philosophy and ways of doing it.
In a sense there is no such thing as the philosophy of education; there are only
philosophies of education that can be classified in many different ways.

Philosophy of education as such does not describe, compare, or explain any enterprises
to systems of education, past or present; except insofar as it is concerned with the
tracing of its own history, it leaves such inquiries to the history and sociology of
education. Analytical philosophy of education is meta to the discipline of education–to
all the inquiries and thinking about education–in the sense that it does not seek to
propound substantive propositions, either factual or normative, about education. It
conceives of its task as that of analysis: the definition or elucidation of educational
concepts like teaching, indoctrination, ability, and trait, including the concept of
education itself; the clarification and criticism of educational slogans like "Teach
children, not subjects"; the exploration of models used in thinking about education
(e.g., growth); and the analysis and evaluation of arguments and methods used in
reaching conclusions about education, whether by teachers, administrators,
philosophers, scientists, or laymen.

To accomplish this task, analytical philosophy uses the tools of logic and linguistics as
well as techniques of analysis that vary from philosopher to philosopher. Its results may
be valued for their own sake, but they may also be helpful to those who seek more
substantive empirical of normative conclusions about education and who try to be
careful about how they reach them. This entry is itself an exercise in analytical
philosophy of education.

Normative philosophies or theories of education may make use of the results of such
analytical work and of factual inquiries about human beings and the psychology of
learning, but in any case they propound views about what education should be, what
dispositions it should cultivate, why it ought to cultivate them, how and in whom it
should do so, and what forms it should take. Some such normative theory of education
is implied in every instance of educational endeavor, for whatever education is
purposely engaged in, it explicitly or implicitly assumed that certain dispositions are
desirable and that certain methods are to be used in acquiring or fostering them, and
any view on such matters is a normative theory of philosophy of education. But not all
such theories may be regarded as properly philosophical. They may, in fact, be of
several sorts. Some simply seek to foster the dispositions regarded as desirable by a
society using methods laid down by its culture. Here both the ends and the means of
education are defined by the cultural tradition. Others also look to the prevailing culture
for the dispositions to be fostered but appeal as well to experience, possibly even to
science, for the methods to be used. In a more pluralistic society, an educational theory
of a sort may arise as a compromise between conflicting views about the aids, if not the
methods, of education, especially in the case of public schools. Then, individuals or
groups within the society may have conflicting full-fledged philosophies of education,
but the public philosophy of education is a working accommodation between them.
More comprehensive theories of education rest their views about the aims and a
method of education neither on the prevailing culture nor on compromise but on basic
factual premises about humans and their world and on basic normative premises about
what is good or right for individuals to seek or do. Proponents of such theories may
reach their premises either by reason (including science) and philosophy or by faith and
divine authority. Both types of theories are called philosophies of education, but only
those based on reason and philosophy are properly philosophical in character; the
others might better be called theologies of education. Even those that are purely
philosophical may vary in complexity and sophistication.

In such a full-fledged philosophical normative theory of education, besides analysis of

the sorts described, there will normally be propositions of the following kinds:

1. Basic normative premises about what is good or right;

2. Basic factual premises about humanity and the world;
3. Conclusions, based on these two kinds of premises, about the dispositions
education should foster;
4. Further factual premises about such things as the psychology of learning and
methods of teaching; and
5. Further conclusions about such things as the methods that education should use.

For example, Aristotle argued that the Good equals happiness equals excellent activity;
that for a individual there are two kinds of excellent activity, one intellectual (e.g., doing
geometry) and one moral (e.g., doing just actions); that therefore everyone who is
capable of these types of excellent activity should acquire a knowledge of geometry and
a disposition to be just; that a knowledge of geometry can be acquired by instruction
and a disposition to be just by practice, by doing just actions; and that the young
should be given instruction in geometry and practice in doing just actions. In general,
the more properly philosophical part of such a full normative theory of education will be
the proposition it asserts in (1),(2), and (3); for the propositions in (4) and hence (5) it
will, given those in (3), most appropriately appeal to experience and science. Different
philosophers will hold different views about the propositions they use in (1) and (2) and
the ways in which these propositions may be established.

Although some normative premises are required in (1) as a basis for any line of
reasoning leading to conclusions in (3) or (5) about what education should foster or
how it should do this, the premises appearing in (2) may be of various sorts–empirical,
scientific, historical, metaphysical, theological, or epistemological. No one kind of
premise is always necessary in (2) in every educational context. Different philosophers
of education will, in any case, have different views about what sorts of premises it is
permissible to appeal to in (2). All must agree, however, that normative premises of the
kind indicated in (1) must be appealed to. Thus, what is central and crucial in any
normative philosophy of education is not epistemology, metaphysics, or theology, as is
sometimes thought, but ethics, value theory, and social philosophy.

Role

Let us assume, as we have been doing, that philosophy may be analytical, speculative,
or narrative and remember that it is normally going on in a society in which there
already is an educational system. Then, in the first place, philosophy may turn its
attention to education, thus generating philosophy of education proper and becoming
part of the discipline of education.

Second, general philosophy may be one of the subjects in the curriculum of higher
education and philosophy of education may be, and presumably should be, part of the
curriculum of teacher education, if teachers are to think clearly and carefully about
what they are doing.

Third, in a society in which there is a single system of education governed by a single

prevailing theory of education, a philosopher may do any of four things with respect to
education: he may analyze the concepts and reasoning used in connection with
education in order to make people's thinking about it as clear, explicit, and logical as
possible; he may seek to support the prevailing system by providing more philosophical
arguments for the dispositions aimed at and the methods used; he may criticize the
system and seek to reform it in the light of some more philosophical theory of
education he has arrived at; or he may simply teach logic and philosophy to future
educators and parents in the hope that they will apply them to educational matters.

Fourth, in a pluralistic society like the United States, in which the existing educational
enterprise or a large segment of it is based on a working compromise between
conflicting views, a philosopher may again do several sorts of things. He may do any of
the things just mentioned. In the United States in the first half of the twentieth century
professional philosophers tended to do only the last, but at the end of the twentieth
century they began to try to do more. Indeed, there will be more occasions for all of
these activities in a pluralistic society, for debate about education will always be going
on or threatening to be resumed. A philosopher may even take the lead in formulating
and improving a compromise theory of education. He might then be a mere eclectic,
but he need not be, since he might defend his compromise plan on the basis of a whole
social philosophy. In particular, he might propound a whole public philosophy for public
school education, making clear which dispositions it can and should seek to promote,
how it should promote them, and which ones should be left for the home, the church,
and other private means of education to cultivate. In any case, he might advocate
appealing to scientific inquiry and experiment whenever possible. A philosopher may
also work out a fully developed educational philosophy of his own and start an
experimental school in which to put it into practice, as John Dewey did; like Dewey, too,
he may even try to persuade his entire society to adopt it. Then he would argue for the
desirability of fostering certain dispositions by certain methods, partly on the basis of
experience and science and partly on the basis of premises taken from other parts of
his philosophy–from his ethics and value theory, from his political and social philosophy,
or from his epistemology, metaphysics, or philosophy of mind.

It seems plausible to maintain that in a pluralistic society philosophers should do all of

these things, someone and some another. In such a society a philosopher may at least
seek to help educators concerned about moral, scientific, historical, aesthetic, or
religious education by presenting them, respectively, with a philosophy of morality,
science, history, art, or religion from which they may draw conclusions about their aims
and methods. He may also philosophize about the discipline of education, asking
whether it is a discipline, what its subject matter is, and what its methods, including the
methods of the philosophy of education, should be. Insofar as the discipline of
education is a science (and one question here would be whether it is a science) this
would be a job for the philosopher of science in addition to one just mentioned.
Logicians, linguistic philosophers, and philosophers of science may also be able to
contribute to the technology of education, as it has come to be called, for example, to
the theory of testing or of language instruction.

Finally, in a society that has been broken down by some kind of revolution or has newly
emerged from colonialism, a philosopher may even supply a new full-fledged normative
philosophy for its educational system, as Karl Marx did for Russia and China. In fact, as
in the case of Marx, he may provide the ideology that guided the revolution in the first
place. Plato tried to do this for Syracuse, and the philosophes did it for France in the
eighteenth century. Something like this may be done wherever the schools "dare to
build a new society," as many ask schools to do.

Dewey once said that since education is the process of forming fundamental
dispositions toward nature and our fellow human beings, philosophy may even be
defined as the most general theory of education. Here Dewey was thinking that
philosophy is the most general normative theory of education, and what he said is true
if it means that philosophy, understood in its widest sense as including theology and
poetry as well as philosophy proper, is what tells us what to believe and how to feel
about humanity and the universe. It is, however, not necessarily true if it refers to
philosophy in the narrower sense or means that all philosophy is philosophy of
education in the sense of having the guidance of education as its end. This is not the
whole end of classical philosophy or even of philosophy as reconstructed by Dewey; the
former aimed at the truth rather than at the guidance of practice, and the latter has
other practical ends besides that of guiding the educational enterprise. Certainly,
analytical philosophy has other ends. However, although Dewey did not have analytical
philosophy in mind, there is nevertheless a sense in which analytical philosophy can
also be said to be the most general theory of education. Although it does not seek to
tell us what dispositions we should form, it does analyze and criticize the concepts,
arguments, and methods employed in any study of or reflection upon education. Again
it does not follow that this is all analytical philosophy is concerned with doing. Even if
the other things it does–for example, the philosophy of mind or of science–are useful to
educators and normative theorists of education, as, it is hoped, is the case, they are not
all developed with this use in mind.

Comments:

Philosophy of education is a field characterized not only by broad theoretical

eclecticism but also by a perennial dispute, which started in the mid-twentieth century,
over what the scope and purposes of the discipline even ought to be. In the
"Philosophy of Education" article that was included in the previous edition of this
encyclopedia, William Frankena wrote, "In a sense there is no such thing
as the philosophy of education". During certain periods of the history of the philosophy
of education, there have been dominant perspectives, to be sure: At one time, the field
was defined around canonical works on education by great philosophers (Plato of
ancient Greece, the eighteenth-century Swiss-born Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
and others); at other times, the field was dominated, in the United States at least, by
the figure of John Dewey (1859–1952) and educational Progressivism; at other times,
the field was characterized by an austere analytical approach that explicitly rejected
much of what had come before in the field as not even being proper "philosophy" at all.
But even during these periods of dominance there were sharp internal disputes within
the field (such as feminist criticisms of the "Great Man" approach to philosophy of
education and vigorous critiques of the analytical method). Such disputes can be read
off the history of the professional societies, journals, and graduate programs that
institutionalize the field, and they can be documented through a succession of previous
encyclopedia articles, which by definition attempt to define and delimit their subject
matter.

These sorts of struggles over the maintenance of the disciplinary boundary, and the
attempt to define and enforce certain methods as paramount are hardly unique to
philosophy of education. But such concerns have so preoccupied its practitioners that at
times these very questions seem to become the substance of the discipline, nearly to
the exclusion of thinking about actual educational problems. And so it is not very
surprising to find, for example, a book such as Philosophers on Education. Consisting of
a series of essays written by professional philosophers entirely outside the discipline of
philosophy of education, the collection cites almost none of the work published within
the discipline; because the philosophers have no doubts about the status of the
discipline of philosophy of education, they have few qualms about speaking
authoritatively about what philosophy has to say to educators. On the other hand, a
fruitful topic for reflection is whether a more self-critical approach to philosophy of
education, even if at times it seems to be pulling up its own roots for examination,
might prove more productive for thinking about education, because this very tendency
toward self-criticism keeps fundamental questions alive and open to reexamination.