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Philosophy of education is the study of such questions as what education is and what its purpose is, the
nature of the knowing mind and the human subject, problems of authority, the relationship between education and society, etc.
Since at least Rousseau, philosophy of education has been
linked to greater or lesser degrees to theories of human
development. The philosophy of education recognizes that the enterprise of civil society depends on the education of the
young, and that to educate children as responsible, thoughtful and enterprising citizens is an intricate, challenging task
requiring deep understanding of ethical principles, moral values, political theory, aesthetics, and economics; not to mention an
understanding of who children are, in themselves and in society.
Critics have accused the philosophy of education of being one the weakest subfields of both philosophy and education, disconnected from philosophy (by being
insufficiently rigorous for the tastes of many "real" philosophers) and from the broader study and practice of education (by
being too philosophical, too theoretical). However, its proponents state that it is an exacting and critical branch of philosophy
and point out that there are few major philosophers who have not written on education, and who do not consider the philosophy of
education a necessity. For example, Plato undertakes to discuss all these elements in
The Republic, beginning the formulation of educational philosophy that endures today.
There are certain key voices in philosophy of education, who have contributed in large part to our basic understandings of
what education is and can be, and who have also provided powerful critical perspectives revealing the problems in education as it
has been practiced in various historical circumstances. There is one particular strand in educational philosophy that stands out
as of extreme importance in the present time, which may be identified as the "Democratic Tradition", because it is a product of
philosophers who, seeking to establish or preserve democracy, turn to education as a method of choice.
The democratic tradition of educational philosophy
Plato
Plato is the earliest important educational thinker. Education is, of course, a
relatively minor part of his overall philosophical vision, but it is an important one. He saw education as the key to creating
and sustaining his Republic. He advocated extreme methods: removing children from
their mothers' care and raising them as wards of the state, with great care being taken to differentiate children suitable to the
various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less
able. Education would be holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, and rigidly censored music and art. For Plato,
the individual was best served by being subordinated to a just society. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the first thinker to conceive of systematic public education in the modern
sense, followed Plato in many respects, adapting him to the particular situation of American democracy in his own time.
Plato should be considered foundational for democratic philosophies of education both because later key thinkers treat him as
such, and because, while Plato's methods are autocratic and his motives meritocratic, he nonetheless prefigures much later
democratic philosophy of education. Plato's belief that talent was distributed non-genetically and thus must be found in children
born to all classes moves us away from aristocracy, and Plato builds on this by insisting that those suitably gifted are to be
trained by the state so that they may be qualified to assume the role of a ruling class. What this establishes is essentially a
system of selective public education premised on the assumption that an educated minority of the population are, by virtue of
their education (and inborn educability), sufficient for healthy governance. This is different in degree rather than kind from
most versions of, say, the American experiment with democratic education, which has usually assumed that only some students
should be educated to the fullest, while others may, acceptably, fall by the wayside.
Aristotle
Pending
Locke
Pending
Rousseau
Rousseau, though he paid his respects to Plato's
philosophy, rejected it as impractical due to the decayed state of society. Rousseau also had a different theory of human
development--where Plato held that people are born with skills appropriate to different castes (though he did not regard these
skills as being inherited), Rousseau held that there was one developmental process common to all humans. This was an intrinsic,
natural process, of which the primary behavioral manifestation was curiosity. This differed from Locke's tabula rasa in that it was an active process deriving from the child's nature,
which drove the child to learn and adapt to its surroundings.
As Rousseau wrote in his Emile (book), all children are
perfectly designed organisms, ready to learn from their surroundings so as to grow into virtuous adults. But, due to the malign
influence of corrupt society, they often failed to do so. Rousseau advocated an educational method which consisted of removing
the child from society (i.e., to a country home) and alternately conditioning him through changes to environment and setting
traps and puzzles for him to solve or overcome.
Rousseau was unusual in that he recognized and addressed the potential of a problem of legitimation for teaching. He advocated
that adults always be truthful with children, and in particular that they never hide the fact that the basis for their authority
in teaching was purely one of physical coercion--"I'm bigger than you." Once children reached the age of reason (about 12), they
would be engaged as free individuals in the ongoing process of their education.
B.F. Skinner
B.F. Skinner's perhaps largest contribution to education philosophy in
his text Walden Two wherein he details the failings of society and education,
as one is intricately and intrinsically linked to the other. Skinner shares
Rousseau's lack of faith of in society. His behaviorist theories play largely in his proposed ideas of social engineering.
Dewey
See entry on John Dewey. More pending.
Freire
A Brazilian who became committed to the cause of educating the impoverished peasants of his nation and collaborating with them
in the pursuit of their liberation from oppression, Paulo Freire
contributes a philosophy of education that comes not only from the more classical approaches stemming from Plato, but also from
modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed may best be read as an
extension of or reply to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth,
which laid strong emphasis on the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern
(rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (that is, that was not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).
Freire is best-known for his attack on what he called the banking
concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Of course, this is not
really a new move--Rousseau's conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from the tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the "banking concept"), and thinkers
like John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead were strongly critical of the transmission of mere facts as the goal of
education.
More challenging, however, is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in
Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it should be completely abolished. Of course, this is
strictly inconceivable in absolute terms (there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child
relationship), but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocality be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. Freire
wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher, that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches, as
the basic roles of classroom participation.
This is one of the few attempts anywhere to implement something like democracy as an educational method and not merely a goal
of democratic education. Even Dewey, for whom democracy was a touchstone, did not integrate democratic practices fully into his
methods. (Though this is in part a function of his peculiar attitudes toward individuality.) However, in its early, strong form
this kind of classroom has sometimes been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's
authority.
Henry Giroux
(Pending)
Critical responses and counter-philosophies
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt largely avoided education as a subject, but she did so
for reasons which are very interesting to educational philosophy. Her thoughts on the subject are recorded in one of the essays
collected in Between Past and Future, entitled, "The Crisis in Education." In this essay, Arendt precedes to argue that
any attempt to create democracy through educational methods was a form of tyranny... (Continuation pending)
E.D. Hirsch
E.D. Hirsch would surely
identify himself as someone interested in educating for democracy, but he is grouped separately here because his philosophy is
basically a counter to Deweyan pragmatic education, and because, like Arendt, he is concerned with preparing children for an
existing order, rather than working towards a new one, let alone instituting the practice of democracy as a part of education.
Hirsch is responsible for promoting the cultural literacy
movement.
Neil Postman and the Inquiry Method
Neil Postman has been a strong contemporary voice in both methods and
philosophy of education. His 1969 book "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" (co-authored with Charles Weingartner) introduced the
concept of a school driven by the Inquiry Method, the basis of which is
to get the students themselves to ask and answer relevant questions. The "teacher" (the two authors disdained the term and
thought a new one should be used) would be limited in the number of declarative sentences he could utter per class, as well as
questions he personally knew the answer to. The aim of this type of inquiry would be to prepare the students to lead responsible
adult lives, primarily by functioning as an antidote to the rampant bureaucracy most adults are faced with after leaving
school.
Postman went on to write several more books on education, notably "Teaching as a Conserving Activity" and "The End of
Education." The latter deals with the importance of goals or "gods" to students, and Postman suggests several "gods" capable of
replacing the current ones offered in schools, namely, Economic Utility and Consumerism.
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