Philosophy of education

{{PhilPsy} The philosophy of education is the study of the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education. This can be within the context of education as a social institution or more broadly as the process of human existential growth, i.e. how it is that our understanding of the world is continually transformed (be it from facts, social customs, experiences, or even our own emotions). Questions include the nature of the knowing mind and the human subject, problems of authority, the relationship between school and society, the learner-teacher dynamic, and so on.

Fundamental purposes that have been proposed for institutional education include:


 * 1) The enterprise of civil society depends on educating young people to become responsible, thoughtful and enterprising citizens. This 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.
 * 2) Progress in every practical field depends upon having capacities that schooling can educate. Education thus is a means to fostering the individual's, society's, and even humanity's future development and prosperity. Emphasis is often put on economic success in this regard.
 * 3) One's individual development and the capacity to fulfill one's own purposes can depend upon an adequate preparation in childhood. Education thus can attempt to give a firm foundation for the achievement of personal fulfillment.

A chronological summary of the work of some of the most important and influential Western culture educational philosophers follows.

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. 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.

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. 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
Though Aristotle wrote a treatise On Education, this only survives through fragments that have come down to us. We thus know of his philosophy of education primarily through brief passages in other works. Aristotle considered nature, habit and reason to be three equally important forces to be cultivated in education. Thus, for example, he considered repetition to be a key tool to develop good habits. The teacher was to lead the student systematically; this differs, for example, from Socrates' emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas (though the comparison is perhaps unfair since Socrates was dealing with adults).

Aristotle placed great emphasis on balancing the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught. Subjects he explicitly mentions as being important included reading, writing and mathematics; music; physical education; literature and history; and a wide range of sciences. He also mentioned the importance of play.

One of education's primary missions for Aristotle, perhaps its most important, was to produce good and virtuous citizens for the polis. All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

Rousseau
Rousseau (1712-78), 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 book Emile, 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 own.

Dewey
See entry on John Dewey.

Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), a philosopher and writer, created a holistic educational impulse that has become known as Waldorf Education. He emphasizes a balance of developing the intellect (or head), feeling and artistic life (or heart), and practical skills (or hands). The education focuses on producing free individuals, and Steiner expected it to enable a new, freer social order to arise, through the creative, free human beings that it would develop.

Waldorf Education is based on Steiner's philosophy, known as anthroposophy, and divides education into three discrete developmental stages; these stages predate but have close similarities to Piaget's stages of child development.

The first stage is early childhood, normally lasting 6-7 years. In this stage, which emphasizes practical skills and concrete experiences, imitation is the primary educative force, and an environment replete with healthy impulses and especially practical work - crafts, gardening, cooking, cleaning, woodwork, and much more - is regarded as the ideal educational setting for the pre-school and kindergarten years. Language development is fostered through story-telling, verse and movement and/or finger games, i.e. primarily imitatively. The children are given opportunities for free play both inside and outside; this is considered vital for their healthy development, as this is the way they digest their impressions and develop their will forces, feeling life and intellect in an age-appropriate manner.

The second stage runs from the beginning of schooling, at six or seven years of age, until puberty. Here, education is best achieved through appeal to the child's imagination; development of the children's feeling and artistic life is strongly emphasized. The teacher's authority is established through guiding the child wisely and sensitively, but clearly; there is great worth placed upon establishing this sense in the child of having found a true authority in the teacher. There is a balance between academic, artistic and practical (crafts) subjects. The arts play an especially large role at this time; all subjects are to be presented with artistic feeling and permeated with imaginative approach. Two foreign languages are normally taught from first grade on. Generally the attempt is made to keep a main teacher with a class for longer periods of time, often from first grade right through the end of the elementary school.

The third stage runs from puberty until the end of childhood, or approximately from 13-14 years of age until 20-21. Here, the authority of the earlier years is no longer a viable pedagogical tool; instead, idealism becomes the key force of education. The children's intellectual development is now intensively fostered and their sense of judgement called upon. Great worth is placed upon avoiding early specialization; even in the secondary school, all students are normally expected to take a full range of academic courses (including physics, chemistry, biology, geology, mathematics, history, art history and literature), one or two foreign languages, arts, crafts, music (frequently both orchestral and choral), physical education and a movement discipline special to the schools (eurythmy). Teachers are specialized according to the discipline and the education should introduce the adolescent to the larger world as much as possible. Foreign exchanges and work experience are both thus common elements of the secondary school.

Throughout the education, a great importance is placed upon having free and creative individuals as teachers; thus, schools should have an appropriate amount of freedom to shape their own curriculum and teachers should have a corresponding freedom to shape the daily life of the classroom. In order for such a system to function, intensive work must take place both amongst teachers within schools and between schools to provide the necessary communication, training and development.

Waldorf education includes a respect for children's physical nature, rhythmic life (technical term: ether body), consciousness (technical term: astral body) and individuality (ego). Anthroposophy includes teachings about reincarnation and schools often try to foster an awareness that each human being - and thus each child - carries a unique being into this earthly life.

As both an independent educational model and a major influence upon other educators - such as Maria Montessori - Waldorf education is currently both one of the largest and one of the fastest growing educational movements in the world. Waldorf schools are also increasingly operating as state-funded (in the U.S.A. charter) schools or even state-run (in the U.S.A. public) schools.

B.F. Skinner
One of B.F. Skinner's (1904-90) contributions to education philosophy is his text Walden Two wherein he details the failings of society and education, as one is intricately and intrinsically linked to the other. The pedagogical methods Direct Instruction and Precision Teaching owe much to his ideas. Behaviorist theories play largely in his proposed ideas of social engineering.

Precision Teaching, developed by Skinner's student Ogden Lindsley, uses the basic philosophy that the "learner knows best". Each learner is charted on a unique graph known as a "Standard Celeration Chart". The record of the rate of learning is tracked by this charting and decisions can be made from these data concerning changes in an educational program.

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 (1921-97) 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 reciprocity 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 and his idea of democracy as a way of living rather than merely a polticial practice or method.) 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.

Freire's work is widely-read by educationalists but is less well-respected among philosophers.

Aspects of the Freirian philosophy have been highly influential in academic debates over 'participatory development' and development more generally. Freire's emphasis on emancipation through interactive participation has been used as a rationale for the participatory focus of development, as it is held that 'participation' in any fora can lead to empowerment of poor or marginalised groups. Critics argue that the inherently undemocratic, unequal nature of development projects foreclose any possibility of Freirian emancipation, but many cling to the 'empowering potential' of development.

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.

Critical responses and counter-philosophies
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.

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 proceeds 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.