Chroniclers and critics

Abstract

In recent papers by Marc Depaepe and Daniel Tröhler, philosophers of education are criticised for their tendency to address eternal questions in pursuit of timeless truths, with insufficient awareness of the genesis of the ideas they refer to and insensitivity to historical context. The suspicion of “presentism” in their approach is reinforced by their practice of speaking of figures of the past in the present tense. This paper takes issue with the characterisation of philosophy of education that both papers presume, suggesting that the field is different from and more varied than these authors imply. More specifically, the logic of the assumptions behind the criticism of usage of the present tense is questioned, and this leads to an exploration of different dimensions of time that casts light on the nature of history.

Keywords:

• philosophy of education
• history of education
• presentism
• positionality
• time

Notes

¹ References in the present text are to the version subsequently published as follows: M. Depaepe, “Philosophy and History of Education: Time to Bridge the Gap?,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 39, no. 1 (February 2007): 28–43.

² Depaepe, 39–40.

³ With the spirited assertion of the principle “A la guerre, comme à la guerre … et chez les philosophes, comme à la philosophie”, Depaepe declared his intention to let his “thoughts roam freely, unbound by any urge to impose a chronological or spatial structure, nor by an historian’s passion (perhaps even more typical of would‐be historians) for a documentary foundation in the form of footnotes” (Depaepe, 29). The idea of thoughts roaming freely is a perhaps surprising projection of what philosophy is, though it is not one that I would want wholly to resist.

⁴ Depaepe, 28.

⁵ This mostly postmodernist approach is associated especially with “‘grand theory’ à la Foucault”. On the face of it this connection is surprising, but I take it that Depaepe is referring to a turn to theory and away from a more empirical approach.

⁶ Depaepe, 35.

⁷ Depaepe, 31.

⁸ Depaepe, 32.

⁹ LaCapra’s distinction is played out in the following terms, on the first approach, “gathering evidence and making referential statements in the form of truth‐claims based on that evidence constitute necessary and sufficient conditions of historiography” (p. 147), D. LaCapra, “Writing History, Writing Trauma,” in Writing and Revising the Disciplines, ed. J. Monroe (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2002): 147–180. For radical constructivism, “referential statements making truth‐claims apply at best only to events and are of restricted, indeed marginal, significance. By contrast, essential are performative, figurative, aesthetic, rhetorical, ideological and political factors that ‘construct’ structures – stories, plots, arguments, interpretations, explanations – in which referential statements are embedded and take on meaning and significance” (ibid.). The more extreme forms of the documentary approach generally involve: “(1) a strict separation or binary opposition between subject and object; (2) a tendency to conflate objectivity with objectivism or the objectification of the other which is addressed only in the form of third‐person referential statements, direct quotations, and summaries or paraphrases; (3) an identification of historical understanding with causal explanation or with the fullest possible contextualization of the other (possibly in the form of thick description or narration); (4) a denial of transference or the problem of the implication of the observer in the object of observation; (5) an exclusion or downplaying of a dialogic relation to the other recognized as having a voice or a perspective that may question the observer or even place him or her in question by generating problems about his or her assumptions, affective investments, and values”, LaCapra, 150. Radical constructivists such as Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, in contrast, accept the distinction between historical and fictional statements on the level of reference to events but question it on structural levels, seeing “the present historiography as a closed window so stained by one set of projective factors or another that, at least on a structural level, it reflects back only the historian’s own distorted image”, LaCapra, 153.

¹⁰ M. Halstead and T.H. McLaughlin, eds, Philosophy, Education and Comparative Education, Special Issue, Comparative Education, 40, no. 4 (2004).

¹¹ p. 284, J. Wilson, “Perspectives on the philosophy of education,” Oxford Review of Education 29, no. 2 (2003): 279–293.

¹² Wilson, 280.

¹³ Ibid. For a critique of Wilson’s views in this paper, see P. Standish, “John Wilson’s Confused ‘Perspectives on the Philosophy of Education’,” Oxford Review of Education 32, no. 2 (2006): 265–279.

¹⁴ There is, it is fair to say, a growing openness on the part of those who identify with the analytical approach towards the pluralism evident in the second account.

¹⁵ For an attempt to present a state‐of‐the‐art collection of work brought together in the light of an inclusive conception of philosophy of education, see N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith and P. Standish, eds, The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Education (Oxford, Blackwell, 2003). For an indication of some aspects of the differences between these two accounts, see the symposium with John White, Wilfred Carr, Richard Smith, Terence H. McLaughlin and myself: J. White, W. Carr, R. Smith, T. McLaughlin and P. Standish, “Five Critical Stances Towards Liberal Philosophy of Education in Britain,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 37, no. 1 (2003): 147–184.

¹⁶ p. 3: R. Smith, “‘As if by machinery’: the levelling of educational research’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 40, no. 2 (2006): 157–168.

¹⁷ p. 172: D. Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (London, Dent, 1962).

¹⁸ p. 13: D. Tröhler, Philosophical Arguments, Historical Contexts, and Theory of Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory 39, no. 1 (February, 2007): 10–19.

¹⁹ Strictly speaking it is not arguments that are true or false but propositions. Arguments are valid or invalid.

²⁰ Tröhler, 16.

²¹ Tröhler, 18.

²² Tröhler, 16.

²³ I would like to use the word “empiricism” here to refer to the belief that things are to be understood only through empirical research – a belief that I would criticise as ideological and dogmatic – but the term plays a different role in Tröhler’s account. To criticise empiricism, in my usage, would emphatically not be to criticise empirical work per se.

²⁴ Depaepe, 30.

²⁵ I am, of course, trying to guard my claim with the qualification of “no one” with “sane and serious”. There may be people, amongst the flat‐earthers and extreme fundamentalists, who still take these ideas seriously, but they do not figure in the kinds of academic debate we are presumably concerned with.

²⁶ In speaking of this contemporary confusion, I am thinking of the tendency, sometimes referred to as subjectivism, to see questions of value as matters of purely personal judgement, as if they were no more than matters of taste. This rules out the possibility of objectivity in ethics. Emotivism, sometimes referred to as the “boo‐hurrah theory,” is the view, associated especially with C.L. Stevenson and to some extent with A.J. Ayer, that ethical judgements are nothing more than expressions of feeling. It seems reasonable to see this as lying behind the confusion in question.

²⁷ Tröhler, 2007, 3.

²⁹ J,‐L. Borges, Funes the Memorious, in Labyrinths (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2000).

³⁰ The term Dasein, which is usually left untranslated, is used by Heidegger in order to avoid the burden of association that the idea of human being has accrued, specifically with the rise of humanism in the modern world.

³¹ Of course, there are museums of natural history, and techniques of carbon‐dating provide a chronology of natural change that extends beyond the existence of human beings. But the point is that this conception of time (chronos) is derivative of the richer and more complex time that is described here.

²⁸ The work I am referring to is predominantly phenomenological in character and includes, for example, the ideas of Bergson, Husserl, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Levinas and Derrida.

³² T. Popkewitz, B. Franklin, and M. Pereyra, “History, the Problem of Knowledge, and the New Cultural History of Schooling,” in Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling, ed. T. Popkewitz, B. Franklin, and M. Pereyra (New York and London, RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), cited in: Depaepe, 29.

³³ Tröhler, 15,

³⁴ Tröhler, 13.

³⁵ The position that LaCapra goes on to develop is, it should be emphasised, far more nuanced. His discussion turns to the theme of the middle voice, especially in relation to the history of trauma, which Haydn White develops from ideas advanced by Roland Barthes.

³⁶ LaCapra, 150.

³⁷ LaCapra, 147.

³⁸ LaCapra, 153.

³⁹ For an elaboration on this conception of the pathology of scepticism, see P. Standish, “Education for grown‐ups, a religion for adults: scepticism and alterity in Cavell and Levinas,” Ethics and Education 2, no. 1 (March 2007): 73–91.