![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
What is the place of philosophy in the study of education? What is its significance for policy and practice? This paper begins by considering the policy and institutional context of the philosophy of education in the UK and by tracing its recent history. It examines both the place of philosophy in Education (as a field of study) and the status and character of the philosophy of education in relation to the ‘parent’ discipline of philosophy. Rival accounts of the nature of the philosophy of education are outlined, in such a way as to acknowledge the importance of conceptual analytical approaches, but also to stress the value of a wider, more inclusive characterization. In the light of these, examples are offered to illustrate the role the subject must have in the understanding and improvement of educational policy and practice. Reference is primarily to the UK context, but the manner in which fundamental questions are addressed makes clear their much wider relevance and importance.
Notes
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was published (in Greek), in 2007, in: H. Theorodopoulou (Ed.) Philosophy of education: discourses, aspects, curriculum (Athens, Atrapos). A further version is to be published in 2007, translated into Spanish by Gonzalo Jover and Ana María Lazarte, under the title ‘Concepciones Rivales de la Filosofía de la Educacíon’, in the Spanish–Canadian Journal Encounters on Education/Encuentros sobre Educacíon/Rencontres sur Education.
1. Take the whole of Plato as a starting-point.
2. The work of PISA and developments under the aegis of the Bologna Process provide convenient examples of this trend. For insightful critiques of aspects of these see, respectively, Bonderup-Dohn (Citation2007) and Masschelein and Simons (Citation2002).
3. Analytical philosophy does, of course, remain the dominant form of the subject in Philosophy departments in most English-speaking countries, but its relation to ‘continental’ and other kinds of philosophy has generally become less hostile, and the reference of the term has been broadened. It is surely an error to think of either of these labels as appropriately naming unified traditions.
4. For a critique of Wilson's views in this paper see Standish (Citation2006). For a critical discussion of proceduralism in education, but also in so much else, see Standish (Citation2001a).
5. 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 Blake et al. (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 Paul Standish in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37(1), 169–173.
6. To illustrate: an example of someone who has been eminently successful in demonstrating the practical relevance of Heidegger's work in various aspects of vocational education is Hubert Dreyfus (see e.g. Dreyfus, Citation2001; Spinosa et al., 1997). For a critique of Dreyfus see Standish (Citation2002, Citation2007).
7. ‘Further education’, roughly the equivalent of the community college system in the United States, is post-compulsory education at sub-university level, concerned especially, though by no means exclusively, with vocational education.
8. The ‘new universities’ are those that were formally classed as polytechnics or colleges of higher education; the older universities are those whose charter predates this change.
9. The early assumption was that courses in computer programming were what was needed. This was gradually superseded by commitment to IT across the curriculum. But in fact neither of these innovations had the importance that was imagined for them at that time, as I here go on to argue.
10. I am struck, for example, by the way that, in a book entitled The Internet: a philosophical inquiry, a philosopher as able as Gordon Graham cogently rehearses arguments from political philosophy but does not succeed in addressing in any depth the more distinctive ways in which the Internet impacts on our lives (Graham, Citation1999). More phenomenological approaches, in my view, have fared much better (see e.g. Feenberg, Citation1999; Kolb, Citation2000; Andler, Citation2006).
11. Lyotard writes: ‘The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output: performativity’ (Lyotard, Citation1984, p. 11). For examples of attempts to examine the broader educational significance of Lyotard's work see Dhillon and Standish (Citation2000).
12. The technical use of the phrase ‘objective testing’, to designate, for example, computer-marked assignments, is profoundly misleading. It feeds this fantasy.