essay on importance of education in wikipedia

Essay on Importance of Education for Students

500 words essay on importance of education.

To say Education is important is an understatement. Education is a weapon to improve one’s life. It is probably the most important tool to change one’s life. Education for a child begins at home. It is a lifelong process that ends with death. Education certainly determines the quality of an individual’s life. Education improves one’s knowledge, skills and develops the personality and attitude. Most noteworthy, Education affects the chances of employment for people. A highly educated individual is probably very likely to get a good job. In this essay on importance of education, we will tell you about the value of education in life and society.

Importance of Education in Life

First of all, Education teaches the ability to read and write. Reading and writing is the first step in Education. Most information is done by writing. Hence, the lack of writing skill means missing out on a lot of information. Consequently, Education makes people literate.

Above all, Education is extremely important for employment. It certainly is a great opportunity to make a decent living. This is due to the skills of a high paying job that Education provides. Uneducated people are probably at a huge disadvantage when it comes to jobs. It seems like many poor people improve their lives with the help of Education.

Better Communication is yet another role in Education. Education improves and refines the speech of a person. Furthermore, individuals also improve other means of communication with Education.

Education makes an individual a better user of technology. Education certainly provides the technical skills necessary for using technology . Hence, without Education, it would probably be difficult to handle modern machines.

People become more mature with the help of Education. Sophistication enters the life of educated people. Above all, Education teaches the value of discipline to individuals. Educated people also realize the value of time much more. To educated people, time is equal to money.

Finally, Educations enables individuals to express their views efficiently. Educated individuals can explain their opinions in a clear manner. Hence, educated people are quite likely to convince people to their point of view.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Importance of Education in Society

First of all, Education helps in spreading knowledge in society. This is perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Education. There is a quick propagation of knowledge in an educated society. Furthermore, there is a transfer of knowledge from generation to another by Education.

Education helps in the development and innovation of technology. Most noteworthy, the more the education, the more technology will spread. Important developments in war equipment, medicine , computers, take place due to Education.

Education is a ray of light in the darkness. It certainly is a hope for a good life. Education is a basic right of every Human on this Planet. To deny this right is evil. Uneducated youth is the worst thing for Humanity. Above all, the governments of all countries must ensure to spread Education.

FAQs on Essay on Importance of Education

Q.1 How Education helps in Employment?

A.1 Education helps in Employment by providing necessary skills. These skills are important for doing a high paying job.

Q.2 Mention one way in Education helps a society?

A.2 Education helps society by spreading knowledge. This certainly is one excellent contribution to Education.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Education/Reasons to use Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an opportunity to teach students essential 21st century skills that most will use in their careers and personal lives. Wikipedia is a valuable public resource, and in a classroom environment, students learn how to contribute to it and how to use it properly. Curricula can and should include Wikipedia. Wikipedia belongs in education.

When using Wikipedia in education, student motivations and learning outcomes can vary widely. However, most students are more engaged in a Wikipedia assignment than a traditional assignment. They also learn many skills.

Student engagement

These are some of the reasons that using Wikipedia in the classroom is so engaging, according to students:

• The global audience — students appreciate that their work could be viewed by thousands of people.
• The usefulness of the assignment — students like that their work serves a purpose; it isn't just graded and forgotten.
• The résumé builder — students add a new skill to their professional portfolio.
• The "cool" factor — students like showing their work to family and friends.
• The feedback — students like getting input from the broader world.
• The different experience — students appreciate an alternative assignment format and learning new things.

Student learning

Students learn a variety of skills by using Wikipedia in the classroom. Some of the main ones are:

• Reading — students get better at reading by reading more, and while working on Wikipedia, they read a lot!
• Writing — students practice writing in an expository, encyclopedic, summary style.
• Critical thinking — in contrast to many class assignments which require an argumentative or persuasive paper, Wikipedia's neutrality policy helps students think about class content in a new way.
• Information literacy — students identify bias and partisanship; students recognize whether an article is credible or not.
• Literature review — students practice finding and summarizing appropriate sources for their topic.
• Collaboration — students work with other people to develop high quality encyclopedia articles.
• Community of practice — students can connect with people in the Wikipedia community who work and study in the same field.
• Citation — students learn how to reference and use reliable sources correctly.
• Copyright — students learn the basics of copyrights and free licenses and the importance of attribution.
• Coding — students learn to use wiki markup, a computer programming language and form of coding, as well as the mechanics of working with wikis.
• Online etiquette — students learn how to work well with people whom they only know online and may never meet in person; this is an essential skill in today's online environment.
• Online citizenship — students participate in a large-scale knowledge project as peers and encounter challenges that are unique to an online environment.

Wikipedia assignments are rewarding, but are in several respects more challenging than traditional assignments.

• Demanding of students — Students typically find Wikipedia assignments more challenging than similar traditional assignments. They must not only research and write as they would normally, but also learn how Wikipedia works and how to follow its rules and norms. Also, the stakes feel much higher when students are writing in public.
• Planning ahead — Instructors must plan Wikipedia assignments well ahead of time, since it takes a bit of extra time to coordinate with the Wikipedia community. For instructors who are new to using Wikipedia in the classroom, this is essential to a successful project.
• Pacing — Students have less flexibility in pacing their work, since some critical elements involving feedback from the Wikipedia community will not be effective if rushed or put off until the last minute.
• Grading — Especially for instructors who are new to Wikipedia, there is a modest learning curve to devising an efficient grading rubric, and assessment of student work may take more time than it would for a traditional assignment.

• Wikipedia Education Program

Navigation menu

Truce Be Told

• Posted September 9, 2011
• By Lory Hough

A look at why some educators are starting to accept the online encyclopedia that anyone can write and edit.

On July 31, 2006, Stephen Colbert did a segment on his show, The Colbert Report , mocking the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The site was five years old at the time and starting to become hugely popular. But it was also greatly debated. Bloggers referred to it as “wicked-pedia” and “irresponsible scholarship.” Headlines called for a “stand against Wikipedia” and proclaimed, “Wikipedia: more dangerous than crack.” A year after the Colbert episode, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AL) even introduced legislation that would have banned Wikipedia from public schools. By far, the biggest criticism — and the biggest jokes — revolved around trustworthiness. What makes the site unique is also what makes it potentially problematic: Anyone can anonymously create entries about anything and, with some exceptions, can also anonymously edit entries created by other “wikipedians,” as they’re called. There is no hierarchy of expertise. As a 2006 New Yorker article pointed out, it is “a system that does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read 15-year-old.”

Colbert, with his laptop in front of him, jumped on this.

“Who is Britannica to tell me George Washington had slaves?” he said, referring to another encyclopedia, the oldest in the English language still in print and one that is often pitted against Wikipedia. After logging on to the Wikipedia site, Colbert continued, “If I want to say he didn’t, that’s my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia,” (he clicks the keyboard) “it’s also a fact.”

At the time, this kind of random contribution — by a regular Joe who was having fun, or at least who wasn’t backing up his claim with scholarly research — was exactly what educators were worried about when it came to students using the free site for research. Teachers, librarians, and professors started discouraging Wikipedia. Others outright banned students from using the site as a resource for projects and papers.

But now, five years after Colbert’s segment, there are signs that attitudes about Wikipedia may be slightly shifting. There are fewer heated debates online about the site’s evils, and headlines are more likely to focus on Wiki leaks than Wiki tweaks. As one blogger noted last January, marking the site’s 10th anniversary, “A reporter told me the other day that mocking Wikipedia is so 2007.”

Even educators, it seems, are starting to throw out olive branches.

Librarian and media specialist Linda O'Connor is one of them. In the fall of 2007, news spread fast and far about her "Just Say No to Wikipedia" posters, which she had hung above every computer in the library at Great Meadows Middle School in New Jersey. The local newspaper ran a story about her actions, as did The Inquirer in London and The New York Times . She appeared on FOX & Friends morning show. Library listservs lit up.

"Kids just take it for gospel, they really do," she said in interviews about Wikipedia. "That's my concern about it." A year later, though, new posters carried a slightly softer message: "Wikipedia-Free Media Center."

"It too led to many good discussions and I used it as a teaching tool throughout the year," O'Connor says, including putting up a bulletin board with the sign, "Using Wikipedia as a research tool." On the board, she posted examples of incorrect Wikipedia entries for students to read, and presumably learn from, such as a piece about the death of Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) during President Obama's inauguration. (Kennedy actually collapsed at the inauguration luncheon and was released from the hospital the next day.)

More recently, O'Connor went one step further: She took down the anti-Wikipedia posters.

"Omitting my Wikipedia posters from the media center bulletin board this year was an easy decision," she says. "Students are using answers from Wikipedia on other websites without realizing it. I decided to concentrate on website evaluation in general," such as teaching eighth-graders how to validate sources.

The same transition happened to Beth Holland, Ed.M.'02. When she started working at a small independent school in Newport, R.I., in 2006, as director of technology, she also told her students not to use Wikipedia.

"During my first year, I really struggled with teaching online research," she says. In particular, she felt like Wikipedia was tricky for her elementary-aged students to navigate, especially when it came to recognizing the difference between opinion and fact-checked research. This became apparent when the fifth-graders had to do a project on a famous artist. "One student used Wikipedia when looking up Andy Warhol," she says. At the time, the site had fewer safeguards than it does now, such as not allowing unregistered users from making edits. "Essentially, this 11-year-old had information about Warhol as a sex maniac and off-color film producer."

While that information may not have been totally fictitious, Holland says, it also wasn't scholarly research, and it wasn't appropriate for someone that age. So she started steering students away from Wikipedia.

And then she began using other research sites like Answer.com, which gathers information from various sources, including Wikipedia, and allows users to compare sources. Over time, she realized that "sometimes, [Wikipedia] is the best, and fastest, way to get information in a manageable format."

These days, what has Holland, now with EdTech Teacher, more concerned is another site: Google.

"I think that Google is more detrimental to the research process than Wikipedia," she says. "At least Wikipedia is an actual source, with documentation and a means to cite information. On the other hand, students feel that Google is a source. I can't count the number of times that I have asked a student where they found their information and the response is 'Google.'"

Google, they believe, is the only place to get information.

"Kids expect research to be a fill-in-the-blank answer sheet rather than a process," she says, "and frequently want to switch topics because they claim that they 'can't find anything.'"

For many educators, what this has prompted in recent years is less of a focus on just saying no to sites like Wikipedia, and instead saying: Can we use this as a teachable moment? Starting in 2010, for example, dozens of college professors (including at Harvard) assigned students to write Wikipedia entries for credit about public policy issues as part of a project launched by Wikimedia. This past academic year, the students had contributed almost 5,800 pages worth of fact-checked information. Other educators, like O'Connor and Holland, are training students how to do research effectively in the digital age so that they make better decisions. As one blogger wrote about Wikipedia, "Educators shouldn't allow students to simply use the site at will, without filtering. Educators can use the site to teach about online credibility, fact checking, primary and secondary sources, crowd sourcing … rather than simply banning it."

This is exactly what is now happening in Burlington, Mass. Librarians in the elementary schools begin the process, teaching basic research skills and Internet safety. By middle school, teachers show students how to check sources. And then in the ninth grade, says Amy Mellencamp, Ed.M.'81, principal of the high school, there is a required, semester-long course that looks more deeply at Internet safety, research strategies, and appropriate resources.

Unfortunately, says Megan Birdsong, Ed.M.'94, a teacher librarian for the Santa Clara United School District, while this kind of training in critical thinking is more needed than ever for students, it's not always a priority everywhere.

"The credentialed librarians in my school district have … been pink-slipped," she says. "Less than 25 percent of California schools have credentialed librarians … and yet the skills that we teach seem more important than ever as discussions of new types and sources of information evolve."

Looking at the numbers, Wikipedia has more than evolved. Today, it consistently ranks in the top 10 visited sites on the Internet. As of August, there were more than 19 million available articles written in 280 languages. In interviews and during speeches, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales stresses that the site tries to be accurate, but also should only be used as a stepping stone when doing research, especially by students.

"For God's sake, you're in college," he said, speaking to students at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. "Don't cite the encyclopedia." A year later, answering a question from a Time magazine reader who complained about a professor who badmouthed Wikipedia as a legitimate research source, Wales no doubt surprised the reader by answering, "I would agree with your teachers that that isn't the right way to use Wikipedia. The site is a wonderful starting point for research. But it's only a starting point because there's always a chance that there's something wrong, and you should check your sources if you are writing a paper."

Clint Calzini, Ed.M.'04, a former teacher and principal, and current doctoral student at the College of William & Mary, says he uses Wikipedia occasionally in his doctoral research "to get a snapshot of something." He advises his undergraduate students to do the same.

"I have always told students that Wikipedia is fine to start with to get an understanding of something, but due to its open source, it should not be quoted directly and that they need to verify information from a qualified source."

He acknowledges that the site has gotten better over the years, especially with footnotes.

"A recent example is [the entry on] daylight savings time," he says. "It has a stunning level of detail and 121 footnotes!" There's evidence that students, at least at the post-secondary level, may actually get this. A 2010 report, How College Students Evaluate and Use Information in the Digital Age , found that while nearly 75 percent of students reported using Wikipedia for school research, almost all of them said they turn first to course readings and consulted more with instructors and scholarly research than with Wikipedia.

Of course, not all educators have entirely jumped on the Wikipedia bandwagon. Matt Shapiro, Ed.M.'10, a secondary science teacher who wrote two op-eds in 2010 in support of students using Wikipedia — one for Education Week , one for Ed. — says he still sees some resistance from other teachers. Often, the level of acceptance depends on the subject matter. Anthony Parker, Ed.M.'93, principal of Weston High School, just outside of Boston, says his school doesn't have a uniform policy regarding Wikipedia, but some teachers feel more comfortable with the site's information than others.

"One math teacher thinks it is very good in computer science classes," he says. "As you might imagine, English and history teachers tend not to use it as much. In history, for example, it might be a decent starting place for a research project — with the caveat that you must check the Wikipedia source — but it is not counted as a source when the research project is turned in. As a former history teacher I am in the 'Wikipedia is not a great source and should be treated with great skepticism' camp."

Chris Kyle, a history professor at Syracuse University and an early critic of the site who has banned students from citing Wikipedia in papers since 2003, agrees.

"History is about being able to evaluate a number of sources, so it's important to know who wrote the piece: what viewpoint they've come from, what their religion is, etc.," he says. "I still feel like Wikipedia is an anonymous department store with no name, which is one-stop shopping. History, as a discipline, is about being able to shop around to a variety of specialists."

Luckily, Kyle says, students at the college level tend to use the site less as they move up in grade and get more sophisticated in their critical thinking. This may be why the librarians at the Ed School, who work primarily with master's and doctoral students, rarely use Wikipedia.

"All of us agree that Wikipedia never even comes up when we are discussing research strategies," says Gutman librarian Kathleen Donovan. "Students don't ask us about it, and we do not include it in our research strategy recommendations."

As the 10-year anniversary of Wikipedia comes to an end, where do educators go from here when it comes to their students and the site? A recent uproar on Wikipedia may provide one answer: This past summer, former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin offered an alternative theory about Paul Revere's famous midnight ride. Many historians publicly disagreed with her, and immediately, suspected Palin supporters rushed to the Paul Revere Wikipedia page and changed information to better fit with Palin's version of history.

And here's where the answer, and lesson, come in: The truth, in a sense, won out. Not only did Wikipedia editors instantly swoop in to delete misinformation, but the entry also ended up with more information and footnotes than before Palin's comments. It also got people talking, thinking, and, perhaps best of all, laughing. As Stephen Colbert said of the controversy, just before he donned a Paul Revere–type hat on his show while ringing a bell, firing a musket, and riding a coin-operated kiddie ride, "That doesn't mean Palin wasn't raising awareness of history. Without her, no one would have checked into what really happened. And more importantly, it did happen."

Note: Wikipedia was used in the writing of this article.

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Related Articles

Lessons Learned: Zid Mancenido, Ph.D.'22

Commencement Marshal Sarah Fiarman: The Principal of the Matter

A Lesson from Ferguson

What Is the Purpose of Education? Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Understanding the notion of education, the purpose of education, reasons to have education, features of an educated person, works cited.

Education has always been regarded as a significant part of the life of every individual. People had developed a particular understanding of education since the first civilizations appeared. Nowadays, primary education is mandatory for children in most of the countries. This necessity is predetermined by the fact that the individual should have the education to become a full value member of society. Also, education is vital for both personal and professional growth. The importance of education cannot be overestimated because it improves one’s potential and knowledge, promotes the development of society, and enhances the understanding of the surrounding world.

As it has been already mentioned, education became an important part of life since the beginning of humanity. Every epoch and civilization, starting from the Antiquity, shared the particular understanding of the notion of education and relationship between teachers and students. For example, the Ancient Greek understanding of the relationships between educators and learners may be described as follows: “The instructor is not noticeably older than the boys, but they appear to give him the respect and deference that would be due an honored teacher” (Austin 7). Such view of the learning process demonstrates the belief that the relationships between teachers and students should be based on the mutual respect. However, other ancient civilizations shared different views.

Hsun Tsu, a disciple of Confucius, saw education as a strict process of alternation. “He compared the process of educating a child to the process of straightening a piece of wood against a board or sharpening a piece of metal with a stone” (Austin 8). Such an approach is more teacher-centered in comparison to the other. Understanding of the notion of education is connected with its definition as well.

In Wikipedia, education is defined as “the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits” (“Education” par. 1). Such understanding of education usually presupposes that the individual studies at school or any other educational establishment to receive particular knowledge. Austin writes about Okakok’s argument that the word “education” should not be used interchangeably with the word “schooling” (79). The author writes that people are tended to speak about an educated person when they mean somebody who has received an official education. “Since all of our traditional knowledge and expertise is of this latter type, the concept of an ‘educated person’ has worked against us as a people, creating conflicting attitudes, and weakening older and proven instructional methods and objects of knowledge” (Austin 79). However, the controversial nature of education is described not only in the meaning of the word.

An interesting view on the nature of education was expressed by Paulo Freire in 1970. According to Freire, education reflects the political situation in the country. In authoritative countries, teachers have the absolute authority over learners who have to follow their orders. Freire considers that the interaction between the teacher and learner has a narrative character. Thus, the teacher is a person who narrates while the student listens. “Education is suffering from narration sickness” (Austin 63). Freire believes that the teacher should let students express their opinions and participate in the process. Ideas of Freire vividly describe one of the purposes of education.

It is difficult to understand and appreciate the significance of education without knowing its purposes. Many students are reluctant to study because they see no point in studying formulas and learning poems by heart. The problem is that not only students but many people are confused when they try to define the purpose of education. Philip Guo writes that many individuals use clichés (e.g. education teaches us how to learn) to explain the purpose of education. “The main purpose of education is to strengthen your mind” (Guo par. 1). Guo considers that permanent learning makes one’s mind strong. Thus, education lets people be prepared to challenging situations in life. Guo provides analog from sport to demonstrate his point of view. He writes that a good player has to work on his or her body all the time. The same is with mental conditioning. Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first advocates of the rights of women, realizes that all people need to develop the strength of mind. Wollstonecraft writes that people always react to something new or unusual “because they want the activity of mind, because they have not cherished the virtues of the heart” (Austin 37). By asserting the rights of women, Wollstonecraft recognizes the importance of education to become an active member of society.

Education comprises a significant part of the social life. The purpose of education was explained by Nick Gibb, the Minister of Education in the United Kingdom in 2015. Gibb dwelled on that education formed a cornerstone of the economy and social life (Gibb par. 10). This statement describes the second significant purpose of education. Proper education is necessary for being able to live in society. When people study at schools, universities, or other institutions, they happen to be involved in various social situations. Also, educators provide students with knowledge concerning the proper behavior in society often. Seneca wrote, “they [liberal arts] are raw materials out of which a virtuous life can be built — such as they are indispensable to the functioning of a free society” (Austin 16). Thus, education is what makes people prepared to the life with others. It makes everybody familiar with the concepts of justice, equity, and freedom. Such identification of the purpose of education is rather limited at the same time if take into account that education is a much broader concept.

Kim Jones writes that when it comes to finding the solution to the particular problem, education becomes inevitable aspect of the proper decision. Education is crucial for addressing poverty issues or environmental problems. For example, Douglas contemplates that education is directly connected with freedom. The author takes slavery as an example. He writes, “Education goes hand in hand with freedom, and the only way to keep people enslaved is to prevent them from learning and acquiring knowledge” (Austin 46). Jones considers that there is no universal purpose of education because it is a too diverse phenomenon (par. 8). The aim of education is connected with the reasons to have it.

The importance of education cannot be overestimated. It is necessary to evaluate the reasons to have education in various spheres of life. First, education is vital for individual development. When the individual receives knowledge, it alters his or her vision of the world. Also, education promotes the development of critical skills. Thus, educated people know how to analyze different situations (“Why is Education So Important” par. 3). In addition, education is useful for the improvement of character. Education teaches individuals how to become civilized citizens and behave properly. Hsun Tzu uses the word “gentleman” to describe an educated man. Confucius’ follower believes that a proper education is necessary for staying human and making right choices in life. “Therefore, a gentleman will take care in selecting the community he intends to live in, and will choose men of breeding for his companions. In this way he wards off evil and meanness, and draws close to fairness and right” (Austin 10). Education makes the individual aware of the way the world works. An educated person does not believe in illusions.

The second reason to have the education is connected with the professional development. College graduates are more likely to find an interesting job in comparison to those who neglect education. People with education have the possibility to build careers and improve their financial situation (“Importance of Education in Society” par. 4). One may argue that education brings purely material rewards. Still, the feeling of personal growth from career achievements should not be overlooked as well. As Tzu states, “If you make use of the erudition of others and the explanations of gentlemen, then you will become honored and may make your way anywhere in the world” (Austin 12).

The third reason to have education refers to its significance to societies and nations. Kurniawan dwells on the connection of the lack of education with large scale problems such as poverty (1). The writer provides insights from the macroeconomic theory arguing that government’s investment in education results in a better productivity of the labor force. Consequently, people can perform better activities and receive high wages. Also, education makes the whole society aware of the challenges and ways of their overcoming. Even more, education leads to the achievement of the higher level of awareness. “It epitomizes the special characteristics of consciousness: being conscious of , not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in Jasperian “split” — consciousness as consciousness of consciousness” (Austin 65).

The importance of education may be understood after the evaluation of the features of an educated person. Many people consider that an educated person knows a lot of facts and can remember information easily. Knowing facts does not make somebody an educated person. For example, one may memorize numerous things but fail to use them in practice. An educated person should have imagination and the ability to think and use acquired knowledge. Otherwise, no efficient result will be achieved. Al-Ghazali thinks that “effort to acquire knowledge is the worship of mind” (Austin 25). Thus, an educated person enjoys the process of learning something new and knows rationales for all efforts. An educated individual comprehends that education is not about having a diploma or certificate (Burdick par. 5). It is about learning how to live and become a better person.

McKay provides an interesting description of three features of educated people. The author believes that educated people do not wait for someone to entertain them. They always know what to do. Second, any educated person may entertain his or her friend. As far as such individuals know a variety of information, they face no difficulty in amusing others (McKay par. 8). The last distinctive feature of an educated person is open-mindedness. Such an individual is open to new suggestions and ideas. Educated people are not prejudiced or biased against something. They always enjoy learning something new even from the extremely different perspective because it broadens their scope of knowledge.

The role of education has always been important for people. Philosophers and educators of ancient civilizations realized the significance of knowledge acquisition. Nowadays, education has become an integral part of modern life. Education is often defined as the process of acquisition of new knowledge, skills, and habits. However, some scholars argue that such a definition does not reveal the true nature of education because it is more than having certificates or diplomas. Numerous views exist about the purpose of education, but most of them recognize the fact that education aims to improve lives of people. Reasons to have education also predetermine its significance. Thus, educated people are aware of many things in the surrounding world. They cannot be easily tricked. Also, they know the true value of knowledge. Besides, educated people have better opportunities for the professional development in comparison to those who do not have the education. Finally, education brings benefits to the nations. An educated society is a substantial advantage of every country. It is also important to be aware of what makes educated people better and different. Educated people are not only those who know a lot of facts. An educated individual realizes that being able to use knowledge is as important as having knowledge. All these factors demonstrate the significance of education in the modern society.

Austin, Michael. Reading the World: Ideas That Matter. New York City, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print.

Burdick, Eamon. An Educated Person . 2014. Web.

Education n.d. Web.

Importance of Education in Society n.d. Web.

Gibb, Nick. The purpose of education . 2015. Web.

Guo, Philip. The Main Purpose of Education . 2010. Web.

Jones, Kim. What is the purpose of education . 2012. Web.

Kurniawan, Budi. The Important of Education for Economic Growth . n.d. PDF file. 2016.

McKay, Brett. The 3 Characteristics of an Educated Man . 2011. Web.

• The “Banking” Concept of Education: An Analysis
• Role of the Notion of Education
• Early Childhood Philosophy of Learning
• Reading and Signing Skills in Deaf Children
• Achieving Academic Excellence
• Ending Cultural and Cognitive Relativism in Special Education
• Technology Revolution in Learning
• Public Policy for Career Development
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, May 14). What Is the Purpose of Education? https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-the-purpose-of-education/

"What Is the Purpose of Education?" IvyPanda , 14 May 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-the-purpose-of-education/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'What Is the Purpose of Education'. 14 May.

IvyPanda . 2020. "What Is the Purpose of Education?" May 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-the-purpose-of-education/.

1. IvyPanda . "What Is the Purpose of Education?" May 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-the-purpose-of-education/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "What Is the Purpose of Education?" May 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-is-the-purpose-of-education/.

• SDG4 coordination
• Global Education Monitoring Report
• Global Coalition for Education
• UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks
• Global network of technical and vocational education and training institutions
• Global network of learning cities
• Right to education
• Education in emergencies
• Inclusion in education
• Early childhood care and education
• Higher education
• Literacy and adult learning
• Technical and vocational education and training
• Education and gender equality
• Girls’ and women’s education in science and technology
• Teacher education
• Education policies and strategies
• Education management, monitoring and evaluation
• Assessment for improved learning outcomes
• Curriculum development
• Global citizenship education
• Education about the Holocaust and genocide
• Countering hate speech
• Education for sustainable development
• Health and education
• Digital learning and transformation of education
• Futures of Education
• All UNESCO news on education
• Education stories
• Subscribe to the Education monthly newsletter
• Publications
• Databases and tools
• National education profiles

About education

UNESCO believes that education is a human right for all throughout life and that access must be matched by quality. The Organization is the only United Nations agency with a mandate to cover all aspects of education. It has been entrusted to lead the Global Education 2030 Agenda through  Sustainable Development Goal 4 . The roadmap to achieve this is the  Education 2030 Framework for Action  (FFA).

UNESCO provides global and regional leadership in education, strengthens education systems worldwide and responds to contemporary global challenges through education with gender equality an underlying principle.

Its work encompasses educational development from pre-school to higher education and beyond. Themes include global citizenship and sustainable development, human rights and gender equality, health and HIV and AIDS, as well as technical and vocational skills development.

How we work

UNESCO leads the coordination and monitoring of the  Global Education 2030 Agenda  through Sustainable Development Goal 4  and using the  Education 2030 Framework for Action  as a roadmap.

The  UNESCO Education Strategy 2014-2021  has three strategic objectives:

The education sector is shifting and evolving towards a more explicit, active commitment to addressing gender-related barriers within and beyond the education system. This shift is being accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic with more NGOs, local governments as well as national governments recognizing the role education has in promoting gender-transformative change. Many are responding to this shift with innovations that aim to address the persistent challenges faced by girls and women in education. By highlighting these key practices through the Prize, we can contribute to inspiring more action for girls and women.

We speak about the importance of gender-transformative change both in and beyond education. Can you define what this means for you?

Gender-transformative education aims not only to respond to gender disparities within the education system but also to harness the full potential of education to transform attitudes, practices and discriminatory gender norms. Education can support critical changes for gender equality, such as promoting women’s leadership, preventing gender-based violence, and catalyzing boys' and men's engagement to embrace gender equality.

I have been very impressed by the capacity shown by many organizations and individuals nominated to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure they could maintain the delivery of their programmes. We know that fewer girls and women have access to and use the internet, and the digital gender gap is growing, particularly in developing countries. Many found new ways of delivering educational content and finding solutions to conduct fully online or blended approaches to learning, often in low-resource settings where access to the internet is extremely limited.  

Related items

• SDG: SDG 4 - Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

What Is “Education”?

• Open Access
• First Online: 26 October 2021

Cite this chapter

You have full access to this open access chapter

• Barry Chazan 2  

78k Accesses

3 Citations

5 Altmetric

Analytic philosophy of education focuses on clarifying such key terms as: “education”, “aims”, “goals”, “objectives”, “overt curriculum”, “covert curriculum”, “null curriculum”, “pedagogical content knowledge”. The understanding of these and other concepts is critical to enable contemporary education to be regarded as a truly professional domain.

You have full access to this open access chapter,  Download chapter PDF

• Pedagogic content knowledge

The world of education—like law, medicine, business, and other spheres—has its own unique language. A discussion of this language is important for principals and teachers, parents, and students in order to facilitate a clear understanding of what education is. In this chapter, I analyze and clarify some key terms with a view to promoting a coherent and more precise educational practice.

Three Ways to Analyze the Term “Education”

There are three kinds of definitions of “education” (Scheffler 1960 ). The first type is called the descriptive . It is a statement that proposes to denote or explain the nature of the meaning of the word called “education” by using a variety of words to explain either what the phenomenon is or how the term is to be understood. This type of definition claims to describe precisely how the word denoted as “education” is most prominently used.

The second type of definition of “education” is the programmatic , which comes to advocate for or prescribe a belief of what education should be or should do. A programmatic definition is less preoccupied with what the phenomenon or language of education is and more concerned with promulgating a particular practice of education that is regarded as desirable. Sometimes prescriptive definitions are expressed in short, clipped sentences such as Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education” or the title of Jonathan Kozol’s description of education as Death at an Early Age (Kozol 1985 ). Programmatic definitions are ultimately short slogans or deeply felt preaching about the way education should be.

The third type of definition is the stipulative and its purpose is technical and utilitarian. It is basically a linguistic agreement or pact that enables a discussion to proceed smoothly without forcing a person to each time state, “This is what I mean by the term ‘education.’” It is essentially is a linguistic shortcut, in which one person’s explanation of the word “education” is called Version 1; a second person’s explanation is Version 2, and the third interpretation is called Version 3. This is a kind of a shortcut that enables the discussion to precede at a decent pace.

My concern in this chapter is the descriptive mode, namely, the endeavor to arrive at a clear and generally agreed-upon statement of what the word “education” means. My aim is to refer to terms that are generally used in everyday speech and to attempts to search for viable and relevant definitions that reflect as accurately as possible the common language usage of the term. There is a technique that students and some academics use in the attempt to understand the term, namely, to trace it back to its original linguistic roots. There are times when this is helpful, but very often this can be misleading, since the way it once was used does not necessarily help us understand the way it is used today. The contemporary word “education” is sometimes traced to the Latin root educare , which means “to train” or “to mold”. Based on this linguistic root, some people like to argue that training or molding is what education today should be. At the same time, the Latin word educere means “to lead out”, which suggests a totally different understanding of “education” as a process aimed at that freeing the person from the prison of ignorance. Generally, it is my sense that the technique of tracing back to former linguistic roots is more useful for understanding ways in which terms were understood in the past rather than helping us to grasp what they mean today.

Some Contemporary Meanings

Let’s now look at some diverse definitions of “education”. One understanding of the term is the conscious effort to equip the unequipped young with facts, knowledge, and skills that will enable them to function as adults in a specific society. This is often called the socialization model.

A second usage of the word “education” understands it as exposure to, understanding of, and practice in skillsets that a person needs to be able to function in contemporary culture. This notion is sometimes called the acculturation model.

A third notion of education focuses on the development of reflective thinking and feeling abilities so that the young will be able to carve out how they wish to exist. This model is sometimes known as the liberal or person-centered model of education.

A Proposed Definition of “Education”

I have found the discussion of diverse meanings of education to be very fruitful because it helps me see the world through different lenses and, particularly, enables me to think about and consider diverse meanings and practices of the dynamics of education. At the same time, since I believe that education is a practice, and in practice we need some very specific tools and toolkits to help us proceed, I have searched over time for a definition of “education” that I regard as both descriptively and programmatically useful for the educational practitioner. Ultimately, the definition that I regard as the most useful was shaped by Lawrence Cremin, who is regarded as the most distinguished historian of twentieth-century education:

Education is the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, provoke or acquire knowledge, values, attitudes, skills or sensibilities as well as any learning that results from the effort (Cremin, Public Education , p. 27)

This broad-based definition indicates that education is a purposeful activity. The word “education” is reserved for frameworks created with the considered and conscious intent to educate. This definition also understands education as a process and not a place. It is a purposeful activity that can happen within a wide range of frameworks and not only in buildings called schools. Moreover, this intentional activity does not only transmit knowledge, but it also is concerned with values, attitudes, skills, and sensibilities. Education is an activity which takes place in many diverse venues and is intended to develop knowledge, understanding, valuing, growing, caring, and behaving. It can happen “when you sit in your house, and when you go on the way, and when you lie down and when you rise” (Deuteronomy, 6:7). While contemporary societies have denoted schools as the agency responsible for education, in fact, education far transcends the certificates of achievement received from pre-school, elementary, secondary, and collegiate frameworks.

“Aims”, “Goals”, “Objectives”

The concept of education invites the question “Education for what?” What is the purpose of education? While the terms, “aims”, “goals”, and “objectives” of education are sometimes used interchangeably, philosophers of education describe three distinct activities related to “purpose”: Aims, Goals, Objectives = AGO (Noddings 2007 ).

“Aims” refer to the most general ideals, values, or principles, which a person, institution, or society regards as the ultimate desideratum of education. Aims are value statements which designate certain principles or values as the ultimate aspiration. Aims describe both the ideal target of an educational institution as well at its ultimate desired outcomes or achievements. Educational aims ultimately frame the overall direction of an educational system or institution.

“Goals” refer to a second stage, which is derivative from aims and focuses on contents and topics that should be studied so as to enable students to understand and actualize core ideals explicit in aims. Goals translate aims into specific contents or stepping-stones that should be part of the educational process. If one of the aims of twentieth-century American schooling was to teach a set of shared values for its diverse populations in order to socialize them into a core American society, then its goal was to provide them with skillsets such as language, science, and mathematics, which were then regarded as contents critical to enable realization of the larger shared American creed.

The word “objectives” refers to the most practical stage, which is the actual teaching materials—books textbooks, maps, videos, and visual aids—used in the classroom each day, week, and month in a year. These are the infamous “lesson plans” which are an hour by hour mapping out of how teachers will spend every single day in the classroom.

This AGO framework can be a useful structure for analyzing education, from its most abstract goals to its most immediate daily application. Moreover, if implemented properly, it would seem to reflect a useful dynamic from theory to practice. Unfortunately, in reality, what often happens is that aims and goals are skipped over and objectives—daily blueprints, and lesson plans—become the main preoccupation. Because of a multitude of exigencies, the thoughtful paradigm of aims, goals, and objectives is often neglected at the expense of “getting through the day” in practice.

Three Notions of “Curriculum”

An important term in the study of education is “curriculum”, which popularly refers to the overall subjects or contents of schooling. As the field of curriculum studies developed into a rigorous academic area of study in schools of education, broader understandings of the term were to emerge (Pinar et al. 1995 ).

One of the important sophistications in the study of curriculum has been the notion of overt, covert, and null curricula. The “overt curriculum” refers to the clearly stated and enunciated objectives, contents, subjects, topics, books, and resources, which are the official frameworks, and requirements of a school and its teachers. It is the approved and mandated contents that shape a school’s operation.

The “covert” curriculum refers to attitudes, values, and behaviors that characterize the norms of daily life in schools beyond the subjects formally taught in a classroom. The covert curriculum is the unspoken “culture’” shaped by a multitude of forces and factors. What is the décor of the school? What do the halls look like? What type examinations are given? What is the nature of student interaction? The covert curriculum refers to the multiple features of a school culture very much shaped by the lives, habits, and “lingo” of students which have significant impact on the actual rhythm and flow of daily school life.

The “null” curriculum refers to the books, subjects, topics, and artifacts that are consciously and purposefully not part of the school curriculum. This may include partial or no discussion of the history of indigenous populations in the teaching of American history. It includes the list of books, sources, ands ideas that have very consciously not been chosen in the formal curriculum. All education requires selection, and the topics not chosen—and why—are just as important as those that have been chosen. Indeed, there are political, racial, gender, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual issues that significantly shape the overt, covert, and null curriculum of each and every type of schooling.

These three terms alert us to the complicated nature of curriculum development. While there is a popular phrase that refers to an individual “writing a curriculum’”, in fact, curriculum development has become a specialized domain that involves subject matter experts classroom teachers, and educational leadership, and requires extensive deliberation, field testing, revision, and production. It is one of the most exciting and, at the same time most demanding of fields in contemporary education.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK)

An important dimension of education is what is commonly known as “pedagogy”, which is understood as the methodologies or the ways in which teaching should happen. Footnote 1 This is obviously a critical dimension of education because it is about what educators teach and how students learn—which are the ultimate domain of education. Pedagogy (sometimes called the “science of teaching”) is the assumption that there are universal patterns and procedures in teaching which should constitute an important part of academic teacher training. There were, and there still are, some general courses on pedagogy in university departments of education which reflect the assumption that there is a core set of methodologies generally appropriate for all sorts of teaching. Twentieth-century philosophers in multiple fields of study—for example, physics, mathematics, literature, and economics—began to focus on the notions of “realms of meaning” or “spheres of knowledge”, which led to the general consensus that there is a diversity of pedagogic methodologies that derive from the many different spheres of knowledge. This kind of thinking made it clear that because of the significant differences between science, mathematics, history, literature, and philosophy, there could be no one overall pedagogy appropriate for all subjects; consequently, such courses as “principles of pedagogy” were misleading. In the 1980s, through the innovative work of a group of educators of whom Professor Lee Shulman was a central figure, an important concept was to emerge which has had a profound effect on styles of teaching (Shulman 1986 ). This research led to the term “pedagogical content knowledge” (PCK). PCK refers to the fact that diverse spheres of knowledge utilize diverse methodologies of researching and understanding and therefore require diverse practices of teaching. In other words, the way a teacher teaches the subject depends on the nature of the subject and that all subjects are not the same. Just as it is clear that the ways we teach someone to drive a car or to learn how to swim have their own characteristics, so it is clear that the teaching of mathematics must differ from the teaching of literature, which differs from the teaching of civics, which differs from the teaching of languages. This notion indicates that one must be wary of general principles of “how to teach” and that quality teaching begins with and is related to an understanding of the subject matter being taught. To teach chemistry or physics one has to understand the role of experimentation. In teaching literature, one has to understand the importance of simile, metaphor, plot, and theme. PCK was to have a major impact particularly in the experimental subject areas, although there were also important implications for teaching literature and other areas. At the heart of PCK is the notion that methodology or “what to do” flows from the content one teaches, and the content one teaches ultimately flows from the “why” of education. In other words, education is an integrated dynamic in which the “why” affects the “what” and the “what” affects the “how”.

I learned about the importance of PCK during my travels over the years to all sorts of Jewish schools. One of the most prominent subjects (typically in the early years of elementary school) I observed was the teaching of Genesis Chapter 12 which describes a conversation between God and Abraham in which God makes a covenant—a legal agreement—with Abraham, that if he follows God’s ways, Abraham will be given a certain body of land for himself and for his children in perpetuity. How one teaches this section depends upon how one understands the nature of this ancient source. If this text is a verifiable history book (which was the mode that I observed in so many schools), it will be taught in one way; if this text is not a history book but rather a philosophical or theological work with profound religious, moral, and human messages, it will be taught in a totally different way. These two understandings result in dramatically diverse pedagogies and messages, depending on whether the text in Genesis 12 was presented as an authoritative history or a profound philosophy.

The contemporary language of education includes some key concepts—“schooling”, “aims”, “goals”, “curriculum”, and “pedagogy”—whose meanings are very important to the practice of education in schools and beyond. This conclusion suggests that the fields of education and Jewish education in the twenty-first century are sophisticated domains which call for serious deliberation and study by prospective educators. The educators of our young deserve the same level of training, investment, and rigor that we expect from the doctors who treat our bodies or from the engineers who build the bridges on which we travel. Education in the twenty-first century is a critical sphere that calls for deep reflection, training, and passion.

Adult education specialist Malcolm Knowles suggested that the term “pedagogy” be used to refer to the teaching of children and that the term “andragogy” be used to denote adult learning. (Knowles 2020 ).

Bibliography

Cremin, Lawrence. 1976. Public Education. (Basic Books).

Google Scholar  

Knowles, Malcom. 2020. The Adult Learner. (Routledge).

Kozol, Jonathan. 1985. Death at an Early Age. The Classic Indictment of Inner City Education. (Plume Reissue Edition).

Noddings, Nel. 2007. “Aims, Goals, and Objectives” Encounters on Education . Vol 8, Fall, 2007, pp. 7–15.

Pinar, William Reynolds, William, Slattery, Taubman, Peter. 1995. Understanding Curriculum . (Peter Lang).

Scheffler, Israel. 1960. The Language of Education. (Charles C. Thomas).

Shulman, Lee. 1986. “Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching”. Educational Researcher Feb. Vol. 15 No. 2. pp. 4–14.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Graduate School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., WA, USA

Barry Chazan

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Chazan, B. (2022). What Is “Education”?. In: Principles and Pedagogies in Jewish Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83925-3_3

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83925-3_3

Published : 26 October 2021

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-83924-6

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-83925-3

eBook Packages : Education Education (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

• Adler, Jonathan E., 2002, Belief’s Own Ethics , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2003, “Knowledge, Truth and Learning”, in Curren 2003: 285–304. doi:10.1002/9780470996454.ch21
• Anderson, Elizabeth, 2007, “Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective”, Ethics , 117(4): 595–622. doi:10.1086/518806
• Archambault, Reginald D. (ed.), 1965, Philosophical Analysis and Education , London: Routledge.
• Audi, Robert, 2017, “Role Modelling and Reasons: Developmental and Normative Grounds of Moral Virtue”, Journal of Moral Philosophy , 14(6): 646–668. doi:10.1163/17455243-46810063
• Baehr, Jason, 2011, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604074.001.0001
• ––– (ed.), 2016, Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology , New York: Routledge.
• Bailey, Richard, Robin Barrow, David Carr, and Christine McCarthy (eds), 2010, The SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Education , Los Angeles: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781446200872
• Bailin, Sharon and Harvey Siegel, 2003, “Critical Thinking”, in Blake et al. 2003: 181–193. doi:10.1002/9780470996294.ch11
• Ben-Porath, Sigal R., 2006. Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Blake, Nigel, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (eds.), 2003, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996294
• Brighouse, Harry, 2005, On Education , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2009, “Moral and Political Aims of Education”, in Siegel 2009: 35–51.
• Brighouse, Harry and Adam Swift, 2009, “Educational Equality versus Educational Adequacy: A Critique of Anderson and Satz”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 26(2): 117–128. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00438.x
• Bull, Barry L., 2008, Social Justice in Education: An Introduction , New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
• Burbules, Nicholas C., 1994, “Marxism and Educational Thought”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 6), Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, second edition, pp. 3617–22.
• Burnyeat, Myles F., 1980, “Aristotle on Learning to be Good”, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics , Berkeley CA: University of California Press, pp. 69–92.
• Callan, Eamonn, 1997, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Oxford: Clarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0198292589.001.0001
• –––, 2006, “Love, Idolatry, and Patriotism”, Social Theory and Practice , 32(4): 525–546. doi:10.5840/soctheorpract200632430
• Carr, David, 2003, Making Sense of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Theory of Education and Teaching , London: RoutledgeFalmer.
• Carter, J. Adam and Ben Kotzee, 2015, “Epistemology of Education”, Oxford Bibliographies Online , last modified: 26 October 2015.
• Carter, J.Adam and Duncan Pritchard, 2017, “Epistemic Situationism, Epistemic Dependence, and the Epistemology of Education”, in Abrol Fairweather and Mark Alfano (eds.), Epistemic Situationism , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 168–191. doi:10.1093/oso/9780199688234.003.0010
• Cartwright, Nancy D., 2013, Evidence: For Policy and Wheresoever Rigor Is a Must , London: London School of Economics and Political Science.
• Cartwright, Nancy D. and Jeremy Hardie, 2012, Evidence-based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Chambliss, J.J. (ed.), 1996a, Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia , New York: Garland.
• Chambliss, J.J., 1996b, “History of Philosophy of Education”, in Chambliss 1996a, pp. 461–472.
• Clayton, Matthew, 2006, Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199268940.001.0001
• Cleverley, John and D.C. Phillips, 1986, Visions of Childhood: Influential Models from Locke to Spock , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Curren, Randall R., 1998, “Education, Philosophy of”, in E.J. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , vol. 3, pp. 231–240.
• –––, 2000, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• –––, (ed.), 2003, A Companion to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996454
• –––, (ed.), 2007, Philosophy of Education: An Anthology , Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 2013, “A Neo-Aristotelian Account of Education, Justice and the Human Good”, Theory and Research in Education , 11(3): 231–249. doi:10.1177/1477878513498182
• –––, 2018, “Education, History of Philosophy of”, revised second version, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online . doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N014-2
• Curren, Randall, Emily Robertson, and Paul Hager, 2003, “The Analytical Movement”, in Curren 2003: 176–191. doi:10.1002/9780470996454.ch13
• Curren, Randall and Charles Dorn, 2018, Patriotic Education in a Global Age , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Dworkin, Ronald, 1977, Taking Rights Seriously , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Elgin, Catherine Z., 1999a, “Epistemology’s Ends, Pedagogy’s Prospects”, Facta Philosophica , 1: 39–54
• –––, 1999b, “Education and the Advancement of Understanding”, in David M. Steiner (ed.), Proceedings of the 20 th World Congress of Philosophy , vol. 3, Philosophy Documentation Center, pp. 131–140.
• Galston, William A., 1991, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139172462
• Gellner, Ernest, 1959, Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology , London: Gollancz.
• Gilligan, Carol, 1982, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Goldberg, Sanford, 2013, “Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief, in the Classroom and Beyond”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 47(2): 168–186. doi:10.1111/1467-9752.12019
• Goldman, Alvin I., 1999, Knowledge in a Social World , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198238207.001.0001
• Greene, Maxine, 1988, The Dialectic of Freedom , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Gutmann, Amy and Dennis F. Thompson, 1996, Democracy and Disagreement , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Hand, Michael, 2006, “Against Autonomy as an Educational Aim”, Oxford Review of Education , 32(4): 535–550. doi:10.1080/03054980600884250
• Hardie, Charles Dunn, 1941 [1962], Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory , New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications.
• Hirst, Paul, 1965, “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge”, in Philosophical Analysis and Education , Reginald D. Archambault, (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 113–138.
• Hirst, Paul and R.S. Peters, 1970, The Logic of Education , London: Routledge.
• Hollis, Martin, 1982, “Education as A Positional Good”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 16(2): 235–244. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.1982.tb00615.x
• Howe, Kenneth R., 2003, Closing Methodological Divides: Toward Democratic Educational Research , Dordrecht: Kluwer. doi:10.1007/0-306-47984-2
• Jacobs, Lesley A., 2010, “Equality, Adequacy, And Stakes Fairness: Retrieving the Equal Opportunities in Education Approach”, Theory and Research in Education , 8(3): 249–268. doi:10.1177/1477878510381627
• Kotzee, Ben (ed.), 2013, Education and the Growth of Knowledge: Perspectives from Social and Virtue Epistemology , Oxford: Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781118721254
• Kristjánsson, Kristján, 2015, Aristotelian Character Education , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2017, “Emotions Targeting Moral Exemplarity: Making Sense of the Logical Geography of Admiration, Emulation and Elevation”, Theory and Research in Education , 15(1): 20–37. doi:10.1177/1477878517695679
• Kvernbekk, Tone, 2015, Evidence-based Practice in Education: Functions of Evidence and Causal Presuppositions , London: Routledge.
• Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, 2000, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Locke, J., 1693, Some Thoughts Concerning Education , London: Black Swan in Paternoster Row.
• Lucas, Christopher J. (ed.), 1969, What is Philosophy of Education? , London: Macmillan.
• Lyotard, J-F., 1984, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1984, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory , second edition, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Martin, Jane Roland, 1985, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Mehta, Ved, 1963, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals , London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• Miller, Richard W., 2007, “Unlearning American Patriotism”, Theory and Research in Education , 5(1): 7–21. doi:10.1177/1477878507073602
• National Research Council (NRC), 2002, Scientific Research in Education , Washington, DC: National Academies Press. [ NRC 2002 available online ]
• Noddings, Nel, 1984, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• –––, 1992, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education , New York: Teachers College Press.
• –––, 2015, Philosophy of Education , fourth edition, Boulder, CO: Westview.
• O’Connor, D.J., 1957, An Introduction to Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.
• Park, J., (ed.), 1965, Bertrand Russell on Education , London: Allen and Unwin.
• Peters, R.S., (ed.), 1973, The Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1981, Moral Development and Moral Education , London: G. Allen & Unwin.
• Phillips, D.C., 1985, “Philosophy of Education”, in International Encyclopedia of Education , Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite, (eds.), pp. 3859–3877.
• –––, 1987, Philosophy, Science, and Social Inquiry: Contemporary Methodological Controversies in Social Science and Related Applied Fields of Research , Oxford: Pergamon.
• –––, 2009, “Empirical Educational Research: Charting Philosophical Disagreements in an Undisciplined Field”, in Siegel 2009: 381–406.
• –––, 2010, “What Is Philosophy of Education?”, in Bailey et al. 2010: 3–19. doi:10.4135/9781446200872.n1
• –––, (ed.), 2014, Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy , Los Angeles: Sage.
• Pritchard, Duncan, 2013, “Epistemic Virtue and the Epistemology of Education”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 47(2): 236–247. doi:10.1111/1467-9752.12022
• –––, 2016, “Intellectual Virtue, Extended Cognition, and the Epistemology of Education”, in Baehr 2016: 113–127.
• Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1993, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Robertson, Emily, 2009, “The Epistemic Aims of Education”, in Siegel 2009: 11–34.
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg (ed.), 1998, Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives , New York: Routledge.
• Satz, Debra, 2007, “Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship”, Ethics , 117(4): 623–648. doi:10.1086/518805
• Scheffler, Israel, 1960, The Language of Education , Springfield, IL: Thomas.
• –––, 1965, Conditions of Knowledge: An Introduction to Epistemology and Education , Chicago: Scott, Foresman.
• –––, 1973 [1989], Reason and Teaching , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
• Schouten, Gina, 2012, “Fair Educational Opportunity and the Distribution of Natural Ability: Toward a Prioritarian Principle of Educational Justice”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 46(3): 472–491. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.2012.00863.x
• Scriven, Michael, 1991a, “Beyond Formative and Summative Evaluation”, in Milbrey McLaughlin and D.C. Phillips (eds.), Evaluation and Education: At Quarter Century , Chicago: University of Chicago Press/NSSE, pp. 19–64.
• –––, 1991b, Evaluation Thesaurus , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Siegel, Harvey, 1988, Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1997, Rationality Redeemed?: Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2004, “Epistemology and Education: An Incomplete Guide to the Social-Epistemological Issues”, Episteme , 1(2): 129–137. doi:10.3366/epi.2004.1.2.129
• –––, 2005, “Truth, Thinking, Testimony and Trust: Alvin Goldman on Epistemology and Education”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 71(2): 345–366. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00452.x
• –––, 2007, “Philosophy of Education”, in Britannica Online Encyclopedia , last modified 2 February 2018. URL = <https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/philosophy-of-education/108550>
• –––, (ed.), 2009, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education , New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195312881.001.0001
• –––, 2016, “Israel Scheffler”, In J. A Palmer (ed.), Routledge Encyclopaedia of Educational Thinkers , London: Routledge, pp. 428–432.
• –––, 2017, Education’s Epistemology: Rationality, Diversity, and Critical Thinking , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2018, “The Epistemology of Education”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online , doi:10.4324/0123456789-P074-1.
• Skinner, B.F., 1948 [1962], Walden Two , New York: Macmillan.
• –––, 1972, Beyond Freedom and Dignity , London: Jonathan Cape.
• Smeyers, Paulus, 1994, “Philosophy of Education: Western European Perspectives”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 8), Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite, (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, second Edition, pp. 4456–61.
• Smith, B. Othanel and Robert H. Ennis (eds.), 1961, Language and Concepts in Education , Chicago: Rand McNally.
• Snook, I.A., 1972, Indoctrination and Education , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Stone, Lynda (ed.), 1994, The Education Feminism Reader , New York: Routledge.
• Strike, Kenneth A., 2010, Small Schools and Strong Communities: A Third Way of School Reform , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Warnick, Bryan R., 2015, “Taming the Conflict over Educational Equality”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 32(1): 50–66. doi:10.1111/japp.12066
• Watson, Lani, 2016, “The Epistemology of Education”, Philosophy Compass , 11(3): 146–159. doi:10.1111/phc3.12316
• Winch, Christopher and John Gingell, 1999, Key Concepts in the Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• PES (Philosophy of Education Society, North America)
• PESA (Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia)
• PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain)
• INPE (International Network of Philosophers of Education)

autonomy: personal | Dewey, John | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | Foucault, Michel | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | liberalism | Locke, John | Lyotard, Jean François | -->ordinary language --> | Plato | postmodernism | Rawls, John | rights: of children | Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Acknowledgments

The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

Copyright © 2018 by Harvey Siegel D.C. Phillips Eamonn Callan

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054