critical understanding of the meaning and aims of education

Philosophy of Education

All human societies, past and present, have had a vested interest in education; and some wits have claimed that teaching (at its best an educational activity) is the second oldest profession. While not all societies channel sufficient resources into support for educational activities and institutions, all at the very least acknowledge their centrality—and for good reasons. For one thing, it is obvious that children are born illiterate and innumerate, and ignorant of the norms and cultural achievements of the community or society into which they have been thrust; but with the help of professional teachers and the dedicated amateurs in their families and immediate environs (and with the aid, too, of educational resources made available through the media and nowadays the internet), within a few years they can read, write, calculate, and act (at least often) in culturally-appropriate ways. Some learn these skills with more facility than others, and so education also serves as a social-sorting mechanism and undoubtedly has enormous impact on the economic fate of the individual. Put more abstractly, at its best education equips individuals with the skills and substantive knowledge that allows them to define and to pursue their own goals, and also allows them to participate in the life of their community as full-fledged, autonomous citizens.

But this is to cast matters in very individualistic terms, and it is fruitful also to take a societal perspective, where the picture changes somewhat. It emerges that in pluralistic societies such as the Western democracies there are some groups that do not wholeheartedly support the development of autonomous individuals, for such folk can weaken a group from within by thinking for themselves and challenging communal norms and beliefs; from the point of view of groups whose survival is thus threatened, formal, state-provided education is not necessarily a good thing. But in other ways even these groups depend for their continuing survival on educational processes, as do the larger societies and nation-states of which they are part; for as John Dewey put it in the opening chapter of his classic work Democracy and Education (1916), in its broadest sense education is the means of the “social continuity of life” (Dewey, 1916, 3). Dewey pointed out that the “primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group” make education a necessity, for despite this biological inevitability “the life of the group goes on” (Dewey, 3). The great social importance of education is underscored, too, by the fact that when a society is shaken by a crisis, this often is taken as a sign of educational breakdown; education, and educators, become scapegoats.

It is not surprising that such an important social domain has attracted the attention of philosophers for thousands of years, especially as there are complex issues aplenty that have great philosophical interest. Even a cursory reading of these opening paragraphs reveals that they touch on, in nascent form, some but by no means all of the issues that have spawned vigorous debate down the ages; restated more explicitly in terms familiar to philosophers of education, the issues the discussion above flitted over were: education as transmission of knowledge versus education as the fostering of inquiry and reasoning skills that are conducive to the development of autonomy (which, roughly, is the tension between education as conservative and education as progressive, and also is closely related to differing views about human “perfectibility”—issues that historically have been raised in the debate over the aims of education); the question of what this knowledge, and what these skills, ought to be—part of the domain of philosophy of the curriculum; the questions of how learning is possible, and what is it to have learned something—two sets of issues that relate to the question of the capacities and potentialities that are present at birth, and also to the process (and stages) of human development and to what degree this process is flexible and hence can be influenced or manipulated; the tension between liberal education and vocational education, and the overlapping issue of which should be given priority—education for personal development or education for citizenship (and the issue of whether or not this is a false dichotomy); the differences (if any) between education and enculturation; the distinction between educating versus teaching versus training versus indoctrination; the relation between education and maintenance of the class structure of society, and the issue of whether different classes or cultural groups can—justly—be given educational programs that differ in content or in aims; the issue of whether the rights of children, parents, and socio-cultural or ethnic groups, conflict—and if they do, the question of whose rights should be dominant; the question as to whether or not all children have a right to state-provided education, and if so, should this education respect the beliefs and customs of all groups and how on earth would this be accomplished; and a set of complex issues about the relation between education and social reform, centering upon whether education is essentially conservative, or whether it can be an (or, the ) agent of social change.

It is impressive that most of the philosophically-interesting issues touched upon above, plus additional ones not alluded to here, were addressed in one of the early masterpieces of the Western intellectual tradition—Plato's Republic . A.N. Whitehead somewhere remarked that the history of Western philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato, and if the Meno and the Laws are added to the Republic , the same is true of the history of educational thought and of philosophy of education in particular. At various points throughout this essay the discussion shall return to Plato, and at the end there shall be a brief discussion of the two other great figures in the field—Rousseau and Dewey. But the account of the field needs to start with some features of it that are apt to cause puzzlement, or that make describing its topography difficult. These include, but are not limited to, the interactions between philosophy of education and its parent discipline.

1.1 The open nature of philosophy and philosophy of education

1.2 the different bodies of work traditionally included in the field, 1.3 paradigm wars the diversity of, and clashes between, philosophical approaches, 2.1 the early work: c.d. hardie, 2.2 the dominant years: language, and clarification of key concepts, 2.3 countervailing forces, 2.4 a new guise contemporary social, political and moral philosophy, 3.1 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 3.2 the content of the curriculum, and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.3 rousseau, dewey, and the progressive movement, 4. concluding remarks, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries, 1. problems in delineating the field.

There is a large—and ever expanding—number of works designed to give guidance to the novice setting out to explore the domain of philosophy of education; most if not all of the academic publishing houses have at least one representative of this genre on their list, and the titles are mostly variants of the following archetypes: The History and Philosophy of Education , The Philosophical Foundations of Education , Philosophers on Education , Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom , A Guide to the Philosophy of Education , and Readings in Philosophy of Education . The overall picture that emerges from even a sampling of this collective is not pretty; the field lacks intellectual cohesion, and (from the perspective taken in this essay) there is a widespread problem concerning the rigor of the work and the depth of scholarship—although undoubtedly there are islands, but not continents, of competent philosophical discussion of difficult and socially-important issues of the kind listed earlier. On the positive side—the obverse of the lack of cohesion—there is, in the field as a whole, a degree of adventurousness in the form of openness to ideas and radical approaches, a trait that is sometimes lacking in other academic fields. This is not to claim, of course, that taken individually philosophers of education are more open-minded than their philosophical cousins!

Part of the explanation for this diffuse state-of-affairs is that, quite reasonably, most philosophers of education have the goal (reinforced by their institutional affiliation with Schools of Education and their involvement in the initial training of teachers) of contributing not to philosophy but to educational policy and practice. This shapes not only their selection of topics, but also the manner in which the discussion is pursued; and this orientation also explains why philosophers of education—to a far greater degree, it is to be suspected, than their “pure” cousins—publish not in philosophy journals but in a wide range of professionally-oriented journals (such as Educational Researcher , Harvard Educational Review , Teachers College Record , Cambridge Journal of Education, Journal of Curriculum Studies , and the like). Some individuals work directly on issues of classroom practice, others identify as much with fields such as educational policy analysis, curriculum theory, teacher education, or some particular subject-matter domain such as math or science education, as they do with philosophy of education. It is still fashionable in some quarters to decry having one's intellectual agenda shaped so strongly as this by concerns emanating from a field of practice; but as Stokes (1997) has made clear, many of the great, theoretically-fruitful research programs in natural science had their beginnings in such practical concerns—as Pasteur's grounbreaking work illustrates. It is dangerous to take the theory versus practice dichotomy too seriously.

However, there is another consequence of this institutional housing of the vast majority of philosphers of education that is worth noting—one that is not found in a comparable way in philosophers of science, for example, who almost always are located in departments of philosophy—namely, that experience as a teacher, or in some other education-related role, is a qualification to become a philosopher of education that in many cases is valued at least as much as depth of philosophical training. (The issue is not that educational experience is irrelevant—clearly it can be highly pertinent—but it is that in the tradeoff with philosophical training, philosophy often loses.) But there are still other factors at work that contribute to the field's diffuseness, that all relate in some way to the nature of the discipline of philosophy itself.

In describing the field of philosophy, and in particular the sub-field that has come to be identified as philosophy of education, one quickly runs into a difficulty not found to anything like the same degree in other disciplines. For example, although there are some internal differences in opinion, nevertheless there seems to be quite a high degree of consensus within the domain of quantum physics about which researchers are competent members of the field and which ones are not, and what work is a strong contribution (or potential contribution). The very nature of philosophy, on the other hand, is “essentially contested”; what counts as a sound philosophical work within one school of thought, or socio-cultural or academic setting, may not be so-regarded (and may even be the focus of derision) in a different one. Coupled with this is the fact that the borders of the field are not policed, so that the philosophically-untrained can cross into it freely—indeed, over the past century or more a great many individuals from across the spectrum of real and pseudo disciplines have for whatever reason exercised their right to self-identify as members of this broad and loosely defined category of “philosophers” (as a few minutes spent browsing in the relevant section of a bookstore will verify).

In essence, then, there are two senses of the term “philosopher” and its cognates: a loose but common sense in which any individual who cogitates in any manner about such issues as the meaning of life, the nature of social justice, the essence of sportsmanship, the aims of education, the foundations of the school curriculum, or relationship with the Divine, is thereby a philosopher; and there is a more technical sense referring to those who have been formally trained or have acquired competence in one or more areas such as epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, and the like. If this bifurcation presents a problem for adequately delineating the field of philosophy, the difficulties grow tenfold or more with respect to philosophy of education.

This essay offers a description and assessment of the field as seen by a scholar rooted firmly in the formal branch of “philosophy of education”, and moreover this branch as it has developed in the English-speaking world (some of which, of course, has been inspired by Continental philosophy); but first it is necessary to say a little more about the difficulties that confront the individual who sets out, without presuppositions, to understand the topography of “philosophy of education”.

It will not take long for a person who consults several of the introductory texts alluded to earlier to encounter a number of different bodies of work (loosely bounded to be sure) that have by one source or another been regarded as part of the domain of philosophy of education; the inclusion of some of these as part of the field is largely responsible for the diffuse topography described earlier. What follows is an informal and incomplete accounting.

First, there are works of advocacy produced by those non-technical, self-identified “philosophers” described above, who often have an axe to grind; they may wish to destroy (or to save) common schooling, support or attack some innovation or reform, shore-up or destroy the capitalist mode of production, see their own religion (or none at all) gain a foothold in the public schools, strengthen the place of “the basics” in the school curriculum, and so forth. While these topics certainly can be, and have been, discussed with due care, often they have been pursued in loose but impressive language where exhortation substitutes for argumentation—and hence sometimes they are mistaken for works of philosophy of education! In the following discussion this genre shall be passed over in silence.

Second, there is a corpus of work somewhat resembling the first, but where the arguments are tighter, and where the authors usually are individuals of some distinction whose insights are thought-provoking—possibly because they have a degree of familiarity with some branch of educational activity, having been teachers (or former teachers), school principals, religious leaders, politicians, journalists, and the like. While these works frequently touch on philosophical issues, they are not pursued to any philosophical depth and can hardly be considered as contributions to the scholarship of the discipline. However, some works in this genre are among the classics of “educational thought”—a more felicitous label than “philosophy of education”; cases in point would be the essays, pamphlets and letters of Thomas Arnold (headmaster of Rugby school), John Wesley (the founder of Methodism), J.H. (Cardinal) Newman, T.H. Huxley, and the writings on progressive schooling by A.S. Neill (of Summerhill school). Some textbooks even include extracts from the writings or recorded sayings of such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Jesus of Nazareth (for the latter three, in works spanning more than half a century, see Ulich, 1950, and Murphy, 2006). Books and extracts in this genre—which elsewhere I have called “cultured reflection on education”—are often used in teacher-training courses that march under the banner of “educational foundations”, “introduction to educational thought”, or “introduction to philosophy of education”.

Third, there are a number of educational theorists and researchers, whose field of activity is not philosophy but—for example—might be human development or learning theory, who in their technical work and sometimes in their non-technical books and reflective essays explicitly raise philosophical issues or adopt philosophical modes of argumentation—and do so in ways worthy of careful study. If philosophy (including philosophy of education) is defined so as to include analysis and reflection at an abstract or “meta-level”, which undoubtedly is a domain where many philosophers labor, then these individuals should have a place in the annals of philosophy or philosophy of education; but too often, although not always, accounts of the field ignore them. Their work might be subjected to scrutiny for being educationally important, but their conceptual or philosophical contributions are rarely focused upon. (Philosophers of the physical and biological sciences are far less prone to make this mistake about the meta-level work of reflective scientists in these domains.)

The educational theorists and researchers I have in mind as exemplars here are the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner (who among other things wrote about the fate of the notions of human freedom and dignity in the light of the development of a “science of behavior”, and who developed a model of human action and also of learning that eschewed the influence of mental entities such as motives, interests, and ideas and placed the emphasis instead upon “schedules of reinforcement”); the foundational figure in modern developmental psychology with its near-fixation on stage theories, Jean Piaget (who developed in an abstract and detailed manner a “genetic epistemology” that was related to his developmental research); and the social psychologist Lev Vygotsky (who argued that the development of the human youngster was indelibly shaped by social forces, so much so that approaches which focused on the lone individual and that were biologically-oriented—he had Piaget in mind here—were quite inadequate).

Fourth, and in contrast to the group above, there is a type of work that is traditionally but undeservedly given a prominent place in the annals of philosophy of education, and which thereby generates a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about the field. These are the books and reflective essays on educational topics that were written by mainstream philosophers, a number of whom are counted among the greatest in the history of the discipline. The catch is this: Even great philosophers do not always write philosophy! The reflections being referred-to contain little if any philosophical argumentation, and usually they were not intended to be contributions to the literature on any of the great philosophical questions. Rather, they expressed the author's views (or even prejudices) on educational rather than philosophical problems, and sometimes—as in the case of Bertrand Russell's rollicking pieces defending progressive educational practices—they explicitly were “potboilers” written to make money. (In Russell's case the royalties were used to support a progressive school he was running with his current wife.) Locke, Kant, and Hegel also are among those who produced work of this genre.

John Locke is an interesting case in point. He had been requested by a cousin and her husband—possibly in part because of his medical training—to give advice on the upbringing of their son and heir; the youngster seems to have troubled his parents, most likely because he had learning difficulties. Locke, then in exile in Europe, wrote the parents a series of letters in which alongside sensible advice about such matters as the priorities in the education of a landed gentleman, and about making learning fun for the boy, there were a few strange items such as the advice that the boy should wear leaky shoes in winter so that he would be toughened-up! The letters eventually were printed in book form under the title Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), and seem to have had enormous influence down the ages upon educational practice; after two centuries the book had run through some 35 English editions and well over thirty foreign editions, and it is still in print and is frequently excerpted in books of readings in philosophy of education. In stark contrast, several of Locke's major philosophical writings—the Essay Concerning Human Understanding , and the Letter on Toleration —have been overlooked by most educational theorists over the centuries, even though they have enormous relevance for educational philosophy, theory, policy, and practice. It is especially noteworthy that the former of these books was the foundation for an approach to psychology—associationism—that thrived during the nineteenth century. In addition it stimulated interest in the processes of child development and human learning; Locke's model of the way in which the “blank tablet” of the human mind became “furnished” with simple ideas that were eventually combined or abstracted in various ways to form complex ideas, suggested to some that it might be fruitful to study this process in the course of development of a young child (Cleverley and Phillips, 1986).

Fifth, and finally, there is a large body of work that clearly falls within the more technically-defined domain of philosophy of education. Three historical giants of the field are Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey, and there are a dozen or more who would be in competition for inclusion along with them; the short-list of leading authors from the second-half of the 20 th century would include Richard Peters, Paul Hirst, and Israel Scheffler, with many jostling for the next places—but the choices become cloudy as we approach the present-day, for schisms between philosophical schools have to be negotiated.

It is important to note, too, that there is a sub-category within this domain of literature that is made-up of work by philosophers who are not primarily identified as philosophers of education, and who might or might not have had much to say directly about education, but whose philosophical work has been drawn upon by others and applied very fruitfully to educational issues. (A volume edited by Amelie Rorty contains essays on the education-related thought, or relevance, of many historically-important philosophers; significantly the essays are almost entirely written by philosophers rather than by members of the philosophy of education community. This is both their strength and weakness. See Rorty, 1998.)

The discussion will turn briefly to the difficulty in picturing the topography of the field that is presented by the influence of these philosophers.

As sketched 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, criteria for selecting evidence that has relevance for the problems that they consider central, and the like. No wonder educational discourse has occasionally been likened to Babel, for the differences in backgrounds and assumptions means that there is much mutual incomprehension. In the midst of the melee sit the philosophers of education.

It is no surprise, then, to find that 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 and methods of argument 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. It is revealing to note some of the names that were heavily-cited in a pair of recent authoritative handbooks in the field (according to the indices of the two volumes, and in alphabetical order): Adorno, Aristotle, Derrida, Descartes, Dewey, Habermas, Hegel, Horkheimer, Kant, Locke, Lyotard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Rawls, Richard Rorty, Rousseau, and Wittgenstein (Curren 2003; Blake, Smeyers, Smith, and Standish 2003). Although this list conveys something of the diversity of the field, it fails to do it complete justice, for the influence of feminist philosophers is not adequately represented.

No one individual can have mastered work done by such a range of figures, representing as they do a number of quite different frameworks or approaches; and relatedly no one person stands as emblematic of the entire field of philosophy of education, and no one type of philosophical writing serves as the norm, either. At professional meetings, peace often reigns because the adherents of the different schools go their separate ways; but occasionally there are (intellectually) violent clashes, rivaling the tumult that greeted Derrida's nomination for an honorary degree at Cambridge in 1992. It is sobering to reflect that only a few decades have passed since practitioners of analytic philosophy of education had to meet in individual hotel rooms, late at night, at annual meetings of the Philosophy of Education Society in the USA, because phenomenologists and others barred their access to the conference programs; their path to liberation was marked by discord until, eventually, the compromise of “live and let live” was worked out (Kaminsky, 1996). Of course, the situation has hardly been better in the home discipline; an essay in Time magazine in 1966 on the state of the discipline of philosophy reported that adherents of the major philosophical schools “don't even understand one another”, and added that as a result “philosophy today is bitterly segregated. Most of the major philosophy departments and scholarly journals are the exclusive property of one sect or another” ( Time , reprinted in Lucas, 1969, 32). Traditionally there has been a time-lag for developments in philosophy to migrate over into philosophy of education, but in this respect at least the two fields have been on a par.

Inevitably, however, traces of discord remain, and some groups still feel disenfranchised, but they are not quite the same groups as a few decades ago—for new intellectual paradigms have come into existence, and their adherents are struggling to have their voices heard; and clearly it is the case that—reflecting the situation in 1966—many analytically-trained philosophers of education find postmodern writings incomprehensible while scholars in the latter tradition are frequently dismissive if not contemptuous of work done by the former group. In effect, then, the passage of time has made the field more—and not less—diffuse. All this is evident in a volume published in 1995 in which the editor attempted to break-down borders by initiating dialogue between scholars with different approaches to philosophy of education; her introductory remarks are revealing:

Philosophers of education reflecting on the parameters of our field are faced not only with such perplexing and disruptive questions as: What counts as Philosophy of Education and why?; but also Who counts as a philosopher of education and why?; and What need is there for Philosophy of Education in a postmodern context? Embedded in these queries we find no less provocative ones: What knowledge, if any, can or should be privileged and why?; and Who is in a position to privilege particular discursive practices over others and why? Although such questions are disruptive, they offer the opportunity to take a fresh look at the nature and purposes of our work and, as we do, to expand the number and kinds of voices participating in the conversation. (Kohli, 1995, xiv).

There is an inward-looking tone to the questions posed here: Philosophy of education should focus upon itself, upon its own contents, methods, and practitioners. And of course there is nothing new about this; for one thing, almost forty years ago a collection of readings—with several score of entries—was published under the title What is Philosophy of Education? (Lucas, 1969). It is worth noting, too, that the same attitude is not unknown in philosophy; Simmel is reputed to have said a century or so ago that philosophy is its own first problem.

Having described the general topography of the field of philosophy of education, the focus can change to pockets of activity where from the perspective of this author interesting philosophical work is being, or has been, done—and sometimes this work has been influential in the worlds of educational policy or practice. It is appropriate to start with a discussion of the rise and partial decline—but lasting influence of—analytic philosophy of education This approach (often called “APE” by both admirers and detractors) dominated the field in the English-speaking world for several decades after the second world war, and its eventual fate throws light on the current intellectual climate.

2. Analytic philosophy of education, and its influence

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—which make up part at least of the philosophical analysis package—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. But traditionally they stood alongside other philosophical activities; in the Republic , for example, Plato was sometimes analytic, at other times normative, and on occasion speculative/metaphysical. 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 (for metaphysics was judged to be literally vacuous, and normative philosophy was viewed as being unable to provide compelling warrants for whatever moral and ethical positions were being advocated).

So, although analytic elements in philosophy of education can be located throughout intellectual history back to the ancient world, 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)

The first object of his analytic scrutiny in the book was the view that “a child should be educated according to Nature”; he teased apart and critiqued various things that writers through the ages could possibly have meant by this, and very little remained standing by the end of the chapter. Then some basic ideas of Herbart and Dewey were subjected to similar treatment. Hardie's hard-nosed approach can be illustrated by the following: One thing that educationists mean by “education according to Nature” (later he turns to other things they might mean) is that “the teacher should thus act like a gardener” who fosters natural growth of his plants and avoids doing anything “unnatural”(Hardie, 1962, 3). He continues:

The crucial question for such a view of education is how far does this analogy hold? There is no doubt that there is some analogy between the laws governing the physical development of the child and the laws governing the development of a plant, and hence there is some justification for the view if applied to physical education. But the educationists who hold this view are not generally very much concerned with physical education, and the view is certainly false if applied to mental education. For some of the laws that govern the mental changes which take place in a child are the laws of learning …. [which] have no analogy at all with the laws which govern the interaction between a seed and its environment. (Hardie, 1962, 4)

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), that 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 should be seen as truncated arguments); Smith and 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 British writers who were becoming prominent—most notably R.S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the USA), 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 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. 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). Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by: the content that had been taught; or by the intention of the instructor; or by the methods of instruction that had been used; or by the outcomes of the instruction; or, of course, 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. Two examples will be sufficient to make the point: (i) The first criterion mentioned above—the nature of the content being imparted—was supported by an argument that ran roughly as follows: “If some students have learned, as factual, some material that is patently incorrect (like ‘The capital city of Canada is Washington D.C.’), then they must have been indoctrinated. This conclusion is reinforced by the consideration that we would never say students must have been indoctrinated if they believe an item that is correct!” However, both portions of this argument have been challenged. (ii) The method criterion—how the knowledge was imparted to the students—usually was supported by an argument that, while different, clearly paralleled the previous one in its logic. It ran roughly like this: “We never would say that students had been indoctrinated by their teacher if he or she had fostered open inquiry and discussion, encouraged exploration in the library and on the net, allowed students to work in collaborative groups, and so on. However, if the teacher did not allow independent inquiry, quashed classroom questions, suppressed dissenting opinions, relied heavily on rewards and punishments, used repetition and fostered rote memorization, and so on, then it is likely we would say the students were being indoctrinated”. (The deeper issue in this second example is that the first method of teaching allows room for the operation of the learners' rationality, while the second method does not. Siegel, 1988, stresses this in his discussion of indoctrination.)

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; I can offer as illustration a presidential address at a US Philosophy of Education Society annual meeting that was an hour-long discourse on the various meanings of the expression “I have a toothache”. (It is worth noting that the 1966 article in Time , cited earlier, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970's radical students in Britain accused the brand of linguistic analysis practiced by R.S. Peters 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 in this arcane topic on the part of the general reading public in the UK 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 examples 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 foundational work on 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; 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 . APE was no longer the center of interest.

By the 1980s, the rather simple if not simplistic ordinary language analysis practiced in philosophy of education, was reeling under the attack from the combination of forces sketched above, but the analytic spirit lived on in the form of rigorous work done in other specialist areas of philosophy—work that trickled out and took philosophy of education in rich new directions. Technically-oriented epistemology, philosophy of science, and even metaphysics, flourished; as did the interrelated fields of social, political and moral philosophy. John Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971; a decade later MacIntyre's After Virtue appeared; and in another decade or so there was a flood of work on individualism, communitarianism, democratic citizenship, inclusion, exclusion, rights of children versus rights of parents, rights of groups (such as the Amish) versus rights of the larger polity. From the early 1990s philosophers of education have contributed significantly to the debates on these and related topics—indeed, this corpus of work illustrates that good philosophy of education flows seamlessly into work being done in mainstream areas of philosophy. Illustrative examples are Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Callan (1997); The Demands of Liberal Education , Levinson (1999); Social Justice and School Choice , Brighouse (2000); and Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education , Reich (2002). These works stand shoulder-to-shoulder with semi-classics on the same range of topics by Gutmann, Kymlicka, Macedo, and others. An excerpt from the book by Callan nicely illustrates that the analytic spirit lives on in this body of work; the broader topic being pursued is the status of the aims of education in a pluralistic society where there can be deep fundamental disagreements:

… the distinction must be underlined between the ends that properly inform political education and the extent to which we should tolerate deviations from those ends in a world where reasonable and unreasonable pluralism are entangled and the moral costs of coercion against the unreasonable variety are often prohibitive. Our theoretical as well as our commonsense discourse do not always respect the distinction…. If some of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church conflict with our best theory of the ends of civic education, it does not follow that we have any reason to revise our theory; but neither does it mean we have any reason to impose these ends on Catholic schools and the families that they serve. (Callan, 1997, 44)

Callan and White (2003) have given an analysis of why the topics described above have become such a focus of attention. “What has been happening in philosophy of education in recent years”, they argue, mirrors “a wider self-examination in liberal societies themselves”. World events, from the fall of communism to the spread of ethnic conflicts “have all heightened consciousness of the contingency of liberal politics”. A body of work in philosophy, from the early Rawls on, has systematically examined (and critiqued) the foundations of liberalism, and philosophy of education has been drawn into the debates. Callan and White mention communitarianism as offering perhaps “the most influential challenge” to liberalism, and they write:

The debate between liberals and communitarians is far more than a theoretical diversion for philosophers and political scientists. At stake are rival understandings of what makes human lives and the societies in which they unfold both good and just, and derivatively, competing conceptions of the education needed for individual and social betterment. (Callan and White, 2003, 95-96)

It should be appended here that it is not only “external” world events that have stimulated this body of work; events internal to a number of democratic societies also have been significant. To cite one example that is prominent in the literature in North America at least, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling ( Wisconsin v. Yoder ) in which members of the Amish sect were allowed to withdraw their children from public schools before they had reached the age of sixteen—for, it had been argued, any deeper education would endanger the existence of the group and its culture. In assessing this decision—as of course philosophers have frequently done (see, for example, Kymlicka, 1995)—a balance has to be achieved between (i) the interest of civic society in having an informed, well-educated, participatory citizenry; (ii) the interest of the Amish as a group in preserving their own culture; and (iii) the interests of the Amish children, who have a right to develop into autonomous individuals who can make reflective decisions for themselves about the nature of the life they wish to lead. These are issues that fall squarely in the domain covered by the works mentioned above.

So much work is being produced on the complex and interrelated issues just outlined, that in a different context it seemed fair for me to remark (descriptively, and not judgmentally) that a veritable cottage industry had sprung up in post-Rawlsian philosophy of education. There are, of course, other areas of activity, where interesting contributions are being made, and the discusion will next turn to a sampling of these.

3. Other areas of contemporary activity

As was stressed at the outset, and illustrated with a cursory listing of examples, 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 the recent A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren, 2003), which contained more than six-hundred pages divided into fourty-five chapters each of which surveyed 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 and truth in 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, purposes of universities in a fluid age, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education.

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 filling out—and deepening—the topographical account of the field that was presented in the preceding sections. The discussion will open with a topic that was not included in the Companion , despite it being one that is of great concern across the academic educational community, and despite it being one where adherents of some of the rival schools of philosophy (and philosophy of education) have had lively exchanges.

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 particularly since publication of the book by Stokes mentioned earlier, and also 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.

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 its 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 epistemolgical: 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 only were used 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, 2008.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millenium 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 decisionmaking.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicans 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 beome common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the U.S. National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC, 2002), that argued 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 exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, they were guilty of advocating “your father's paradigm”(clearly this was not intended as a compliment). One critic with postmodernist leanings asserted that educational research should move “toward a Nietzschean sort of ‘unnatural science’ that leads to greater health by fostering ways of knowing that escape normativity”—a suggestion that evokes the reaction discussed in Section 1.3 above, namely, one of incomprehension on the part of most researchers and those philosophers of education who work within a different tradition where a “way of knowing”, in order to be a “way”, must inevitably be normative.

The final complexity in the debates over the nature of educational research is that there are some respected members of the philosophy of education community who claim, along with Carr, that “the forms of human association characteristic of educational engagement are not really apt for scientific or empirical study at all” (Carr, 2003, 54-5). His reasoning is that educational processes cannot be studied empirically because they are processes of “normative initiation”—a position that as it stands begs the question by not making clear why such processes cannot be studied empirically.

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 (as Dewey pointed out), and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches, or 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 in a 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 particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why is evolution included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Why is Driver Education part of the high school curriculum, and methods of birth control usually not—even though sex has an impact on the life of teenagers that at least is comparable to the impact of car-driving? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Does the justification for not including the Holocaust or the phenomenon of wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some countries 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 brilliant pioneering efforts all draw upon, explicitly or implicitly, 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), or alternatively, what constitutes the good life and human flourishing. These two formulations are related, for presumably our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to act rationally and/or autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. How this is to be done, of course, is not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the matter. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing a conception of the good life, and then for pursuing it; 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. Luckily for Hirst, the typical British high school day was made up of seven instructional periods. (Hirst, 1965; for a critique see Phillips, 1987, ch.11.)

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a ruler or ruling class; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as a medium 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 the ruling class. Michael Apple is typical:

… the knowledge that now gets into schools is already a choice from a much larger universe of possible social knowledge and principles. It is a form of cultural capital that comes from somewhere, that often reflects the perspectives and beliefs of powerful segments of our social collectivity. In its very production and dissemination as a public and economic commodity—as books, films, materials, and so forth—it is repeatedly filtered through ideological and economic commitments. Social and economic values, hence, are already embedded in the design of the institutions we work in, in the ‘formal corpus of school knowledge’ we preserve in our curricula….(Apple, 1990, 8-9)

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 (who arguably were following Plato's lead in the Republic ), 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 probably 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, 2007.) 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 be able to contemplate the metaphysical realm of the “forms”, thanks to their advanced training in mathematics and philosophy. Having seen the form of the Good, they would be eligible after a period of practical experience to become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

Plato's educational scheme was guided, presumably, by the understanding he thought he had achieved of the transcendental realm of fixed “forms”. John Dewey, ever a strong critic of positions that were not naturalistic, or that incorporated a priori premises, commented as follows:

Plato's starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice…. And only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. (Dewey, 1916, 102-3)

Furthermore, as Dewey again put it, Plato “had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals…. they fall by nature into classes”, which masks the “infinite diversity of active tendencies” which individuals harbor (104). In addition, Plato tended to talk of learning using the passive language of seeing, which has shaped our discourse down to the present (witness “Now I see it!” when a difficult point has become clear).

In contrast, for Dewey each individual was an organism situated in a biological and social environment in which problems were constantly emerging, forcing the individual to reflect and act, and learn. Dewey, following William James, held that knowledge arises from reflection upon our actions; and the worth of a putative item of knowledge is directly correlated with the problem-solving success of the actions performed under its guidance. Thus Dewey, sharply disagreeing with Plato, regarded knowing as an active rather than a passive affair—a strong theme in his writings is his opposition to what is sometimes called “the spectator theory of knowledge”. All this is made clear enough in a passage containing only a thinly-veiled allusion to Plato's famous analogy of the prisoners in the cave whose eyes are turned to the light by education:

In schools, those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect. The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly. Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs of activity. (164)

This passage also illuminates a passage that many have found puzzling: “philosophy is the theory of education” (387). For in the sentences above it is easy to see the tight link between Dewey's epistemology and his views on education—his anti-spectator epistemology morphs directly into advocacy for anti-spectator learning by students in school—students learn by being active inquirers. Over the past few decades this view of learning has inspired a major tradition of research by educational psychologists, and related theory-development (the “situated cognition” framework); and these bodies of work have in turn led to innovative efforts in curriculum development. (For a discussion of these, see Phillips, 2003.)

The final important difference with Plato is that, for Dewey, each student is an individual who blazes his or her unique trail of growth; the teacher has the task of guiding and facilitating this growth, without imposing a fixed end upon the process. Dewey sometimes uses the term “curriculum” to mean “the funded wisdom of the human race”, the point being that over the course of human history an enormous stock of knowledge and skills has accumulated and the teacher has the task of helping the student to make contact with this repertoire—but helping by facilitating rather than by imposing. (All this, of course, has been the subject of intense discussion among philosophers of education: Does growth imply a direction? Is growth always good—can't a plant end up misshapen, and can't a child develop to become bad? Is Dewey some type of perfectionist? Is his philosophy too vague to offer worthwhile educational guidance? Isn't it possible for a “Deweyan” student to end up without enough relevant knowledge and skills to be able to make a living in the modern world?)

Dewey's work was of central importance for the American progressive education movement in its formative years, although there was a fair degree of misunderstanding of his ideas as progressives interpreted his often extremely dense prose to be saying what they personally happened to believe. Nevertheless, Dewey became the “poster child” or the “house philosopher” of progressive education, and if he didn't make it onto many actual posters he certainly made it onto a postage stamp.

His popularity, however, sharply declined after the Soviets launched Sputnik, for Dewey and progressive education were blamed for the USA losing the race into space (illustrating the point about scapegoating made at the start of this essay). But he did not remain in disgrace for long; and for some time has been the focus of renewed interest—although it is still noticeable that commentators interpret Dewey to be holding views that mirror their own positions or interests. And interestingly, there now is slightly more interest in Dewey on the part of philosophers of education in the UK than there was in earlier years, and there is growing interest by philosophers from the Continent (see, for example, Biesta and Burbules, 2003).

To be a poster child for progressivism, however, is not to be the parent. Rather than to Dewey, that honor must go to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and to his educational novel written in soaring prose, Emile (1762). Starting with the premise that “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil” (Rousseau, 1955, 5), Rousseau held that contemporary man has been misshapen by his education; the “crushing force” of social conventions has stifled the “Nature within him”. The remedy adopted in the novel is for the young Emile to be taken to his family estate in the country where, away from the corrupting influence of society, and under the watchful eye of his tutor, “everything should … be brought into harmony with these natural tendencies”. (This idea of education according to nature, it will be recalled, was the object of Hardie's analytic attention almost two centuries later.)

Out in the countryside, rather than having a set curriculum that he is forced to follow, Emile learns when some natural stimulus or innate interest motivates him—and under these conditions learning comes easily. He is allowed to suffer the natural consequences of his actions (if he breaks a window, he gets cold; if he takes the gardener's property, the gardener will no longer do him favors), and experiences such as these lead to the development of his moral system. Although Rousseau never intended these educational details to be taken literally as a blueprint (he saw himself as developing and illustrating the basic principles), over the ages there have been attempts to implement them, one being the famous British “free school”, A.S. Neill's Summerhill. (It is worth noting that Neill claimed not to have read Rousseau; but he was working in a milieu in which Rousseau's ideas were well-known—intellectual influence can follow a less than direct path.) Furthermore, over the ages these principles also have proven to be fertile soil for philosophers of education to till.

Even more fertile ground for comment, in recent years, has been Rousseau's proposal for the education of girls, developed in a section of the novel (Book V) that bears the name of the young woman who is destined to be Emile's soul-mate, Sophy. The puzzle has been why Rousseau—who had been so far-sighted in his discussion of Emile's education—was so hide-bound if not retrograde in his thinking about her education. One short quotation is sufficient to illustrate the problem: “If woman is made to please and to be in subjection to man, she ought to make herself pleasing in his eyes and not provoke him …her strength is in her charms” (324).

The educational principles developed by Rousseau and Dewey, and numerous educational theorists and philosophers in the interregnum, are alive and well in the twenty-first century. Of particular contemporary interest is the evolution that has occurred of the progressive idea that each student is an active learner who is pursuing his or her own individual educational path. By incorporating elements of the classical empiricist epistemology of John Locke, this progressive principle has become transformed into the extremely popular position known as constructivism, according to which each student in a classroom constructs his or her own individual body of understandings even when all in the group are given what appears to be the same stimulus or educational experience. (A consequence of this is that a classroom of thirty students will have thirty individually-constructed, and possibly different, bodies of “knowledge”, in addition to that of the teacher!) There is also a solipsistic element here, for constructivists also believe that none of us—teachers included—can directly access the bodies of understandings of anyone else; each of us is imprisoned in a world of our own making. It is an understatement to say that this poses great difficulties for the teacher. The education journals of the past two decades contain many thousands of references to discussions of this position, which elsewhere I claimed has become a type of educational “secular religion”; for reasons that are hard to discern it is particularly influential in mathematics and science education. (For a discussion of the underlying philosophical ideas in constructivism, and for an account of some of its varieties, see the essays in Phillips, ed., 2000.)

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world—France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, to mention only a few—have their own intellectual traditions, and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education into 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 to the discipline that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her areas of competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last twenty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, commenting on the field as a whole or on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules, 1994; Chambliss, 1996; Phillips, 1985; Siegel, 2007; Smeyers, 1994); two large volumes—a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith and Standish, 2003) and a “Companion” (Curren, 2003)—have been produced by Blackwell in their well-known philosophy series; and the same publisher recently released an anthology, with 60 papers considered to be important in the field, and which also are representative of the range of work that is being done (Curren, 2007). Several encyclopedias of philosophy of education have been published or are in the works (for example, Chambliss, 1996; Siegel, 2008); there is a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch and Gingell, 1999), and a good textbook or two (see Noddings, 2007); 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 in the present work (for another sampling see A. Rorty, 1998; Smeyers and Marshall, 1995; Stone, 1994); and several international journals appear to be flourishing— Educational Philosophy and Theory , Educational Theory , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Studies in Philosophy and Education , Theory and Research in Education . Thus there is enough material available to keep the interested reader busy, and to provide alternative assessments to the ones presented in this present essay.

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• Archambault, R., (ed.), 1965, Philosophical Analysis and Education , London: Routledge.
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• Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R., and Standish, P., (eds.), 2003, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Brighouse, H., 2000, Social Justice and School Choice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• Carr, D., 2003, Making Sense of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Theory of Education and Teaching , London: RoutledgeFalmer.
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• Hardie, C., 1962, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory , New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications.
• Hirst, P., 1965, “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge”, in Philosophical Analysis and Education , R. Archambault, (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 113-138.
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• –––, 1987, Philosophy, Science, and Social Inquiry , Oxford: Pergamon.
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• –––, 2003, “Theories of Teaching and Learning”, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education , R. Curren, (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 232-245.
• –––, 2008, “Empirical Educational Research: Charting Philosophical Disagreements in an Undisciplined Field”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education , H. Siegel (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press.
• Reich, R., 2002, Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Rorty, A., (ed.), 1998, Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives , New York: Routledge.
• Rousseau, J-J., 1955, Emile , B. Foxley, (tr.), London: Dent/Everyman.
• Scheffler, I., 1960, The Language of Education , Illinois: Thomas.
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• –––, 2007, “Philosophy of Education”, in Britannica Online Encyclopedia , [ Available online ].
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• Smeyers, P., 1994, “Philosophy of Education: Western European Perspectives”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 8), T. Husen and N. Postlethwaite, (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, 2 nd . Edition, pp. 4456-61.
• Smeyers, P., and Marshall, J., (eds.), 1995, Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein's Challenge , Dordrecht: Kluwer.
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• 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)
• UNESCO/International Bureau of Education: Thinkers on Education

autonomy: personal | -->Dewey, John --> | feminist (interventions): ethics | feminist (interventions): liberal feminism | feminist (interventions): political philosophy | -->feminist (topics): perspectives on autonomy --> | feminist (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 -->

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1 The Epistemic Aims of Education

Emily Robertson is Dual Associate Professor of Education and Philosophy in the School of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University. Her primary research focus is on the development and defense of fostering rationality as an educational aim. She has also written on moral and civic education. Recent publications include “Teacher Education in a Democratic Society: Learning and Teaching the Practices of Democratic Participation” in the 3rd edition of The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (2008).

• Published: 02 January 2010
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This article examines the ideal epistemic aims of education. It explains that epistemology is concerned with giving an account of knowledge and suggests that if educators ought to aim at having their students acquire knowledge their epistemic aims should be related to this goal. It contends that the epistemic aims of education do not concern curricular subjects but with the way the work of the educator should be guided by an understanding of the nature of knowledge itself.

[T]he educational ideal of rationality…[is aligned] with the complementary ideal of autonomy , since a rational person will also be an autonomous one, capable of judging for herself the justifiedness of candidate beliefs and the legitimacy of candidate values. —H. Siegel, “Cultivating Reason”

Rationality sometimes consists in refusing to think for oneself. —J. Hardwig, “Epistemic Dependence”

[T]he independent thinker is not someone who works everything out for herself, even in principle, but one who exercises a controlling intelligence over the input she receives from the normal sources of information whether their basis be individual or communal. —C. A. J. Coady, “Testimony, Observation, and ‘Autonomous Knowledge’ ”

Epistemology in the broadest sense is concerned with giving an account of knowledge. If educators ought to aim at having their students acquire knowledge, their epistemic aims are related to this goal. Knowledge is a familiar concept in public and professional debates about education. 1 People often consider what particular forms of knowledge ought to be included in the curriculum. Should schools offer a course on world religions, for example? Should they teach the theory of intelligent design in addition to, or in place of, the theory of evolution? But the epistemic aims of education do not concern curricular subjects, at least not directly. Rather, the issue concerns the way the work of the educator should be guided by an understanding of the nature of knowledge itself. What is knowledge? When does a student really know something as opposed to having simply guessed a correct answer, for example?

There are different types of knowledge, such as knowing that something is so, knowing how to do something, or knowing a person. Much philosophical inquiry has focused on what is required for knowing that something is so, commonly called propositional knowledge . There is considerable disagreement about the correct analysis of this type of knowledge. 2 Many hold, however, that having knowledge of a particular proposition requires justified true belief. 3 Thus if Professor Choi knows that social class differences in the United States affect educational attainment, she must believe the proposition, her belief must be true (i.e., it must be the case that class differences affect attainment), and she must be justified in believing the claim. On some accounts of justification, but not all, this means that she must have good reasons for her belief. What constitutes proper justification is one of the unresolved issues in the analysis of knowledge. 4

It seems reasonable to assume that acquiring propositional knowledge is a major aim of education. If that assumption is correct, then the above analysis provides a starting point for our inquiry. If education aims at knowledge, and knowledge requires truth and justification, then they must lie among the epistemic aims of education. 5 But these aims, though central, cannot be the only epistemic aims, for several reasons. No one supposes that just any justified true belief should be included in an educational curriculum. Are there additional epistemic aims that guide the selection? Further, it's common to regard students not only as consumers of expert information but also as apprentices to the cognitive communities that produce knowledge (at least to the extent appropriate and possible given their goals and developmental levels). Is this assumption justified and, if so, what further epistemic aims does it entail? Even apprentices to cognitive communities can be regarded as subservient to the experts' construction of knowledge, however. Should educators aim more ambitiously at some degree of cognitive autonomy, making it possible, as Siegel ( 2003 ) puts it, for a student to be capable “of judging for herself the justifiedness of candidate beliefs” (p. 307)?

Answering these questions, as we will see, creates an abstract picture of the ideal knower whose characteristics embody a set of normative epistemic aims for education. I believe this picture is useful, indeed crucial, but it has also encountered significant challenges that should to be addressed in developing a defensible account. I'll discuss two main concerns:

 Some have argued that the characterization of the ideal knower outlined above is too abstract (Alcoff and Potter 1993 ; Antony 2002 ; Code 1993 ; Daukas 2006 ; Haraway 1988 ; Harding 1991 ). It assumes that there are no epistemologically relevant differences among knowers, that they can be regarded as the same for the purposes of producing a theory of knowledge. It does not take into account differences in the situation and features of potential knowers that are relevant, it is urged, to the knowledge (or theories of knowledge) they construct. Culture, gender, race, and group subordination or oppression, for example, are embodied features of those who construct knowledge that cannot be neglected if an adequate and helpful theory of knowledge is to result. At issue in this critique is not the abstractness of the characterization of knowledge per se, as if it were simply not concrete enough, but, rather, the way in which that abstraction denies or obscures the relationship between knowledge and power, a feature that an educationally useful (and morally and politically just) theory of knowledge cannot ignore. Thus, understanding the social and political conditions of the production and dissemination of knowledge is a crucial epistemic aim of education from this point of view.

 The second issue concerns how epistemic educational aims should acknowledge each individual's dependence on the knowledge of others. On the one hand, it seems plausible that educators should teach students to think for themselves. On the other hand, we live in a world in which reliance on the testimony and expert judgment of others is pervasive. Is Hardwig ( 2006 ) right, then, that “Rationality sometimes consists in refusing to think for oneself” (p. 329)? Nor is the issue only a matter of whether and when it's appropriate to accept the claims of individual experts. As Elgin ( 1996 ) puts it, “Understanding and knowledge are collective accomplishments” (p. 116). The content of the curriculum that schools teach is the result of cognitive activity by communities of inquirers, the community of historians, for example. An individual learner's knowledge draws upon the resources of public bodies of knowledge created by these communities. There are, as Goldman ( 2002 ) argues, social pathways to knowledge. These pathways include not only communities of inquirers who create knowledge but also the disseminators of knowledge, the media and press, the educational system itself, for example. How should the social dimensions of knowledge be reflected in the epistemic aims of education?

The conclusion I'll argue for is that educators ought not to abandon the goal of thinking for oneself; yet thinking for oneself itself requires attention to the social conditions of knowledge. Thus I agree with Coady ( 1994 ) that the “independent thinker” is “one who exercises a controlling intelligence over the input she receives from the normal sources of information whether their basis be individual or communal” (p. 248). Understanding the social conditions of knowledge production, including the relationship between knowledge and power, is part of being an independent thinker in this sense. Yet even this conclusion has a largely individualist thrust in that it positions the individual knower at the center of the enterprise. In some respects, this focus is unavoidable, since educators do have a responsibility to help individuals think for themselves, or so I'll argue. On the other hand, given that knowledge creation and dissemination is a social enterprise, individuals should also understand their role as citizens, as well as knowledge producers, in supporting effective and just social pathways to knowledge. Here, consideration of the epistemic ends of education begins to merge with civic education.

1. Knowledge, Truth, and Justification

Eventually we will need to broaden the epistemic aims of education beyond acquiring propositional knowledge, as I have already acknowledged. For example, the goal is not information per se, but, rather, knowledge that is significant and organized in patterns that contribute to perspective and understanding in orienting thought and action (Elgin 1996 ; Siegel 1988 ). Nevertheless, truth and justification—conditions of propositional knowledge—are arguably at the core of the educational enterprise. While teachers are not infallible, “we do not,” Noddings ( 2007 ) observes, “defend the practice of teaching what we know to be false” (p. 123). 6 And Scheffler ( 1960 ) emphasizes the importance of teachers’ justifying their claims to their students. Teaching, he says, requires teachers to submit themselves “to the understanding and independent judgment” of their students; to reveal their reasons for believing the claims they're teaching to their students and so submit them to the students' “evaluation and criticism” (p. 57). This is true, Scheffler ( 1965 ) holds, because teachers do not want merely “to bring about true belief, but to bring it about through the exercise of free rational judgment by the student” (p. 11).

It might seem evident that education should aim at truth. Those who think that knowledge is the proper goal are logically committed to the truth‐aim given the standard analysis of propositional knowledge. Adler ( 2003 ) argues that, while justification has been the central educational interest, “one's reasons must genuinely establish one's belief as true” if the knowledge‐aim of education is to be served (p. 287). Later we will consider whether education should aim at epistemic ends that involve skills and character, ends that are not evaluated in terms of truth or falsity, per se. If so, truth may not be a broad enough category to cover all the epistemic aims of education. Perhaps there are truth analogs in each of these cases. Skills should be effective in achieving their proper ends and character traits should be virtuous, for example. Or perhaps epistemic skills and virtues are valuable only instrumentally in terms of their effectiveness in generating true beliefs. But I am concerned here with the role of truth in the narrower educational domain of transmitting propositional knowledge.

The truth‐aim is not without its critics. Here, I'll briefly consider four types of challenges to truth that have implications for education. I should admit at the outset that these are very large questions that cannot be fully explored here. I'll focus on the questions these positions raise for the epistemic aims of education.

 It is sometimes argued that, since we have no access to truth independent of our reasons or justification for believing something true, truth itself can be dispensed with in favor of justification. For example, Rorty (1998) argues that there is no practical difference between truth and justification—that is, nothing that makes a difference to judgment or action. From this point of view, one might argue that the appropriate epistemic aim of education is justified or rational belief rather than justified true belief. This issue will be explored further in section 1.2 . 7

 A second challenge to truth lies in observations from some feminists and postmodernists about the interconnections between knowledge and power (Code 1993 ; Foucault 1980 , 1988 ). Much like Thrasymachus' claim in Plato's Republic that justice is what is in the interest of the stronger party, the worry here is that what counts as true will reflect the interests of those who have sufficient power to define the aims and rules of inquiry. This is a real worry, especially under conditions where some group's oppression places severe limits on its members' opportunities to participate in knowledge construction and limits the extent to which their experiences are part of the data to be understood and explained. Under these conditions, the dominant group tends to regard its perspectives and ways of thinking as the universal norm and all nonconforming views as deviant. But rejecting truth is surely not necessary for accepting the validity of this point. Exposing the workings of power leads not only to more inclusive theorizing but also to findings that are more nearly true (Siegel 1998 ). The position that the epistemic aims of education should include fostering critical perspectives that teach students to analyze theory and findings from this perspective will be explored further in section 3 .

 A third line of criticism rejects the idea that truth is objective or universal. Rather, truth is said to be relative to the organizing framework or perspective being employed. The world has no structure in itself, independent of the mind that represents it. According to the relativist, there is no scheme‐independent way of deciding between competing frameworks, no possibility of determining truth in a way that transcends all schemes. In its strongest form, the thesis implies that a statement may be true relative to one framework and false relative to another. Some constructivist theorists of learning, for example, appear to hold the view that different persons can arrive at equally well‐grounded but conflicting beliefs, each appropriately called knowledge. 8

Whether relativism about truth is ultimately a coherent position or not cannot be decided here. 9 For our purpose of examining the epistemic aims of education, I note that, even if it is a coherent view, it is not a reason to dispense with a commitment to seek truth. Presumably, any useful and viable framework will contain methods of inquiry and standards of justification that allow for a distinction to be drawn between truth and error from within its perspective. Individual inquirers working within a framework cannot make any claim they like true; they are bound by the framework's standards. Neither is it possible to make any claim we like true by adopting a suitable perspective. Some claims lack plausibility from any reasonable perspective. Further, all individuals and groups seek to improve their fund of knowledge. They modify their beliefs in light of new experiences and information in an effort to arrive at beliefs that are more adequate. If we regarded all positions as equally valid, why would we be interested in learning or education at all? These facts give truth sufficient objectivity to make an admonition to seek truth a viable educational goal.

 The final challenge to truth that I'll consider concerns the claim that truth does not necessarily trump all other values. In Beyond Good and Evil , Nietzsche ( 1966 ) wrote: “The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment.…The question is to what extent it is life‐promoting, life‐preserving, species‐preserving, perhaps even species‐cultivating” (pp. 11–12). Ellsworth ( 1997 ) takes a similar stance in her philosophy of education: “In what ways does the world rise or fall in value when a reader or groups of readers perform and let loose in the world this particular meaning or reading of a text or event? …‘What counts’ as a ‘rise’ or ‘a fall’ in the value of the world becomes a historical and social achievement—not a transcendental given waiting to be discovered.…Is this reading true or false, right or wrong, good or bad? is a question that drives toward closure, stasis, and the fixing of knowledge. But the question, What has this reading performed or let loose in the world? sends us out on an exploration” (127–28).

In both these claims, commitment to truth is simply deferred, not dispensed with. Presumably, investigating which judgments or readings are life‐promoting or increase value in the world will require an inquiry whose end is discovering the truth of the causal connections in question. Nevertheless, Nietzsche and Ellsworth would be willing to give higher priority to noncognitive ends over truth in particular circumstances, just as many tell small lies rather than give offense to a friend or as a peace negotiator may care less about the truth of what happened and more about arranging a viable agreement (Robertson 2007 ). The desirability of such tradeoffs in particular circumstances does not challenge, however, the claim that truth is a primary epistemic goal.

1.2. Justification

On the standard account of propositional knowledge, a belief must be justified to count as knowledge. Under what conditions is a belief justified? Epistemologists have produced a daunting array of theories. Here, I consider one main disagreement concerning whether internalism or externalism is the correct view of justification. 10 According to internalists, justification must rest on factors accessible to the consciousness of the knower. Foundationalist internalists hold that justification ultimately depends on basic beliefs (foundational beliefs) that do not themselves depend on any other beliefs for their justification. Coherentist internalists hold that justification depends on mutual support among the agent's beliefs. For externalists, justification can depend on at least some factors outside the scope of the consciousness of the knower (and, indeed, any knowers) that are, nevertheless, in interaction with the agent's cognitive states. In one form, reliabilism, externalism holds that justified beliefs are those beliefs produced in the agent under appropriate conditions by a reliable and truth‐conducive process (perception is an example). It's irrelevant from the externalist perspective whether the agent or anyone else knows that the causal processes involved are in fact truth‐conducive. If they are, then the agent's beliefs arrived at under appropriate conditions through this process are justified (my belief that there is a computer in front of me right now, for example).

One way of understanding the internalist perspective is to suppose that internalists think justificatory criteria should provide guidance about what to believe; but if we lack access to the justificatory grounds for our beliefs, then those grounds cannot provide such guidance. As Elgin ( 1996 ) says, externalism is useless in our lives because, if we don't know when the right relationship obtains between our beliefs and the appropriate causal mechanisms, the criterion doesn't help us distinguish between true and false beliefs (p. 51).

Wherever the truth lies in epistemology, I believe that educators rightly adopt an internalist stance. From a first‐person standpoint, there is no way to pursue truth except by searching for good reasons that are truth‐conducive. Perhaps for this reason educational practice may seem to place greater weight on justification than on truth, a state of affairs noted by Adler ( 2003 ): “Because it is an external condition for knowledge, truth has been of less educational interest than the justification condition” (p. 286). There are, however, important educational reasons for the focus on justification. Educators should seek not merely to transmit knowledge but also to put students into a position where they can, to some extent, decide for themselves what to believe. It would be a poor education that transmitted a fixed body of facts without also developing the resources for arriving at new beliefs and evaluating old ones. Hence, the cogency of justifications that students offer for their beliefs is a prime concern of educators and leads to a central focus on conveying what sorts of reasons are good reasons for belief within a given domain. Thus, educators rightly want students to have access to the justificatory grounds for their beliefs.

Given an internalist perspective, is justified true belief too demanding an epistemic aim for educators? One might reasonably argue that knowing the evidential base for every belief is too strenuous even as an ideal. Students often come to believe what their teachers tell them or what their textbooks say, without necessarily knowing the reasons for these beliefs, for example. Are their beliefs in such cases unjustified? And what about the teachers' beliefs? Are their beliefs, the ones they are passing on to their students, fully justified on the internalist standard? What one says here will depend on whether beliefs based solely on the testimony of others can be justified and, if so, under what conditions. I defer discussion of this issue to section 3 .

Since truth and justification are both conditions of knowledge, they cannot be educationally incompatible if knowledge is a proper educational goal. Nevertheless, the connection between justification and truth can come apart. Human claims to knowledge are fallible, since we have no way to truth except through our justificatory beliefs and strategies, and they can fail us. Sometimes these failures are unknown to anyone; they represent as yet unappreciated problems in the current state of knowledge. But there can also be, and frequently are, individual cases in which a person can appear to be justified in his or her belief, although the belief is not true and its falsity is known to others. Lehrer ( 1994 ) draws a distinction between “subjective” justification and “objective” justification to capture this situation. A person's belief is subjectively justified if the belief is supported by the other beliefs the person holds and he or she has arrived at the belief through appropriate reasoning and the belief would be sustained on reflection. If, however, known facts of which the person is unaware defeat the justification, the agent's belief is not objectively justified.

Educators often confront such cases. Sometimes teachers may more highly evaluate a student whose belief is false, but subjectively justified, than a student who has a true, but not subjectively justified, belief. Is it reasonable for educators to prefer subjectively justified false beliefs over unjustified true beliefs? Do educators rightly weight subjective justification more highly than truth, per se? If so, (subjective) justification would have a stronger claim to being the epistemic goal of education than knowledge, since knowledge requires truth. 11

It is not unreasonable for teachers to prefer the former to the latter in their evaluations of students. A student who has learned to reason well is more likely to arrive at true beliefs in the future than one who has made a lucky guess or gullibly takes the word of another. On this view, justification is valued for its instrumental connection with truth. Or perhaps justification is valuable in its own right. Sosa ( 2003 ) proposes that, just as we value an archer's skill in hitting the bull's eye, we might also value not only “hitting the mark of truth” but also “ how one accomplishes that…. On this conception, knowledge is not just hitting the mark but hitting the mark somehow through means proper and skillful enough” (p. 105). Or the educator might take a more deontological view of justification—that is, that it consists in fulfilling one's epistemic obligations. The subjectively justified student has better fulfilled those obligations. In education, these suggestions seem particularly apt: teachers are concerned not only about their students’ holding true beliefs but also about the skills and virtues students display in doing so.

I believe that educators should aim at objective justification, however, and hence at what is believed to be true as judged from the perspective of the relevant disciplinary communities. The student whose belief is subjectively justified but false needs instruction just as much as the student whose belief is true but unjustified. Both truth and justification are educationally desirable. But that doesn't settle the proper pedagogy for changing the subjectively justified but false belief of a student. Merely telling the student what belief is best justified and why may not actually alter the student's belief structures and may undermine developing competence in rationality. Some constructivist pedagogies express reluctance to correct the views of those whose subjectively justified beliefs deviate from those of the relevant disciplinary community (Grandy 2007 ). But this strategy is in the interest of having the student construct his or her own knowledge rather than simply being told what is right by the teacher. Understood as a pedagogical response, constructivism need not deny that both truth and justification are proper epistemic aims of education.

2. Beyond Propositional Knowledge: Understanding, Skills, Virtues, and Judgment

I have argued that propositional knowledge, hence truth and justification, are central epistemic aims of education, but they do not appear to exhaust the domain. I'll not attempt to determine whether the additional aims, briefly mentioned in this section, are valuable in their own right or as means to achieving some unitary epistemic aim, truth, for example. For our purposes, it's enough that each has importance in an adequate educational program. Indeed, when educators speak of “knowledge” it is often assumed that these elements are included. 12

2.1. Understanding

Even those in favor of students' memorizing lists of information agree that educators shouldn't aim at having students acquire only isolated bits of information. Students should understand the meaning and significance of the knowledge they acquire. Their knowledge should be organized in patterns and structures that contribute to perspective and understanding in orienting thought and action. Elgin ( 1996 , 2007 ) argues that understanding, not propositional knowledge, is the goal of both inquiry and education. While I hold that knowledge and understanding are not incompatible goals (understanding generally requires a fair bit of knowledge), I'll not try to resolve this issue here. I agree, however, that understanding is a central epistemic aim of education. Knowledge of individual propositions is an abstraction from knowledge in a broader sense that encompasses understanding. Understanding requires a holistic grasp of an area that involves seeing the connections among the individual elements—how they fit together to generate an overall pattern or system. While some cases of understanding can be expressed in propositional form (e.g., understanding the meaning of a sentence), others arguably cannot (e.g., understanding a musical composition). Unlike propositional knowledge, understanding comes in degrees. A high school biology student's understanding of brain functioning is not equivalent to that of a neurologist's. But for the student's grasp to count as understanding it has to have some purchase on the phenomenon in question. A child who believes that the stork brings babies doesn't understand where babies come from. So understanding must meet an adequacy condition just as propositional knowledge requires truth (Riggs 2003 ; Roberts and Wood 2007 , pp. 42–50). Still, there are degrees of adequacy of understanding, not simply the binary function of true or false associated with propositional knowledge.

2.2. Cognitive Skills and Know‐how

Philosophers of education have argued that educators should be concerned not only to transmit expert knowledge with understanding but also to develop to some extent the cognitive skills required to produce and evaluate such knowledge. The development of such skills opens the possibility of the student's becoming a critical thinker (Bailin 1998 ; Siegel 1988 , 2003 ). The cognitive skills aimed at may be general (e.g., appraising arguments for their validity) or specific to disciplinary fields (e.g., evaluating the merits of a musical performance) (Smith 2002 ).

Knowing how to produce and evaluate knowledge in a wide range of areas would be an impossible aim if it weren't the case that knowing how, like understanding, is in many cases achieved in varying degrees. A reasonable aim would be to enable students to develop cognitive skills to a degree appropriate to their stage of development and their specific educational goals. Knowledge of how to conduct a scientific experiment appropriate for high school biology students, for example, is not the same as the knowledge expected of doctoral students in the field.

The ability to engage in critical inquiry is not limited, however, to evaluating disciplinary claims. Critical thinking or critical rationality in education also aims at helping students to surface and criticize assumptions so deeply embedded in cognitive and cultural practices that they typically escape our scrutiny. This type of inquiry seeks to open up alternative perspectives as a way of evaluating current commitments and of creating new possibilities for thought and action. Inquiry that aims at uncovering assumptions that help to perpetuate forms of social injustice is one example (see section 4.2 for further discussion). What modes of thinking best foster such critical thought is contested (Thompson 2004 ). But at the very least, the aim of critical inquiry makes apparent a feature of cognitive skills that is also true of the practices described above: cognitive skills are not typically algorithmic, routinized performances. Their exercise often requires situation‐specific knowledge and judgment.

Knowing how has not received the same attention from epistemologists as propositional knowledge. Some argue that knowing how is a species of propositional knowledge, at least in some senses (Sosa 2003 ; Stanley and Williamson 2001 ). Sosa ( 2003 ), for example, argues that knowing how may be a form of propositional knowledge, “of knowledge, with respect to a certain way of doing something, that one does it that way” (p. 101). Such knowledge is compatible with not knowing how to perform the action oneself. A soccer fan may know how a bicycle kick is performed, for example, without having the knowledge required to do a bicycle kick herself. Sosa calls the former a spectator sense of knowing how and the latter an agential sense. Both of these senses are further distinguished from the agent's ability to perform the act in question. Even someone with agential knowledge might cease to be able to perform the act given new physical disabilities, for example, without losing the relevant know‐how.

Should educators aim at the spectator or agential sense of knowing how with respect to cognitive skills? Answering this question depends on the ultimate epistemic aim for teaching cognitive skills. Doctoral students, as the next generation of researchers, should be able to employ the relevant skills themselves, not simply know how it's done. But even at lower levels of the educational system, if the goal is generating some degree of epistemic autonomy, some capacity to think for oneself, then, to the degree possible, the agential sense is the proper aim.

2.3. Epistemic Virtues and Cognitive Emotions

Educators seek to embed cognitive knowledge and skills in an epistemic character. Not only should students be able to exercise the relevant cognitive abilities, they should also be disposed to exercise them in the right way in the appropriate circumstances. Recent work by virtue epistemologists on the cognitive virtues suggests a number of relevant virtues. Central commitments are a disposition to seek good reasons for one's beliefs and to base one's beliefs on them. Associated virtues include open‐mindedness, willingness to entertain the views of others, responsiveness to the criticism of others, reasonableness, and self‐reflectiveness (BonJour 2002 ; Burbules 1991 , 1995 ; Hare 2003 ; Sherman and White 2003 ; Siegel 1988 ; Riggs 2003 ). Cognitive emotions—a love of truth or respect for good arguments, for example—are also part of a desirable epistemic character (Scheffler 1991 ; Sherman and White 2003 ).

The proper analysis of a virtue is disputed. For example, for some virtue theorists, virtue encompasses a competence condition while for others it is sufficient to have the proper motives (Riggs 2003 ). Suppose a person seeks reasons for her beliefs and bases her beliefs on her reasons, but frequently fails to achieve knowledge or understanding. Is such a person epistemically virtuous? Or does virtue require epistemic success? Teachers rightly give credit to students whose hearts are in the right place even if they fail to hit the mark, much as we may continue to admire the epistemic character of great thinkers from the past even if they were ultimately proved wrong. But whether competence is part of virtue or an additional element within the total set of epistemic aims of education, both competence (as the discussion above of cognitive skills indicates) and proper motivation have a place.

2.4. Judgment

Finally, educators rightly aim at the progressive development of intellectual judgment. What distinguishes experts from novices is not only their knowledge and skill but also the level of judgment they display (Dreyfus 2006 ). There are often no ultimate criteria, no algorithmic decision procedures, for settling intellectual disputes or solving intellectual problems. Still, there are better and worse reasons for taking one position rather than another. When a scientific experiment, for example, does not confirm the hypothesis being investigated, scientists must decide whether and, if so, where, to make accommodations in the theory that generated the hypothesis. Good intellectual judgment is not an independent epistemic aim, since success in developing judgment requires achieving the other aims described above. Sound judgment is impossible without the appropriate knowledge, understanding, skills, and virtues. And one cannot have fully achieved those aims without the development of judgment.

3. Epistemic Dependence

Goldman ( 1999 ) is not alone in claiming that “[t]raditional epistemology has long preserved the Cartesian image of inquiry as an activity of isolated thinkers, each pursuing truth in a spirit of individualism and pure self‐reliance” (p. vii). That individualism can be seen in the above analysis, which is from the point of view of epistemic aims for the individual knower. The epistemic individualism of epistemology has influenced educational aims in the direction of an ideal of epistemic autonomy, expressed in Locke's claim that “The floating of other men's opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true” ( Essay , I, iv, #23). Yet we live in a world in which reliance on the testimony and expert judgment of others is pervasive. This situation is not limited to laypersons in their relationships to experts. Scientists, for example, must rely on the reports of other scientists in doing their work since scientific inquiry itself requires collaboration (Hardwig 2006 ). Epistemic dependence results not only from dependence on the direct testimony of others (teachers, physicians, neighbors) but also from the social division of cognitive labor. We rely on social practices for creating and distributing knowledge, as social epistemologists have emphasized through a variety of perspectives and projects (Goldman 2002 ; Longino 1990 ; Nelson 1993 ; Schmitt 1994 ). We are all dependent on cognitive practices of others for producing knowledge—cognitive practices that individual scholars and experts help shape over time but that they also largely inherit. And we are dependent on social practices for the dissemination of knowledge. The media, the press, the textbook industry are collective and sometimes anonymous sources of our testimonial beliefs.

These “social pathways to knowledge,” as Goldman ( 2002 ) calls them, present special challenges for the epistemic aims of education (p. ix). On the one hand, the educational system educates the experts in knowledge production, who, in the areas in which they work, are capable of judging directly the evidence for their knowledge claims. The preceding analysis of epistemic aims applies most robustly to them as they develop their areas of expertise. On the other hand, the system educates us all as consumers of knowledge that we are often unable to directly evaluate when it lies outside our fields of special expertise and our everyday experience. How should our epistemic educational aims acknowledge our dependence on the knowledge of others and on social pathways to knowledge?

As a window into these considerations, I will examine the epistemic status of beliefs acquired through the testimony of others—that is, through their telling us what is the case. A chief question will be the conditions under which a testimonial belief is justified and, hence, what stance educators should teach their students to take toward the testimony of others, including collective sources of knowledge production and dissemination. I explore in particular two sorts of educational projects that I believe are justified in light of epistemic dependence: (1) a critical stance toward our collective cognitive practices in order to consider ways in which they might embody biases that pervert the quest for knowledge and understanding; and (2) shared civic responsibility for supporting institutions that increase the likelihood of successful epistemic outcomes.

3.1. Testimonial Belief

It is evident that much of what any individual believes derives from the testimony of others, through what others have said or written. 13 Can these beliefs, if true, count as knowledge? The issue here concerns the conditions under which one's belief based on testimony will count as justified from the internalist perspective that, I've argued, is the proper stance for educators. Does one have to, as J. L. Mackie ( 1970 ) puts it, “know whatever it is off [one's] own bat,” and what would that require (p. 254)? Does one have to appropriate the relevant evidence before the belief, if true, counts as knowledge? From this perspective, insofar as the educational system communicates testimonial beliefs, it at best aims at knowledge in the weak sense of true belief. Or does verifying the trustworthiness of the speaker count as justification? Or is testimony a basic ground of justification such that one is entitled to accept what another person says as true absent defeating conditions? 14

No individual can investigate the grounds for any substantial proportion of the beliefs he or she has acquired through the testimony of others (including texts as well as face‐to‐face encounters) so as to base them on his or her own direct knowledge of the truth‐making factors. It may be, as Adler ( 2002 ) argues, that beliefs initially gained through testimony are sustained through other forms of evidence, such as coherence of those beliefs with what we're told by other sources and through satisfactory experiences while acting on the beliefs in question (chap. 5). Yet even Adler holds only that the gap between testimonial support and other forms has been exaggerated, not that we are never in the position of relying on testimony to sustain beliefs. And since we know that testimony is sometimes false, a policy of blind acceptance of all testimony, “gullibility” as Elizabeth Fricker ( 1994 ) calls it, is obviously a mistake. Under what conditions are beliefs based on testimony justified? Or, more weakly, even if they are not sufficiently justified to count as knowledge, how should one be able to defend a belief grounded in testimony so as to make its acceptance rational?

If one is thinking of education, what stance to take toward testimony is a particularly important question. Students are in a vulnerable epistemic position with respect to teachers, who are invested with societal, institutional, and (sometimes) parental authority that inclines students to accept their testimony. Further, teachers are not only telling students what to believe about the matters at hand. There are also explaining what the reasons are for a particular claim and, indeed, teaching students what counts as good reasons in a given domain. It is within their role to prepare students for a critical stance toward knowledge claims whether from individuals (including themselves) or from social sources such as newspapers and the media. What stance should teachers prepare their students to take toward testimony, their own included?

The philosophical literature on testimony suggests two basic options that educators might consider (Adler 2002 ; Goldman 1999 ; Matilal and Chakrabarti 1994 ; Selinger and Crease 2006b ):

Regarding others as epistemologically trustworthy, and thus accepting their testimonial claims, is justified unless there are overriding reasons not to do so. On this view, hearers don't need reasons to be justified in accepting another's report but rather need reasons to distrust the speaker and reject the report. For example, if a stranger offers directions, we're normally justified in accepting them and acting on them. If, however, parts of the directions (e.g., US Interstate 40 runs through Santa Fe) contradict other things we know, we have reason to reject the speaker's claims.

One should always assess the speaker's trustworthiness. There are stronger and weaker versions of this requirement depending on the context.

One should accept testimony only after one has personally verified the credentials of the speaker and satisfied oneself that he or she is likely to be trustworthy. Trustworthiness has two components: sincerity (intention to tell the truth) and competence within the domain of knowledge in question. Thus, we have good reasons to accept a testimonial claim on this account if we have good reasons for believing that the author of the claim is truthful and competent. This condition might apply to someone giving expert opinion, such as physicians, for example.

In some contexts, particularly those dealing with everyday, commonsense claims (e.g., a speaker tells us the month of her birth), it is reasonable to accept what the speaker says if there are no evident reasons not to do so. Thus far, this position seems equivalent to option 1. However, what distinguishes it from option 1 is a requirement that the hearer continue to monitor the speaker for evidence that the speaker is not to be trusted. Elizabeth Fricker ( 1994 ) puts this condition as a “counter‐factual sensitivity” of the hearer: “it is true throughout of the hearer that if there were any signs of untrustworthiness, she would pick them up” (p. 154).

It is not entirely clear how distinct the active‐monitoring condition expressed in 2b is from option 1. Presumably, defenders of option 1 would want the agent to abandon trust in the face of disconfirming evidence. Fricker holds that the difference lies in how active the hearer must be in searching out disconfirming evidence of the speaker's trustworthiness. To exhibit the proper “counter‐factual sensitivity” the agent must engage in epistemic activity, must “be alert for” the presence of defeating conditions. Not so according to option 1, she argues, if it is truly to be a distinct option (p. 143).

3.2. Testimonial Belief and Educational Aims

On the above account of the two possible stances toward testimonial belief, it seems right that teachers should adopt the second position, encouraging students to be active and alert to disconfirming evidence, even under conditions where initial acceptance is warranted. Still there is considerable room for interpretation concerning the appropriate degree of epistemic activity. Knowing that teachers have been hired for their positions, and thus have presumably been judged competent by the hiring agencies, provides initial reasons for students to accept what the teacher says. Experience with particular teachers offers further opportunities for knowing something about their individual competence, as what they say is confirmed by other sources, for example. But should students simply be alert to inconsistencies that might reveal a lack of competence, or should they be more active in checking what the teacher says through other sources, for example? And do general reasons for holding their teachers trustworthy, such as their educational credentials, justify students in accepting particular utterances of theirs? In short, how active a stance should teachers encourage their students to take toward their own claims and the claims of others?

Likely there are no general answers to these questions, the appropriate degree of activity being subject to judgment and relative to context. For example, the experience of individuals or groups with experts in a given area can generate rationally grounded skepticism when it results from past violations of trust. If African Americans as a group have more negative experiences with police or the court system, for example, higher levels of skepticism and unwillingness to accept claims at face value would be warranted. Or, to suggest a second complicating feature, successful claims to expertise not only rest on competence within a given domain but also require recognition of that form of expertise by an audience (Selinger and Crease 2006a ). Some people acknowledge practitioners of alternative medicine as experts and some do not, based on their beliefs about the validity of such practices, for example. Finally, a policy of automatic mistrust would require a high degree of epistemic activity that has costs, if only in terms of time and resources. Thus, overall prescriptions about stances toward expert claims need to be located within a complex social and experiential context.

Fricker's “counter‐factual sensitivity” to conditions that might defeat acceptance of a testimonial report seems to count as an epistemic virtue in the terms of my previous analysis of epistemic aims. There are also skills of investigating the trustworthiness of testimonial reports that should be part of an educational agenda. These skills, unlike the cognitive skills in the previous section, are not ones that enable direct production or assessment of knowledge claims in terms of their evidential base but, rather, allow students to judge the acceptability of the source of the reported information or judgment. Common strategies in individual cases involve checking credentials, getting a “second opinion” in the sense of comparing the information to that available through other sources, or in the case of professional advice, seeking out references from other professionals or from former clients about the past effectiveness of the practitioner. Similar strategies may be devised for evaluating media, newspapers, and so on. These strategies are not always easy or even possible for laypersons to apply in all contexts, but they mitigate to some extent our need to blindly accept what others tell us.

One important mode of assessment involves examining our sources of knowledge for implicit biases. Knowing that a drug study has been funded by the drug's manufacturer, for example, may reasonably lead to some caution in accepting the results without further confirmation. Much recent work has focused on the ways in which factors such as the gender, race, class, or culture of the knowledge producers or disseminators may affect their theories or knowledge claims or the ways in which their theories or claims are received. Here are a few examples:

 In a recent book, Miranda Fricker ( 2007 ) has introduced the notion of “epistemic injustice” in connection with assessments of testimony. A speaker suffers from one form of epistemic injustice if his or her claims are persistently accorded less credibility than is appropriate for reasons of prejudice connected with the speaker's social identity, where persons with that identity marker experience systematic structural social inequalities. If racial prejudice against African Americans, for example, leads white jury members to accord less credibility to testimony by African‐Americans, then the African‐American witnesses suffer from epistemic injustice. Not only is such a state of affairs unjust, it also leads to mistaken judgments. That is, in addition to being morally wrong and unjust, such prejudices have negative epistemic consequences.

 Selinger and Crease ( 2006a ) argue that expertise cannot be regarded simply as the embodied development of skilled behavior because its development is always socially and culturally embedded. Experts themselves will typically not be fully aware of the ways in which their social location shapes their judgments and performances. Anderson ( 2007 ) offers an example of a personnel manager who created a tax‐sheltered dependent‐care account only to find that the staff members for whom it was largely designed (working mothers with children in day care) did not take advantage of it. What the manager had failed to appreciate was the inability of low‐wage workers to afford to contribute to the dependent‐care account while simultaneously paying for their children's day care. Their wages did not provide enough surplus funds to allow them to wait for later reimbursement. The manager's own economic position and lack of experience of the situation of the staff led to a less than optimal proposal.

 Feminist scholars have argued that not only individual judgments and performances but also structures of knowledge, with their associated claims to truth, incorporate the biases and interests of their creators and do not serve well the interests of marginalized and oppressed groups who typically do not participate in knowledge production. Routinized measures for bias detection do not work well when the bias is shared by all the members of the group (Antony 2002 ; Harding 1991 ). Antony points out the misogyny that feminist philosophers have discovered in the Western philosophical tradition, for example. Features that are first argued to be central to what it is to be human (rationality, autonomy, acting on the basis of moral principles) are then said to be impossible for women, thus denying women fully human status.

Making students aware of issues of bias such as these is an increasingly embraced epistemic aim of education. While some feminists and postmodernists who have pointed out the need for such aims reject the concepts of truth and knowledge that have been described earlier, such rejection is not necessary for recognizing the validity of their observations (Siegel 1998 ). In general the relevant aim is to develop a critical perspective on one's own acculturated point of view and on the forms of knowing available in one's cultural and social context, examining them through a lens of privilege and power. Numerous anti‐racist or multicultural educational programs have been devised with this end in mind at all levels of the educational system (Applebaum 2004 ; Hytten 2006 ; Michelli and Keiser 2005 ). Daukas ( 2006 ), for example, endorses Narayan's ( 1988 ) view that people in dominant groups would do well to develop an epistemic virtue of “methodological humility” when discussing issues of social oppression (p. 121). Such a stance requires recognizing that one “might be missing something” by virtue of one's privilege (Narayan 1988 , p. 38).

3.3. Thinking for Oneself Revisited

The strategies I've canvassed above for being actively alert to defeating conditions for the acceptance of testimony are aimed at the individual knower. In some respects, the individualistic focus is unavoidable, since educators do have a responsibility to help individuals think for themselves, or so I've argued. But some theorists have proposed collective strategies of evaluation that may also have implications for the epistemic aims of education. I don't mean to suggest that knowers are communities rather than individuals, although that point of view has been argued (Nelson 1993 ). Rather, I have in mind ways in which achieving the epistemic aims of knowledge and understanding, given the facts of epistemic dependence, might be construed as a collaborative endeavor rather than a do‐it‐yourself project.

For Kant, the autonomous agent is a member of the “Kingdom of Ends” and joins in a public discussion that helps foster independent understanding. After all, never giving any weight to the opinions of others when they conflict with one's own is an epistemic vice just as much as total gullibility. The epistemic virtues previously mentioned include willingness to entertain the views of others and responsiveness to their criticisms. Are there social practices, actual or proposed, that could augment the individual strategies described above for assessing testimonial beliefs through generating a wider conversation?

Here are a few, largely tentative and programmatic, proposals. Goldman ( 2002 ) asks whether there could be “communicational intermediaries” that “might help make the novice‐expert relationship more one of justified credence than blind trust?” (p. 160). In the Public and Its Problems , Dewey ( 1927 ) argued that the press could play a mediating role in making expert knowledge accessible to the public in the interest of solving public problems. Ihde ( 2006 ) argues for a practice of “science criticism” that would be similar to literary criticism. Such critics would have to be very well informed in the area of expertise, but not insiders, who might work in collaboration with scientists. Philosophers, perhaps, could play such a role. Said ( 2006 ) believes that increased specialization within universities has created a culture of noninterference across specializations and has limited critical conversation to insiders, rather than encouraging a broader intellectual conversation. He asks: “What is the acceptable humanistic antidote to what one discovers, say, among sociologists, philosophers, and so‐called policy scientists who speak only to and for each other in a language oblivious to everything but a well‐guarded, constantly shrinking fiefdom forbidden to the uninitiated?” (p. 377). Said forgoes any general answers to this question (e.g., interdisciplinary studies) in favor of encouraging heterogeneous interpretations within a broader intellectual community. Selinger and Crease ( 2006a ) claim that, in some areas such as exposing cultural and other biases, outsiders can have better purchase on expert performance than the experts themselves and can improve it through their insights. They suggest that there could be forums in which experts are held accountable.

Since these practices are not, for the most part, yet actual, it would not make sense to prepare students for participation in them specifically. And many of the proposals I've described above require new categories of experts (counter‐experts) as intermediaries between other expert groups and the public. Thus, if reliance on testimony is judged problematic, these strategies do not wholly solve the problem. But students should be aware of the ways in which we are both benefited by the division of intellectual labor and also challenged by it in our quest to think for ourselves.

The primary epistemic consequence of the acceptance of testimony as a source of justification lies in the shift from justification as reasons for the belief in question to reasons for believing others’ claims. There is an important difference here, but the line can be drawn too sharply. In both situations, reliance on others is pervasive. Experts working in their areas of expertise and laypersons in everyday life rely on the knowledge of others even when they judge the matter at hand for themselves based on the available evidence for the claim in question. Conceptual frameworks, theories, cognitive strategies, and so on used in the evaluation are part of our social inheritance. The assessment of a particular claim often brings to bear background knowledge not directly assessed by the individual. As previously noted, in fields such as science, where research projects involve large teams of scientists, scientists accept the findings or data of others involved in the project without checking the results themselves. In both areas of expert knowledge and in everyday life, assessment of claims often involves dialogue with others, as one considers and responds to their objections and criticisms. So even justification understood as reasons for the belief in question is often a collaborative enterprise.

There is a difference, however, even if not an entirely sharp one, between knowing the reasons for a claim and accepting the testimony of others. Hardwig ( 2006 ) asserts that our dependence on testimony means that “‘Thinking for oneself’ is no longer at the heart of what it is to be rational” (p. 328); hence “Rationality sometimes consists in refusing to think for oneself” (p. 329). But this is too strong. On the view that rational acceptance of testimonial claims requires actively monitoring the situation for disconfirming evidence (a view it appears Hardwig accepts since he holds that justification requires our having good reasons for believing experts' claims), there is still an epistemic requirement to think for oneself about whether to accept testimonial claims as true.

Nevertheless, acknowledgment of the role of testimony demonstrates the need for assessments of the social context of knowledge production and dissemination if one is still to some extent to think for oneself. As Coady ( 1994 ) puts it, “[T]he independent thinker is not someone who works everything out for herself, even in principle, but one who exercises a controlling intelligence over the input she receives from the normal sources of information whether their basis be individual or communal” (p. 248). Such a conception of epistemic independence does not require the impossible task of extricating oneself from social influences but, rather, that one become capable of evaluating and criticizing particular received views, assessing the credentials of experts, and examining the potential biases of social pathways to knowledge if there is reason to do so. Such assessments and evaluations will often be a collaborative enterprise. Thus, I would add to Coady's account that there is a social and political dimension to becoming an independent thinker: individuals should be taught to understand the importance of supporting social institutions that make us all less gullible. Here, consideration of the epistemic ends of education becomes an aspect of civic education. 15

It is impossible to approach a topic of this size without making some assumptions that limit the scope of the inquiry. In this chapter I consider the normative epistemic aims of education in the context of the formal educational system. First, of course, education can be thought of in a more expansive way that includes the informal education that comes from participation in everyday life and enculturation into various communities of membership. Whether informal education invokes a different set of epistemic aims is not a question I address here. Second, the epistemic aims of education could be thought of as encompassing the fostering of practical rationality as well as the transmission of propositional knowledge and understanding. I confine myself to an account of the latter here.

For an overview of recent debates, see R. K. Shope 2002 .

The account of propositional knowledge as justified true belief has come to be called the “standard analysis” of knowledge. See Scheffler 1965 for a still useful exploration of the standard analysis of knowledge in the context of education. Gettier 1963 has shown that justified true belief is not a sufficient condition for knowledge, thus challenging the standard analysis in this respect. See Zagzebski 1999 for discussion of the Gettier problem. My account of the epistemic aims of education does not assume that the standard analysis gives sufficient conditions for propositional knowledge but, rather, focuses on truth and justification as necessary conditions.

For an account of central positions in the debate, see BonJour and Sosa 2003 .

I'll not give separate treatment to the belief condition for propositional knowledge, since philosophical attention has focused mainly on the truth and justification conditions. It seems to be largely agreed that one can't be said to know something one doesn't even believe. But see Shope 2002 for a review of some objections to the belief condition and Scheffler 1965 for discussion of the belief condition in the context of education.

It's true that sometimes teachers do not teach the exact truth because they need to simplify what they're teaching to fit the development level of students. But this pedagogical point is compatible with Noddings's observation; See Scheffler 1965 , p. 12.

I'm sympathetic with Price's 2003 position that truth does make a difference of the sort Rorty denies: “truth is the grit that makes our individual opinions engage with one another” (p. 169). Aiming at truth is what turns difference into disagreement. Without the truth‐aim, one could regard what another person says as an expression of that person, as what he or she thinks, but not as a reason to engage with the individual to resolve disagreement and determine what to believe or how to act.

For a helpful map of the various positions on constructivism, see D. C. Phillips 2007 .

For further discussion, see Davidson 1984 (his chapter “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”); Harre and Krausz 1996 ; Krausz 1989 ; Siegel 1987 , 1998 , 2004a . See also Blake et al. 1998 , chap. 1, for an argument that poststructuralism should not be understood as endorsing relativism about knowledge.

This statement is a simplification of the issue, since externalists disagree among themselves about whether externalism is a theory of justification or a proposal for a different third condition of knowledge in addition to true belief. See BonJour 2002 . See also BonJour and Sosa 2003 for a lively account of the internalism vs. externalism debate.

See Feldman 2002 for an argument that epistemic success consists in “having reasonable or justified cognitive attitudes” rather than “having knowledge” (p. 379). Schmitt 2005 argues that justified belief, not true belief, is the ultimate cognitive aim of liberal arts education. But see Siegel ( 2005 , 2004a ) for an argument that both true belief and rational belief should be thought of as fundamental epistemic aims of education.

For example, see Carr 2003 on knowledge and education, pp. 132–33.

The philosophical literature on testimony seems largely to be framed in terms of face‐to‐face interactions between speakers and hearers, but I assume that the analysis is intended to cover writers and readers as well. Yet some strategies for establishing the trustworthiness of speakers can be difficult or impossible to apply to writers—knowing something of their character and circumstances, for example, or picking up on body language or other clues to lack of sincerity. I do not explore these issues further here.

I'm not addressing the question of whether there can be a global reduction of testimony to memory, perception, and inference as the basic sources of knowledge or whether testimony takes its place alongside them as itself a basic source of knowledge. The important question from an educational perspective is what stance to take toward any particular testimonial claim. Since we know that some claims are insincere or mistaken, a policy of total acceptance would not be justified even if testimony could be noncircularly established as a generally reliable pathway to knowledge under appropriate conditions. It's this question that I pursue in my discussion of testimony and education. (For discussion of the prospects for global reduction see Alston 1994 , Coady 1994 , and Fricker 1994 and 1995 .)

Expertise is an area where epistemic and political aims intertwine. How are experts to be held accountable to the public in a democratic society if their expertise is publicly inaccessible? See Turner 2006 for further discussion.

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• The Whitehead Encyclopedia
• Thematic entries

Whitehead’s Philosophy of Education: Its Promise and Relationship to the Philosophy of Organism

1. main themes of education.

The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929) is a series of lectures delivered primarily in England before, during, and after the First World War. [1] Whitehead envisages an egalitarian society in which a reenergized liberal education strengthens the imaginative capacities of students from every social class. [2] His views still resonate with us almost a century later.

“The whole book,” he writes, “is a protest against dead knowledge, that is to say against inert ideas” ( AE v). Indeed, “the problem of keeping knowledge alive, of preventing it from becoming inert […] is the central problem of education” ( AE 5). Inert ideas are those “ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations” ( AE 1). Where knowledge is transmitted to a passive learner unable to use ideas in a practical way or relate them to her own experience, the result is a “useless” waste of time. By utilizing an idea, Whitehead means “[…] relating it to that stream, compounded of sense perceptions, feelings, hopes, desires, and of mental activities, adjusting thought to thought, which forms our life” ( AE 3). The life of the learner, like that of all human beings, is a stream flowing from the past through the present to the future, one in which all events are connected to each another. The stream is a fluid mix of emotions, desires, hopes, feelings, and sense perceptions. Mental activity consists of relating one idea to another in novel and creative ways. [3] This is why inert ideas are so “harmful”: they stultify the “self-development,” or growth, of “students [who] are alive” ( AE v).

As a mathematician, Whitehead was especially concerned with the “inclusion of mathematics in a liberal education” so as “to train the pupils to handle abstract ideas.” In order for such ideas to come to life, students taking elementary courses should be spared the drudgery and “pointless accumulation of details,” since the “general use of mathematics should be the simple study of a few general truths, well illustrated by practical examples” ( AE 80, 81). The examples he has in mind have become standard fare in teaching the subject: a train passing several stations in a certain amount of time can illustrate continuous and discontinuous functions; a train can also help to explain the differential calculus; and vectors as straight lines are graphically illustrated by someone walking across the deck of a moving steamer ( IM 111-12, 167, 37).

“Another way in which the students” ideas can be generalized,” Whitehead claims, “is by the use of the History of Mathematics” ( AE 84). In An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), he gives the example of Archimedes jumping from his bath, running naked in the streets and shouting “ Eureka! ” when he first realized that a body immersed in water is pressed upwards by a force equal to the weight of the water it displaces. “This day,” writes Whitehead, “ought to be celebrated as the birthday of mathematical physics” ( IM 24) and taught to students as part of their mathematical education. The influence of the Chinese on the introduction of the compass into Europe more than three thousand years after they had first used it; Galileo’s dropping of weights from the tower of Pisa in order to show that bodies of a different weight fall from the same height in the same time; and the dispute between Newton and Leibniz about who had invented the calculus ( IM 19-20, 27-8, 163-4) all provide a rich source for bringing abstract ideas to life. [4] By means of historical examples illustrating the importance of mathematical ideas when they were first advanced, Whitehead believed it possible for students to learn “the precise connection between this world [of abstract ideas] and the feelings of actual experience” ( AE 106).

Arguably the most important contribution Whitehead made to educational thought is the rhythmic cycles of growth. The process of self-development, which lies at the base of all learning, is a natural one to which educators should pay close attention. He claims that “life is essentially periodic” with its “alternations of work and play, of activity and of sleep” punctuated by “subtler periods of mental growth with their cyclic recurrences, yet always different as we pass from cycle to cycle” ( AE 17). Learning passes through a threefold cycle of romance (“adventure” and “the joy of discovery”), precision (the “self discipline” required to master any discipline) and generalization (“a return to romanticism” coupled with a broad understanding) ( AE 33, 2, 35, 19). The cycles can overlap with one another and are conjoined in a repetitive, or more accurately reiterative, process of growth that is lifelong. [5]

According to Whitehead, “the rhythmic pulses of life” comprise a “difference within a framework of repetition” or, put differently, “an alternation of dominance” ( AE 25, 17, 28) in which freedom and discipline complement each other in a creative dance of contrasting patterns. [6] The cycle of romance is characterized by the freedom of the learner in “a process of discovery […that] is both natural and of absorbing interest” ( AE 32). Romance is arguably the most important of the cycles, since it allows the student to pursue her own interests unconstrained by the demands of others, for “its essence is browsing and the encouragement of vivid freshness.” This initial phase is too often neglected, resulting in an inertia in which the learner regards knowledge as one would “the dryness of the Sahara” ( AE 22, 17).

Once romance has run its course and “been properly guided another craving grows […for] the enlightenment that comes from precise knowledge.” The discipline required for the cycle of precision is important, because “there are right ways and wrong ways, and definite truths to be known,” but it is also capable of stifling romance (“training is apt to kill initiative”). Teachers and learners need “pace, pace, pace. Get your knowledge quickly, and then use it. If you can use it, you will retain it” ( AE 33-6). The freedom experienced in the cycle of generalization is built upon both the adventure of romance and the discipline of precision. Now, however, the learner can dispense with “the precise knowledge of details […] in favour of the active application of principles, the details retreating into subconscious habits.” This ability to relate general principles to the concrete facts of experience is “the final possession of wisdom” ( AE 37). It enables one to recognize the practical implications of theoretical knowledge and the possibilities for more coordinated forms of human thought and action ( AI 66-7).

Generalization is the main goal of university education, though it is not limited to this level. The University should be imbued with imagination in the form of “a contagious disease […] communicated by a faculty whose members wear their learning with imagination.” Only then will faculty and students work together as “a band of imaginative scholars,” who recognize that “the learned and imaginative life is a way of living, and is not an article of commerce.” For Whitehead, unless the imagination infects the University in this manner, faculty are likely to become “a faculty of very efficient pedants and dullards” ( AE 97, 100, 97, 99) and their students pale reflections of their professors. [7]

2. A History of Scholarship on the Relationship between Whitehead’s Philosophy of Education and the Philosophy of Organism

Over the last half century, scholars have debated whether or not Whitehead had a fully thought out and systematic philosophy of education. Some of his many essays pertaining to education were reprinted in The Aims of Education and a handful of others published posthumously in Essays in Science and Philosophy (1948). But these essays are all capable of “standing on their own,” because they are not necessarily linked to each other or to an overall philosophical framework. For this reason, some scholars have concluded that Whitehead never wrote systematically on education. Nevertheless, it is widely held that Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) is his magnum opus , and many scholars have asked whether or not we may interpret or apply the concepts and ideas therein for the purposes of setting forth a more systematic Whiteheadian philosophy of education.

In his 1951 essay, “Whitehead’s Views on Education,” Henry Holmes notes that Whitehead has “not written about education extensively” and that “neither Process and Reality nor Adventures of Ideas contains direct references to education as a process.” Holmes concentrates mostly on the Aims of Education and provides little evidence of how one may link Whitehead’s educational thought to his other works. However, Holmes does predict that “it is not unlikely that his influence on education will have to come in part by indirection—through interpretation of his general theory” (1951, 622, 626). Hence, from Holmes’ perspective, Whitehead’s philosophical writings may eventually prove to inform his views on education.

Likewise, in 1957, Frank Wegener notes the same problem of linking Whitehead’s respective writings on education and cosmology. Wegener writes that “although Whitehead did write and lecture on aspects of education, he did not apply his basic philosophical conceptions in the overt formulation of a systematic organic philosophy of education” (1957, 43-44). In the introduction to his much overlooked book, The Organic Philosophy of Education , Wegener raises the question of whether or not one may utilize Whitehead’s philosophy of organism for the purposes of elucidating his pedagogical views. Particularly, he asks if one logically turned

the question around it might be asked “to what extent would the Philosophy of Organism be in agreement with the Organic Philosophy of Education?” It should be clearly understood that discrepancies of interpretation, application, and emphasis would no doubt be very evident (1957, 36).

In such a case, for Wegener, there is an asymmetrical relationship in which Whitehead’s speculative metaphysics can be said to ground his philosophy of education, but not vice-versa. However, we think that there are several themes in Whitehead’s philosophy of education which may inform his cosmology, such as the interpretation of the notion of the rhythms of education as reverberating throughout nature. But, Wegener does take quite a bold approach with respect to the idea of using Whitehead’s complex philosophical notions towards the construction of an organic, “process” pedagogy. He utilizes the complex cosmological notions of Process and Reality , such as “creativity,” “prehension,” “concrescence,” “subjective aim,” and “self-realization,” in the construction of a truly novel and organic philosophy of education. At the same time, he maintains that while “the Organic Philosophy of Education is in substantial agreement with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism,” he makes no “intimation […] to convert the philosophy of organism directly into an equivalent educational philosophy” (1957, 35). In any case, Wegener uses Whiteheadian concepts in order to improve upon those previous theories of education which maintained rigid separations between the various notions of education; for example, between “teacher” and “student,” “authority” and “freedom,” and “academic” and “experiential.” [8] Wegener posits Whitehead’s cosmological notions as coextensive with education since he believes that life and experience comprise the real “classroom” of learning. Specifically, for Wegener, “education involves the blending of systematic “schooling” and “life-experience” in the total educational process” (1957, 89).

Wegener’s stance is admirable in its depiction of the connection between education and the rest of the organic universe. But, it might be argued, scholarship demands more clarity regarding the boundaries between what is practical in education and what is not. Later in the book, Wegener claims that

by and large there is an educational philosophy implicit in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Yet in order to make this philosophy of education explicit, one must bring a knowledge of the unique problems and content of the field of education, realized from one’s study and experience, to the general philosophy in question (1957, 324-25).

It would seem, following from Wegener’s reflections, that a philosophy of education is contained within Whitehead’s general philosophical writings, but not vice-versa. Any consideration of education in light of the theory of prehensions should appeal to one’s own experiences in education. Later, we shall consider these important notions further.

In the mid-1960s, in his book, Whitehead on Education , Harold Dunkel further raised the issue of the relationship between Whitehead’s writings on education and his general philosophizing. According to Dunkel, Whitehead’s interest in education

stemmed from being an educator in the same sense as are all professors who are sincere and conscientious about their professional duties. His educational writings are scattered essays. He never attempted to publish a specific philosophy of education or to train teachers in it. […] One may then ask why, apart from certain brief essays on Whitehead’s educational position, no extended attempt has been made to use his general philosophy as a basis for educational thought and action (1965, 7-8).

According to Dunkel, Whitehead himself made little attempt to link his views on education with his cosmology and made few references to the theory of prehensions in his writings on education. The question, then, is why scholars would want to attempt to make the connection. Dunkel goes on to write that since Whitehead

never presented his educational ideas in one organized, coherent statement […there is the] question whether his views on education represent only scattered insights and comments or whether they actually form a coherent whole. […] The question[s] immediately arise […] whether the views expressed in these earlier educational essays are congruent with (or even related in any way to) his more mature philosophic doctrines […], whether there is any relation possible between general philosophic theory, on the one hand, and educational theory, ideas, and practice, on the other […and] whether there is any significant connection [between them] (1965, 9-10).

With these problems in mind, Dunkel carefully maintains a focus primarily on The Aims of Education , while at the same time making reference to many of the key philosophical themes of Whitehead’s other writings. Education, for Dunkel, is connected with the processes Whitehead describes in his general philosophizing, and tends “to have moments or aspects [that] correspond to parts of this process.” Specifically, Dunkel points to the process of learning as “self-development,” which may be analogous to the process of concrescence of an actual entity, described by Whitehead in Process and Reality . Since the purpose of education in general is to assist such self-development, Dunkel believes that Whiteheadian cosmology offers a “comprehensive conceptual matrix” within which a philosophy of education could be elaborated. And he argues that educators should become more interested in philosophy so as to carry out this task. Dunkel concludes that “the correspondence between Whitehead’s philosophic doctrine and his educational views appears both extensive and fundamental” (1965, 102, 20, 170). But Dunkel is more reserved than Wegener in merging Whitehead’s views on education with his cosmology.

More recently, Malcolm Evans, in Whitehead and Philosophy of Education has raised similar questions regarding the possible use of Whitehead’s general philosophy for the purposes of education:

in much of his formal philosophy, Whitehead is writing about ideas that are indispensably relevant to the universe. What are the ideas in his metaphysics that are indispensably relevant to our lesser universe—education and schooling? […] Do such ideas as creativity […], prehension, concrescence, satisfaction, etc. […] fit into education? (1998, 98).

In attempting to answer these questions, Evans’ book serves as a useful introduction to understanding Whitehead’s perspectives on education. He outlines many previous commentators’ approaches to the question of the possible connection between the philosophy of organism and the philosophy of education, and uses Whitehead’s formal technical vocabulary in his discourse about the latter. From Evans’ perspective, Whitehead’s writings on education and philosophy must be joined together, for “those who would seek Whitehead, philosopher of education, must examine all of his writings.” In this direction, Evans endeavors to “tap both formal and informal philosophies for the rich insight they provide and to draw out the implicit philosophy of education found there.” He recommends that we read Whitehead’s formal,” or more systematic writings with a view to applying them to education since “Whitehead’s metaphysical writings, although far removed from traditional educational theory, provide a new and necessary frame for thinking about education and its societal setting” (1998, 34, 34, 49; emphasis added). Whitehead’s metaphysical writings provide a cosmological framework within which a philosophy of education may be situated. But, for him, the task of constructing a more complete Whiteheadian philosophy of education or of “unpacking” (2000, 5) one from Whitehead’s speculative metaphysical writings are tasks which have yet to be carried out. Evans’ book provides an excellent preparation for such an endeavor.

These four writers do not represent the whole history of scholarship on the question of the connections between Whitehead’s philosophy of education and his philosophy of organism. Many others have pondered the question extensively and have made valuable contributions on the issue. [9] However, from this particular sampling of scholars, it is evident that there is a general disagreement about the question of the putative link between Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and his views of education. While some try to connect Whitehead’s writings on education with his general philosophizing, others are more hesitant about making such links.

In summary, there are three major reasons why connecting Whitehead’s cosmology and his philosophy of education might be said to be problematic. First, Whitehead’s writings on education do not form a systematic conceptual whole, and he does not explicitly spell out the relationship between his views on education and his general philosophy. Second, the technical vocabulary employed in his philosophy of organism is a deterrent to many scholars of his philosophy of education, and especially to those who feel that such concepts have little to do with the concrete states of affairs in classrooms, schools, and universities. Third, education does not seem to have much to do with the biological or organic processes in nature at the core of his cosmology. However, we have argued that the project to merge the two in a systematic way constitutes an important advance in theoretical scholarship in the area of Whiteheadian philosophy of education. Historically speaking, since most of Whitehead’s philosophy of education is to be found in addresses and writings from 1912-1922, before his mature philosophical works were written, there is need for a reconsideration of his philosophy of education in light of his cosmological works. In short, any attempt to “put his philosophy of organism back into” Whitehead’s philosophy of education demonstrates the compatibility of both frameworks.

3. Integrating Whitehead’s Philosophies of Education and Organism

There are several key ways in which Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and his philosophy of education complement one another. First, although his account of education does not seem to be related to the organic processes in nature described in his general philosophy, both exhibit a concern for life . As Whitehead himself explains,

education is the guidance towards a comprehension of the art of life; and by art of life I mean the most complete achievement of varied activity expressing the potentialities of that living creature in the face of its actual environment. […] Each individual embodies an adventure of existence. The art of life is the guidance of this adventure ( AE 39).

The “art of life” is a journey filled with adventure in which education provides the lure that enables the learner’s self-development or self-realization. The fulfillment of this process is the actualization of the many life-possibilities of which s/he is capable in a more “comprehensive life-range,” [10] namely, a wider range of feeling, thought, and action. As such, educational institutions are a main vehicle for enhancing those organic processes and activities of appropriation, creation, self-realization, and self-enjoyment that Whitehead describes in his speculative writings.

Second, Whitehead insists that his philosophy of organism is applicable to many domains of thought. At the outset of Process and Reality , Whitehead writes that “the true method of philosophical construction is to frame a scheme of ideas, the best that one can, and unflinchingly […] explore the interpretation of experience in terms of that scheme” ( PR xiv). Furthermore, he states that a speculative scheme of ideas should “in respect to its interpretation, [be] applicable and adequate” ( PR 3), such that many forms of experience, including educational experience, should be interpretable through it. This suggests an implicit connection between his speculative cosmology and education.

Third, in The Aims of Education , Whitehead provides a possible analogy between education and his theory of prehensions. He writes,

education is not the process of packing articles in a trunk. Such a simile is entirely inapplicable. […Rather] its nearest analogue is the assimilation of food by a living organism: and we all know how necessary to health palatable food is under suitable conditions. When you have put your boots in a trunk, they will stay there till you take them out again; but this is not at all the case if you feed a child with the wrong food ( AE 33).

Both the process of education and the notion of a “prehension” are defined as the “assimilation” or the “appropriation” of food by an organism. Whereas “assimilation” designates “taking something in and making it part of the thing it has joined,” a “prehension” designates an organism’s “uncognitive apprehension” and “selective appropriation” of the elements in its environment for the sake of its own existence. To be sure, Whitehead explains that “for the foundation of its own existence” an organism feels and appropriates “the various elements of the universe out of which it arises” which, in his speculative terminology, means that “each [such] process of appropriation of a particular element is termed a prehension” ( PR , 219). The notion of a prehension as an appropriation, parallels a student’s selective reception of a lecture, taking down only those parts s/he finds of interest and importance. It is reasonable to infer that Whitehead considers learning as a similar process to an organism’s feeling and absorption of the multifarious data in the environment.

Fourth, Whitehead conceives of the theory of prehensions as primarily a “theory of feelings.” Feelings and emotions provide the ground from which cognition grows and their importance cannot be ignored as though it were some kind of encumbrance to rational thought. As such, the theory of prehensions can be favorably compared with cognitivist and behaviorist theories, both of which underestimate the importance of “affect” in learning. Jean Piaget, for example, emphasizes cognitive development as the exclusive goal of education in which the learner acquires “the critical attitude of the mind, objectivity, and discursive reflection” (1969b, 180). However noble these attributes may be as integral to an emerging critical consciousness, Piaget considers them in abstraction from the emotions and feelings of the learner. If, as Whitehead argues, our primary awareness as human beings is “emotional feeling, felt in its relevance to a world beyond” ( PR 163), then any attempt to develop a theory of cognition that does not take this concrete experience into account will “fail to explain the relationship between bodily feelings, emotions, and higher forms of consciousness in human beings” (Flynn 1995, 378). On the other hand, behaviorists of Whitehead’s day, such as J. B. Watson, reduced human beings to stimulus-response mechanisms whose “measurable behaviors” could be changed by means of classical conditioning. They gave no account of the interior lives of human beings at all, since they were part of a “black box” whose mysteries could be ignored as non-scientific. While more recent behaviorists like B. F. Skinner have proposed “operant conditioning” as a process of rewards in which “a bit of behavior is followed by a certain kind of consequence” so that “it is more likely to occur again,” their neglect of the emotions is no less striking. [11]

By way of contrast, the theory of prehensions depicts the non-linear process of intellectual development, starting from primitive bodily feelings and emotions, and ending with consciousness and self-consciousness. According to Whitehead, while feelings and emotions are more primitive than consciousness, the latter is a high level of experience belonging to high-grade organisms like human beings, but it is fraught with the problems of abstraction. The theory of prehensions describes the process by which consciousness develops from our basic feelings and emotions on the basis of which we appropriate and assimilate the data in our environment. Moreover, it speaks of the interrelation of body and mind, as well as the need to enhance our pre-conscious awareness of the world through feelings and emotions.

Fifth, Whitehead’s conception of the cyclical stages of educational growth of education (romance, precision, and generalization) has a remarkably similar structure to the theory of prehensions. Whitehead’s rhythms of education are a general articulation of the natural phases of learning, to which teachers must be attentive if they are to provide an environment conducive to learning. While each of the stages cannot be said to be rigidly separate from the others, learning is a process, which in general flows in a cyclical manner from one phase to the next. Without permitting the flow from phase to phase, and by neglecting this natural pattern in the variance of methods of presentation of a subject-matter, teachers may stunt the learning of their pupils.

The original stage of romance involves a first-step into intellectual inquiry. It is the stage of “first apprehension,” of potentiality, wonder, curiosity, and the joy of discovery, as well as of interrogative and imaginative stirrings in the body and mind regarding a particular subject-matter to be learned. Romance builds upon “the creative impulse toward growth [which] comes from within” ( AE , 39) by strengthening the emotions of the child in her love of learning. Next, the stage of precision involves an analytic engagement with the specific principles of a subject-matter, and the coming to conscious awareness of the conceptual divisions within a domain of investigation. It is the stage of self-discipline, and the development of a specialized knowledge of a subject-matter, through analysis, negation, elimination, critique, and selectivity, which, as Whitehead maintains, are intrinsic to the development of consciousness. Last, the stage of generalization is the application of the specific conceptual divisions learned in the stage of precision, creatively modifying them, and applying them to actuality. It is the stage of satisfaction, aesthetic experience, synthesis, and the awareness of logical contrasts. The stage of generalization also involves the merging and comparison of the feelings originally experienced in the stage of romance with the conscious awareness of the subject-matter attained through the stage of precision. According to Whitehead, the stage of generalization also leads to “a return to Romanticism” ( AE 19) after the acquisition of specialized knowledge, leading to a new cycle of learning. These rhythms of education correspond to a learner’s process of educational self-realization (of research and discovery in learning) are akin to Whitehead’s analogy of the creative process as the flight of an airplane, with a take-off, a flight, and a landing:

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation ( PR 5).

The structure of Whitehead’s theory of prehensions also mirrors that of his cyclic rhythms of education. There is, at first, experience characterized by the broad physical feeling of the interconnected environment as well as the emotions. Through integrations and eliminations of felt data, chiefly involving negation, selectivity, and eventually judgment, the prehending subject’s (e.g. the learner’s) awareness of an object in its environment (or a subject-matter) is then raised to consciousness. Subsequently, having experienced the conceptual wealth of higher conscious experience, the prehending subject overcomes the abstractions of consciousness, attains some measure of satisfaction, and “steps back” down to the level of feelings in order to begin the prehensive process anew. Thus, Whitehead’s theory of prehensions offers a more precise and comprehensive way of understanding the rhythms of education, one in which these stages are reflected as an integral part of the unfolding of the organic universe.

Sixth, there is a general correspondence between the underlying meaning of “education” and Whitehead’s notion of “concrescence.” According to the Canadian philosopher John McMurtry, the true etymological root of the word “education” is not, as is commonly held, the Latin word educere , “to lead out,” but rather educare , “to enable to grow” (1988, 39). [12] Education, defined as “enabling a learner to grow” or as authentically assisting the flourishing and self-development of learners, resonates with Whitehead’s theory of prehensions in its chief notion of “concrescence” or the “growing together” of organisms. As Dunkel explains, “the student is engaged in a process of self-development, which is more than merely analogous to the general process of concrescence described in [Whitehead’s] cosmological works” and the role of the teacher is “to guide and foster this process” (1965, 149, 269). One final similarity is that in describing a subject who is engaged in an “activity of other -formation” ( AI 193), Whitehead coins the term “subject-superject,” a notion which is consistent with the role of a teacher in enabling the learner’s growth or self-development. In short, all these connections suggest that education is an organic process consisting in the mutual “growing together” of teachers and students, in which students learn from teachers and teachers learn from students in a fusion of horizons. Moreover, as a whole, they confirm that much of Whitehead’s philosophical terminology is exemplified in education, which can indeed be interpreted through his speculative scheme.

4. Whitehead’s Contribution to Educational Thought

Of all Whitehead’s contributions to educational thought, his views on technical education are particularly striking. [13] Technical education should be integrated with the rest of the curriculum to promote a liberal education in which all students can relate knowledge to their concrete experience.

Whitehead defines technical education as “a training in the art of utilizing knowledge for the manufacture of material products,” for which are needed “manual skill, and the coordinated action of hand and eye, and judgment in the process of construction.” The process of “hand-craft” involves “a reciprocal influence between brain activity and material creative activity” in which “the hands are peculiarly important.” Students learn to put their ideas into practice by making objects with an increasing dexterity for, as he puts it, “If you want to understand anything, make it yourself” ( AE , 49-53). In the modern world, there is an overwhelming need for craftspeople, who create beautiful objects in wood and metal, as well as farmers and cooks freed from the fetters of industrialization ( AE 55-6).

In order for hand-craft to be successful, however, some scientific knowledge is required in the form of an understanding of “those natural processes of which the manufacture is the utilization.” Scientific education, which is “primarily a training in the art of observing natural phenomena, and in the knowledge and deduction of laws concerning the sequence of such phenomena” provides a theoretical base for the activities of technical education. At the same time, technical education can overcome “the narrow specialism” too often found in “a study of science” ( AE 50, 49). Once again, the interrelationship of theory and practice enables knowledge to remain fresh in students’ minds.

The full integration of the curriculum is only possible with the inclusion of literary studies, or “the study of language,” its structure, techniques of verbal expression, and relationship to intellectual feelings. Indeed, it is “the subtle relations of language to feeling […which] lead to keen aesthetic appreciations being aroused by the successful employment of language.” The language of poetry or prose appeals to “the sense organs” and fosters their “high development” as a channel for the expression of feeling in aesthetic and constructive ways. Analogously, it is “bodily feeling[s] […] focused in the eyes, the ears, the voice, the hands” which provide the “reciprocal influence between brain activity and material creative activity” at the base of technical education ( AE 49-50). On the one hand, the artistic use of language emancipates the thoughts and feelings of the speaker; on the other, the bodily feelings of the craftsperson are liberated though the creative practice of the plastic arts. The two forms of education complement one another, which is why “geometry and poetry are as essential as turning lathes” ( AE 45).

Whitehead is arguing for a kind of “spiral curriculum” (Entwistle 1970, 115) in which there is an alternating emphasis upon the literary, the scientific, and the technical. The goal is to achieve a balanced education better suited to the needs of modern (and postmodern) society than the classical education of an English gentleman of yesteryear. Just as the cycles of romance, precision, and generalization constitute the general rhythm of education, so “the problem of education is to retain the dominant emphasis, whether literary, scientific, or technical and without loss of coordination to infuse into each way of education something of the other two” ( AE 54). This alternating emphasis, or rhythm, integrates all three spirals, producing a “seamless coat of learning” that imparts “an intimate sense for the power of ideas, the beauty of ideas, and for the structure of ideas” ( AE 11-12). Nor should technical education be “conceived as a maimed alternative to the perfect Platonic education.” One of “the evil side[s] of the Platonic culture has been its total neglect of technical education,” stemming from the dualism of mind and matter” ( AE 54, 50).

The Platonic belief in “disinterested intellectual appreciation” as the goal of education and life should be replaced by an emphasis on “action and our implication in the transition of events amid the inevitable bond of cause to effect” ( AE 47). Students learn to bring about change by creating objects of beauty through a combination of thought (“headwork”) and action (“handwork”). They thereby come to appreciate the importance of “causal efficacy,” or “the “withness” of the body […] that makes the starting point for our knowledge of the circumambient world” ( PR 81). The bodily feelings expressed in the unity of mental and manual labor provide a direct epistemological connection between the learner and reality.

Education and work must both allow for the creative expression of bodily feelings. A restructuring of the workplace is required in order to overcome the alienation of labor. “Is it likely,” Whitehead asks, “that a tired, bored workman [sic], however skillful his hands, will produce a large output of first-class work?” Greed and the “desire for money” among employers is a destructive force which “will produce hard-fistedness and not enterprise.” This deadening of the purposes of life infects the whole of society, heightening class conflict, for “there can be no prospect of industrial peace so long as masters and men in the mass conceive themselves as engaged in a soulless operation of extracting money from the public.” In order to ensure “a large supply of skilled workmen, men [sic] with inventive genius […] and employers who enjoy their work,” the entire process should be “transfused with intellectual and moral vision and thereby turned into a joy” ( AE 44, 45, 44). The Benedictine approach to communal work, “stripped of its theological trappings,” provides the basis for such a vision. Since “the nation has need of a fluidity of labour,” a new breed of skilled workers should be educated to move freely “not merely from place to place, but […] from one special type of work to another” ( AE 44, 55). This vision of work as joyful, creative, non-specialized activity capable of overcoming humanity’s alienation as a species being is reminiscent of the early Marx. [14]

The craft exemplified in the human capacity for skilled work is no different in kind from that in painting, sculpture or music. The creative impulse finds its full expression in the “aesthetic emotions” at the base and forefront of Art in this most general sense. Aesthetic emotions provide students and workers alike with “the sense of value, the sense of importance […] the sense of beauty, the aesthetic sense of realized perfection” with which their own work is imbued ( AE 40). It would be quite easy, Whitehead argues, to educate an artistic population with a sense of their own potentiality for constructive and coordinated action. As men and women work together creatively, they learn to appreciate the growing “strength of beauty” in their interior lives. “The beauty of the soul,” as John Cobb calls it, enables people to work with others and share in the accomplishments of the community so that “all will understand that their achievements are products of the group and contributions to the group” (1998, 107).

This Utopian vision of a just and equitable society ( AE 41) is strengthened by the humanizing power of Art articulated in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. [15] Unlike scientific materialism, whose “assumption of the bare valuelessness of mere matter led to a lack of reverence in the treatment of natural or artistic beauty” so that “art was treated as a frivolity,” the goal of an organic philosophy of education is “to strengthen habits of concrete appreciation of the individual facts in their full interplay of emergent values” ( SMW 196, 198). Only where students appreciate the beauty in nature and human artifacts, and the panoply of changing values inherent in both, will they learn “the art of life,” namely “(i) to live, (ii) to live well, (iii) to live better.” Art and aesthetic appreciation enable human beings to lead civilized lives in which they strive “towards the attainment of an end realized in imagination but not in fact” ( FR 4, 8). At the same time, art brings the potentiality of the imagination into the actuality of everyday life. Artists, like craftspeople, are engaged in a bodily activity in which they create tangible objects expressive of human perfection, “a finite fragment of human effort achieving its own perfection within its own limits.” As a result, “Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation of feeling which is supernatural […]. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement” ( AI 270, 271). Art enables us to recognize the perfection of which humanity is capable. It acts as a lure to consciousness in discriminating between what is worthwhile in human life and what is not. It is for this reason that Whitehead regards “the use of art as a condition of healthy life […] analogous to sunshine in the physical world” ( AE 58).

[1] We wish to thank the other members of the University of Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit—Mark Flynn, Bob Regnier, and Ed Thompson—for their continuing support and collegiality.

[2] Whitehead’s vision of a liberal education is similar to that of Russell in Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916, Chapter 5) except that Russell places a greater emphasis on education for peace. For a comparison of the educational thought of Russell, Whitehead, and Dewey, see Woodhouse 1983.

[3] This is similar to Dewey’s principle of the continuity of experience (1959, 26-27).

[4] Whitehead’s influence can be seen today in such works as de Berg 1992, Thompson 1997, and Ernst 2000.

[5] This contrasts with Piaget who conceives of the stages of learning as linear, discrete, invariant, and sequential (1969a, 123). For a full account of Whitehead’s rhythmic cycles of growth, see Entwistle 1970, 212-17.

[6] For a connection between the rhythmic cycles of growth and the “characteristics of life,” see Woodhouse 1995. For a similar connection, based on the notion of concrescence, see Garland 2005.

[7] See Woodhouse 1999 and 2005c, and Regnier 2005.

[8] According to Wegener, “existing conflicts between educational theories—formal versus informal, conservative versus progressive, classic versus subjective, liberal versus practical, realistic versus idealistic, academic versus pragmatic, logical versus psychological, external versus internal, and many others—are really complementary and reciprocal when viewed organically” (1957, 29).

[9] See for example Mellert 1998: “the third chapter of The Aims of Education , entitled, ‘The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline,’ is where I find the essence of Whitehead’s educational philosophy. This philosophy, I shall argue, is simply a reiteration in educational language of the core principles of his general philosophy as stated in Process and Reality and in Science and the Modern World .” Hendley quotes a letter from Whitehead stating that working in Harvard’s philosophy department would provide him with “a welcome opportunity of developing in systematic form my ideas on Logic, the Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, and some more general questions, half philosophical and half practical, such as Education” (1986, 80). Breuvart writes: “Whitehead’s reflection about the educative process ought to be first found in his book The Aims of Education . But my point in this paper is to prove that one could find a more complete conception through a closer examination of Process and Reality ’s Categoreal Scheme. For we could find in it a conception of responsibility which is more relevant for a theory of educational process, and for a practice as well, in the sense of a more effective commitment in the educative process” (2001, 286). See also Cobb 1998, which takes up some of the work of Woodhouse and Regnier; and Flynn 1995 and 2005, which relate Whitehead’s philosophy of organism to his philosophy and psychology of education.

[10] Woodhouse 2001, 223. For Whitehead’s cosmological explanation of the notion of “the art of life,” see FR , 4.

[11] See Skinner 1972, 5, 147-48, 27. For a critique of behaviorism, see Woodhouse 2005b, 399-401.

[12] Cf . Woodhouse 2001b, 224.

[13] See Hendley 1986, 87-88; Allan 1999; Collins 1996, 70-71, 82.

[14] See Marx 1972; Spring 1994, 11-12; Nivens 2005. Johnson claims that Whitehead believed in strict limits to the freedom of craftspeople who would simply add the “finishing touches” to mass-produced articles (1962, 92).

[15] Cf . Taggart 2004.

Works Cited and Further Readings

Breuvart, J.-M. 2001. “How Could Be Related Ethics and Education in Whitehead’s Process Philosophy?” Proceedings of the Whitehead and China in the New Millenium Conference .

Cobb, J. B., Jr. 1998. “Beyond Essays,” Interchange , 29, 1, 105-110.

Dewey, J. 1959. Experience and Education (New York, MacMillan).

Dunkel, H. B. 1965. Whitehead on Education (Ohio, Ohio State University Press).

Evans, M. 1998. Whitehead and Philosophy of Education (Atlanta, Rodopi).

Evans, M. 2000. “Process, Teaching, and Learning,” Process Perspectives , Winter. 3, 225-41.

Entwistle, H. 1970. Child-Centred Education (London, Methuen).

Flynn, M. 1995. “Conflicting Views on the Importance of Emotion to Human Development and Growth: Piaget and Whitehead,” Interchange , 26, 4, 365-381.

Hendley, B. 1986. Dewey, Russell, and Whitehead: Philosophers as Educators (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University).

Holmes, H. 1951. “Whitehead’s Views on Education,” in The Library of Living Philosophers, Volume 3: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead , edited by P.A. Schilpp (New York, Tudor Publishing), 621-40.

Johnson, A. H. 1962. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Civilization (New York, Dover Publications).

Marx, K. 1972. “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in The Marx-Engels Reader , edited by R.C. Tucker (New York, W.W. Norton), 56-65

McMurtry, J. 1988. “The History of Inquiry and Social Reproduction: Educating for Critical Thought,” Interchange , 19, 1.

Nivens, P. 2005. “Gramsci and Whitehead Rate Consent in Politics,” in Chromatikon 1: Annuaire de la philosophie en procès , edited by M. Weber, M. and D. D’Epremesnil (Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain), 177-93.

Piaget, J. 1969a. Psychology of Intelligence (Totowa, N.J., Littlefield, Adams).

Piaget, J. 1969b. Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (New York, Penguin Books).

Russell, B. 1916. Principles of Social Reconstruction (London, George Allen and Unwin).

Taggart, G. 2004. “Whitehead and Marcuse: Teaching the ‘Art of Life’,” Process Papers , 8, 53-67.

Wegener, F. C. 1957. The Organic Philosophy of Education (Dubuque, Wm.C. Brown). “Whitehead’s Philosophy and Education,” Special Issue, Process Studies , 34, 2, 2005.

Author Information

Adam Scarfe Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies California State University, Bakersfield, 9001 Stockdale Hwy, Bakersfield, California, 93311 U.S.A. [email protected]

Howard Woodhouse Department of Educational Foundations University of Saskatchewan, 28 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK S7N 0V6, Canada http://www.usask.ca/usppru/ [email protected]

How to Cite this Article

Scarfe, Adam, and Howard Woodhouse, “Whitehead’s Philosophy of Education: Its Promise and Relationship to the Philosophy of Organism”, last modified 2008,  The Whitehead Encyclopedia , Brian G. Henning and Joseph Petek (eds.), originally edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond, URL = <http://encyclopedia.whiteheadresearch.org/entries/thematic/education/whiteheads-philosophy-of-education/>.

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Article 29: The Aims of Education

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Different Approaches to Teacher Education

Teachers and Teacher Education

Educating Everybody: Properly!

States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:

The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;

The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations;

The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different from his or her own;

The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin;

The development of respect for the natural environment.

No part of the present article or article 28 shall be construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions, subject always to the observance of the principle set forth in paragraph 1 of the present article and to the requirements that the education given in such institutions shall conform to such minimum standards as may be laid down by the State.

‘In some schools, the discipline that students receive is biased against students of colour. For instance, some schools have higher rates of discipline actions and suspensions among Hispanic and Black students, compared to white students in the same schools. Government should do more to monitor the different discipline actions.’ (Western Europe/Other)

‘Every schoolbook has video and audio material (with) additional explanation of lectures and additional information.’ (Africa)

Recognition that education should be directed towards the full development of the personality and respect for human rights was first addressed in Article 26 (2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and strengthened in the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights through the provision, in Article 13, that education must also be directed to the sense of dignity and to enable all persons to participate in a free society. Article 29 affirms these aims and expands them, for both state and private schools, to require that education addresses respect for the child’s family, for tolerance and diversity, and for the natural environment. It is closely linked with Article 28, but whereas Article 28 focuses primarily on access to and provision of education, Article 29 is directed to the content and style of the education provided. In neither article does the Convention define education, but the Committee has made clear that it endorses an approach that understands education to go ‘beyond formal schooling to embrace the broad range of life experiences and learning which enables children … to develop their personalities, talents and abilities and to live a full and satisfying life within society’ ( 2001 , para. 2). The Committee also affirms that, although Article 29 does not remove the freedom of individuals or bodies to establish their own schools, in doing so they must comply with the article’s aims.

Article 29 elaborates an approach to education which promotes, supports, and protects the core values of the Convention, and requires that the provision of education is grounded in the principles on which it is based. In other words, education must be ‘child-centred, child friendly and empowering’ (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 , para. 2). The drafters of the Convention recognised that the vision of education elaborated in Article 29 does have significant resource implications and it is therefore subject to progressive realisation. However, the Committee has emphasised that resources must be available to the maximum extent possible and cannot be a justification for failing to adopt any of the measures required ( 2001 , para. 28). In this regard, it urges States Parties providing development cooperation to design programmes consistent with the implementation of Article 29 ( 2001 , para. 28).

General Principles

To comply with Article 2, all aspects of the education system and school provision must be free from all forms of discrimination. Thus, for example, the curriculum should be consistent with principles of gender, disability, and race equality. Teachers must demonstrate equal respect for all students and not discriminate in the treatment of different groups of children in schools. An active focus within the curriculum on respect for human rights should also give explicit attention to the importance of challenging all forms of discrimination, xenophobia, and prejudice.

The best interests of the child demand educational services that are child friendly and child-centred such that each child can develop to their potential.

The aims of education explicitly speak to the development of the child’s personality, talents, mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential.

Children’s participation in school communities and school councils, peer education, peer counselling and disciplinary proceedings are integral to the process of learning about and experiencing the realisation of rights (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 , para. 8). In addition, children should be enabled to contribute to the development of education legislation and policy, the design of the curriculum, teaching methods, schools’ structures, standards, budgeting, and child protection systems (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 , paras. 105–114). Their participation in all these aspects of education will contribute towards the overall aims of education as elaborated in Article 29.

Articles Related or Linked to Article 29

Article 5 requires that children’s evolving capacities are reflected in the nature of the education that they receive

Article 18 recognises that both parents have common responsibilities for the upbringing and development of the child and that the state cannot interfere with the liberty of parents to choose the education they wish for their child, as long as it complies with the principles outlined in paragraph 1 of Article 29

Article 13 provides children with the right to freedom of expression in education, and to seek, receive, and impart information through a variety of media

Article 14 allows the child freedom of thought and conscience in education settings, and to manifest their beliefs or religion. Children cannot be compelled to follow any particular religion in an educational setting

Article 17 encourages the provision of sources of information to children through appropriate mass media dissemination, international cooperation in production of educational materials and children’s books, and the development of guidelines to protect children from potentially injurious information

Article 23 requires the provision of quality education to children living with disabilities

Article 24 obligates educational settings to provide health information

Article 28 requires children to have access to schools that are child friendly, safe, and respect the child’s dignity

Article 30 provides linguistic and cultural rights to children belonging to minority groups, that should be respected in schools

Article 31 protects the child’s right to rest, leisure, play, recreation activities, and to participate in artistic and cultural life, all of which must inform educational services, hours of study, and rest and play times during the school day

Article 40 protects the right to education of children detained as a measure of criminal justice enforcement

Article 42 obligates States Parties to take active measures to ensure children and adults are educated about the principles and provisions of the Convention.

Relevant Instruments

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), Article 13

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), Article 2

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1966), Articles 2 and 7

UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979), Article 10

UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), Article 2

UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), Article 24

UN Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960)

UNESCO Recommendation concerning Education for International Understanding, Co-operation and Peace and Education relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1974)

UN Convention on Technical and Vocational Education (1989)

UNESCO Declaration of Principles on Tolerance (1995)

UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005)

Attribute One: Ensuring that Aims and Objectives of Education Are in Conformity with the Convention

Article 29, paragraph 1(a) establishes that the overarching objective of education is the fullest possible development of the child’s personality, talents, and physical and mental abilities. In its entirety, Article 29 provides for a framework of education for the realisation of the child’s human dignity and rights. This requires a curriculum far broader than the traditional focus on literacy and numeracy, and necessitates teaching on developing respect for human rights, for the child’s parents, and for cultural identity as for well as the values of the country in which the child is living, for life in a free society, and for the natural environment. To realise this goal, it is imperative that the principles in Article 29 inform all aspects of education, and that they are explicitly addressed in all States Parties’ education laws, policies, and programmes (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 , para. 17).

The Committee has urged cooperation among internal bodies concerned with education and human rights, and has called on States Parties to develop comprehensive national plans of action to promote and monitor implementation of the Article 29 objectives ( 2001 , para. 23). In order to strengthen accountability, the Committee recommends that States Parties establish review procedures to allow for complaints or practices that are in breach of or inconsistent with Article 29 ( 2001 , para. 25). National level monitoring is also strongly recommended to ensure that children, teachers, and parents have input into decisions relevant to education (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 , para. 22). Where an educational institution is established privately, it must comply with the aims of education as elaborated in Article 29, as well as with the Convention as a whole. The state must provide minimum standards for such schools and create systems for monitoring compliance. Footnote 1

Attribute Two: Rights-Consistent Curricula

The aims elaborated in Article 29 have significant implications for the curriculum delivered in schools. In respect of the formal curriculum, the Committee has stressed that it requires ensuring that school curricula, textbooks, and other teaching materials address the full scope of the aims elaborated in Article 29 ( 2001 , para. 18), and at all levels of the education system. Footnote 2 The curriculum needs to go beyond the basic areas of knowledge such as literacy, numeracy, and science, to provide a ‘holistic approach to education that ensures that the educational opportunities made available reflect an appropriate balance between promoting the physical, mental, spiritual and emotional aspects of education, the intellectual, social and practical dimensions and the childhood and lifelong aspects’ (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 , para. 12). The skills needed include critical thinking and decision-making, social relationships, citizenship, and healthy lifestyles (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 , para. 9). The Committee also has underscored the importance of curricula relevant to the child’s daily life and context. The Committee has called for peace and conflict-resolution education for children and, in light of climate change, for education that empowers children to become agents of change and defenders of the environment. Footnote 3 The curricula should include the life skills needed for ‘responsible life in a free society’ (Verheyde, 2005 , pp. 26–28).

The Committee has consistently called for human rights education in schools and expressed concern over its absence from the curriculum. Moreover, where it is provided, it often fails to include a specific focus on the rights of the child (Jerome et al., 2015 ). The Committee recommends non-formal educational tools such as outdoor activities and field trips, as well as direct involvement of children in environmental protection, as a crucial component of their learning process and an exercise in social practices that constitute civic participation ( 2016c ). The Committee also places considerable emphasis on the importance of health education ( 2003a , para. 17), and in line with the child’s evolving capacities and development, the school curriculum should provide children with age-appropriate, comprehensive, and inclusive sexual and reproductive health education, including gender equality, sexual diversity, sexual and reproductive rights, responsible parenthood and sexual behaviour, and violence prevention ( 2016d , para. 61). It should also address tobacco, alcohol, and drug use, and diet (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2003b ).

Participation of children in curriculum development is identified by the Committee as a strategy to achieve relevance, Footnote 4 to increase children’s engagement in learning ( 2006a , para. 22), and to ensure respect for the principles of the Convention (2001).

Attribute Three: Rights-Respecting Pedagogy

Article 29 challenges educators to restructure education from a child rights perspective (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 ), recognising that traditional teaching styles may stifle individuality and promote conformity, and result in education lacking a global and human rights perspective (UN Secretary General, 1978 ). Footnote 5 The Committee has emphasised that pedagogy focused on knowledge accumulation and competition can compromise the development of children’s abilities (2001). It has criticised States Parties for priority given to rote-learning ( 2003c , para. 46), the competitive nature of schooling ( 2004 , para. 49, 2006b , para. 63), and for the lack of human rights education in schools ( 2012a , paras. 24–25, 2014 , para. 23, 2016b , para. 21, 2017b , para. 37).

Consistency with the aims of education and the principles of the Convention therefore requires a participatory pedagogy through which children learn about human rights through experiencing them in practice. Education must be designed to enable children to participate actively in their own learning (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 , para. 12). Achieving such education requires training for both pre-service and in-service teachers, to equip them with competency in participatory methodologies, as well as the provisions and principles of the Convention (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2006d , para. 24; Verheyde, 2005 , p. 28), The lack of appropriate teacher training and child rights awareness among educators continue to be of serious concern and criticism in assessments of States Parties’ reports. Footnote 6 Meaningful implementation can only be achieved with supportive school management, awareness raising and participation of communities and parents, and the necessary materials and infrastructure.

Attribute Four: Rights-Reflecting School Environment

Children learn much from the environment in which their education takes place. The school environment, which includes all policies and practices including the behaviour of school staff and administrators, must be infused with and reflect the values of the Convention—respect for rights, peace, tolerance, understanding, and equality—and allow children to exercise rights such as the right to participation under Article 12 (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Rädda barnen (Society: Sweden), 2007 ). A rights-respecting school environment will promote and teach the values and behaviours associated with human rights by allowing children to experience them (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2001 ).

The Committee has identified bullying in schools to be a serious impediment to an appropriate school environment. Footnote 7 States Parties have been urged to adopt programmes and activities that create a culture in schools which rejects bullying behaviours and all forms of discrimination. Footnote 8

To promote the exercise of rights and citizenship, it is important that schools have policies and practices that systematically provide for children’s participation in non-discriminatory ways. Children should be represented by peers on all committees including disciplinary proceedings, and be provided opportunities for participation in student councils, peer education, and peer counselling (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2006a , para. 20). Data should be collected to enable monitoring and evaluation of how human rights values are reflected in the daily experiences of children and how children are empowered to defend their rights when these are not respected.

See, for example, concluding observations for Senegal ( 2016a , para. 38 (b)) and Guinea ( 2013a , para. 73 (e)).

See, for example, concluding observations for Canada ( 2012a , para. 24), Antigua and Barbuda ( 2017a , para. 17 (b)), Congo ( 2014 , para. 23), and Benin ( 2016b , para. 21).

See Day of General Discussion: Children’s Rights and the Environment (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2016c ). Particular concerns were expressed about children’s exposure to environmental toxins, the impact of climate change, and the loss of biodiversity.

See, for example, concluding observations to Costa Rica ( 2000 , para. 24) and Italy ( 1995 , para. 21).

See, in particular, the comments expressed by UNESCO, Norway, and Greece.

Recent examples include concluding observations to Antigua and Barbuda ( 2017a , para. 17), Benin ( 2016b , para. 21), Canada ( 2012a , para. 27), Congo ( 2014 , para. 23), Haiti ( 2016e , para. 17 (b)), and Zimbabwe ( 2016f , para. 22 (b)).

See, for example, concerns about high rates of bullying in schools in Hong Kong ( 2013b , para. 77), Iceland ( 2012b , para. 46 (b)), and Sweden ( 2015 , para. 31).

See, for example, concluding observations to Canada ( 2012a ), and to Lithuania ( 2006c , para. 27).

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Lansdown, G., Covell, K., Vaghri, Z. (2022). Article 29: The Aims of Education. In: Vaghri, Z., Zermatten, J., Lansdown, G., Ruggiero, R. (eds) Monitoring State Compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84647-3_27

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Supporting Students’ Meaning-Making in Reading Instruction

Teachers can guide students to connect their interests to class texts and to share their ideas in collaborative discussions.

Recently I had the opportunity to immerse myself in the healthy buzz of animated conversation that occurs when meaning-making is at the heart of learning. Sitting in my colleague’s classroom, I found myself thinking about the importance of placing learning in students’ hands—providing opportunities, as my colleague does, for learners to share ideas, explain their perspectives, challenge each other, and refine their thinking. 

Meaning-making  is especially important in reading experiences, as reading is a dynamic process. And so, when reading, my colleague provides learners time to think deeply about topics, share their unique understandings with each other, and build community. 

In today’s educational landscape, meaning-making classrooms may seem like a luxury; after all, we’re in a constant state of competition, whether for learners’ attention or performance on standardized assessments. Yet we must prepare learners to be literate citizens in an information-rich world. This means designing experiences where they learn to be critical consumers of information and active participants in collaborative dialogue. It means providing opportunities to be meaning-makers rather than meaning-receivers. 

Here are several ways to begin.

Start with ‘Why’ 

Building a meaning-making classroom driven by authentic, collaborative dialogue requires prioritizing content and reconsidering what counts as comprehension.

Readers need a purpose , a reason to dig in and find meaning in the text; however, these “whys” should be broad . Consider using an essential question for the larger unit, such as “How do others see the world differently than I do?” Or introduce learners to a larger project or task connected to the text. 

I’ve found that these broader contexts hold learners accountable to their reading but limit the surface level-skimming often associated with guided note activities that don’t underscore a larger purpose.

Activate The Mental Velcro 

Set learners up for success by activating their prior schemas using quick collaborative activities. The goal here is to tap into the text and spark discussion. Marilyn Jager Adams refers to prior schemas as a form of mental Velcro , because they provide spaces for new knowledge to stick. My favorite Velcro activation strategies include interactive anticipation guides ( Four Corners or Maȋtre D’ ) and a quotation mingle .

In an interactive anticipation guide, students consider their stance in regard to teacher-generated prompts or questions and share their thinking with others to pique curiosity and activate their understanding of a topic. In a quotation mingle, learners consider a sentence from the text, then meet with classmates to share their sentences and make predictions. In this activity, learners begin making-meaning before they ever encounter the reading. 

Let Kids Do the Lifting 

Comprehension is about meaning-making, not memorization of facts or transmission of information. Build opportunities for learners to extract their own meaning from text through note-making . When learners make notes, they’re responsible for translating concepts and ideas into their own words (or visual images). This shifts learning from a passive to an active process, leading to greater retention of ideas and concepts, higher engagement, and personally meaningful learning.

If note-making is a new practice in your classroom, consider using a think-aloud and a document camera (a small, flexible presentation device that allows you to display images and objects in real time) to model for learners how to extract meaning from text. For example, you might place a short text under the document camera and annotate in real time, showing learners what you find personally meaningful. Learners at all levels benefit from explicit modeling. 

You might also introduce note-making with a teacher-created text guide . Through scaffolds, a text guide focuses learners on key concepts from the text while holding them responsible for meaning-making. 

Sketchnoting , on the other hand, is an open-ended visual note-making strategy that allows learners to use a mix of words and images to make meaning of the text, further strengthening connections to content. Sketchnoting allows learners to make connections, synthesize, summarize, and focus on the content in ways that are most meaningful to them. 

Give Time to Talk 

It’s important for students not only to make their own meanings of texts but also to share their understandings with others. Dialogue is the most effective means of engagement and helps learners refine their thinking as they negotiate, challenge, and share their ideas. 

When students make meaning of texts, their interpretations are varied. Collaborative dialogue , then, invites learners to develop or deepen their understandings together. And this skill is transferable to life beyond school; when we let kids talk, we extend their engagement beyond answering questions or preparing for a test, promoting deep and critical thinking, which is more reflective of the real world.

Dialoguing about a text may be as simple as a turn-and-talk or other structured thinking routine . These discussions are powerful, can occur frequently, and offer opportunities for all learners to have ample participation. 

Socratic seminars are another avenue for engaging learners in reading-based discussion and exposing them to diverse perspectives. I’ve witnessed kids coming alive during these learner-driven dialogues as they share their ideas with each other. Sentence stems are a useful addition to Socratic seminars to encourage using inviting, affirming language and to scaffold entry points for reluctant participants. Sentence stems I’ve found most helpful include supporting learners to agree, disagree, clarify, or add on to the ideas of others. 

Regardless of the structure you choose, discussion is an integral part of the meaning-making process. 

Establishing a collaborative, meaning-making culture in the literacy classroom doesn’t happen overnight, but if you commit to making these shifts in student participation and engagement, you will soon experience the healthy buzz that permeated my colleague’s classroom, inspiring young learners.