Table Of ContentNEW ESSAYS IN THE
PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
Edited by
GLENN LANGFORD
AND
D.J.O’CONNOR
Volume 13
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published in 1973
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New essays in the
philosophy of education
Edited by
Glenn Langford
and
D.J.O’Connor
Routledge & Kegan Paul
London and Boston
First published in 1973
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
Broadway House, 68–74 Carter Lane,
London EC4V 5EL and
9 Park Street,
Boston, Mass. 02108, U.S.A.
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of
Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks
please go to www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© Routledge & Kegan Paul 1973
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism
ISBN 0-203-86111-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0 7100 7690 8 (Print Edition)
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 73-83120
Contents
page
General editor’s note viii
Preface x
Acknowledgments xi
Part 1 Education
1 The concept of education 2
Glenn Langford
2 The concept of indoctrination 25
Patricia Smart
3 The nature and scope of educational theory (1) 36
D.J.O’Connor
4 The nature and scope of educational theory (2) 51
P.H.Hirst
Part 2 Education and values
5 Education—a moral concept 60
T.F.Daveney
6 Moral autonomy as an aim of moral education 73
Kurt Baier
7 Values in education (1) 87
Glenn Langford
8 Values in education (2) 102
R.S.Peters
Part 3 Aspects of education
9 Language and moral education 112
R.M.Hare
10 Is religious education possible? 125
W.D.Hudson
Contents vii
11 Aesthetic education 147
Diané Collinson
12 The problem of curriculum sequence in mathematics 162
Christopher Ormell
13 Philosophy of education and the place of science in the curriculum 176
P.H.Nidditch
Index 195
Name index 201
General editor’s note
There is a growing interest in philosophy of education amongst students of philosophy as
well as amongst those who are more specifically and practically concerned with educa-
tional problems. Philosophers, of course, from the time of Plato onwards, have taken an
interest in education and have dealt with education in the context of wider concerns about
knowledge and the good life. But it is only quite recently in this country that philosophy of
education has come to be conceived of as a specific branch of philosophy like the philoso-
phy of science or political philosophy.
To call philosophy of education a specific branch of philosophy is not, however, to
suggest that it is a distinct branch in the sense that it could exist apart from established
branches of philosophy such as epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind. It would be
more appropriate to conceive of it as drawing on established branches of philosophy and
bringing them together in ways which are relevant to educational issues. In this respect
the analogy with political philosophy would be a good one. Thus use can often be made of
work that already exists in philosophy. In tackling, for instance, issues such as the rights of
parents and children, punishment in schools, and the authority of the teacher, it is possible
to draw on and develop work already done by philosophers on ‘rights’, ‘punishment’, and
‘authority’. In other cases, however, no systematic work exists in the relevant branches
of philosophy—e.g. on concepts such as ‘education’, ‘teaching’, ‘learning’, ‘indoctrina-
tion’. So philosophers of education have had to break new ground—in these cases in the
philosophy of mind. Work on educational issues can also bring to life and throw new light
on long-standing problems in philosophy. Concentration, for instance, on the particular
predicament of children can throw new light on problems of punishment and responsibility.
G.E.Moore’s old worries about what sorts of things are good in themselves can be brought
to life by urgent questions about the justification of the curriculum in schools.
There is a danger in philosophy of education, as in any other applied field, of polariza-
tion to one of two extremes. The work could be practically relevant but philosophically
feeble; or it could be philosophically sophisticated but remote from practical problems.
The aim of the new International Library of Philosophy of Education is to build up a body
of fundamental work in this area which is both practically relevant and philosophically
competent. For unless it achieves both types of objective it will fail to satisfy those for
whom it is intended and fall short of the conception of philosophy of education which the
International Library is meant to embody.
This volume of essays which emanates, in the main, from the University of Exeter has
two distinctive features. First, it attempts to explore what is meant by ‘education’ and
‘educational theory’. In part it does this by containing articles which are critical of what
many regard as the current orthodoxy in British philosophy of education as represented by
R.S.Peters and P.H.Hirst. Replies by Peters and Hirst are included.
General editor’s note ix
Second, an attempt is made to open up discussion about the main spheres of education—
i.e., moral, religious, aesthetic, mathematical and scientific education. This is very much
to be welcomed; for philosophers of education in Great Britain have tended to concentrate
more on central issues. Although they have done a lot of work on moral education and on
indoctrination, they have tended to neglect the other spheres of education dealt with by this
volume.
It is to be hoped, therefore, that this volume will be influential not only in continuing
the controversy about the nature of education and of educational theory, but also in open-
ing up discussion about more specialized forms of education. There has been a great deal
of work, of course, in philosophy generally, on aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philoso-
phy of mathematics and philosophy of science but little investigation of the educational
implications of the positions adopted. The relevance of such detailed studies to problems
of the curriculum is obvious enough. They fit very well into the concept of philosophy of
education underlying the International Library which is to link established branches of
philosophy with educational issues.
Preface
It seems advisable, in order to avoid possible misunderstanding, to explain our policy in
compiling and editing this book. The intention was to collect together newly-written essays
on the concept of education and related topics such as indoctrination and theory of educa-
tion; and on aspects of education of particular interest, such as moral education, or which,
as a matter of fact, are reflected prominently in the curricula of schools and colleges. The
most regrettable omission, from this point of view, relates to history and the social sci-
ences. Contributors were informed of this general plan but beyond that were left to develop
their own views in their own ways. Though contributors therefore share roughly the same
view of philosophy and roughly the same view of education, since all are writing within
the same philosophic and educational traditions, no further agreement than this suggests is
to be expected from them. Indeed we are of the opinion that the philosophy of education
is an embryonic field of enquiry in which no orthodoxies have been established. It would
be a mistake therefore to expect the essays to support one another in dealing with different
aspects of a single underlying theme.
G.L.
D.J.O’G.
