Table Of ContentProblems in Philosophy of Education
Also available from Bloomsbury
New Perspectives in Philosophy of Education, edited by
David Lewin, Alexandre Guilherme and Morgan White
The Philosophy of Education, Richard Pring
Problems in Philosophy of Education
A Systematic Approach
James Scott Johnston
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
Part One Philosophy of Education in North America: History,
Diagnosis, and Prognosis
1 Educational Theories; Philosophic Models 21
2 Present Circumstances of Philosophy of Education 33
3 Conclusion: The Two Constants in Philosophy of Education 43
Part Two Theory and Research in Scholarship
4 Between Philosophy and Education 51
5 Philosophy or Theory of Education 73
6 Philosophy and Educational Research 87
Part Three Practice
7 Teaching and Learning 99
8 The Questions of Curriculum 127
9 The Questions of Schools as Social Institutions 147
Part Four Toward a New Program
10 Question 1 171
11 Question 2 189
12 Question 3 203
13 Wither the Concept? 217
Appendix: Philosophical Presuppositions 226
References 234
Index 244
Acknowledgments
This book is the product of certain frustrations with the discipline to which I
belong. The project began with a panel presentation at the Canadian Philosophy
of Education Society in 2009 on the future of philosophy of education. Panelists
included myself, Charles Bingham, Sayyed Moshen Fatimi, and Andrea English.
Discussions with a number of philosophers and philosophers of education over
the past several years have helped solidify my opinions. These include Sean
McGrath, Joel Madore, Peter Gratton, Rosa Bruno-Jofre, the late George C.
(“Skip”) Hills, Gonzalo Jover, Walter Okshevsky, Chris Martin, Darron Kelly,
and Jim Garrison. Special thanks to graduate assistant Cheng Li for helping me
with the penultimate draft. Additional thanks to graduate assistant Nate Little
for assembling the index.
Acknowledgment also goes out to the journal Encounters in Education for
allowing me to publish a large percentage of “Philosophy of Education: Where
Has It Been? Where Is It Going?” from the 2007 volume. This article forms the
bulk of Part One.
Introduction
This volume is about the discipline of philosophy of education. It concerns
its past, present, and future. It concerns its form and matter, its structure and
content. It concerns its aims, goals, and purposes. It concerns its motivations,
both internal and external. It concerns its topics, its areas of investigation, and
its scholarship. It concerns its basis, its grounding, its foundations.1 It concerns
its teaching, its research, its conferences, its activities. It concerns all of these
and more, besides. However, it concerns them in a way not considered by many
philosophers of education working at present: for it has as its supposition the
view that philosophy of education is deeply imperiled and the remedy for
this is not to be found in engaging with the concerns of either philosophy or
educational theory and practice.
That philosophers of education would concern themselves with the status
of their discipline is not surprising, given the tendency of philosophy to dwell
upon its history, aims, methods, and results. Many other humanities and social-
scientific disciplines operating under the umbrella of education (sociology,
psychology, anthropology, economics, as well as curriculum and instruction,
educational leadership, and the like) don’t seem as taken with self-scrutiny as
philosophy of education. But this self-scrutiny presupposes that philosophy
of education is a legitimate subdiscipline of philosophy—or at least, strongly
attached to philosophy—a presupposition I deny. For the past 20 years or so,
philosophers of education have openly pondered their discipline’s relationship
to philosophy and their answers vary. Some think the relationship is fine. Others
think philosophy of education should go its own way; others (the majority)
think whatever we make of philosophy of education’s relationship to philosophy,
1 A corresponding volume will discuss the presuppositions involved in claiming a systematic
philosophy of education. These presuppositions include the basic logical, metaphysical, knowledge-
theoretic, ethical, and socio-political frameworks needed to scaffold such an account. I hope to have
this volume available in the near future.
2 Problems in Philosophy of Education
it must have something important to say to educational theory and practice or
risk obsolescence or triviality.
Some of this angst no doubt has to do with the history of the discipline.
Philosophers of education can’t agree on its origins. Some think it extends as
far back as Socrates; others think it began in the eighteenth century with the
advent of “childhood”; still others think it occurred even later, with the rise of
courses of instruction in philosophy of education and the formation of scholarly
societies. The boundaries of the discipline are partly constituted of this history; if
philosophers of education can’t decide on the origins of the discipline, they can’t
pronounce on boundary questions (what constitutes philosophy of education;
what about it differs from other disciplines; what is at the core; and what at the
periphery). And this leads to difficulties identifying the subject matters of the
discipline. For, without recourse to historical precedent, it becomes difficult to
ascertain what counts as philosophy of education.
Fortunately, there is a history to which we can turn. Something called
philosophy of education did come about in fin de siecle Anglo-America, and
this can serve as an approximate starting point for historians and philosophers
of education so inclined to trace origins. Issues of pedagogy (teaching and
learning), the curriculum, and schools naturally factored in these early iterations
of the discipline. So it is in keeping with precedent to discuss these in terms of
their saliency for any present philosophy of education, regardless of whether
we ultimately reject them as insufficiently substantive for the discipline.
Admittedly, this is not much to go on—there is no detailed volume prescribing
what philosophy of education should consider—but it is most certainly a start.
And it is where I begin my journey.
However, I end up in a very unfavorable place: unfavorable, that is, to those
who consider philosophy or educational theory and practice to have something
intrinsically valuable to say about philosophy of education. For I resist attempts
to have philosophy of education yoke itself to either philosophy or educational
theory and practice. I claim philosophy of education must develop and solve its
own questions and problems, and not continue attempting to solve the problems
of others. Much of the ground philosophy of education has occupied for the
last several decades now needs clearing. A fresh start is demanded. From the
initial questions philosophy of education has asked—questions of origins—
new accounts and new subject matters must come forth. This is what I hope to
provide in this volume.
A stated purpose of this book is to persuade those in philosophy of education
that the discipline is imperiled and requires urgent intervention if it is to survive
Introduction 3
and prosper. Now this may seem ridiculous to some and obvious to others.
It may seem ridiculous to those who have healthy and vibrant careers in the
discipline, are successfully teaching and producing what they believe to be
relevant scholarship, and have built up connections with those in philosophy,
philosophy of education and education more generally. On the other hand, it
may seem obvious to those who struggle to obtain employment or to those
who teach in a discipline other than philosophy of education, having trained in
philosophy of education. It may also seem obvious to those with some history
in the discipline; those who have seen the discipline’s relevance with respect to
faculties of education diminish during the last two decades. To those who believe
philosophy of education is in fine shape or otherwise stable, I must disagree. This
disagreement will constitute the focus of my discussion in Parts Two and Three.
A second purpose of this book is to suggest a way to correct the problematic
state of affairs that preoccupies philosophy of education. What particular affairs
do I have in mind? Aside from the issue of employment and economics, there
are very troubling issues of scholarship. To my mind, philosophers of education
are not invested in asking and answering their own questions: they are invested
in asking and answering the questions of others. Who are these others? These
are philosophers on the one hand and educators on the other. Why is this
problematic? Because these questions are illegitimate, they do not belong to the
domain of philosophy of education. They are not built up in and through the
history of the scholarship we have historically done and continue to do, and they
do not entail a set of accounts of logic, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics,
and socio-politics. Instead, these are questions taken from other contexts and
other scholarly disciplines. The context of philosophy of education is foreign
to them; these questions are question-begging absent these historical and
philosophical moorings.
Philosophers of education typically draw on two main sources for their
questions and answers. The first of these is philosophy, the second education.
It is not uncommon to see pure philosophy papers in leading journals of
philosophy of education (though this has greatly improved in the last 20 years
or so). The claims of these papers obviously have little to do with philosophy
of education. More troubling is the converse case: educational questions and
answers with no bearing on philosophy of education. These have become far
more common in philosophy of education journals. But the mere absence
of historical philosophers or philosophies is not my chief concern. My chief
concern is that the questions being asked and answered do not belong to
philosophy of education. This raises the question of what questions do belong to
