## 1. Problems in Delineating the Field



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



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



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



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


## 2. Analytic Philosophy of Education and Its Influence



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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


## 3. Areas of Contemporary Activity



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



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


### 3.1 The Content of the Curriculum and the Aims and Functions of Schooling



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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




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



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



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


### 3.2 Social, Political and Moral Philosophy



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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


### 3.3 Social Epistemology, Virtue Epistemology, and the Epistemology of Education



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



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



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



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



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



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



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


### 3.4 Philosophical Disputes Concerning Empirical Education Research



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



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



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



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


## 4. Concluding Remarks



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

 

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