The Philosophy in the Philosophy of Education

"It cannot any longer be seriously doubted that there is such a thing as the philosophy of education." So says Mary Warnock in her Schools of Thought. And if a subject were made by the publishers of books she would certainly be right. Not only has the philosophy of education arrived, but it might even seem to be flourishing, albeit without much enthusiastic support from members of the Mind Association. While, as Peters characterized it in 1973 by reference to "straight" philosophy (epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, etc)—most of this work draws on such established branches of philosophy and brings them together in ways which are relevant to educational issues (Peters, 1973, p. 2), one may be forgiven for entertaining a residual doubt that there is yet a proper subject with a sufficiently large number of adequate works or workers.

I am not interested here in fighting over "a proper subject" or "a sufficiently large number," though I shall later have something to say about the standard of typical works. The source of the doubt is sociological. Philosophy of education, like the other "foundation" disciplines in education, is a creature of teacher-training courses. Like them, its isolation from the main discipline to which it is allied is only slowly being broken down, despite some notable individual achievements and some optimistic prophecy. One might ask, for instance, how many "straight" philosophy departments ever offer a course in the philosophy of education, or again how many articles on the area appear in the outstanding journals of general philosophy. My experience suggests that the answers to such questions will be "very few." I would not claim that it could not be otherwise, only that as a matter of recent fact it isn't. In such a context a problem arises for those of us committed to philosophy as to what to offer trainee teachers under the rubric "Philosophy of Education." And it is this question, and the difficulties of finding a decent answer to it, which I wish to raise.

I shall first elaborate a little, and with unacademic impressionism, on the social history that I have claimed contributes to the problem and that gives it now a particular urgency. I shall then glance at the present state of the art and turn to consider a proposal for finding a way out of the uncertainties. I argue that there are two divergent ways of implementing the proposal and give some general reasons for preferring one of them. These reasons are backed up by an examination of a couple of recent books which also serve to exemplify some of the other points I shall be urging. In conclusion I shall sketch some of the directions I think we should go in strengthening the alliance between philosophy of education and philosophy.

As may perhaps be obvious already, I write as one most familiar with English practice, and the sketch that follows bears a likeness only to what has happened in that country. But I hope that it has more than parochial interest and relevance, as remarks of American authors suggest that a broadly similar story is to be told for the U.S. For a succinct account, see Broudy's contribution to a survey volume of the Teachers College Record heralding the eightieth NSSE Yearbook which is devoted to philosophy of education. I suspect that there may be analogous developments in other outposts of philosophy, such as social work.

For a long time the training, as it was then denominated, of teachers included something often labelled "Philosophy of Education." This was usually little more than the pious sentiments of the "Great Educators," with the emphasis on the practical supposed consequences of their reflections rather than on the critical examination of the philosophical underpinnings thereof. It was there because people had a vague feeling that it ought to be, and it was usually handled by teachers with expertise in some other, meatier, field. Not exactly a context to inspire intellectual interest or command high status. Bourdieu's castigation of education (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, p. 59) applies with fullest force to what such courses managed to make of the questioning and challenging of a Plato, a Rousseau, or a Dewey. While the mass product hardly rose above the soporific, even a noted contributor "tends to paint with his pen rather than lay out systematic arguments," as Professor Peters judges Professor Reid (Peters, 1973, p. 271).

Into this world, along with the 1960's expansion of tertiary education, burst Peters himself. The expansion of the educational system in this period in England provided an opportunity for many teachers to migrate into teacher training, often via some postgraduate work in education. Perhaps the main route for these more recent philosophers of education was specialization in the philosophy options of an M. Ed. degree. This meant that they typically came to philosophy at a postgraduate period in their own academic lives, but to only a comparatively elementary and highly selective exposure to straight philosophy itself. For people in such a position Peters' writings were, as one recently retired practitioner at a Scottish University told me, an excitement and a challenge because they had indeed only nibbled at real philosophy. (Peters himself, of course, had come over from mainline philosophy.)

It is a mark, I think, of this situation that for so long Peters has held the field virtually alone. He had cornered the market in decent philosophizing about education.¹ At a time of expansion his erstwhile colleagues in philosophy were content to let him have his head; they would condescend to say something on request but were not in general much concerned with the field. And, as I have suggested, his fellow labourers were not usually able to match his technical skill or his philosophical rootedness. There is some of the eclecticism of the amateur about even the most eminent of them, witness Professor Hirst, whose official programme has been his own rendition of late Wittgenstein and D. W. Hamlyn, but who reveals his good sense in numerous falls from this very murky grace.²

In such a context, Peters' articulation of "the most general beliefs about education held … by the concerned and reflective segments of our society" (McClellan's verdict, 1976, p. 20) won almost without a fight. In addition, the predominant concern to preserve what was of value and to promote modest reform of the educational system helped to keep philosophy domesticated within the ideologically ambivalent teacher-training departments and institutions.³

In the very recent past there have been some interesting and, I believe, significant changes in this picture. Economic recession, which has thrown mainline philosophers on the market, in conjunction with a revamping of the professional qualifications of teachers, has brought an influx of straight philosophers into philosophy of education posts. Teacher education, as it is now called, requires a degree, a degree usually validated by the Council for National Academic Awards and for which the work is weighted more heavily in favour of the academic than the previous more practical certificates.

To staff such courses, and to impress C.N.A.A. during its inspection, many colleges have taken to employing academically impeccable but otherwise unemployable philosophers (and others).They have thereby contributed to the quite extensive academic stirring-up of traditionally quiescent and low-status parts of English tertiary education. For our purposes its significance is that there are now younger, philosophically more sophisticated practitioners, often with little or no knowledge of schooling beyond their own adolescence, whose approaches, political leanings,⁴ and status deprivation make them most unlikely to sustain the domesticated, emasculated, and hortatory role traditionally allocated to them. Just as Peters and Warnock see the new field sprouting, here come the radicals to dig it up again. And, perhaps more alarming for college managements, just as the sparkling new integrated foundations courses come off the drawing board the philosopher starts belabouring his psychologist or sociologist colleagues.

I have tried to indicate why, as a matter of historical fact, there is a problem about philosophy of education for those of us with a commitment to philosophy. For perfectly intelligible reasons most of the work in the area has been undistinguished. The area itself is of low status. I have suggested that very recent developments have made the situation much more volatile, though there is little in print yet to bear this out. Since book-publishing policy is an important factor in the issue of questions I am addressing, it is perhaps worth closing this section by noting the consequences of the conditions of the Peters era for texts in the philosophy of education. Even when most of the books proclaim themselves "introductions" to the subject, Hirst thought it appropriate to claim for the philosophy of education that "most [students] have no immediate interest in, or aptitude for, the form of sustained abstract thought it demands, … and they find it hard to see any direct bearing of this work on the immediate practical judgments endlessly demanded of teachers in the classroom. As yet there are few if any books that are simple enough for most students in teacher training to understand" (Hirst, 1977, p. 367). While I have not met such a representative sample of students as Hirst, I would not say that the books, with a few exceptions such as those by Peters and Hirst himself perhaps, have failed to speak to the invincible dullness here attributed to most future teachers. A striking though perhaps unfair comparison may be made between the intellectual level of Penguin Education's self-styled Philosophy books and that of the very distinguished works of pure philosophy put out by the same publisher.

I have tried to say something to account for the lack of standing on the part of philosophy of education and to explain why I believe there is now greater pressure for insisting on the philosophy in the philosophy of education. While there may not have been much evidence of a new heart-searching in the books published in the field, there have been signs in the more ephemeral literature that others are wondering what we should do with our students, given both a commitment to philosophy and a commitment not to waste our student's time. One symptom was a flurry of articles in the last few issues of Education for Teaching.⁵ As with Radical Philosophy's early demands, the proposals in these articles were mostly for whoring after "new" gods: Nietzsche, Marx, Phenomenology, one vote even for Bernard Lonergan, to restore the subject after the creeping paralysis and complacency of linguistic analysis.

Such a wholesale repudiation of analysis, though not of the complacency, conservatism, and insularity that have too often accompanied it, is, I believe, premature; but it must be admitted that this is a somewhat awkward belief to defend in this context. The awkwardness arises from the fact, easily documentable from the introductions and other writings of Peters, Scheffler, Hirst, Wilson, et al.,⁶ that in the philosophy of education (though by no means only there) people are not agreed on what they are doing when they go in for analysis. They do not know what to count as success or failure at the task and they cannot give a perspicuous account of what they are trying to achieve. This is so despite the voluminous literature, both in general philosophy and the philosophy of education, that tries to tackle precisely these questions. Of course, some may find perspicuous what I think is a superficial avoidance of the issues, but it is not so much the justice of these judgments as the existence of deep-seated unclarity that concerns me here. And for that I can offer anecdotal evidence that it is not an idiosyncratic perception of the philosophical world: Keith Graham tells of a tutor who ended a session by asking for the difference between a trivial tautology and an interesting analysis and he comments that while it seemed at the time like an exercise, he suspects "the tutor would have been as eager as any of us to be told the answer" (1977, p. 24).

While I find Graham's own considered answer clear and useful for pedagogical purposes (see his 1977, ch. II) my own thinking in this area owes most to J. L. Mackie (see esp. 1973, ch. 1). While my argument does not perhaps require it, it is only fair that I lay my cards, or my version of Mackie's, on the table, particularly since they constitute the framework my later remarks assume. Mackie distinguishes questions of what we intend to convey by the use of a bit of language, from questions of what cues, perceptual or logical, govern our regular usage, and also from questions of what he calls factual analysis, questions about what is going on in the world when we correctly use a bit of language. The lack of clarity I discern in most of the standard analytical discussions of analysis stems, I suggest, from their failure to distinguish at least these four distinguishable issues. Of course, in many cases, identical or nearly identical answers will be forthcoming for the different questions, but philosophical interest arises in some of those cases where the most plausible answers begin to diverge, and clarity is promoted when we see that our ordinary thinking leaves some of the logical cues, for example, indeterminate. I hope it is obvious even in this brief summary that Mackie's framework allows one to by-pass some pseudo-controversies without having genuine problems miraculously disappear in the course of therapy. Thus one could hold, as a first approximation, that moral intuitionists are right about what we intend to convey but that subjectivists are right about the factual analysis of moral language. (For Mackie's actual view of these matters see his 1977.) Such a stance focuses the issues more clearly and all but insists that one face the genuine problems that bring outsiders to the philosopher's door.

Granting then that a perspicuous account of analysis can be given along Mackie's lines, and one moreover that certainly does not come ready fitted with a tendency to conservatism or complacency, the proposal for strengthening the philosophy in philosophy of education that I wish to endorse and explore is hardly original, indeed it is simply what Bernard Williams recommended several years ago: "Philosophy of education should rather be philosophy for education: and that is not primarily philosophizing about teaching, but rather encouraging teachers to philosophize" (1969, p. 181). This may seem a staggeringly unexciting proposal to reach this late in the discussion. But, to recapitulate, I have tried to show why teachers (and more particularly their teachers) have not been in much of a position to philosophize: Williams' proposal is still calling for a radical change, though one that recent changes make more feasible. I have acknowledged, but tried to answer, the charge that analytical philosophy is bankrupt, unable even to give a clear account of itself, and so I claim that Williams' proposal is still in the field; if so, it seems an obvious choice and worth exploring further.

Williams' article expresses a mitigated scepticism about the existence of a genuine speciality, philosophy of education, but his reason for his recommendation stands whatever view one takes of that matter: "What indeed there are, are philosophical questions and considerations likely to be of particular interest and relevance to teachers. Some of these may be specifically philosophical questions about teaching, but most of them will not be: they will rather be philosophical questions about society, morality, religion or, indeed, the different branches of knowledge the teachers will teach" (ibid.). His recommendation can easily be made into a slogan—"Philosophy For rather than Philosophy Of"—but as with many slogans there is a large gap between its inspiring good sense and its faltering implementation. Simplifying somewhat, one might distinguish two divergent approaches to implementing the Williams line. The first—revisionist, if you will—is to keep on talking about teaching and education but with a sophistication due to a grasp of general philosophy and an openness to where general questions impinge on the educational discussion. The second is to plunge into some straight philosophy and hope that its significance for education will somehow emerge from prefatory remarks, occasional allusions, and a supplementary reading list. A crippling practical disadvantage for both approaches is the amount of time allotted to the subject in the education of a teacher, but I shall not let such contingencies obtrude into the discussion.

While the analogy is far from perfect, it might be useful to compare the first approach I have suggested with some work in political philosophy. Popper, and more recently Nozick, have wanted to persuade us of the merits of certain sorts of polity; Brian Barry has wanted us to agree with him on various, slightly less general questions, in his Political Argument; but all these writers (and of course many others) pursue their political ends with a wealth of philosophically interesting arguments and a clear awareness of what general philosophy can, and cannot, do for them. In education we have work of comparable scope in the writings of Dewey; more recently and with a more restricted goal we have McClellan's and Passmore's advocacy of a certain kind of teaching, and Warnock's attempt to get teachers and the general public to adopt her view of the political aspects of the school system. I shall look more closely at Warnock's book in the next section because I believe it neatly exemplifies the comparative insubstantiality of this type of work in education. It is certainly the sort of work that one would like to see done well since it would be both intellectually respectable and socially responsible. It is also what many of one's colleagues and students expect of a course in the philosophy of education. But, for the kinds of reason I have tried to give earlier, it does not in general have the depth and solidity of comparable work in, say, political philosophy.

If I am right, an obvious remedy might be to shift to the second way of implementing the Williams line—take the man at his word and do the straight philosophy that is lacking in Warnock and the others. The political philosophizing I have pointed to succeeds as an integrated discipline because both sides engaged in it (writers and readers) can be taken to have the requisite grounding in logical analysis, ethics, and so on. The desirable educational counterpart at present lacks these foundations, so we have to turn aside from the educational issues to concentrate on laying the philosophical foundations. To put it briefly, to advance clearly and quickly beyond Warnock, you need to spend a few hours on basic logical analysis. This is, indeed, what I am advocating in the present state of affairs, and I have given some reasons for thinking that it is not now a hopeless program. But in the real world, particularly the real world of publishers and their various markets, this proposal needs to be distinguished from the provision of special introductions to philosophy for trainee teachers. As long as philosophers of education remain in general in the state I ascribed to the Peters' era, their introductions to philosophy will be of little value. In the next section I shall briefly comment on an egregious example, but it helps to make my case for the general debility of this kind of philosophizing without a lengthy survey of less exaggerated error, which it would be easy, but unacceptably tedious, to present.

I shall close this section with the caveat that there is no guaranteed recipe for laying relevant philosophical foundations. One can make frivolous distinctions with the same tools that others use to insist on vital distinctions; one can stick doggedly to the exact words someone uses when a certain amount of charitable interpretation is called for, or again grossly misrepresent what an author is trying hard to say exactly. With the diversity of contemporary philosophy, even within a broadly analytical tradition, there are also a variety of fundamental notions, ways of tackling problems, and so on about which there is much room for disagreement: Some may find illumination in the concept of a "form of life" while others only register an abnegation of explanatory understanding. In recommending that we supplement the discussion of educational questions with firsthand straight philosophy I am not supposing that we can dispense with practical wisdom.

I have claimed that the more attractive way of moving in the direction of Williams' proposal is to remain attentive to educational issues but to discuss them with philosophical sophistication. I further claimed that at present there is still not enough such sophistication for this approach to flourish, so we are forced to turn explicitly to the philosophical and logical issues themselves. This, I claimed, has to be at first-hand, not by way of less than competent interpreters. Granting the historical account I offered of the philosophy of education, these are not implausible claims. But before going into more detail on what should now be done to improve the situation I shall try to support this diagnosis by looking at two recent books, Mary Warnock's Schools of Thought and Allen Brent's Philosophical Foundations for the Curriculum. Warnock because she is concerned with thinking about education and is aware of its philosophical ramifications; Brent because one of his aims is to introduce philosophy to advanced education students.

Warnock's is a good text to use with students (or would be if it were still in print). It has a unifying thread but covers many different topics that can be isolated for seminar treatment. She is usually sensible and has cogent but not always popular arguments and points of view. My major quarrel with her is that she has still skimped on the philosophical side, on the questions of analysis that she raises or that crop up in her discussions. There is a disquieting logical flabbiness even about her central topic: "I hope to show that it is impossible wholly to separate educational from moral and political arguments" (1977, p. 10); "are there purely educational criteria for deciding what education should be like?" (p. 19); speaking of equality, "I want to treat this as a test case … of a political notion, in order to see whether by itself it can dictate any solutions to educational problems" (p. 21). Now to show, as she tries to, that equality on its own cannot dictate a solution to some educational questions would not necessarily tell you anything at all about the possibility of purely educational considerations alone dictating those same solutions. Tea leaves on their own do not quench thirst, you need to add water; water on its own, however…. It seems Warnock is none too concerned about the precise linkages so long as the reader can get a feeling of moral, political, and educational considerations entangling with one another in the gloom.

This disdain for precision, for digging any deeper than her authorities, allows her to adopt a quite extravagant position with respect to equality. If you want equality in any respect you are said to be espousing a modification of the demand for equality in every respect, which is therefore the "idealized model at the heart of all egalitarian thought" (p. 30, a quotation from Isaiah Berlin). Now this ideal limit is indeed impossible and would be abhorrent, if per impossibile it were possible; but these are no reasons not to be an egalitarian, she says. Because ideals are meant to be impossible and equality is not meant to be your only ideal, others will temper the nastiness of total uniformity.

I suppose this is consistent; it is certainly bizarre. And even more certainly, unnecessary. Once we recognize that all judgments regarding equality must have a "respect gap" filled either explicitly or implicitly to make any determinate statement at all (either with a specific respect: equal in wealth; or with a quantifier over respects: equal in some respects; equal in most socially significant and socially alterable respects; equal in all respects), then we can see that no-one ever need make a demand for equality in every respect, that such a maniacal and logically impossible demand need play no role in anybody's political thinking. Equality before the law is, if you like, a "modification" of equality in every respect, just as "I believe that the earth is approximately spherical" is a modification of "For all p, I believe that p," but so what? The fact that "All men are created equal" is at least a complete grammatical sentence, should not blind us to the obvious fact that such a sentence is not logically complete. I don't suppose Warnock would think that in riding my hobby-horse about ellipsis I was telling her something she didn't already know. My point, however, is that she has not let the simple logical points sink home and infuse her actual thinking about the subject.

She is rightly dismissive of the stock analyses of "being educated" or "teaching" that litter the literature. But she should be wary of too hastily rejecting all analysis. Whatever we may think of what Platts has recently dubbed "decompositional" analysis of the bachelor is an unmarried man type (Platts, 1979, pp. 71-72),⁷ there is also the question of the logical cues that govern our more considered usage, in Mackie's terms. Here is an area where logical analysis can transform itself into logical criticism by revealing the incompleteness of much of what we say, by uncovering the ways language allows us not to see how indeterminate are our conscious commitments. The elementary remarks about equality above give only one small illustration of the point of this type of analysis, (I have tried to give a rather more extended example, focusing on the verb "to need", in my 1980.)

I have concentrated on showing that Warnock has not attended sufficiently to the philosophical, logical, issues that she has to deal with. She wants to press forward to educationally important conclusions, but the argumentative substructure is fatally flawed because of such lapses. As so often in education, people are interested in the conclusions without much concern for the arguments that support them, the premises they supposedly derive from. My conclusion is that if one wants to retrace her steps one must spend more time getting the logical issues straight first. I warned earlier that this will mean a first-hand exposure to the relevant parts of philosophy and logic; to support this I shall look very briefly at what Brent has offered by way of introducing philosophy to advanced students in education.

One danger in "doing" philosophy is to mimic the stage tourist who "does" Europe in a week. There are certainly a good number of stately homes, rusty weapons, and grandiose follies in the philosophical tour. Some stopping places are of immense value; but it is better, I think, to get to know a few of them well than to be paraded around the whole lot with hardly an introduction. But Brent whisks you round: the synthetic a priori rides again (though his main example, universal causation, was fatally wounded at the turn of the century); empiricism and rationalism get a look in; as does Wittgenstein, early and late; the teleological argument for a god comes in an aside about the Third Man argument against Plato's Forms; Hirst on objectivity provides the excuse for a remark about the institutional status of morality; the relationship between belief and knowledge is argued in terms of dream and reality; we are even promised an ontological argument for divine existence but diligent search has failed to find it. In most of these cases Brent moves so swiftly from one issue to another that nothing of value can be said about any of them. Reports, of varying reliability, are given of what different people have thought, but we never engage with them on their own ground.

Engagement in persuasive argument is not one of Brent's talents⁸ but he raises doubts even in asserting the truth. He urges the universality of the law of non-contradiction but nowhere bothers to say what a contradiction amounts to. His discussions do not re-assure. None of his examples ("he is a bachelor but not married," "the moon is a white-feathered cockatoo") are explicit contradictions, and one of them is clearly not a contradiction at all—the answer "I don't know, I just know" to a question "How do you know?" Further, Brent's example about the moon invites a lengthy discussion which his casual introduction of tenuously related problems prevents him undertaking. This may be just as well since, as Revel (1957, p. 136) remarked of a more eminent author, when one displays such ignorance of what we share⁹ there is little to he hoped for from one's views of a society we do not know. One might have expected the bachelor example to provoke Brent into a potted history of Quinean arguments but the world has been spared that on this occasion.

Brent's book epitomizes the deleterious consequences of the historical situation of philosophy of education as I described it earlier: We can see here what Feyerabend has recently pointed to in the narrower context of philosophy of science—the institutionalizing of incompetence (Feyerabend, 1978). Feyerabend began from the fact, known, I suspect, to anyone who has had an article refereed, or like Feyerabend, a book reviewed (cf. also Graham, 1981), that some of one's colleagues cannot, or at least do not, read. I have described a situation in which many people's grasp of the subject is such that they cannot write about it either. Philosophers of education, and their students, tend to write about other philosophers of education; publishers encourage them to produce books for a market they conceive of as barely literate. The moral to be drawn in such a state of affairs is Plato's: go for the real thing.

So far I have tried to describe and briefly document this sorry state of affairs and to suggest that changes are imminent; I have urged my colleagues to return to Williams' proposal for guidance on how to satisfy both their philosophical consciences and their obligations not to waste their students' time. I have indicated agreement with his demotion of the issues that are currently the staple diet of introductions to the philosophy of education in favour of "philosophical questions about society, morality, religion, or different branches of knowledge," though I have added that ideally such issues might best be embedded in an argument for some educational proposal or conclusion.

This support for long-standing proposals is, however, something of an interim measure. Given the present structure of courses, the present type of graduate or quasi-graduate trainee teacher, and so on, I am suggesting a redistribution of emphasis among topics, or perhaps in many cases a new selection of topics for philosophy of education courses—the course to become philosophy for education. But it would be uncharacteristic not to raise the wider question of what place philosophy should have, if any, in the education of a teacher. I shall close with a few tentative thoughts about this less confined question.

Briefly my preference is for philosophy as a service subject.¹⁰ Integrated courses, thematic approaches, come and go, and I have no fondness for them in general. But it has long seemed to me that philosophy has a crucially important role but one it can hardly play in isolation. The philosopher must interact with the psychologist, the economist, the theologian, or whomever. In the context of educating teachers, the obvious link would be with those charged with instructing teachers in the teaching of history, chemistry, social studies, or whatever. But if students continue to be exposed to other "foundation" subjects (psychology of education, etc.) then there might be a point in linking also with such subjects, and in any case I believe there would be a point in focusing on some elementary logical matters explicitly and for all, and so perhaps most efficiently in a separate slot on the time-table.

One theme in my preceding comments has been the importance of certain logical notions and an approach to analysis for the discussion of the kinds of philosophical and educational questions Williams and I wish to see discussed. As we know, informal logic or logic and scientific-method courses do not rate very highly, but I believe I am not alone in thinking that they could be of the greatest value. I have recently found two biologists urging that "logic should be taught in all courses in biology" and that "some lectures should be given on semantics" (Hillman and Sartory, 1980, P. 250).¹¹ Their reasons surely apply, mutatis mutandis, to other disciplines. If a healthy awareness of one's cognitive standing is desirable for a practicing biologist it would seem to me equally desirable in anyone venturing to teach that subject to others. Within philosophy, the fact that authors as eminent as Geach, Scriven, and Flew have recently published work in informal logic suggests that they at least think it valuable.

While logical and evaluative questions might properly be studied by all intending teachers I would also wish to stress the last pan of Williams' proposal the problems that arise within the fields the teachers will go out to teach. Various philosophical issues arise here, and some of them are dealt with in some way by the subject specialists. But we cannot in general expect such specialists also to be au fait with the philosophical niceties. As I have said already, what we need here is a modicum of practical wisdom to see the bearing of philosophy on the problems that arise for teachers of history or guidance counsellors, to see whether a look at intuitionism will help math teachers understand the nature of mathematical knowledge. There is no guarantee that what is being debated in the philosophy of X at the moment is the kind of thing that will help school teachers of X; but it is pretty clear that there are issues arising for such teachers that are philosophical and to which the philosopher could profitably address himself. Some of these questions concern the general cognitive standing of constituents of X, and as such might be covered in a general course, but the lesson is probably more forceful when expressed in terms of the detail of the subject matter the teacher is familiar with.

A final and even more tentative line of advance would be to introduce at least parts of philosophy into what the teachers are expected to go out and teach. Some work of this kind is being done by the Institute for Advancement of Philosophy for Children. Until I know more of this work I can only argue for what I believe is supported by the position I have already argued for teachers of other subjects, and that is to stress once again the importance of informal logic and logical tools of analysis. I believe that Mackie's stress on the logical cues governing our usage goes along with the stress on syntax that flows from much modem work on linguistics and language teaching. It seems to me, though it is only a hunch at this time, that an awareness of transformational relationships between sentences can function in the way that learning a foreign language often does to promote an awareness of the logical properties of what is said. If so, there lies open, I believe, a path for fruitful commerce between philosophical logic and the classroom, and one that might give some of the benefits without the hardships of mathematics.

These last remarks have been sketchy in the extreme, and they probably require a very different structuring of universities and colleges from what exists at present. But their purpose has been only to indicate where I believe there is room for strengthening and developing the role of philosophy in the preparation of teachers. If I am right, it requires philosophical and extra-philosophical competence, practical wisdom, and the co-operation of many others who are involved in the training of teachers. It may not be all sweetness and light, since much goes on in schools, and in the thinking of teachers, that should not be able to withstand philosophical scrutiny. But even if Mary Warnock is wrong in thinking that ideals are unattainable, no-one supposes they are always easy.

Notes

1. And not just metaphorically—he edits the major series of philosophy of education books. Of course Peters does not stifle criticism, but my diagnosis of our condition is borne out by the absence of radically opposed views in print when one looks at the contentions within pure philosophy. But again it can hardly be said that the philosophy of education "establishment" abets criticism of Peters or Hirst: I have been told that Hirst believes in the correspondence theory of truth despite what he says about it (Hirst, 1974, p. 158) and what he does with the notion of truth; and I have been told that Hirst is not a relativist because he says he isn't. Perhaps it is necessary to join Graham (1981, p. 146-47) in reminding the world that it is not what you say you do that matters, but what you do.

For an independent verdict on Peters' place in British philosophy of education, see Wilson (1977).

2. To defend this adequately would need another paper, but I might mention Hirst's attempts to square his official commitment to "agreement in judgment is all that matters" with his pre-theoretical grasp of the fact that different religions are incompatible with one another. The evidence of his collection of essays (1974) suggests that in this area good sense is losing the battle. I owe to a referee another interesting example (especially since Hirst was originally a mathematician): his silence on later Wittgensteinian views about mathematics and his endorsement of some sort of "if-thenism".

3. Many, especially their students, have commented on the irony of colleges promoting anti-authoritarian, child-centered doctrines in a very authoritarian manner (see, for example, Sharp and Green [1975, ftn. p. 238 and relevant text]). It is interesting that most published work in philosophy of education has, however, been largely critical of anti-authoritarian doctrines.

4. Whatever an individual's political or philosophical stance, Radical Philosophy and the movement associated with the journal have had wide repercussions on philosophy in Britain. It should now be a little harder to talk with Peters about educated men without stopping to think of what happens to most boys and girls at school.

5. Freeman (1975); Colbeck (1976); Meynell (1976); and Gillies (1976) with replies by Colbeck and Meynell.

6. One convenient collection of symptoms is the debate about the concept of education reprinted as the first section of Peters (1973). Philosophers of education are well aware of the lack of clarity about what they mostly claim to be doing. Pratte recently commented that "there was and continues to be a certain amount of controversy over the ways in which the analysis is to be done" (1979, p. 152-53).

7. Decompositional analysis is not likely to do much, on its own, to promote clarity and the search for truth when applied to terms that are diffuse, confused, or weighed down with ideological mystification: it is likely rather to replace one confused and confusing term with a string of others. When concepts are "essentially contested" there is a danger of imposing one contestable view by ignoring or "refuting" others. We also need to take care in deciding whether we are offering an analysis of (perceptual) cues or of what we intend to convey, in Mackie's terminology. But when all such reservations have been made I still think that these types of analysis can serve us well, at least until their post-Davidsonian and post-Quinean replacements come on the market. Warnock, for instance, tries very hard to be clear about work, but she wants to hold simultaneously that a lot of work is boring and dispiriting and that we all want to work (1977, p. 147). To say that she is sometimes glossing 'work' as 'activity which tries to reduce things to order' seems to me to illuminate her confusion while making pretty minimal theoretical commitments.

Since I am advocating a bricoleur approach to applied philosophy I perhaps need to reiterate an earlier warning: good sense is required to know which tools are useful and how far to rely on them. We also need to know what tools there are. I am pleased to find some support for my belief in the potential value of many tools in the contemporary analytic tool-box in the second edition of Trevor Pateman's stimulating Language, Truth and Politics: "My partial ignorance of, and hostility towards, contemporary analytic philosophy prevented me in 1973 from making any explicit use of Searle's speech act theory or Grice's theory of conversation, even in a simple comparison with Jakobson. I now think that speech act and conversation theory … offer a powerful way of approaching the kinds of questions raised in this chapter" (1980, pp. 79-80).

8. Brent thinks there is in mathematics a qualitative difference between the concepts of number and fraction on the one hand and that of square root on the other. He says that if we fail to distinguish fractions from whole numbers mathematics collapses, while we could quite easily change our concept of square root. While it is quite obscure what this last change might be, the argument in support of an essential difference between integers and fractions does nothing to distinguish the latter from square roots: Brent says (p. 103) we must hold to the former distinction to block a fallacious argument for 2 + 2 = 2, viz. 2 halves + 2 halves = 2. But since 2√2 + 2√2 = +/- 5.6568... I fail to see how this argument endows fractions with a status denied to square roots. Brent replies to a suggestion that utility might lead us to teach falsehoods by giving an example where what is said to be closer to the truth is also more useful (1978, p. 16). Examples could be multiplied, but to no purpose.

9. I have heard of the "two cultures," but what should we make of the following? "Then in the course of the 1930's a young man named Albert Einstein wrote a paper entitled 'The general theory of relativity'. In this paper, certain problems are solved with the aid of Euclidean geometry, but it is shown that these solutions give rise to other problems that prove intractable within a Euclidean system. These problems are solved in his later paper 'The special theory of relativity' with the aid of Riemannic geometry." (Brent, 1978, p. 110; confusion worse confounded by a later remark: "Einstein, by means of Lobachevskyan geometry,…" (p. 209).)

This tissue of what Dr. Johnson would have called "lies" has passed unremarked by the publisher's readers, and the two reviewers I have read—Hirst himself and D. E. Cooper. Does no-one care what we put into the hands of our students so long as they are there to constitute a market? At the risk of pedantry, Brent should have said: In 1905 Einstein published "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" ("On the electrodynamics of moving bodies") in Annalen der Physik 17, in which he first set out what is now known as the Special Theory of Relativity. The geometry of this theory is not exactly Euclidean, certainly not in the straightforward way in which Newton's physics had been Euclidean. Since a paper by Minkowski in 1908 it has usually been regarded as a four-dimensional geometry with zero curvature. In 1916 Einstein published "Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie" ("The foundations of the general theory of relativity") in Annalen der Physik 49, in which he argued that the extensions required in the earlier theory lead to the breakdown of the Euclidean assumption of zero curvature; instead he adopted a geometry of variable curvature. (Riemann's links here are complicated. He is associated with a non-Euclidean geometry of constant positive curvature, while Lobachevsky is associated with one of constant negative curvature, but Riemann is also associated with a general theory of curved spaces, and it is this that is used by Einstein. See Sklar (1974, ch. II B) for details.)

10. I am pleased to acknowledge the influence of my first Head of Department, Bob McGowan, in adopting this view of the teaching role of philosophers in a university.

11. Under logic they draw attention to the need for biologists to understand the difference between findings and hypotheses; under semantics they say: "Consider what reality is represented by the following terms: function; contamination; quasi-fluid; disinhibition; structure linked; transport; critical point drying; ultrastructure; vesicle-like; and non-specific. Some of these terms are meaningless; some are vague; some are mystical; some imply experiments that have not been done; some are emotive. Students should be trained to analyze them, and to understand what they really mean in measurement or hypothesis—if they mean anything at all." They go on to stress the importance of understanding the need for control experiments. For some of the same conclusions by a different route, see my 1981.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre & Passeron, Jean-Claude. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice. Sage, 1977.

Brandon, E. P. "O Reason not the Need," Education for Development, vol. 6, pp. 18-25, 1980.

Brandon, E. P. "Logic in the Laboratory," School Science Review, vol.62, pp. 762-65, 1981.

Brent, Allen. Philosophical Foundations for the Curriculum. Allen & Unwin, 1978.

Broudy, Harry S. "Philosophy of Education Between Yearbooks," Teachers College Record, vol. 91, pp. 130-41, 1979.

Colbeck, J. E. "The Vulgar Component in Philosophy," Education for Teaching, no. 99, pp. 22-27, 1976.

Feyerabend, Paul K. "From Incompetent Professionalism to Professionalized Incompetence—The Rise of a New Breed of Intellectuals," Philosophy of Social Science, vol. 8, pp. 37-53, 1978.

Freeman, Helen. "On the Nature of Philosophy of Education and its Practice in Colleges and Departments of Education or 'Does Philosophy of Education leave everything as it is?'," Education for Teaching, no. 98, pp. 37-48, 1975.

Gillies, Francis. "Philosophy and the 'Philosophy of Education' Debate," Education for Teaching, no. 101, pp. 50-56, 1976.

Graham, Keith. J. L. Austin: A Critique of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Humanities, 1977.

Graham, Keith. "A Note on Reading Austin," Synthese, vol. 46, pp. 143-47, 1981.

Hillman, Harold & Sartory, Peter. "A re-examination of the fine structure of the living cell and its implications for biological education," School Science Review, vol. 62, pp. 241-52, 1980.

Hirst, Paul H. Knowledge and the Curriculum. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.

Hirst, Paul H. Review. Philosophy, vol. 52, pp. 366-68, 1977.

Mackie, J. L. Truth, Probability, and Paradox. Oxford University Press, 1973.

Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Penguin, 1977.

McClellan, James E. Philosophy of Education. Prentice-Hall, 1976.

Meynell, Hugo. "What is to be Done about the Philosophy of Education?," Education for Teaching, no. 99, pp. 28-34, 1976.

Pateman, Trevor. Language, Truth and Politics. 2nd. ed. Jean Stroud, 1980.

Peters, R. S. ed. The Philosophy of Education. Oxford University Press, 1973.

Platts, Mark. Ways of Meaning. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

Pratte, Richard. "Analytic Philosophy of Education: A Historical Perspective," Teachers College Record, vol. 81, pp. 145-65, 1979.

Revel, Jean-Francois. Pourquoi des Philosophes? Juillard, 1957.

Sharp, Rachel & Green, Anthony. Education and Social Control. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.

Sklar, Lawrence. Space, Time, and Spacetime. University of California Press, 1974.

Warnock, Mary. Schools of Thought. Faber, 1977.

Williams, Bernard. "Philosophy," in Yudkin, Michael, ed., General Education. Penguin, 1969.

Wilson, P. S. Review. Journal of Further & Higher Education, vol. 1, pp. 135-43, 1977.

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