Philosophy of Education

First published Mon Jun 2, 2008; substantive revision Sun Oct 7, 2018
Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the
nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory
and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and
individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-
ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology,
metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it
looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social,
legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns
itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both
basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of
educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies
and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social,
economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of
curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity,
argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or
affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation
of educational aims and interventions.
Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical
tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most
distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader
philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus
here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his
descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the
extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and
to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that
education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying
articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it
continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973
[1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial;
some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.
This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy
of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

 1. Problems in Delineating the Field

 2. Analytic Philosophy of Education and Its Influence
 3. Areas of Contemporary Activity
o 3.1 The Content of the Curriculum and the Aims and Functions of Schooling
 o 3.2 Social, Political and Moral Philosophy
o 3.3 Social Epistemology, Virtue Epistemology, and the Epistemology of
Education
o 3.4 Philosophical Disputes Concerning Empirical Education Research
 4. Concluding Remarks
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

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.