The Blackwell Companion to
Philosophy of Education is a very welcome addition to the philosophical
literature examining the foundations of education.  It consists of 45 chapters
by scholars in both philosophy departments and schools of education, collected
by editor Randall Curren into four groups: Historical and Contemporary
Movements, Teaching and Learning, The Politics and Ethics of Schooling, and
Higher Education.  For those who are new to this area of philosophy, it is an
excellent introduction, and for those who teach this subject, it is an
indispensable resource. 

There are some areas with which
most philosophers with a background in "applied ethics" will be
familiar, especially as relevant to college education; Robert Simon has an
article on academic freedom and Michael Davis discusses the ethics of research;
Bernard Boxhill surveys arguments on affirmative action in higher education and
Peter Markie spells out issues in regulating the professor-student
relationship.  These are all worthy issues, and it is good that this collection
includes them, but they are not so important to the fundamental question of the
ultimate aims of public education, which mostly concerns children and
adolescents before they get to college. 

The first section of the book
contains fourteen articles on the history of philosophy of education from
Socrates to Postmodernism.  Many of the chapters are useful although others are
problematic for pedagogical use.  C.D.C. Reeve writes less than two pages on
Socrates, six on Plato and seven on Aristotle, and this leaves him very little
space to discuss these foundational figures in any detail.  Yet there are three
separate articles devoted to Stoicism, the Judaic tradition, and Augustine,
none of which are particularly essential for a course in the philosophy of
education.  Descartes, Locke and John Stuart Mill are crammed together in one
dense chapter on enlightenment liberalism, with epistemology and political
theory as regards to education mixed together.  In another chapter, Rousseau
and Dewey are conjoined which is a puzzling editorial choice since as they are
widely regarded as two of the most important philosophers to discuss education
at length in recent centuries.  Patrick Riley bravely tries to explain the
concept of the general will and his Rousseau’s political theory in a few pages,
but his discussion will be opaque to most who are not already well versed in
the history of political thought.  (Students will do better to refer to Randall
Curren’s own entries on the "History of Philosophy of Education" in
the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  Jennifer Welchman’s
explanation of the educational philosophy of John Dewey is another exercise in
condensation of ideas, and is also challenging for non-experts to fully
appreciate.  One of the essential difficulties in setting out the import of
philosophers of education is that they are reacting not so much to previous
philosophers as to trends in educational practice.  So to explain their
theories in an historical vacuum is inviting confusion.  It would be helpful to
have thumbnail sketches of the chronology of landmark events in the history of
education in the West, dating back to ancient Athens, and this would provide
essential background to these articles. 

Three intriguing articles in this
section focus on "Kant, Hegel, and the Rise of Pedagogical Science,"
(G. Felicitas Munzel), German Romanticism (Frederick C. Beiser), and "The
Past as Future? Hellenism, the Gymnasium, and Altertunwissenschaft"
(Wolfgang Mann).  They discuss trends in German thought in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries which have been profoundly influential for contemporary
educational movements; these influences may be less familiar to philosophers
and so these three chapters are especially useful.  They are rich discussions
but they will probably be difficult for students. 

The final four chapters in this
section are on analytical philosophy, feminism, critical theory and
postmodernism.  These all provide helpful brief surveys of these movements, and
reflect much of the diversity of approach and the contested definitions within
each.  Some might wish for a longer discussion of the ideas of Paulo Freire and
critical pedagogy (which get only a couple of pages), since he is often held up
to be such a powerful influence on the field.  David Cooper’s unenthusiastic
exposition of postmodern theorists such as Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard
and Sloterdijk leaves one wondering what value there is in such an approach or
why it is worth any discussion at all. 

In the second section on teaching
and learning are thirteen articles that set out some standard debates in
education and what has come to be referred as pedagogy.  Paul Standish writes
on the aims of education, D.C. Phillips on theories of teaching and learning,
Harvey Siegel on cultivating reason, Jonathan Adler on knowledge, truth, and
learning; and Graham Haydon on moral education.  These survey familiar debates
on different models of education, different theories on the nature of
knowledge, the nature and measurement of intelligence, and critical thinking.  Haydon’s
discussion of moral education is rather abstract when it would have been
helpful to be more concrete about different models of what it is to make
students ethically educated, such as values clarification and character
education.  Siegel’s survey of approaches to rationality spends most of its
space considering critiques of reason from Feyerabend, feminism and
postmodernism.  It would have been enlightening to know more about the project
of trying to teach critical thinking skills to children and what philosophers
have said about the project.  Indeed, it would have been helpful to have more
discussion about the possibility of teaching philosophy to children and
adolescents. 

An intriguing chapter is Richard
Ryan and Martin Lynch’s on motivation on classroom management.  Much of it is
psychological theory but at the heart is a more philosophical issue about the
autonomy of students and whose responsibility it is for them to learn.  They
give special mention to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s view that education is a
matter of helping a child develop constructive powers and they relate this to
John Dewey’s models of education that promote the autonomy of students. 
Unfortunately, the authors do not draw links between this debate and one of the
most common complaints of school teachers today, that students are unmotivated
because their parents are not encouraging them at home.  When faced with
student indifference, to what extent do teachers have a responsibility to
overcome the students’ attitudes?  This issue is particularly important when
combined with that of teacher assessment, when another worrying trend is that
teachers are being assessed on their students’ performance.  As Andrew Davis
points out in one of the best articles in the book, on the measurement of
learning, it is not only unreasonable to hold teachers to such standards, but
it also hampers teaching since teachers then "teach to the test." 
Davis does a wonderful job of setting out problems for teacher assessment and
makes a powerful skeptical case that "the current approaches to assessment
in the UK and the USA are counterproductive even if education is seen as the
servant of a competitive economy," which of course is an impoverished
conception of education in the first place. 

The section ends with four more
subject-specific discussions of teaching, concerning science, elementary
arithmetic, art and literature.  Obviously they will be of most interest to
teachers of those subjects.  Richard Smith surveys some of the philosophical
issues that arise in teaching literature without giving extensive discussion of
any particular one.  Michael Matthews spells out the case for making teachers
aware of the conceptual and methodological questions at the heart of science,
because they are fundamental to the students’ understanding of science.  While
he is undoubtedly correct, reflecting on the actual ways that science is taught
in public schools, and the pressures to "teach to the test," may make
one wish that Matthews’ article were required reading for school
administrators.  Mark Steiner’s article on teaching elementary arithmetic
through empirical applications seems rather specialized to be of general
interest, and his use of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics will be over
the head of most educators, and possibly a good number of philosophers too. 
Noel Carroll’s discussion of the educational function of art is primarily aimed
at refuting the aesthetic view that art is primarily valuable on its own terms
rather than for its social effects, and this allows him to conclude that art
has a powerful educational role.  It might have helped if he had included
discussion of particular works of art, but his argument should be clear enough
to most readers. 

The most philosophically
interesting part of the book is the third, on the politics and ethics of
schooling.  This includes 11 chapters, providing expositions of philosophical
debates concerning fundamental issues in education.  There is a version of Amy Gutmann’s
first chapter of Democratic Education, and this is nicely complemented
by Rob Reich’s discussion of common schooling and educational choice, where he
provides a Deweyan argument for the essential democratic value of bringing
people of different backgrounds together.  James Dwyer provides a helpful
discussion of children’s rights, making a strong case that in the Supreme
Court’s decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder that Amish parents can give their
children a different education from other children, the equality rights of
Amish children were violated.  Harry Brighouse brings in political theory in
his exploration of educational equality and justice.  He is mainly interested
in liberal theories of distributive justice such as those of Rawls or Dworkin,
and he spells out the difficulties of determining what is a just distribution
of education. 

Robert Fullinwider casts a skeptical
light on multicultural education, making a great deal of its confused
foundations.  He points out that only some cultures are generally included, and
indeed, it is far from clear what should count as a culture.  He explains with
approval that in the UK, such education is given the more plain and honest
label of anti-racist education.  The background to such trends in modern
education is set out nicely in Yael Tamir’s article on education and the
politics of identity, where he argues that liberal theory can "foster a
wide range of cultural and linguistic diversity but a rather limited normative
diversity" (507).  Kenneth Strike provides a helpful discussion of the
ethics of teaching, pointing out some of the problems with the NEA Code of Ethics. 
Strike emphasizes the importance of the concept of teaching a subject with
integrity, and he argues that teaching is an intrinsically moral profession. 

One of the most important articles
in the book is Robert Ladenson’s "Inclusion and Justice in Special Education,"
because the ethics of inclusion deserves extensive philosophical discussion yet
has not so far received it.  Ladenson starts with a case from his own
experience as a hearing officer in a dispute between parents of a girl with a
form of autism and her school.  The parents wanted their daughter Beth to be
included in a regular education kindergarten but the school did not believe
that it was an appropriate.  Aside from the question of what arrangement would
provide the best education, there is the question of what is the most ethical
distribution of resources.  Including a child with cognitive impairments or
behavioral problems in a regular education classroom can be disruptive but it
can also create an atmosphere in which students become more accepting of each
other’s differences.  Landenson explains some of the details of the Individuals
with Disabilities Education Act, and he spells out two different approaches to
determining what is the best kind of education to provide.  What he calls
"the ethics of inclusionary care" is closely related to the ethics of
care as defended by feminist theorists.  He contrasts it with "the
morality of equal educational concern," which focuses more on concepts of
justice.  Ladenson goes into some detail in describing and contrasting these
two approaches, but he does not defend one over the other.  His discussion will
be extremely helpful to future discussion in philosophical issues in special
education and disability studies.

In conclusion, Randall Curren’s
collection of articles in the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of
Education is a very strong selection that will make the subject interesting
to philosophers who were not previously aware that interesting work was being
done here.  It will also greatly enrich the existing discussion of the
foundations of education proceeding in education schools and facilitate the
dialog between educational experts and philosophers.

© 2004 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also
editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Philosophical