Wilfred Carr’s anthology
provides us with eighteen papers published in the decade up to 2004 by a
predominantly British cohort of professional philosophers of education with
tertiary students in mind. To that extent, we are given a snapshot of how the
turn-of-the-century self-consciously defines its forays into the thickets of
educational politics and policy, institutional pedagogy and practice, against a
previous generation’s adherence to conceptual analysis of a supposedly decontextualised
kind. Also brooding over this collection is the specter of the moral philosopher
Alasdair MacIntyre whose seminal 1981 work, After Virtue, explicitly
figures in seven of the contributions. Both factors will form the kernel of
this brief review.

In the initial segment
of the anthology, readers are immediately introduced to the theme that rival
traditions employed by philosophers of education nowadays cannot be adjudicated
because there is no basis for so doing which is itself not dependent upon some
tradition or other. For this reason alone, we are assured, we should not expect
that any approach contained within the anthology has been or will be
universally accepted. This concession proves to be a marked contrast to the
analytic approach of the ‘sixties inspired by R.S. Peters and Israel Scheffler
on either side of the Atlantic. As MacIntyre himself
is cited as claiming, by its "piecemeal" focus upon isolated issues
whilst rigorously analysing the logical criteria of such basic educational
concepts as teaching and learning, development and indoctrination, the analytic
movement failed to "provide decisive answers" to the pressing
substantive concerns affecting actual pedagogic policies and procedures (3).
Ultimately, the movement is found guilty of erecting conceptual interpretations
which, though universal in intent, were "both historically contingent and
culturally specific" (4). In its place and mindful of the growing
irrelevance of mere conceptual analysis, the task at hand is now largely though
not exhaustively construed in the Aristotelian terms promulgated by MacIntyre
since the ‘eighties. Philosophers of education, we are told, need to develop a
practical and evaluative rather than a theoretical and speculative approach–at
times given to "analysis of policy"; at other times, "analysis
for policy" (24). Demonstrated by all contributors is the degree to which
they specifically attune themselves to the socio-cultural and socio-political
practices of persons joined in pursuit of the intrinsic (or internal) good
rather than the extrinsic (or instrumental) goods of educative processes.
Nowhere perhaps is this attunement more tightly captured than in the
"experiential subtleties of the moral vocabulary of care" (220)
explored by Max van Manen.

Notwithstanding the
foregoing contrasts, the papers by Wilfred Carr and Terence McLaughlin more
explicitly, James Walker and Mark Halstead more implicitly, take care when
condemning the analytic approach for presupposing that concepts exist in some
non-temporal form or for presupposing that the very act of analysis is detached
from actual cultural and ideological circumstances. None simply reduces the
analytic movement to its linguistic variant, the so-called ordinary language
approach dominating Oxford during the ‘forties and
‘fifties. Yet none recognizes the full ramifications that the aim of analysis,
irrespective of its execution, is one of understanding the cluster of concepts
that, in specific communal, cultural, or institutional settings then and now,
so often lacks clarity and coherence, let alone consistency. Moreover, all seem
oblivious to the radical strains of the wider analytic movement as it evolved
in North
America.
None recognises, for instance, how W.V.O. Quine, whose assault upon our crucial
appeals to meaning and reference, or Donald Davidson, whose construal of action
and interpretation, might invite a profound re-configuration of the very nature
of pedagogic theory and practice.

When readers enter the
last three segments of this collection, very noticeable is how
contributors–most notably Joseph Dunne and Richard Smith–wrestle with the
persistent theme of practice, a theme that lends a unity to the anthology as a
whole and which would have been more evident had an index been provided. To a
greater or lesser degree, it becomes apparent that the initial wave of MacIntyre’s
tripartite analysis of the acquisition and development of virtues–charity and
courage, honesty and integrity, to mention but four–buoys so many papers here
anchored as they are to his conception of practice. By "practice" we
are meant to understand, as succinctly summarized by Dunne (152-154), any
coherent, complex, and co-operative activity whose intrinsic worth is realized
in the attempts to achieve the appropriate standard of excellence that are at
least in part constitutive of that activity. Hence, those individuals socially
inducted into it find their notion of its intrinsic ends and goods
systematically extended. Because our practices may be multiple and competing
and because they are not immune to criticism and may in fact be evil, MacIntyre
concedes that this preliminary phase of analysis cannot be regarded as the
final word. None the less, whatever else "practice" might mean, for MacIntyre
and, by extension, his followers in this anthology not all activities are
practices. Laying bricks is not a practice in the way that composing a lay is,
to draw upon Aristotle’s distinction between "praxis" and "poiesis,"
between doing and making. Nor are practices simply a means to an
institutionally ordained end or a set of technical proficiencies. Nor again are
the standards of a practice merely determined by individual choice; rather,
they are the historical product of practitioners past and present.

Readers may well ask
whether, in the rush to seize upon the educative dimensions of MacIntyre’s
coupling of practice and virtue, one factor has been overlooked in this
collection. Practice is not a unitary notion. Not only do we constantly switch
between its "task" sense ("Epsilon was, is, or will be practicing
how to sculpt a block of limestone") and its "achievement" sense
("Epsilon had, has, or will have practiced how to sculpt a block of
limestone"). We also apply the notion of practice in quite different ways:
from exercising a profession or occupation to planning or scheming in a
duplicitous manner; from the action of doing, executing, operating, or
performing something to the usual, habitual, customary, or conventional way of
doing something; from having a committed rather than a nominal membership of
some institution to training or drilling someone in order to gain proficiency;
or from emphasizing the contrast with believing, knowing, professing, or theorizing
something to negotiating or dealing with someone in order to influence or
persuade him or her in some course of action. Not all of the half-a-dozen kinds
of practice just enumerated need be linked to the acquisition or development of
moral virtues.

Finally, even if we
accept the stipulative use of practice employed within this anthology, we still
encounter another quandary. How are we to discriminate communal practices from
the very institution at the centre of each writer’s pre-occupation, the school
as the site of education? In sum, the location and the number of people
involved is as insufficient a set of criteria as is the basis of membership in
or "exclusion" from these "curiously sequestered zones"
(146). Similarly, the overt or covert enforceability of relationships and rules
(whether rules be of the regulative or imperative or of the constitutive or
definitional kind) would seem to apply to both practices and institutions. As
Robin Barrow reminds us in light of debates over the education of the
handicapped (186-187), it would appear our puzzlement persists as long as we
continue to resort to contingent sociological or empirical factors. Describing
a set of activities exclusively by brute facts fails to establish what makes
the very activities so described a distinctive practice. No matter how detailed
our description of Epsilon’s actions of cutting and chiseling, brushing and
polishing a block of limestone, appealing to raw facts alone does not capture
the institutional practice of sculpting (aside from whether, in turn, the
resultant sculpture can be construed as a representation or not). So, not only
is the onus on contributors to Carr’s anthology to confront what might be meant
by practice–and here the absence of reference to the work of, say, Pierre Bourdieu,
Jean Lave, and Etienne Wenger seems curious–but they also have the burden of
logically distinguishing the notion of practice from the concept of
institution.

Yet, if we are correct
in identifying certain gaps in how the analytic movement and the notion of
practice are handled, testimony still should be given to the strengths
otherwise displayed by this collection of essays, a collection which extends
yesteryear’s adherence to the formal logical process of inferring conclusions
from propositions to philosophical argument which nowadays deliberately
encompasses psychological, sociological, and linguistic perspectives.

© 2005 R.A. Goodrich

R.A. Goodrich teaches in the School of
Communication & Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia and is a co-editor of the online refereed
arts-practice journal, Double
Dialogues.

Categories: Philosophical