OF THE EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHYADVANCED IN THIS VOLUME
Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, eventhough the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship havefar-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and thefamily. The study of moral education has traditionally taken itsbearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, andthis is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The majordevelopment here has been the revival of virtue ethics as analternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories thatdominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.
One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been aboutwhether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligationsto those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasinglyinterdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with whichmodern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly aboutwhat we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed byphilosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is relatedto a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally orintellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship shouldbe. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivativeconception of civic education will be. Contemporary politicalphilosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. Forexample, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diversedemocracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life oftheir fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). Theneed arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls)believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek tocooperate with others politically on terms that make sense fromtheir moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready toenter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctivecontent. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and sothe task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still,our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in suchreciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as(diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. Thisis tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the roleof citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist criticalconsideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting myresponsibilities as a deliberative citizen.
The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moralright and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideallyvirtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics isthus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology whichlocate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences ormeeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate aboutthe comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from aneducational perspective that may be less important than it hassometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure,adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shedlight on how best to construe the process of moral education, andphilosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicatebetween the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation andvirtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981).But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtueethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects ofmoral education—in particular, the paired processes ofrole-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutinythan they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).
My Personal Philosophy of Education Essay
Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster ofquestions about civic education, and not always from a liberalperspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984)strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theorywhich, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation ofcommunity could preempt many of the problems with conflictingindividual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standingalternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little torecommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to thinkabout how communities could be built and sustained to support the morefamiliar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010).Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced byfeminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because sheinferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools fromher conception of care (Noddings 1992).
Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educationaldistribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessaryunderstanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for justas much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing sois that the rationale for requiring equality under any justdistribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-relatedskills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not(Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in businessmanagement for which we are equally qualified, any increase in yourjob-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I cancatch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition,though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit thatstructure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal incivic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education isno disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a goodcitizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, sofar as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts asa good education, the moral stakes of inequality are therebylowered.
Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of educationand schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specificallyepistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated bysocial and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactionsamong social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophersof education.)
The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophyover the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment inpolitical philosophy that included, among other things, new researchon educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice ineducational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in thisliterature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has beenpervasive.
[PDF] Philosophy of Education Paper
Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educationalinstitution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interestsand goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, includingone’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design thecurriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of socialengineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century therewere numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly fromMarxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the soberinganalysis that in many educational systems, including those in Westerndemocracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interestsof powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it isindeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is farfrom clear and is the focus of much work at the interface ofphilosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of whichis discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this:ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determinedsocial ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate allsuch ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must
An Essay towards a Philosophy of Education
Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helpedto become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life andpursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophicalink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determinecurriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed byPaul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing andthen pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logicalanalysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms ofknowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum isto introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculumcontent should be selected so as “to help the learner attainmaximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” Therelevant 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
An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte M
A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest tophilosophers of education, concerns indoctrination: How if atall does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and ifso is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we sawearlier, extant analyses focus on the aims orintentions of the indoctrinator, the methodsemployed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrinationis successful, all have the result that students/victims eitherdon’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinatedmaterial to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces bothbelief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncriticaldispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, sounderstood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems thatvery young children, at least, have no alternative but to believesans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions toseek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence orevaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination isboth unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious howthis conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish betweenacceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguishbetween indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinatingbelief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taughtsome things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to readand count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of allsuch material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two optionsmight be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).