An Introduction to Philosophy of Education, 4th Edition

225 Pages·2006·1.29 MB·English

An Introduction to Philosophy of
Education, 4th Edition
‘Well written, accessible to students with no previous background in philosophy...
an excellent introduction.’
The Times Higher Education Supplement(on an earlier edition)
What does it mean to be well educated?
In the fourth edition of this best-selling textbook, the authors introduce
students to the business of philosophizing, thereby inducting them into the
art of reasoning and analysing key concepts in education.
This introductory text is a classic in its field. It shows, first and foremost,
the importance of philosophy in educational debate and as a background to any
practical activity such as teaching. What is involved in the idea of educating a
person or the idea of educational success? What, if anything, can be known and
how should weorganize what we know for curriculum purposes? What are the
criteria for establishing the optimum balance between formal and informal
teaching techniques? How trustworthy is educational research? In addition to
these questions, which strike to the heart of the rationale for the educative
process as a whole, the authors explore such concepts as culture, creativity,
autonomy, indoctrination, needs, interests, and learning by discovery.
In this new updated edition, the authors draw on the latest research in
genetics to argue that education is uniquely human and is essentially what
develops us as humans. Resisting modern tendencies to equate knowledge
with opinion, and value judgements with taste, this book leads the reader
into the business of philosophizing and champions the cause of reason in
education.
Robin Barrow was previously Reader in Philosophy of Education at the
University of Leicester, UK; he is currently Professor of Philosophy of
Education at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada where for
ten years he was also Dean of Education.
Ronald Woods was until recently Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of
Education at the University of Leicester, UK.
Related titles
Philosophy and Educational Policy
A critical introduction
John Gingell and Christopher Winch
Making Sense of Education
An introduction to the philosophy and theory of
education and teaching
David Carr
Spirituality,Philosophy and Education
David Carr and John Haldane
The authors are grateful to Educational Philosophy and Theoryfor permission to make use of
some material originally published in that journal.
An Introduction to
Philosophy of Education,
4th Edition
Robin Barrow and Ronald Woods
4th edition revised by Robin Barrow
First published in 1975 by Methuen & Co.
Second edition 1982
Third edition in 1988 by Routledge
Fourth edition published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1975, 1982, 1988, 2006 Robin Barrow and Ronald Woods
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN10: 0–415–38127–4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–38126–6 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–96995–2 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–38127–7 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–38126–0 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–96995–3 (ebk)
Contents
Preface vi
Foreword ix
Introduction 1
1 Thinking about education 8
2 What is it to be human? 21
3 The concept of education 26
4 Knowledge and the curriculum 38
5 Curriculum theory 58
6 Indoctrination 70
7 Rationality 84
8 Self-determination 98
9 The postmodern challenge 109
10 Needs, interests, and experience 115
11 Creativity 142
12 Culture 155
13 Research into teaching 174
14 Conclusion: theory and practice 185
Bibliography 192
Index 197
Preface
Philosophers sometimes refer to a ship that needs repairs over the course of
a long voyage, in order to illustrate certain problems or questions about
identity. The wooden ship leaves harbour and, while at sea, certain planks
have to be replaced. A short time later some others have to be replaced; a
few days after that, some more; and so on, until by the journey’s end all the
planks that went to make up the original ship have been replaced. Is this
theship that was originally put to sea or an entirely different one? Whatever
theanswer to that question, this book is beginning to resemble that ship.
Since the launching of the first edition in 1975 five completely new
chapters have been added, one has been thrown overboard, and the remain-
ing text has been subjected to repeated overhaul. Nonetheless, I hope it can
be said that the book remains recognizably the same one that Ron Woods
and I set out to write thirty years ago. That is to say, I hope that it still pro-
vides a helpful introduction to the business of philosophizing in the sense
of engaging in conceptual analysis and coherent reasoning about education,
while providing a plausible answer to some specific educational questions
and establishing at any rate the groundwork of an argument for a particular
view of what education is all about and what it therefore demands of us.
In this revision, three new chapters entitled, respectively, ‘Thinking about
Education’, ‘What is it to be Human?’ and ‘The Postmodern Challenge’
have been added. ‘Thinking about Education’attempts to set the stage by
briefly examining the context in which philosophical thought about educa-
tion operates, stressing in particular the rational tradition in Western
thought to which philosophical analysis belongs, and the wider concerns of
schooling of which education is merely a part, albeit, it will be argued, the
major part. It seems important also to address the question ‘What is it to be
Human?’in view of much recent research, particularly in genetics, and in
order to locate education as a peculiarly human activity. It seemed neces-
sary to add the brief chapter on ‘The Postmodern Challenge’not in order to
address any theses associated with any particular individuals, but to combat
the stultifying effect of certain propositions, such as that there is no truth or
Preface vii
that nothing can be known, which, rightly or wrongly, are often classified
as postmodern in tenor and which, if accepted, would undermine the key
foundations not only of the positive educational argument of this book but
also of the philosophical activity that it is concerned with. The chapter on
‘Understanding’of previous editions has been dropped, not because we do
not continue to believe that education is primarily and essentially about
understanding, but because a great deal of the overall text is concerned
directly and indirectly with issues to do with understanding and knowledge,
and, given a need to cut something at the publishers’behest, it was felt that
a direct examination of what ‘understanding’ means could be foregone.
Beyond these major changes, the bibliography has been brought up to date
and the remaining text has been subjected to various fairly minor revisions
and one or two paragraph length additions.
I should like to conclude with a comment on the updating of references
and examples. I have, by and large, attempted to bring specific examples of,
for example, films up to date, so that the ‘Straw Dogs’ of 1975, which
became ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ of 1988, now becomes ‘Crash’.
This is simply to help the majority of readers recognize the reference! And
though, for example, a few references to the game of Bingo are retained,
because as a matter of fact for a period educational philosophers used it as
an iconic example and argued about its specifically educational potential,
most of them have been replaced by reference to, for example, video-games,
since clearly it is the latter that represent a potential challenge to education
today rather than Bingo. But, and this is important, by and large the philo-
sophical references – the author cited, the arguments explored – have not
been changed.
A very minor reason for this is that after discussion with the publisher it
was agreed to produce a new edition of this work rather than a new intro-
duction to philosophy of education altogether, since, strange as it may be,
this book has proven itself capable of weathering changes of fashion and
focus over time. If all the topics and the arguments relating to them had
been brought up to date, drawing on new material written exclusively in the
last ten years, then clearly it would not have been a new edition; it would
have been a new book – a different ship.
A major reason is related to the original aim of the book: to introduce the
business of philosophizing about education. To that end, provided the exam-
ples are not so foreign as to be incomprehensible to the reader, it really
doesn’t matter what issues, what authors, or what arguments one uses, since
the primary purpose is to illustrate philosophy in action and to have mate-
rial on which to practice (i.e. get thinking). That reason would be sufficient
to justify continuing to examine, for example, Peters’work on the concept
of education or Hirst’s work on forms of knowledge. Indeed, in the latter
case, Hirst himself, if he hasn’t actually repudiated his original thesis, has
viii Preface
certainly moved way beyond it. But that does not stop it still being an
intriguing and persuasive thesis, and one which may serve as an excellent
way of introducing the question of the nature of knowledge and the signif-
icance of the question for curriculum.
But sufficient though that reason alone would be, I must in honesty add
one more. While philosophy of education continues to thrive, not very
much has been done in recent years that really adds to the primary analytic
work done thirty to forty years ago, at least at a basic level. If I look at a
recent issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education, for example, I see
a number of excellent articles, but none of them speak to the issues in this
book. This is not to set the stage for a confrontation between different types
and styles of philosophy. It is simply to say that this book is predicated on
the belief that it is desirable that all teachers and educators should recog-
nize the importance of, and become reasonably adept at, analysing the key
concepts in education; that, and secondarily suggesting a particular view of
what such analysis leads us to recognize as genuinely educational, is what
this book is about, and most of the work focused on that was indeed done
some years ago. Does this make the book old fashioned? No. This –
analysing the key educational concepts – is something that each generation
has to do for itself anew.
Robin Barrow
Vancouver
2005
Foreword
This Foreword consists of the Prefaces to the second and third editions,
which are retained largely for historical reasons. Apart from registering
when various specific changes and additions were made, they provide a
record of the continual debate among philosophers as to the precise nature
of analysis, and remind us of the constant need for those who are committed
to the view of rationality that underpins this book to defend it against those
who, however incoherently, seem to question it, whether in the name of
relativism, nihilism, Marxism, sociology of knowledge, or postmodernism.
Preface to second edition
The invitation from our publishers to update and revise our Introduction to
Philosophy of Educationgives rise to the question of the nature of philoso-
phy, for it is not the kind of subject that dates in the way that physics or even
history may do. There are revolutionary thinkers in philosophy who open
up entirely new paths of inquiry, but they are exceedingly rare, and even
they do not often falsify the past so much as move away from it. Philosophy
is less about generating knowledge of new matters than about providing
greater understanding of what we are already familiar with. Seldom are
there new discoveries or new interpretations that make previous work in the
field unacceptable. What, for example, Plato had to say about love or jus-
tice over two thousand years ago has not been invalidated, replaced, or ren-
dered obsolete by the work, of, say Wittgenstein in the last century. Plato’s
writings really do have as much pertinence today to the questions with
which they are concerned as any contemporary work, in a way that the writ-
ings of early Greek doctors or scientists, for all their intrinsic interest, do
not. There can of course be specific criticism in philosophy that shows
arguments thought to have been sound to be untenable, but that kind of shift
of view scarcely applies at the level of an introductory text.
Out initial aim was to provide an introduction to the business of
philosophizing in the context of educational problems; in line with that aim