The Aims of Education Restated (International Library of the Philosophy of Education Volume 22)

141 Pages·2010·1.32 MB·English

by  John White

INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF THE
PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
THE AIMS OF EDUCATION
RESTATED
THE AIMS OF EDUCATION
RESTATED
JOHN WHITE
Volume 22
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published in 1982
This edition first published in 2010
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© 1982 John White
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The aims of education restated
John White
ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL
London, Boston and Henley
First published in 1982
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
39 Store Street, London WCIE 7DD,
9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA and
Broadway House, Newtown Road,
Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 IEN
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.
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.
© John White 1982
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
White, John Ponsford.
The aims of education restated.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Education—Aims and objectives. I. Title.
LB41.W58 370′.11 81–14385
ISBN 0-203-86101-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-7100-0941-0 AACR2
ISBN 0-7100-0998-4 (pbk.)
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Preface ix
1 Introduction 1
A revised concept of education
Are aims necessary?
2 Intrinsic aims 7
Types of justification
Excellence and selection
Conclusion
3 The good of the pupil 17
Introduction
Basic goods
Intrinsic goods
Pupil-centred education: the two-fold tasks
4 The good of society (1): economic, moral and pupil-centred aims 44
Economic aims and pupil-centred aims
Moral aims and pupil-centred aims
5 The good of society (2): moral aims in their economic and political aspects 75
Moral aims and economic aims
Citizenship as an aim
6 The educated man 87
A sketch of his achievements
Problems of objectivity and indoctrination
Childhood education and lifelong education
Different aims for different pupils?
7 The realisation of aims 101
Socioeconomic conditions
Contents vii
Educational means
(1) The ethos of the community
(2) Schools
(3) Other educational institutions
A utopian theory?
Notes 123
Bibliography 125
Index 127
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank those of my MA students at the London Institute of Education who
heard or read earlier drafts of this book and under pressure of whose criticisms I recon-
structed my main argument, sometimes in a radical way. I am grateful, too, for comments
on chapter 3, both from members of the Philosophy of Education Society, to whom I read
papers in Reading, Exeter, Birmingham and London, and from members of the Policies
Research Group in Philosophy of Education at the London Institute.
The comments both of Professor Richard Peters and of Routledge’s anonymous reader
proved very helpful in the final stages of writing and I would like to thank them warmly for
the care they took and the judiciousness of their comments.
My colleague Graham Haydon kindly read and commented on one of the early drafts.
To my wife and colleague, Pat White, I owe an inexpressible debt. This partly concerns
the content of the book, since the basic conception of educating pupils for membership
of a participatory democracy has been heavily influenced by her thought. To her critical
acumen and constant encouragement through all the writings and rewritings, I owe almost
everything. I would like to say a word of thanks and apology, too, to our daughter, Louise,
who has had to put up with a lot of talk within the family over the last few years about the
aims of education, despite the fact that the three things she dislikes most are philosophy,
education and politics!
My final thanks are to Mrs E.M.Simpson and Bernadette Cifuentes for their help in
preparing the typescript.
Preface
This is not by any means a long book, but it is the longest piece of work on what the aims
of education should be that has been published, to my knowledge, since…shall we say since
Whitehead’s Aims of Education of 1929? Not really. Whitehead’s book is a collection of
essays on various subjects, only one of which is on the topic in the title. It may sound odd,
in view of the importance of the issue, but, unless I am mistaken, there just has not been as
yet any book-length investigation of priorities among educational aims.
This causes me some last minute nervousness as I write this preface. Perhaps there are
only too telling reasons why no one has attempted this. Is the topic too impossibly vast, too
densely interconnected with fundamental and ramifying questions about ultimate values,
the good of society, mankind’s place in the cosmos, to be tractable in less than thirty-two
closely printed volumes? Or is it, on the contrary, that there is nothing whatsoever to say:
that there’s no point in discussing what the aims of education should be, either because
there aren’t any, or because all any such discussion could amount to would be purely sub-
jective lucubrations?
I would prefer to think that there are other explanations. For the past twenty years at
least, the keyword in writings about the content of education has been ‘curriculum’, not
‘aims’. Under the aegis of the Schools Council and other bodies there has been a constant
flow of projects, working papers, books and articles on all aspects of school curricula. Only
gradually, it seems to me, has it become apparent that, excellent as much of this work has
been in detail, it cannot stand alone without some overall picture of how the various bits
and pieces should fit together, of what they are all for. One could, I suppose, spend a long
time fashioning separate stones, which will some day be put together to make a house,
without having any overall architectural conception of how the house should look. It would
seem more sensible in both cases to begin from general aims and work down into particu-
larities from there. But when it comes to social planning, of which educational planning
is one example, this seems to go against the grain of the British temperament, at least in
its late twentieth-century form. ‘Piecemeal social engineering’, to use Karl Popper’s well-
known phrase, is more congenial to us than working from first principles. ‘Going back to
square one’ is not exactly seen as a recipe for social progress.
One might have thought that of all the educational disciplines, philosophy of educa-
tion would have kept its head so high in the air, that general discussions of educational
aims would be just what it would engage in. But until very recently it has been much more
analytically orientated. It has been interested in aims, certainly, but almost as much in how
the concept of aim is to be understood as in substantive questions of what aims should be.
Where it has turned to the substantive questions, it has concentrated for the most part on
particular aims, like ‘happiness’, ‘growth’, ‘mental health’, ‘autonomy’, without trying in a
more global way to see how these and other aims should be interrelated and what priorities
there should be among them.