Philosophy as Educational Enquiry and Critique

Paul Standish
Paul is a Professor of Philosophy of Education, at the School of Education, University of Sheffield.

Aims of this resource

Education as an essential aspect of human life, its institutions, its practices, its policies, can be studied in a variety of ways. People have reflected on education since they began to reflect. In recent decades institutionalised research into education tends to have been dominated by certain assumptions, and these have been adopted in more or less narrow ways: commonly it is assumed that such research must be empirical in character; sometimes it is taken to be in service of educational institutions such as schools, to find ways for them to more effective or to be improved; sometimes the view is expressed that educational research should model itself on medical research, the randomised control trial being its optimum research method. Yet all of these assumptions lose sight of the fact that over more than two millennia there has been systematic enquiry into education of a quite different kind. Such enquiry has been influential not only for policy and practice but for the ways that whole civilisations have understood themselves.

In order to gain an understanding of the ways in which philosophical enquiry into education takes place, we need some preliminary conception of what philosophy is. Defining philosophy is often found to be difficult, and this reflects the fact that in certain respects it is unlike other subjects. One way by which philosophy proceeds is to examine and analyse the concepts that are operative in other forms of enquiry or indeed in life more generally. In the 17 th Century John Locke described philosophy's role as that of the ‘ underlabourer ', on the grounds that its task was not that of the master-craftsman, the person with the grand vision, but rather of his assistant, who would undertake more fine-scale aspects of the work. Even if the aptness of this analogy is not particularly clear, this name has persisted for a certain conception of philosophy's role. Thus, it will be the task of the philosopher to examine the concepts operative in psychological research, or in school improvement or in moral education, and to try to ensure that these are clear and distinct. Research into, for example, self-esteem and its relation to success in school is unlikely to be cogent or to deserve credibility if the idea of self-esteem is shrouded in confusion. It is the philosopher's task to expose this confusion and to offer in its place a more coherent and robust conceptualisation. With the benefit of this the empirical researcher will be able to proceed with greater confidence and on stronger foundations. An expansion of this example and a number of others can be found in, Section (i).

Some see the dispelling of conceptual confusion and the advancing of coherent and robust conceptualisations as philosophy's most important role. Others, by contrast, the eager to affirm that importance, take the view that this is not philosophy's only contribution to education. For philosophers who have addressed questions of education have typically been concerned above all with two principal, interconnected areas of concern: the nature of the good life and how we learn to lead it; and the nature of knowledge and how we come to know. These are admittedly extremely broad matters, and we shall shortly consider how these break down into more specific questions and topics. But in a sense it is these matters that lie behind most questions about education, and it is some response to these that characterises the great visions of education that have come down to us. Brief accounts of examples of such visions can be found in, Section (ii).

Enquiry into these matters inevitably involves questions of justification and value, and in this sense questions of education are ethical through and through. By the same token, empirical research is never free from questions of value: they are there at the start of enquiry, in the concerns that the research seeks to address, and they are there in the discussion of results. Indeed some of the most interesting aspects of social science research are to be found in its discussion of findings – a discussion that is quite commonly informed by reference to literature of a non-empirical kind.

In the light of this broader conception of philosophy – as involving conceptual analysis as well as questions of justification and value – it can be seen that much that is published under the name of educational research touches on its methods of enquiry. A quick look at mainstream educational journals will show that much of what they publish is not concerned with the reporting of empirical findings but rather with the advancing of an argument in one way or another. This surely is the territory of philosophy. But this is often done in a haphazard way and without careful and systematic attention to the ways that such questions have been handled in the past, to the arguments and modes of approach that have been developed, and to the literatures in which these are embodied. An indication of these different literatures, with an important caveat, is to be found in, Section ( iii ).

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