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The London School : (Oakeshott), Peters, Hirst, Dearden
An important tradition within modern philosophy of education has been the analytical approach sometimes referred to as the London School . This name, however, is misleading in two respects: first, while key figures in this development were employed at the Institute of Education in the University of London, other important contributors were not; second, the name tends to hide the fact that parallel developments were under-way elsewhere, most notably at Harvard with the work of Israel Scheffler. A landmark in the early stages of this work was the appointment, in 1957, of R.S. Peters to a chair in the philosophy of education at the London Institute of Education. Peters had previously worked in a Philosophy department, but he quickly established his reputation in this new field. Peters and his colleagues – most notably Paul Hirst and Robert Dearden – worked together to develop an approach to the study of education that was both distinctive and highly influential, at home and overseas. Their approach was distinctive especially because it applied the assumptions, methods and approaches of analytical philosophy to the study of education. Analytical philosophy, which was the dominant form of the subject in Philosophy departments at the time, understands philosophy to involve a process of conceptual analysis in order to arrive at clear and distinct ideas; it takes the point of enquiry to be the uncovering of the underlying logic of the matter at hand. Hence, in the study of education the assumption is that the concepts of teaching, learning, authority, knowledge, understanding, creativity, imagination and so on need to be addressed. Through the analysis of these and similar concepts the logic of education will be revealed and a sound basis for policy and practice will be established. To some extent, the role of philosophy of education will involve looking at the concepts that are operative in other modes of enquiry into education – take, for example, the concept of intelligence in psychology – and clarifying these so that the psychologist's empirical work will be based on sound conceptual foundations.
An important aspect of the work of the London School was its critique of progressive, child-centred educational thought, which in the 1960s became something of an orthodoxy in teacher education. In ways that may at first sight sound reactionary, they criticised progressivism's preoccupation with play, happiness, creativity, experiential learning and growth, within which they detected a somewhat sentimental view of the child. For example, progressive educators tended to think that children must above all be happy, that only the happy child would learn well; and this came to mean that a classroom in which children were smiling and laughing was a good classroom. But, as Dearden in particular pointed out, happiness is a much more elusive notion than this suggests. Sometimes we can be laughing but not be happy, or happy only in a superficial way. Sometimes a greater degree of happiness comes as a result of struggling and then feeling that one has really achieved something. Struggles may bring satisfactions that are more profound. If smiling and laughing were the ultimate satisfaction, we should put scientists to work on a drug that would produce this state reliably and without difficulty. But surely we want more from our lives than this. At least, surely we should!
Moreover, the emphasis in child-centred education on new methods of teaching led R.S. Peters to complain that it was concerned too much with the manner and insufficiently with the matter of education. In other words, it was insufficiently attentive to questions about what was learned. From the point of view of liberal education, by contrast, the question of what is to be learned is the fundamental question of education. Let us consider how its proponents set about answering that question. This will enable us to see how their ideas were not reactionary and authoritarian; like the progressives, they were concerned with freedom, but they differed over what freedom consisted in and how this was to be realised. There should be little doubt, however, that in expanding on this their work went beyond the methods of conceptual analysis that they espoused towards a more substantive vision of the good. This was realised especially in their restatement of the idea of a liberal education , a restatement that drew its greatest strengths from the inspiration of the British political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott.
In Ethics and Education , Peters attempts to address the question of what makes people's lives worthwhile through the consideration of ascending stages of enjoyment – from physical pleasures (which, as the example of eating shows, provide remarkable scope for refinement and style), through games and other activities (where skill can be exercised with increasing precision and finesse), and finally to those ‘theoretical activities', such as the study of history or mathematics, that not only offer infinite scope for development and deepening interest but cast light, so it was claimed, on the living of one's life as a whole.
Crucial to the account being advanced was the idea that the development of the mind is quite unlike the development of, say, a muscle in the body. Of course, there are physical parts of the body upon which the mind depends, but the mind is not an organ of the body; the brain is not the mind. To recognise this is to realise the immense importance that initiation into a culture has for the mind's development. To speak of initiation into a culture is not to refer to something highbrow but rather to think of the range of complex practices that makes up any society and into which children are gradually introduced. Coming to participate in these practices is the development of mind. If education is to be more than the mere training for a job, it should free the mind to function in as rich a way as is possible; it is in this sense particularly that it is liberal. Not to introduce learners to the ways of understanding that have come down to us would amount to leaving them confined within limited ways of thinking – ones that they had acquired perhaps only from their immediate community or perhaps from a diet of mindless television.
The idea that education ought to initiate people into those forms of knowledge and understanding that have come down to us was developed most explicitly in the writings of Paul Hirst . In his classic essay “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge”, he ventures to suggest that there are some seven distinct forms that knowledge takes (history, the physical sciences and so on). The fertility of this idea in curricular terms needs to be understood in terms not so much of whether or not the list that is generated is finally definitive but of the implication that an education that is limited to only some of these forms will in the end constitute a restriction on the development of mind and, hence, on the possibilities of freedom. The spirit of Hirst's commitment here is powerfully conveyed by the words with which he concludes this important essay, words drawn from Michael Oakeshott's “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind”:
As civilised human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and enquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages. . . Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. . . Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human utterance (in Hirst, 1965).
The initiation into the “conversation of mankind” then involves something like an initiation into “the best that has been thought and said”, in Matthew Arnold's famous (if contentious) phrase. And in this respect these words not only value the past but connect with values that shaped the thinking of Ancient Greece. The past is not valuable because it is the past. It is valuable because it offers us the developing history of attempts to get at the truth of things and to understand what matters in human lives.
The commitment to a liberal education is a commitment to freedom, and this does indeed connect with the modern political liberalism associated especially with J.S. Mill. But the extent of the connection is to be questioned. In Mill, and in the political liberalism that is in part his legacy, the commitment is to freedom to choose what to do : in the absence of any indisputable substantive conception of the good, the individual should decide for herself how she is going to live her life. Far from being a licence for irresponsibility, this aspect of freedom was developed by the London School in terms of what came to be called “rational autonomy”, the most succinct expression of which is to be found in Dearden's essay “Autonomy and Education” (for more on this, see autonomy ). As Dearden explains: “A man is autonomous, on Kant's view, if in his actions he has bound himself by moral laws legislated by his own reason, as opposed to being governed by his own inclinations” (Dearden, 1972). But there is a potential conflict here between the freedom of rational autonomy, a freedom to choose what to do, and the emphasis in more classical moments of liberal education on freedom from illusion , the freedom to see things truly, the essence of Plato's conception of the good life (see Ancient Greece). In the decades since this restatement of the idea of a liberal education was made, with the growing emphasis on political liberalism, there has been a tendency for the connection with political liberalism (and hence with autonomy) to come to the fore, to the growing neglect of that more classical connection with the contemplation of truth. It is this precisely that is found, for example, in the work of John White and Harry Brighouse , Peters' immediate successors to the London chair.
For further reading, see:
Dearden, R.F. (1972) Autonomy and Education.
Hirst, P.H. (1972) Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge.
Standish, P. (2007) Rival Conceptions of the Philosophy of Education, Ethics and Education.
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