Philosophy of Education

What it asks

Education transmits knowledge, and it also forms people. It decides what a generation will find obvious.

That gives the field two questions. What are the aims - knowledge for its own sake, employment, citizenship, autonomy, the transmission of a culture? These are not compatible, and every curriculum ranks them whether or not anyone says so.

And what makes teaching legitimate? A teacher forms beliefs in someone who cannot yet assess them independently. Doing that well is education and doing it badly is indoctrination, and the difference is not in the content.

The recurring problems

Teaching against indoctrination. Both instil beliefs in people not yet able to evaluate them. The usual answer is that education aims at the capacity to revise what it taught, which is a good answer and hard to apply to the early years when the most is instilled.

Autonomy as an aim. Making autonomy the goal is itself a substantive commitment, and communities whose way of life it undermines are entitled to notice that it was not neutral.

What knowledge is of most worth. The curriculum is finite. Choosing what goes in is a judgement about what matters, made by some people for others, and it is rarely presented as a judgement at all.

Equality and excellence. Resources spent raising the floor are not spent raising the ceiling. Both are goods, the trade-off is real, and it is usually disguised as a technical question about attainment.

How it developed

Plato's Republic is a work of educational philosophy as much as political philosophy: it asks who should be taught what, and answers in terms of what each is fit for.

Rousseau's Emile in 1762 inverted the tradition by proposing an education that follows the child's development rather than imposing a curriculum, and every child-centred movement since descends from it.

Dewey's Democracy and Education in 1916 tied the two together: education is not preparation for life but a form of it, and a democracy requires citizens formed by participation rather than instruction.

The analytic phase in the 1960s worked on the concepts - what teaching, learning and indoctrination actually are - and produced the field's sharpest distinctions.

Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968 attacked the assumption underneath all of it, that education transmits from those who know to those who do not, and argued that this form itself reproduces domination whatever is taught.

The positions within it

Perennialism and essentialism hold that a canon of enduring value should be transmitted. Progressivism centres the learner's development and experience. Critical pedagogy treats education as a site of political struggle. Liberal education aims at the capacity for autonomous judgement. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

The field is more practical than most and less heeded than it should be, since education policy is generally made without reference to it.

The live questions are about who decides curricula and on what authority, about what education is for when the labour market it prepares people for is unstable, and about what it means to teach the capacity to evaluate claims in an environment where the volume of claims exceeds anyone's capacity to check them.