Problems, issues, and tasks

The aims of education

The most basic problem of philosophy of education is that concerning aims: what are the proper aims and guiding ideals of education? What are the proper criteria for evaluating educational efforts, institutions, practices, and products? Many aims have been proposed by philosophers and other educational theorists; they include the cultivation of curiosity and the disposition to inquire; the fostering of creativity; the production of knowledge and of knowledgeable students; the enhancement of understanding; the promotion of moral thinking, feeling, and action; the enlargement of the imagination; the fostering of growth, development, and self-realization; the fulfillment of potential; the cultivation of “liberally educated” persons; the overcoming of provincialism and close-mindedness; the development of sound judgment; the cultivation of docility and obedience to authority; the fostering of autonomy; the maximization of freedom, happiness, or self-esteem; the development of care, concern, and related attitudes and dispositions; the fostering of feelings of community, social solidarity, citizenship, and civic-mindedness; the production of good citizens; the “civilizing” of students; the protection of students from the deleterious effects of civilization; the development of piety, religious faith, and spiritual fulfillment; the fostering of ideological purity; the cultivation of political awareness and action; the integration or balancing of the needs and interests of the individual student and the larger society; and the fostering of skills and dispositions constitutive of rationality or critical thinking.

All such proposed aims require careful articulation and defense, and all have been subjected to sustained criticism. Both contemporary and historical philosophers of education have devoted themselves, at least in part, to defending a particular conception of the aims of education or to criticizing the conceptions of others. The great range of aims that have been proposed makes vivid the philosopher of education’s need to appeal to other areas of philosophy, to other disciplines (e.g., psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the physical sciences), and to educational practice itself. Given that consideration of education’s proper aims is of fundamental importance for the intelligent guidance of educational activities, it is unfortunate that contemporary discussions of educational policy rarely address the matter.

Clarification of educational concepts

A perennial conception of the nature of philosophy is that it is chiefly concerned with the clarification of concepts, such as knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, mind, meaning, and existence. One of the tasks of the philosophy of education, accordingly, has been the elucidation of key educational concepts, including the concept of education itself, as well as related concepts such as teaching, learning, schooling, child rearing, and indoctrination. Although this clarificatory task has sometimes been pursued overzealously—especially during the period of so-called ordinary language analysis in the 1960s and ’70s, when much work in the field seemed to lose sight of the basic normative issues to which these concepts were relevant—it remains the case that work in the philosophy of education, as in other areas of philosophy, must rely at least in part on conceptual clarification. Such analysis seeks not necessarily, or only, to identify the particular meanings of charged or contested concepts but also to identify alternative meanings, render ambiguities explicit, reveal hidden metaphysical, normative, or cultural assumptions, illuminate the consequences of alternative interpretations, explore the semantic connections between related concepts, and elucidate the inferential relationships obtaining among the philosophical claims and theses in which they are embedded.

Rights, power, and authority

There are several issues that fall under this heading. What justifies the state in compelling children to attend school—in what does its authority to mandate attendance lie? What is the nature and justification of the authority that teachers exercise over their students? Is the freedom of students rightly curtailed by the state? Is the public school system rightly entitled to the power it exercises in establishing curricula that parents might find objectionable—e.g., science curricula that mandate the teaching of human evolution but not creationism or intelligent design and literature curricula that mandate the teaching of novels dealing with sexual themes? Should parents or their children have the right to opt out of material they think is inappropriate? Should schools encourage students to be reflective and critical generally—as urged by the American philosophers Israel Scheffler and Amy Gutmann, following Socrates and the tradition he established—or should they refrain from encouraging students to subject their own ways of life to critical scrutiny, as the American political scientist William Galston has recommended?

The issue of legitimate authority has been raised recently in the United States in connection with the practice of standardized testing, which some critics believe discriminates against the children of some racial, cultural, religious, or ethnic groups (because the test questions rely, implicitly or explicitly, on various culturally specific cues or assumptions that members of some groups may not understand or accept). In such controversial cases, what power should members of allegedly disadvantaged groups have to protect their children from discrimination or injustice? The answer to this question, as to the others raised above, may depend in part on the status of the particular school as public (state-supported) or private. But it can also be asked whether private schools should enjoy more authority with respect to curricular matters than public schools do, particularly in cases where they receive state subsidies of one form or another.

These questions are primarily matters of ethics and political philosophy, but they also require attention to metaphysics (e.g., how are “groups” to be individuated and understood?), philosophy of science (e.g., is “intelligent design” a genuinely scientific theory?), psychology (e.g., do IQ tests discriminate against members of certain minority groups?), and other areas of philosophy, social science, and law.