philosophy of education a branch of philosophy concerned with virtually every aspect of the educational enterprise. It significantly overlaps other, more mainstream branches (especially epistemology and ethics, but even logic and metaphysics). The field might almost be construed as a ‘series of footnotes’ to Plato’s Meno, wherein are raised such fundamental issues as whether virtue can be taught; what virtue is; what knowledge is; what the relation between knowledge of virtue and being virtuous is; what the relation between knowledge and teaching is; and how and whether teaching is possible. While few people would subscribe to Plato’s doctrine (or convenient fiction, perhaps) in Meno that learning by being taught is a process of recollection, the paradox of inquiry that prompts this doctrine is at once the root text of the perennial debate between rationalism and empiricism and a profoundly unsettling indication that teaching passeth understanding. Mainstream philosophical topics considered within an educational context tend to take on a decidedly genetic cast. So, e.g., epistemology, which analytic philosophy has tended to view as a justificatory enterprise, becomes concerned if not with the historical origins of knowledge claims then with their genesis within the mental economy of persons generally – in consequence of their educations. And even when philosophers of education come to endorse something akin to Plato’s classic account of knowledge as justified true belief, they are inclined to suggest, then, that the conveyance of knowledge via instruction must somehow provide the student with the justification along with the true belief – thereby reintroducing a genetic dimension to a topic long lacking one. Perhaps, indeed, analytic philosophy’s general (though not universal) neglect of philosophy of education is traceable in some measure to the latter’s almost inevitably genetic perspective, which the former tended to decry as armchair science and as a threat to the autonomy and integrity of proper philosophical inquiry. If this has been a basis for neglect, then philosophy’s more recent, postanalytic turn toward naturalized inquiries that reject any dichotomy between empirical and philosophical investigations may make philosophy of education a more inviting area.
Alfred North Whitehead, himself a leading light in the philosophy of education, once remarked that we are living in the period of educational thought subject to the influence of Dewey, and there is still no denying the observation. Dewey’s instrumentalism, his special brand of pragmatism, informs his extraordinarily comprehensive progressive philosophy of education; and he once went so far as to define all of philosophy as the general theory of education. He identifies the educative process with the growth of experience, with growing as developing – where experience is to be understood more in active terms, as involving doing things that change one’s objective environment and internal conditions, than in the passive terms, say, of Locke’s ‘impression’ model of experience. Even traditionalistic philosophers of education, most notably Maritain, have acknowledged the wisdom of Deweyan educational means, and have, in the face of Dewey’s commanding philosophical presence, reframed the debate with progressivists as one about appropriate educational ends – thereby insufficiently acknowledging Dewey’s trenchant critique of the means–end distinction. And even some recent analytic philosophers of education, such as R. S. Peters, can be read as if translating Deweyan insights (e.g., about the aim of education) into an analytic idiom.
Analytic philosophy of education, as charted by Peters, Israel Scheffler, and others in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, has used the tools of linguistic analysis on a wide variety of educational concepts (learning, teaching, training, conditioning, indoctrinating, etc.) and investigated their interconnections: Does teaching entail learning? Does teaching inevitably involve indoctrinating? etc. This careful, subtle, and philosophically sophisticated work has made possible a much-needed conceptual precision in educational debates, though the debaters who most influence public opinion and policy have rarely availed themselves of that precisification. Recent work in philosophy of education, however, has taken up some major educational objectives – moral and other values, critical and creative thinking – in a way that promises to have an impact on the actual conduct of education. Philosophy of education, long isolated (in schools of education) from the rest of the academic philosophical community, has also been somewhat estranged from the professional educational mainstream. Dewey would surely have approved of a change in this status quo. See also DEWEY, EPISTEMOLOGY, PIAGET, PLATO , PRAGMATISM , VIRTUE ETHIC. D.M.S.