function of education summary

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What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

The Purpose of Education

Morehouse College, 1948

As I engage in the so-called “bull sessions” around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the “brethren” think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.

It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of men we call educated?

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, “brethren!” Be careful, teachers!

"The Purpose of Education"

Author:  King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Date:  September 1, 1946 to January 31, 1947 ?

Location:  Atlanta, Ga. ?

Genre:  Published Article

Topic:  Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views

This essay, written sometime during King’s junior year at Morehouse, may be an early draft of the article of the same name published in the  Maroon Tiger . He suggests that education should not only “teach man to think intensively” but also provide “worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.”

Last week we attempted to discuss the purpose of religion. This week our attention moves toward education. I will attempt to answer the question, what is the purpose of education?

To my mind, education has a two-fold function in society. On the one hand it should discipline the mind for sustained and persistent speculation. On the other hand it should integrate human life around central, focusing ideals. It is a tragedy that the latter is often neglected in our educational system.

Education should equip us with the power to think effectively and objectively. To think is one of the hardest things in the world, and to think objectively is still harder. Yet this is the job of education. Education should cause us to rise beyond the horizon of legions of half truth, prejudices and propaganda. Education should enable us to “weigh and consider,” to discern the true from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant, and the real from the unreal. 1  The first function of education, therefore, is to teach man to think intensively. But this is not the whole of education. If education stops here it can be the most dangerous force in society. Some of the greatest criminals in society have been men {who) possessed the power of concentration and reason, but they had no morals. Perhaps the most dangerous periods in civilization have been those periods when there was no moral foundation in society.

Education without morals is like a ship without a compass, merely wandering nowhere. It is not enough to have the power of concentration, but we must have worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. It is not enough to know truth, but we must love truth and sacrifice for it.

1.  “Read not to contradict and confute; nor yet to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider” (Francis Bacon, “Of Studies,” in  The Works of Francis Bacon , ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath [New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1877], p. 252). King used the phrase “weigh and consider” in three papers written at Crozer Theological Seminary (“Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East,” 14 September–24 November 1948, p. 180 in this volume; “The Sources of Fundamentalism and Liberalism Considered Historically and Psychologically,” 13 September–23 November 1949, p. 237; and Book review of  A Functional Approach to Religious Education  by Ernest J. Chave, 12 September–22 November 1950, p. 355).

Source:  MLKP-MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954-1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass.

©  Copyright Information

16.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Education

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Define manifest and latent functions of education
• Explain and discuss how functionalism, conflict theory, feminism, and interactionism view issues of education

While it is clear that education plays an integral role in individuals’ lives as well as society as a whole, sociologists view that role from many diverse points of view. Functionalists believe that education equips people to perform different functional roles in society. Conflict theorists view education as a means of widening the gap in social inequality. Feminist theorists point to evidence that sexism in education continues to prevent women from achieving a full measure of social equality. Symbolic interactionists study the dynamics of the classroom, the interactions between students and teachers, and how those affect everyday life. In this section, you will learn about each of these perspectives.

Functionalism

Functionalists view education as one of the more important social institutions in a society. They contend that education contributes two kinds of functions: manifest (or primary) functions, which are the intended and visible functions of education; and latent (or secondary) functions, which are the hidden and unintended functions.

Manifest Functions

There are several major manifest functions associated with education. The first is socialization. Beginning in preschool and kindergarten, students are taught to practice various societal roles. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who established the academic discipline of sociology, characterized schools as “socialization agencies that teach children how to get along with others and prepare them for adult economic roles” (Durkheim 1898). Indeed, it seems that schools have taken on this responsibility in full.

This socialization also involves learning the rules and norms of the society as a whole. In the early days of compulsory education, students learned the dominant culture. Today, since the culture of the United States is increasingly diverse, students may learn a variety of cultural norms, not only that of the dominant culture.

School systems in the United States also transmit the core values of the nation through manifest functions like social control. One of the roles of schools is to teach students conformity to law and respect for authority. Obviously, such respect, given to teachers and administrators, will help a student navigate the school environment. This function also prepares students to enter the workplace and the world at large, where they will continue to be subject to people who have authority over them. Fulfillment of this function rests primarily with classroom teachers and instructors who are with students all day.

Education also provides one of the major methods used by people for upward social mobility. This function is referred to as social placement . College and graduate schools are viewed as vehicles for moving students closer to the careers that will give them the financial freedom and security they seek. As a result, college students are often more motivated to study areas that they believe will be advantageous on the social ladder. A student might value business courses over a class in Victorian poetry because she sees business class as a stronger vehicle for financial success.

Latent Functions

Education also fulfills latent functions. As you well know, much goes on in a school that has little to do with formal education. For example, you might notice an attractive fellow student when he gives a particularly interesting answer in class—catching up with him and making a date speaks to the latent function of courtship fulfilled by exposure to a peer group in the educational setting.

The educational setting introduces students to social networks that might last for years and can help people find jobs after their schooling is complete. Of course, with social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn, these networks are easier than ever to maintain. Another latent function is the ability to work with others in small groups, a skill that is transferable to a workplace and that might not be learned in a homeschool setting.

The educational system, especially as experienced on university campuses, has traditionally provided a place for students to learn about various social issues. There is ample opportunity for social and political advocacy, as well as the ability to develop tolerance to the many views represented on campus. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement swept across college campuses all over the United States, leading to demonstrations in which diverse groups of students were unified with the purpose of changing the political climate of the country.

Functionalists recognize other ways that schools educate and enculturate students. One of the most important U.S. values students in the United States learn is that of individualism—the valuing of the individual over the value of groups or society as a whole. In countries such as Japan and China, where the good of the group is valued over the rights of the individual, students do not learn as they do in the United States that the highest rewards go to the “best” individual in academics as well as athletics. One of the roles of schools in the United States is fostering self-esteem; conversely, schools in Japan focus on fostering social esteem—the honoring of the group over the individual.

In the United States, schools also fill the role of preparing students for competition in life. Obviously, athletics foster a competitive nature, but even in the classroom students compete against one another academically. Schools also fill the role of teaching patriotism. Students recite the Pledge of Allegiance each morning and take history classes where they learn about national heroes and the nation’s past.

Another role of schools, according to functionalist theory, is that of sorting , or classifying students based on academic merit or potential. The most capable students are identified early in schools through testing and classroom achievements. Such students are placed in accelerated programs in anticipation of successful college attendance.

Functionalists also contend that school, particularly in recent years, is taking over some of the functions that were traditionally undertaken by family. Society relies on schools to teach about human sexuality as well as basic skills such as budgeting and job applications—topics that at one time were addressed by the family.

Conflict Theory

Conflict theorists do not believe that public schools reduce social inequality. Rather, they believe that the educational system reinforces and perpetuates social inequalities that arise from differences in class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Where functionalists see education as serving a beneficial role, conflict theorists view it more negatively. To them, educational systems preserve the status quo and push people of lower status into obedience.

The fulfillment of one’s education is closely linked to social class. Students of low socioeconomic status are generally not afforded the same opportunities as students of higher status, no matter how great their academic ability or desire to learn. Picture a student from a working-class home who wants to do well in school. On a Monday, he’s assigned a paper that’s due Friday. Monday evening, he has to babysit his younger sister while his divorced mother works. Tuesday and Wednesday, he works stocking shelves after school until 10:00 p.m. By Thursday, the only day he might have available to work on that assignment, he’s so exhausted he can’t bring himself to start the paper. His mother, though she’d like to help him, is so tired herself that she isn’t able to give him the encouragement or support he needs. And since English is her second language, she has difficulty with some of his educational materials. They also lack a computer and printer at home, which most of his classmates have, so they have to rely on the public library or school system for access to technology. As this story shows, many students from working-class families have to contend with helping out at home, contributing financially to the family, poor study environments and a lack of support from their families. This is a difficult match with education systems that adhere to a traditional curriculum that is more easily understood and completed by students of higher social classes.

Such a situation leads to social class reproduction, extensively studied by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He researched how cultural capital , or cultural knowledge that serves (metaphorically) as currency that helps us navigate a culture, alters the experiences and opportunities available to French students from different social classes. Members of the upper and middle classes have more cultural capital than do families of lower-class status. As a result, the educational system maintains a cycle in which the dominant culture’s values are rewarded. Instruction and tests cater to the dominant culture and leave others struggling to identify with values and competencies outside their social class. For example, there has been a great deal of discussion over what standardized tests such as the SAT truly measure. Many argue that the tests group students by cultural ability rather than by natural intelligence.

The cycle of rewarding those who possess cultural capital is found in formal educational curricula as well as in the hidden curriculum , which refers to the type of nonacademic knowledge that students learn through informal learning and cultural transmission. This hidden curriculum reinforces the positions of those with higher cultural capital and serves to bestow status unequally.

Conflict theorists point to tracking , a formalized sorting system that places students on “tracks” (advanced versus low achievers) that perpetuate inequalities. While educators may believe that students do better in tracked classes because they are with students of similar ability and may have access to more individual attention from teachers, conflict theorists feel that tracking leads to self-fulfilling prophecies in which students live up (or down) to teacher and societal expectations (Education Week 2004).

To conflict theorists, schools play the role of training working-class students to accept and retain their position as lower members of society. They argue that this role is fulfilled through the disparity of resources available to students in richer and poorer neighborhoods as well as through testing (Lauen and Tyson 2008).

IQ tests have been attacked for being biased—for testing cultural knowledge rather than actual intelligence. For example, a test item may ask students what instruments belong in an orchestra. To correctly answer this question requires certain cultural knowledge—knowledge most often held by more affluent people who typically have more exposure to orchestral music. Though experts in testing claim that bias has been eliminated from tests, conflict theorists maintain that this is impossible. These tests, to conflict theorists, are another way in which education does not provide opportunities, but instead maintains an established configuration of power.

Feminist Theory

Feminist theory aims to understand the mechanisms and roots of gender inequality in education, as well as their societal repercussions. Like many other institutions of society, educational systems are characterized by unequal treatment and opportunity for women. Almost two-thirds of the world’s 862 million illiterate people are women, and the illiteracy rate among women is expected to increase in many regions, especially in several African and Asian countries (UNESCO 2005; World Bank 2007).

Women in the United States have been relatively late, historically speaking, to be granted entry to the public university system. In fact, it wasn’t until the establishment of Title IX of the Education Amendments in 1972 that discriminating on the basis of sex in U.S. education programs became illegal. In the United States, there is also a post-education gender disparity between what male and female college graduates earn. A study released in May 2011 showed that, among men and women who graduated from college between 2006 and 2010, men out-earned women by an average of more than $5,000 each year. First-year job earnings for men averaged $33,150; for women the average was $28,000 (Godofsky, Zukin, and van Horn 2011). Similar trends are seen among salaries of professionals in virtually all industries.

When women face limited opportunities for education, their capacity to achieve equal rights, including financial independence, are limited. Feminist theory seeks to promote women’s rights to equal education (and its resultant benefits) across the world.

Sociology in the Real World

Grade inflation: when is an a really a c.

In 2019, news emerged of a criminal conspiracy regarding wealthy and, in some cases, celebrity parents who illegally secured college admission for their children. Over 50 people were implicated in the scandal, including employees from prestigious universities; several people were sentenced to prison. Their activity included manipulating test scores, falsifying students’ academic or athletic credentials, and acquiring testing accommodations through dishonest claims of having a disability.

One of the questions that emerged at the time was how the students at the subject of these efforts could succeed at these challenging and elite colleges. Meaning, if they couldn’t get in without cheating, they probably wouldn’t do well. Wouldn’t their lack of preparation quickly become clear?

Many people would say no. First, many of the students involved (the children of the conspirators) had no knowledge or no involvement of the fraud; those students may have been admitted anyway. But there may be another safeguard for underprepared students at certain universities: grade inflation.

Grade inflation generally refers to a practice of awarding students higher grades than they have earned. It reflects the observation that the relationship between letter grades and the achievements they reflect has been changing over time. Put simply, what used to be considered C-level, or average, now often earns a student a B, or even an A.

Some, including administrators at elite universities, argue that grade inflation does not exist, or that there are other factors at play, or even that it has benefits such as increased funding and elimination of inequality (Boleslavsky 2014). But the evidence reveals a stark change. Based on data compiled from a wide array of four-year colleges and universities, a widely cited study revealed that the number of A grades has been increasing by several percentage points per decade, and that A’s were the most common grade awarded (Jaschik 2016). In an anecdotal case, a Harvard dean acknowledged that the median grade there was an A-, and the most common was also an A. Williams College found that the number of A+ grades had grown from 212 instances in 2009-10 to 426 instances in 2017-18 (Berlinsky-Schine 2020). Princeton University took steps to reduce inflation by limiting the number of A’s that could be issued, though it then reversed course (Greason 2020).

Why is this happening? Some cite the alleged shift toward a culture that rewards effort instead of product, i.e., the amount of work a student puts in raises the grade, even if the resulting product is poor quality. Another oft-cited contributor is the pressure for instructors to earn positive course evaluations from their students. Finally, many colleges may accept a level of grade inflation because it works. Analysis and formal experiments involving graduate school admissions and hiring practices showed that students with higher grades are more likely to be selected for a job or a grad school. And those higher-grade applicants are still preferred even if decision-maker knows that the applicant’s college may be inflating grades (Swift 2013). In other words, people with high GPA at a school with a higher average GPA are preferred over people who have a high GPA at a school with a lower average GPA.

Ironically, grade inflation is not simply a college issue. Many of the same college faculty and administrators who encounter or engage in some level of grade inflation may lament that it is also occurring at high schools (Murphy 2017).

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism sees education as one way that labeling theory is seen in action. A symbolic interactionist might say that this labeling has a direct correlation to those who are in power and those who are labeled. For example, low standardized test scores or poor performance in a particular class often lead to a student who is labeled as a low achiever. Such labels are difficult to “shake off,” which can create a self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton 1968).

In his book High School Confidential , Jeremy Iversen details his experience as a Stanford graduate posing as a student at a California high school. One of the problems he identifies in his research is that of teachers applying labels that students are never able to lose. One teacher told him, without knowing he was a bright graduate of a top university, that he would never amount to anything (Iversen 2006). Iversen obviously didn’t take this teacher’s false assessment to heart. But when an actual seventeen-year-old student hears this from a person with authority over her, it’s no wonder that the student might begin to “live down to” that label.

The labeling with which symbolic interactionists concern themselves extends to the very degrees that symbolize completion of education. Credentialism embodies the emphasis on certificates or degrees to show that a person has a certain skill, has attained a certain level of education, or has met certain job qualifications. These certificates or degrees serve as a symbol of what a person has achieved, and allows the labeling of that individual.

Indeed, as these examples show, labeling theory can significantly impact a student’s schooling. This is easily seen in the educational setting, as teachers and more powerful social groups within the school dole out labels that are adopted by the entire school population.

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What Are We Doing? Reflecting on the Purpose of Education—And Where Such Reflection Might Lead

• First Online: 30 August 2019

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• John D. Whelen 3  

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The question of purpose, or the point of education, has a long history in writing on education and continues to be a site of controversy and debate. Whelen critiques the approaches taken by two authors, Nel Noddings and Gert Biesta, to the question: what is education for? The very idea of purpose in education is so often taken for granted in contemporary discourses focussing on its instrumental value in terms of national identity, or positioning, whereas for those involved in doing it, or more importantly, experiencing it, the question of purpose is framed very differently. Noddings in particular argues for a revival of what she calls ‘aims-talk’ in order to clarify the fundamental ends of education and in doing so argues that an ethics of care is indispensable to the educational enterprise. Whereas Noddings argues the case for the primacy of an ethic of care in education, Biesta, while deeply concerned to clarify ‘ultimate values’ underlying the aims and purposes of education, asks ‘what is good education for? ’ By refining the question with the adjective ‘good’, or ‘effective’, he is able to interrogate a range of arrangements and endeavours in education in terms of what he refers to as domains of educational purpose. These two positions then form the basis of a discussion in which the author, further drawing on performative crises experienced by teachers, brings them together to suggest pedagogical and curricular consequences that might be expected if (new, often young) teachers, together with their students, can find a way to understand and to challenge the situations they find themselves in.

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Among the former, for example, are Dewey (1966) [ 1916 ], Neill ( 1961 ) [1926], Freire ( 1968 ) [1970], ( 1994 ), Illich ( 1971 ), Goodman (1971) [ 1962 ], Apple ( 2004 ) [ 1979 ], Harber ( 2004 ), Darling-Hammond ( 2010 ). For a useful contemporary discussion, see Moore ( 2015 ).

National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy. Tests are undertaken every second year from Year 3 to Year 9 nationwide.

Noddings has not had it all her own way. For feminist responses, see the Review Symposium on Noddings ( 1984 ) in Hypatia 5 (1) 101–126. For a response from virtue ethics, see M. Slote, ‘Caring versus the philosophers,’ in Slote ( 2010 ).

Noddings further develops what appears initially to be a naive assumption about ‘the best homes’ and who might inhabit them in Noddings ( 2002a ).

For a critique of this hierarchical theory of curriculum, especially as it relates to Australia, see Bleazby ( 2015 ). On this issue and the vexed relationship of the liberal humanist curriculum to vocational educational and training (VET), see Teese and Polesel ( 2003 ).

Or, alternatively, ‘The fundamental aim of education is to help children grow in desirable ways’ (Noddings, 2002a , 287).

See, for example, Hattie ( 2012 ).

Biesta is far from alone in making this observation. See, e.g., Lingard ( 2010 , 135) and Nikel and Lowe ( 2010 , 596).

Hattie ( 2009 ) perfectly exemplifies this view.

This may be true in terms of political and bureaucratic discourses of education, and even in some parts of the academy, but more generally this issue is widely contested. See, e.g., contributors to Scott and Hargreaves ( 2015 ) for a variety of responses.

In asking ‘What is the educational task? Biesta writes: ‘The answer I propose is that the task of the educator is to make the grown-up existence of another human being possible or, (more precisely) it is about arousing the desire in another human being for wanting to exist in the world in a grown-up way’ ( 2017 , 4). For Biesta, subjectivity is immanent in teaching which opens ‘possibilities for students to exist in and with the world—other … than in terms of learning’ (ibid., 5).

Here one might note the emphasis currently being given to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects in secondary education in Australia. In 2015 the Australian Government allocated $81.6 million to increase and improve participation in STEM fields of study.

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Whelen, J.D. (2019). What Are We Doing? Reflecting on the Purpose of Education—And Where Such Reflection Might Lead. In: Webster, R., Whelen, J. (eds) Rethinking Reflection and Ethics for Teachers. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9401-1_9

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Philosophy of Education

All human societies, past and present, have had a vested interest in education; and some wits have claimed that teaching (at its best an educational activity) is the second oldest profession. While not all societies channel sufficient resources into support for educational activities and institutions, all at the very least acknowledge their centrality—and for good reasons. For one thing, it is obvious that children are born illiterate and innumerate, and ignorant of the norms and cultural achievements of the community or society into which they have been thrust; but with the help of professional teachers and the dedicated amateurs in their families and immediate environs (and with the aid, too, of educational resources made available through the media and nowadays the internet), within a few years they can read, write, calculate, and act (at least often) in culturally-appropriate ways. Some learn these skills with more facility than others, and so education also serves as a social-sorting mechanism and undoubtedly has enormous impact on the economic fate of the individual. Put more abstractly, at its best education equips individuals with the skills and substantive knowledge that allows them to define and to pursue their own goals, and also allows them to participate in the life of their community as full-fledged, autonomous citizens.

But this is to cast matters in very individualistic terms, and it is fruitful also to take a societal perspective, where the picture changes somewhat. It emerges that in pluralistic societies such as the Western democracies there are some groups that do not wholeheartedly support the development of autonomous individuals, for such folk can weaken a group from within by thinking for themselves and challenging communal norms and beliefs; from the point of view of groups whose survival is thus threatened, formal, state-provided education is not necessarily a good thing. But in other ways even these groups depend for their continuing survival on educational processes, as do the larger societies and nation-states of which they are part; for as John Dewey put it in the opening chapter of his classic work Democracy and Education (1916), in its broadest sense education is the means of the “social continuity of life” (Dewey, 1916, 3). Dewey pointed out that the “primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group” make education a necessity, for despite this biological inevitability “the life of the group goes on” (Dewey, 3). The great social importance of education is underscored, too, by the fact that when a society is shaken by a crisis, this often is taken as a sign of educational breakdown; education, and educators, become scapegoats.

It is not surprising that such an important social domain has attracted the attention of philosophers for thousands of years, especially as there are complex issues aplenty that have great philosophical interest. Even a cursory reading of these opening paragraphs reveals that they touch on, in nascent form, some but by no means all of the issues that have spawned vigorous debate down the ages; restated more explicitly in terms familiar to philosophers of education, the issues the discussion above flitted over were: education as transmission of knowledge versus education as the fostering of inquiry and reasoning skills that are conducive to the development of autonomy (which, roughly, is the tension between education as conservative and education as progressive, and also is closely related to differing views about human “perfectibility”—issues that historically have been raised in the debate over the aims of education); the question of what this knowledge, and what these skills, ought to be—part of the domain of philosophy of the curriculum; the questions of how learning is possible, and what is it to have learned something—two sets of issues that relate to the question of the capacities and potentialities that are present at birth, and also to the process (and stages) of human development and to what degree this process is flexible and hence can be influenced or manipulated; the tension between liberal education and vocational education, and the overlapping issue of which should be given priority—education for personal development or education for citizenship (and the issue of whether or not this is a false dichotomy); the differences (if any) between education and enculturation; the distinction between educating versus teaching versus training versus indoctrination; the relation between education and maintenance of the class structure of society, and the issue of whether different classes or cultural groups can—justly—be given educational programs that differ in content or in aims; the issue of whether the rights of children, parents, and socio-cultural or ethnic groups, conflict—and if they do, the question of whose rights should be dominant; the question as to whether or not all children have a right to state-provided education, and if so, should this education respect the beliefs and customs of all groups and how on earth would this be accomplished; and a set of complex issues about the relation between education and social reform, centering upon whether education is essentially conservative, or whether it can be an (or, the ) agent of social change.

It is impressive that most of the philosophically-interesting issues touched upon above, plus additional ones not alluded to here, were addressed in one of the early masterpieces of the Western intellectual tradition—Plato's Republic . A.N. Whitehead somewhere remarked that the history of Western philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato, and if the Meno and the Laws are added to the Republic , the same is true of the history of educational thought and of philosophy of education in particular. At various points throughout this essay the discussion shall return to Plato, and at the end there shall be a brief discussion of the two other great figures in the field—Rousseau and Dewey. But the account of the field needs to start with some features of it that are apt to cause puzzlement, or that make describing its topography difficult. These include, but are not limited to, the interactions between philosophy of education and its parent discipline.

1.1 The open nature of philosophy and philosophy of education

1.2 the different bodies of work traditionally included in the field, 1.3 paradigm wars the diversity of, and clashes between, philosophical approaches, 2.1 the early work: c.d. hardie, 2.2 the dominant years: language, and clarification of key concepts, 2.3 countervailing forces, 2.4 a new guise contemporary social, political and moral philosophy, 3.1 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 3.2 the content of the curriculum, and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.3 rousseau, dewey, and the progressive movement, 4. concluding remarks, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries, 1. problems in delineating the field.

There is a large—and ever expanding—number of works designed to give guidance to the novice setting out to explore the domain of philosophy of education; most if not all of the academic publishing houses have at least one representative of this genre on their list, and the titles are mostly variants of the following archetypes: The History and Philosophy of Education , The Philosophical Foundations of Education , Philosophers on Education , Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom , A Guide to the Philosophy of Education , and Readings in Philosophy of Education . The overall picture that emerges from even a sampling of this collective is not pretty; the field lacks intellectual cohesion, and (from the perspective taken in this essay) there is a widespread problem concerning the rigor of the work and the depth of scholarship—although undoubtedly there are islands, but not continents, of competent philosophical discussion of difficult and socially-important issues of the kind listed earlier. On the positive side—the obverse of the lack of cohesion—there is, in the field as a whole, a degree of adventurousness in the form of openness to ideas and radical approaches, a trait that is sometimes lacking in other academic fields. This is not to claim, of course, that taken individually philosophers of education are more open-minded than their philosophical cousins!

Part of the explanation for this diffuse state-of-affairs is that, quite reasonably, most philosophers of education have the goal (reinforced by their institutional affiliation with Schools of Education and their involvement in the initial training of teachers) of contributing not to philosophy but to educational policy and practice. This shapes not only their selection of topics, but also the manner in which the discussion is pursued; and this orientation also explains why philosophers of education—to a far greater degree, it is to be suspected, than their “pure” cousins—publish not in philosophy journals but in a wide range of professionally-oriented journals (such as Educational Researcher , Harvard Educational Review , Teachers College Record , Cambridge Journal of Education, Journal of Curriculum Studies , and the like). Some individuals work directly on issues of classroom practice, others identify as much with fields such as educational policy analysis, curriculum theory, teacher education, or some particular subject-matter domain such as math or science education, as they do with philosophy of education. It is still fashionable in some quarters to decry having one's intellectual agenda shaped so strongly as this by concerns emanating from a field of practice; but as Stokes (1997) has made clear, many of the great, theoretically-fruitful research programs in natural science had their beginnings in such practical concerns—as Pasteur's grounbreaking work illustrates. It is dangerous to take the theory versus practice dichotomy too seriously.

However, there is another consequence of this institutional housing of the vast majority of philosphers of education that is worth noting—one that is not found in a comparable way in philosophers of science, for example, who almost always are located in departments of philosophy—namely, that experience as a teacher, or in some other education-related role, is a qualification to become a philosopher of education that in many cases is valued at least as much as depth of philosophical training. (The issue is not that educational experience is irrelevant—clearly it can be highly pertinent—but it is that in the tradeoff with philosophical training, philosophy often loses.) But there are still other factors at work that contribute to the field's diffuseness, that all relate in some way to the nature of the discipline of philosophy itself.

In describing the field of philosophy, and in particular the sub-field that has come to be identified as philosophy of education, one quickly runs into a difficulty not found to anything like the same degree in other disciplines. For example, although there are some internal differences in opinion, nevertheless there seems to be quite a high degree of consensus within the domain of quantum physics about which researchers are competent members of the field and which ones are not, and what work is a strong contribution (or potential contribution). The very nature of philosophy, on the other hand, is “essentially contested”; what counts as a sound philosophical work within one school of thought, or socio-cultural or academic setting, may not be so-regarded (and may even be the focus of derision) in a different one. Coupled with this is the fact that the borders of the field are not policed, so that the philosophically-untrained can cross into it freely—indeed, over the past century or more a great many individuals from across the spectrum of real and pseudo disciplines have for whatever reason exercised their right to self-identify as members of this broad and loosely defined category of “philosophers” (as a few minutes spent browsing in the relevant section of a bookstore will verify).

In essence, then, there are two senses of the term “philosopher” and its cognates: a loose but common sense in which any individual who cogitates in any manner about such issues as the meaning of life, the nature of social justice, the essence of sportsmanship, the aims of education, the foundations of the school curriculum, or relationship with the Divine, is thereby a philosopher; and there is a more technical sense referring to those who have been formally trained or have acquired competence in one or more areas such as epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, and the like. If this bifurcation presents a problem for adequately delineating the field of philosophy, the difficulties grow tenfold or more with respect to philosophy of education.

This essay offers a description and assessment of the field as seen by a scholar rooted firmly in the formal branch of “philosophy of education”, and moreover this branch as it has developed in the English-speaking world (some of which, of course, has been inspired by Continental philosophy); but first it is necessary to say a little more about the difficulties that confront the individual who sets out, without presuppositions, to understand the topography of “philosophy of education”.

It will not take long for a person who consults several of the introductory texts alluded to earlier to encounter a number of different bodies of work (loosely bounded to be sure) that have by one source or another been regarded as part of the domain of philosophy of education; the inclusion of some of these as part of the field is largely responsible for the diffuse topography described earlier. What follows is an informal and incomplete accounting.

First, there are works of advocacy produced by those non-technical, self-identified “philosophers” described above, who often have an axe to grind; they may wish to destroy (or to save) common schooling, support or attack some innovation or reform, shore-up or destroy the capitalist mode of production, see their own religion (or none at all) gain a foothold in the public schools, strengthen the place of “the basics” in the school curriculum, and so forth. While these topics certainly can be, and have been, discussed with due care, often they have been pursued in loose but impressive language where exhortation substitutes for argumentation—and hence sometimes they are mistaken for works of philosophy of education! In the following discussion this genre shall be passed over in silence.

Second, there is a corpus of work somewhat resembling the first, but where the arguments are tighter, and where the authors usually are individuals of some distinction whose insights are thought-provoking—possibly because they have a degree of familiarity with some branch of educational activity, having been teachers (or former teachers), school principals, religious leaders, politicians, journalists, and the like. While these works frequently touch on philosophical issues, they are not pursued to any philosophical depth and can hardly be considered as contributions to the scholarship of the discipline. However, some works in this genre are among the classics of “educational thought”—a more felicitous label than “philosophy of education”; cases in point would be the essays, pamphlets and letters of Thomas Arnold (headmaster of Rugby school), John Wesley (the founder of Methodism), J.H. (Cardinal) Newman, T.H. Huxley, and the writings on progressive schooling by A.S. Neill (of Summerhill school). Some textbooks even include extracts from the writings or recorded sayings of such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Jesus of Nazareth (for the latter three, in works spanning more than half a century, see Ulich, 1950, and Murphy, 2006). Books and extracts in this genre—which elsewhere I have called “cultured reflection on education”—are often used in teacher-training courses that march under the banner of “educational foundations”, “introduction to educational thought”, or “introduction to philosophy of education”.

Third, there are a number of educational theorists and researchers, whose field of activity is not philosophy but—for example—might be human development or learning theory, who in their technical work and sometimes in their non-technical books and reflective essays explicitly raise philosophical issues or adopt philosophical modes of argumentation—and do so in ways worthy of careful study. If philosophy (including philosophy of education) is defined so as to include analysis and reflection at an abstract or “meta-level”, which undoubtedly is a domain where many philosophers labor, then these individuals should have a place in the annals of philosophy or philosophy of education; but too often, although not always, accounts of the field ignore them. Their work might be subjected to scrutiny for being educationally important, but their conceptual or philosophical contributions are rarely focused upon. (Philosophers of the physical and biological sciences are far less prone to make this mistake about the meta-level work of reflective scientists in these domains.)

The educational theorists and researchers I have in mind as exemplars here are the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner (who among other things wrote about the fate of the notions of human freedom and dignity in the light of the development of a “science of behavior”, and who developed a model of human action and also of learning that eschewed the influence of mental entities such as motives, interests, and ideas and placed the emphasis instead upon “schedules of reinforcement”); the foundational figure in modern developmental psychology with its near-fixation on stage theories, Jean Piaget (who developed in an abstract and detailed manner a “genetic epistemology” that was related to his developmental research); and the social psychologist Lev Vygotsky (who argued that the development of the human youngster was indelibly shaped by social forces, so much so that approaches which focused on the lone individual and that were biologically-oriented—he had Piaget in mind here—were quite inadequate).

Fourth, and in contrast to the group above, there is a type of work that is traditionally but undeservedly given a prominent place in the annals of philosophy of education, and which thereby generates a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about the field. These are the books and reflective essays on educational topics that were written by mainstream philosophers, a number of whom are counted among the greatest in the history of the discipline. The catch is this: Even great philosophers do not always write philosophy! The reflections being referred-to contain little if any philosophical argumentation, and usually they were not intended to be contributions to the literature on any of the great philosophical questions. Rather, they expressed the author's views (or even prejudices) on educational rather than philosophical problems, and sometimes—as in the case of Bertrand Russell's rollicking pieces defending progressive educational practices—they explicitly were “potboilers” written to make money. (In Russell's case the royalties were used to support a progressive school he was running with his current wife.) Locke, Kant, and Hegel also are among those who produced work of this genre.

John Locke is an interesting case in point. He had been requested by a cousin and her husband—possibly in part because of his medical training—to give advice on the upbringing of their son and heir; the youngster seems to have troubled his parents, most likely because he had learning difficulties. Locke, then in exile in Europe, wrote the parents a series of letters in which alongside sensible advice about such matters as the priorities in the education of a landed gentleman, and about making learning fun for the boy, there were a few strange items such as the advice that the boy should wear leaky shoes in winter so that he would be toughened-up! The letters eventually were printed in book form under the title Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), and seem to have had enormous influence down the ages upon educational practice; after two centuries the book had run through some 35 English editions and well over thirty foreign editions, and it is still in print and is frequently excerpted in books of readings in philosophy of education. In stark contrast, several of Locke's major philosophical writings—the Essay Concerning Human Understanding , and the Letter on Toleration —have been overlooked by most educational theorists over the centuries, even though they have enormous relevance for educational philosophy, theory, policy, and practice. It is especially noteworthy that the former of these books was the foundation for an approach to psychology—associationism—that thrived during the nineteenth century. In addition it stimulated interest in the processes of child development and human learning; Locke's model of the way in which the “blank tablet” of the human mind became “furnished” with simple ideas that were eventually combined or abstracted in various ways to form complex ideas, suggested to some that it might be fruitful to study this process in the course of development of a young child (Cleverley and Phillips, 1986).

Fifth, and finally, there is a large body of work that clearly falls within the more technically-defined domain of philosophy of education. Three historical giants of the field are Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey, and there are a dozen or more who would be in competition for inclusion along with them; the short-list of leading authors from the second-half of the 20 th century would include Richard Peters, Paul Hirst, and Israel Scheffler, with many jostling for the next places—but the choices become cloudy as we approach the present-day, for schisms between philosophical schools have to be negotiated.

It is important to note, too, that there is a sub-category within this domain of literature that is made-up of work by philosophers who are not primarily identified as philosophers of education, and who might or might not have had much to say directly about education, but whose philosophical work has been drawn upon by others and applied very fruitfully to educational issues. (A volume edited by Amelie Rorty contains essays on the education-related thought, or relevance, of many historically-important philosophers; significantly the essays are almost entirely written by philosophers rather than by members of the philosophy of education community. This is both their strength and weakness. See Rorty, 1998.)

The discussion will turn briefly to the difficulty in picturing the topography of the field that is presented by the influence of these philosophers.

As sketched earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, criteria for selecting evidence that has relevance for the problems that they consider central, and the like. No wonder educational discourse has occasionally been likened to Babel, for the differences in backgrounds and assumptions means that there is much mutual incomprehension. In the midst of the melee sit the philosophers of education.

It is no surprise, then, to find that the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content and methods of argument in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg. It is revealing to note some of the names that were heavily-cited in a pair of recent authoritative handbooks in the field (according to the indices of the two volumes, and in alphabetical order): Adorno, Aristotle, Derrida, Descartes, Dewey, Habermas, Hegel, Horkheimer, Kant, Locke, Lyotard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Rawls, Richard Rorty, Rousseau, and Wittgenstein (Curren 2003; Blake, Smeyers, Smith, and Standish 2003). Although this list conveys something of the diversity of the field, it fails to do it complete justice, for the influence of feminist philosophers is not adequately represented.

No one individual can have mastered work done by such a range of figures, representing as they do a number of quite different frameworks or approaches; and relatedly no one person stands as emblematic of the entire field of philosophy of education, and no one type of philosophical writing serves as the norm, either. At professional meetings, peace often reigns because the adherents of the different schools go their separate ways; but occasionally there are (intellectually) violent clashes, rivaling the tumult that greeted Derrida's nomination for an honorary degree at Cambridge in 1992. It is sobering to reflect that only a few decades have passed since practitioners of analytic philosophy of education had to meet in individual hotel rooms, late at night, at annual meetings of the Philosophy of Education Society in the USA, because phenomenologists and others barred their access to the conference programs; their path to liberation was marked by discord until, eventually, the compromise of “live and let live” was worked out (Kaminsky, 1996). Of course, the situation has hardly been better in the home discipline; an essay in Time magazine in 1966 on the state of the discipline of philosophy reported that adherents of the major philosophical schools “don't even understand one another”, and added that as a result “philosophy today is bitterly segregated. Most of the major philosophy departments and scholarly journals are the exclusive property of one sect or another” ( Time , reprinted in Lucas, 1969, 32). Traditionally there has been a time-lag for developments in philosophy to migrate over into philosophy of education, but in this respect at least the two fields have been on a par.

Inevitably, however, traces of discord remain, and some groups still feel disenfranchised, but they are not quite the same groups as a few decades ago—for new intellectual paradigms have come into existence, and their adherents are struggling to have their voices heard; and clearly it is the case that—reflecting the situation in 1966—many analytically-trained philosophers of education find postmodern writings incomprehensible while scholars in the latter tradition are frequently dismissive if not contemptuous of work done by the former group. In effect, then, the passage of time has made the field more—and not less—diffuse. All this is evident in a volume published in 1995 in which the editor attempted to break-down borders by initiating dialogue between scholars with different approaches to philosophy of education; her introductory remarks are revealing:

Philosophers of education reflecting on the parameters of our field are faced not only with such perplexing and disruptive questions as: What counts as Philosophy of Education and why?; but also Who counts as a philosopher of education and why?; and What need is there for Philosophy of Education in a postmodern context? Embedded in these queries we find no less provocative ones: What knowledge, if any, can or should be privileged and why?; and Who is in a position to privilege particular discursive practices over others and why? Although such questions are disruptive, they offer the opportunity to take a fresh look at the nature and purposes of our work and, as we do, to expand the number and kinds of voices participating in the conversation. (Kohli, 1995, xiv).

There is an inward-looking tone to the questions posed here: Philosophy of education should focus upon itself, upon its own contents, methods, and practitioners. And of course there is nothing new about this; for one thing, almost forty years ago a collection of readings—with several score of entries—was published under the title What is Philosophy of Education? (Lucas, 1969). It is worth noting, too, that the same attitude is not unknown in philosophy; Simmel is reputed to have said a century or so ago that philosophy is its own first problem.

Having described the general topography of the field of philosophy of education, the focus can change to pockets of activity where from the perspective of this author interesting philosophical work is being, or has been, done—and sometimes this work has been influential in the worlds of educational policy or practice. It is appropriate to start with a discussion of the rise and partial decline—but lasting influence of—analytic philosophy of education This approach (often called “APE” by both admirers and detractors) dominated the field in the English-speaking world for several decades after the second world war, and its eventual fate throws light on the current intellectual climate.

2. Analytic philosophy of education, and its influence

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—which make up part at least of the philosophical analysis package—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. But traditionally they stood alongside other philosophical activities; in the Republic , for example, Plato was sometimes analytic, at other times normative, and on occasion speculative/metaphysical. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity (for metaphysics was judged to be literally vacuous, and normative philosophy was viewed as being unable to provide compelling warrants for whatever moral and ethical positions were being advocated).

So, although analytic elements in philosophy of education can be located throughout intellectual history back to the ancient world, the pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie, 1962, xix)

The first object of his analytic scrutiny in the book was the view that “a child should be educated according to Nature”; he teased apart and critiqued various things that writers through the ages could possibly have meant by this, and very little remained standing by the end of the chapter. Then some basic ideas of Herbart and Dewey were subjected to similar treatment. Hardie's hard-nosed approach can be illustrated by the following: One thing that educationists mean by “education according to Nature” (later he turns to other things they might mean) is that “the teacher should thus act like a gardener” who fosters natural growth of his plants and avoids doing anything “unnatural”(Hardie, 1962, 3). He continues:

The crucial question for such a view of education is how far does this analogy hold? There is no doubt that there is some analogy between the laws governing the physical development of the child and the laws governing the development of a plant, and hence there is some justification for the view if applied to physical education. But the educationists who hold this view are not generally very much concerned with physical education, and the view is certainly false if applied to mental education. For some of the laws that govern the mental changes which take place in a child are the laws of learning …. [which] have no analogy at all with the laws which govern the interaction between a seed and its environment. (Hardie, 1962, 4)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D.J. O'Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences; Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), that contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and should be seen as truncated arguments); Smith and Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of British writers who were becoming prominent—most notably R.S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the USA), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970), and Peters (1973), of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage”, it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills, and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for—it was argued—getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook, 1972). Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by: the content that had been taught; or by the intention of the instructor; or by the methods of instruction that had been used; or by the outcomes of the instruction; or, of course, by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Two examples will be sufficient to make the point: (i) The first criterion mentioned above—the nature of the content being imparted—was supported by an argument that ran roughly as follows: “If some students have learned, as factual, some material that is patently incorrect (like ‘The capital city of Canada is Washington D.C.’), then they must have been indoctrinated. This conclusion is reinforced by the consideration that we would never say students must have been indoctrinated if they believe an item that is correct!” However, both portions of this argument have been challenged. (ii) The method criterion—how the knowledge was imparted to the students—usually was supported by an argument that, while different, clearly paralleled the previous one in its logic. It ran roughly like this: “We never would say that students had been indoctrinated by their teacher if he or she had fostered open inquiry and discussion, encouraged exploration in the library and on the net, allowed students to work in collaborative groups, and so on. However, if the teacher did not allow independent inquiry, quashed classroom questions, suppressed dissenting opinions, relied heavily on rewards and punishments, used repetition and fostered rote memorization, and so on, then it is likely we would say the students were being indoctrinated”. (The deeper issue in this second example is that the first method of teaching allows room for the operation of the learners' rationality, while the second method does not. Siegel, 1988, stresses this in his discussion of indoctrination.)

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import; I can offer as illustration a presidential address at a US Philosophy of Education Society annual meeting that was an hour-long discourse on the various meanings of the expression “I have a toothache”. (It is worth noting that the 1966 article in Time , cited earlier, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970's radical students in Britain accused the brand of linguistic analysis practiced by R.S. Peters of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education. There even had been a surprising degree of interest in this arcane topic on the part of the general reading public in the UK as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner's Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein's philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner's book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner's side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced examples of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta, 1963)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with. (See Peters, 1973, where to the editor's credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted.)

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault, and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard's foundational work on The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s; the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin's Reclaiming a Conversation . APE was no longer the center of interest.

By the 1980s, the rather simple if not simplistic ordinary language analysis practiced in philosophy of education, was reeling under the attack from the combination of forces sketched above, but the analytic spirit lived on in the form of rigorous work done in other specialist areas of philosophy—work that trickled out and took philosophy of education in rich new directions. Technically-oriented epistemology, philosophy of science, and even metaphysics, flourished; as did the interrelated fields of social, political and moral philosophy. John Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971; a decade later MacIntyre's After Virtue appeared; and in another decade or so there was a flood of work on individualism, communitarianism, democratic citizenship, inclusion, exclusion, rights of children versus rights of parents, rights of groups (such as the Amish) versus rights of the larger polity. From the early 1990s philosophers of education have contributed significantly to the debates on these and related topics—indeed, this corpus of work illustrates that good philosophy of education flows seamlessly into work being done in mainstream areas of philosophy. Illustrative examples are Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Callan (1997); The Demands of Liberal Education , Levinson (1999); Social Justice and School Choice , Brighouse (2000); and Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education , Reich (2002). These works stand shoulder-to-shoulder with semi-classics on the same range of topics by Gutmann, Kymlicka, Macedo, and others. An excerpt from the book by Callan nicely illustrates that the analytic spirit lives on in this body of work; the broader topic being pursued is the status of the aims of education in a pluralistic society where there can be deep fundamental disagreements:

… the distinction must be underlined between the ends that properly inform political education and the extent to which we should tolerate deviations from those ends in a world where reasonable and unreasonable pluralism are entangled and the moral costs of coercion against the unreasonable variety are often prohibitive. Our theoretical as well as our commonsense discourse do not always respect the distinction…. If some of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church conflict with our best theory of the ends of civic education, it does not follow that we have any reason to revise our theory; but neither does it mean we have any reason to impose these ends on Catholic schools and the families that they serve. (Callan, 1997, 44)

Callan and White (2003) have given an analysis of why the topics described above have become such a focus of attention. “What has been happening in philosophy of education in recent years”, they argue, mirrors “a wider self-examination in liberal societies themselves”. World events, from the fall of communism to the spread of ethnic conflicts “have all heightened consciousness of the contingency of liberal politics”. A body of work in philosophy, from the early Rawls on, has systematically examined (and critiqued) the foundations of liberalism, and philosophy of education has been drawn into the debates. Callan and White mention communitarianism as offering perhaps “the most influential challenge” to liberalism, and they write:

The debate between liberals and communitarians is far more than a theoretical diversion for philosophers and political scientists. At stake are rival understandings of what makes human lives and the societies in which they unfold both good and just, and derivatively, competing conceptions of the education needed for individual and social betterment. (Callan and White, 2003, 95-96)

It should be appended here that it is not only “external” world events that have stimulated this body of work; events internal to a number of democratic societies also have been significant. To cite one example that is prominent in the literature in North America at least, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling ( Wisconsin v. Yoder ) in which members of the Amish sect were allowed to withdraw their children from public schools before they had reached the age of sixteen—for, it had been argued, any deeper education would endanger the existence of the group and its culture. In assessing this decision—as of course philosophers have frequently done (see, for example, Kymlicka, 1995)—a balance has to be achieved between (i) the interest of civic society in having an informed, well-educated, participatory citizenry; (ii) the interest of the Amish as a group in preserving their own culture; and (iii) the interests of the Amish children, who have a right to develop into autonomous individuals who can make reflective decisions for themselves about the nature of the life they wish to lead. These are issues that fall squarely in the domain covered by the works mentioned above.

So much work is being produced on the complex and interrelated issues just outlined, that in a different context it seemed fair for me to remark (descriptively, and not judgmentally) that a veritable cottage industry had sprung up in post-Rawlsian philosophy of education. There are, of course, other areas of activity, where interesting contributions are being made, and the discusion will next turn to a sampling of these.

3. Other areas of contemporary activity

As was stressed at the outset, and illustrated with a cursory listing of examples, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume, and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in the recent A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren, 2003), which contained more than six-hundred pages divided into fourty-five chapters each of which surveyed a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge and truth in learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, purposes of universities in a fluid age, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education.

There is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to filling out—and deepening—the topographical account of the field that was presented in the preceding sections. The discussion will open with a topic that was not included in the Companion , despite it being one that is of great concern across the academic educational community, and despite it being one where adherents of some of the rival schools of philosophy (and philosophy of education) have had lively exchanges.

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but particularly since publication of the book by Stokes mentioned earlier, and also in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one.

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is its not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn's ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred-to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemolgical: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they only were used sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe, 2003, and Phillips, 2008.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millenium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decisionmaking.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicans and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has beome common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the U.S. National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC, 2002), that argued this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work.

Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value-neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, they were guilty of advocating “your father's paradigm”(clearly this was not intended as a compliment). One critic with postmodernist leanings asserted that educational research should move “toward a Nietzschean sort of ‘unnatural science’ that leads to greater health by fostering ways of knowing that escape normativity”—a suggestion that evokes the reaction discussed in Section 1.3 above, namely, one of incomprehension on the part of most researchers and those philosophers of education who work within a different tradition where a “way of knowing”, in order to be a “way”, must inevitably be normative.

The final complexity in the debates over the nature of educational research is that there are some respected members of the philosophy of education community who claim, along with Carr, that “the forms of human association characteristic of educational engagement are not really apt for scientific or empirical study at all” (Carr, 2003, 54-5). His reasoning is that educational processes cannot be studied empirically because they are processes of “normative initiation”—a position that as it stands begs the question by not making clear why such processes cannot be studied empirically.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education (as Dewey pointed out), and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches, or the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or in a system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why is evolution included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Why is Driver Education part of the high school curriculum, and methods of birth control usually not—even though sex has an impact on the life of teenagers that at least is comparable to the impact of car-driving? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Does the justification for not including the Holocaust or the phenomenon of wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some countries stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato's brilliant pioneering efforts all draw upon, explicitly or implicitly, the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues. First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same), or alternatively, what constitutes the good life and human flourishing. These two formulations are related, for presumably our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to act rationally and/or autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. How this is to be done, of course, is not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the matter. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing a conception of the good life, and then for pursuing it; and because logical analysis shows—he argued—that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms. Luckily for Hirst, the typical British high school day was made up of seven instructional periods. (Hirst, 1965; for a critique see Phillips, 1987, ch.11.)

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a ruler or ruling class; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as a medium of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect, and serve, the interests of the ruling class. Michael Apple is typical:

… the knowledge that now gets into schools is already a choice from a much larger universe of possible social knowledge and principles. It is a form of cultural capital that comes from somewhere, that often reflects the perspectives and beliefs of powerful segments of our social collectivity. In its very production and dissemination as a public and economic commodity—as books, films, materials, and so forth—it is repeatedly filtered through ideological and economic commitments. Social and economic values, hence, are already embedded in the design of the institutions we work in, in the ‘formal corpus of school knowledge’ we preserve in our curricula….(Apple, 1990, 8-9)

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century (who arguably were following Plato's lead in the Republic ), sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all”.

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all! Medically, this probably is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings, 2007.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato's system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually be able to contemplate the metaphysical realm of the “forms”, thanks to their advanced training in mathematics and philosophy. Having seen the form of the Good, they would be eligible after a period of practical experience to become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

Plato's educational scheme was guided, presumably, by the understanding he thought he had achieved of the transcendental realm of fixed “forms”. John Dewey, ever a strong critic of positions that were not naturalistic, or that incorporated a priori premises, commented as follows:

Plato's starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice…. And only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. (Dewey, 1916, 102-3)

Furthermore, as Dewey again put it, Plato “had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals…. they fall by nature into classes”, which masks the “infinite diversity of active tendencies” which individuals harbor (104). In addition, Plato tended to talk of learning using the passive language of seeing, which has shaped our discourse down to the present (witness “Now I see it!” when a difficult point has become clear).

In contrast, for Dewey each individual was an organism situated in a biological and social environment in which problems were constantly emerging, forcing the individual to reflect and act, and learn. Dewey, following William James, held that knowledge arises from reflection upon our actions; and the worth of a putative item of knowledge is directly correlated with the problem-solving success of the actions performed under its guidance. Thus Dewey, sharply disagreeing with Plato, regarded knowing as an active rather than a passive affair—a strong theme in his writings is his opposition to what is sometimes called “the spectator theory of knowledge”. All this is made clear enough in a passage containing only a thinly-veiled allusion to Plato's famous analogy of the prisoners in the cave whose eyes are turned to the light by education:

In schools, those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect. The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly. Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs of activity. (164)

This passage also illuminates a passage that many have found puzzling: “philosophy is the theory of education” (387). For in the sentences above it is easy to see the tight link between Dewey's epistemology and his views on education—his anti-spectator epistemology morphs directly into advocacy for anti-spectator learning by students in school—students learn by being active inquirers. Over the past few decades this view of learning has inspired a major tradition of research by educational psychologists, and related theory-development (the “situated cognition” framework); and these bodies of work have in turn led to innovative efforts in curriculum development. (For a discussion of these, see Phillips, 2003.)

The final important difference with Plato is that, for Dewey, each student is an individual who blazes his or her unique trail of growth; the teacher has the task of guiding and facilitating this growth, without imposing a fixed end upon the process. Dewey sometimes uses the term “curriculum” to mean “the funded wisdom of the human race”, the point being that over the course of human history an enormous stock of knowledge and skills has accumulated and the teacher has the task of helping the student to make contact with this repertoire—but helping by facilitating rather than by imposing. (All this, of course, has been the subject of intense discussion among philosophers of education: Does growth imply a direction? Is growth always good—can't a plant end up misshapen, and can't a child develop to become bad? Is Dewey some type of perfectionist? Is his philosophy too vague to offer worthwhile educational guidance? Isn't it possible for a “Deweyan” student to end up without enough relevant knowledge and skills to be able to make a living in the modern world?)

Dewey's work was of central importance for the American progressive education movement in its formative years, although there was a fair degree of misunderstanding of his ideas as progressives interpreted his often extremely dense prose to be saying what they personally happened to believe. Nevertheless, Dewey became the “poster child” or the “house philosopher” of progressive education, and if he didn't make it onto many actual posters he certainly made it onto a postage stamp.

His popularity, however, sharply declined after the Soviets launched Sputnik, for Dewey and progressive education were blamed for the USA losing the race into space (illustrating the point about scapegoating made at the start of this essay). But he did not remain in disgrace for long; and for some time has been the focus of renewed interest—although it is still noticeable that commentators interpret Dewey to be holding views that mirror their own positions or interests. And interestingly, there now is slightly more interest in Dewey on the part of philosophers of education in the UK than there was in earlier years, and there is growing interest by philosophers from the Continent (see, for example, Biesta and Burbules, 2003).

To be a poster child for progressivism, however, is not to be the parent. Rather than to Dewey, that honor must go to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and to his educational novel written in soaring prose, Emile (1762). Starting with the premise that “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil” (Rousseau, 1955, 5), Rousseau held that contemporary man has been misshapen by his education; the “crushing force” of social conventions has stifled the “Nature within him”. The remedy adopted in the novel is for the young Emile to be taken to his family estate in the country where, away from the corrupting influence of society, and under the watchful eye of his tutor, “everything should … be brought into harmony with these natural tendencies”. (This idea of education according to nature, it will be recalled, was the object of Hardie's analytic attention almost two centuries later.)

Out in the countryside, rather than having a set curriculum that he is forced to follow, Emile learns when some natural stimulus or innate interest motivates him—and under these conditions learning comes easily. He is allowed to suffer the natural consequences of his actions (if he breaks a window, he gets cold; if he takes the gardener's property, the gardener will no longer do him favors), and experiences such as these lead to the development of his moral system. Although Rousseau never intended these educational details to be taken literally as a blueprint (he saw himself as developing and illustrating the basic principles), over the ages there have been attempts to implement them, one being the famous British “free school”, A.S. Neill's Summerhill. (It is worth noting that Neill claimed not to have read Rousseau; but he was working in a milieu in which Rousseau's ideas were well-known—intellectual influence can follow a less than direct path.) Furthermore, over the ages these principles also have proven to be fertile soil for philosophers of education to till.

Even more fertile ground for comment, in recent years, has been Rousseau's proposal for the education of girls, developed in a section of the novel (Book V) that bears the name of the young woman who is destined to be Emile's soul-mate, Sophy. The puzzle has been why Rousseau—who had been so far-sighted in his discussion of Emile's education—was so hide-bound if not retrograde in his thinking about her education. One short quotation is sufficient to illustrate the problem: “If woman is made to please and to be in subjection to man, she ought to make herself pleasing in his eyes and not provoke him …her strength is in her charms” (324).

The educational principles developed by Rousseau and Dewey, and numerous educational theorists and philosophers in the interregnum, are alive and well in the twenty-first century. Of particular contemporary interest is the evolution that has occurred of the progressive idea that each student is an active learner who is pursuing his or her own individual educational path. By incorporating elements of the classical empiricist epistemology of John Locke, this progressive principle has become transformed into the extremely popular position known as constructivism, according to which each student in a classroom constructs his or her own individual body of understandings even when all in the group are given what appears to be the same stimulus or educational experience. (A consequence of this is that a classroom of thirty students will have thirty individually-constructed, and possibly different, bodies of “knowledge”, in addition to that of the teacher!) There is also a solipsistic element here, for constructivists also believe that none of us—teachers included—can directly access the bodies of understandings of anyone else; each of us is imprisoned in a world of our own making. It is an understatement to say that this poses great difficulties for the teacher. The education journals of the past two decades contain many thousands of references to discussions of this position, which elsewhere I claimed has become a type of educational “secular religion”; for reasons that are hard to discern it is particularly influential in mathematics and science education. (For a discussion of the underlying philosophical ideas in constructivism, and for an account of some of its varieties, see the essays in Phillips, ed., 2000.)

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world—France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, to mention only a few—have their own intellectual traditions, and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education into the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world, there is such a diversity of approaches to the discipline that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her areas of competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last twenty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, commenting on the field as a whole or on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules, 1994; Chambliss, 1996; Phillips, 1985; Siegel, 2007; Smeyers, 1994); two large volumes—a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith and Standish, 2003) and a “Companion” (Curren, 2003)—have been produced by Blackwell in their well-known philosophy series; and the same publisher recently released an anthology, with 60 papers considered to be important in the field, and which also are representative of the range of work that is being done (Curren, 2007). Several encyclopedias of philosophy of education have been published or are in the works (for example, Chambliss, 1996; Siegel, 2008); there is a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch and Gingell, 1999), and a good textbook or two (see Noddings, 2007); in addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift in the present work (for another sampling see A. Rorty, 1998; Smeyers and Marshall, 1995; Stone, 1994); and several international journals appear to be flourishing— Educational Philosophy and Theory , Educational Theory , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Studies in Philosophy and Education , Theory and Research in Education . Thus there is enough material available to keep the interested reader busy, and to provide alternative assessments to the ones presented in this present essay.

• Apple, M., 1990, Ideology and Curriculum , New York: Routledge, 2 nd . Editon.
• Archambault, R., (ed.), 1965, Philosophical Analysis and Education , London: Routledge.
• Biesta, G., and Burbules, N., 2003, Pragmatism and Educational Research , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R., and Standish, P., (eds.), 2003, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Brighouse, H., 2000, Social Justice and School Choice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Burbules, N., 1994, “Marxism and Educational Thought”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 6), T. Husen and N. Postlethwaite (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, 2 nd . Edition, pp. 3617-22.
• Callan, E., 1997, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• Callan, E., and White, J., 2003, “Liberalism and Communitarianism”, in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education , N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith and P. Standish (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp.95-109.
• Carr, D., 2003, Making Sense of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Theory of Education and Teaching , London: RoutledgeFalmer.
• Chambliss, J., 1996, “History of Philosophy of Education”, in Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia , J. Chambliss (ed.), New York: Garland, pp.461-72.
• Cleverley, J., and Phillips, D.C., 1986, Visions of Childhood , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Curren, R., (ed.), 2003, A Companion to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Curren, R., (ed.), 2007, Philosophy of Education: An Anthology , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Dewey, J., 1916, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education , New York: Macmillan.
• Gellner, E., 1959, Words and Things , London: Gollancz.
• Hardie, C., 1962, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory , New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications.
• Hirst, P., 1965, “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge”, in Philosophical Analysis and Education , R. Archambault, (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 113-138.
• Hirst, P., and Peters, R., 1970, The Logic of Education , London: Routledge.
• Howe, K., 2003, Closing Methodological Divides: Toward Democratic Educational Research . Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Kaminsky, J., 1996, “Philosophy of Education: Professional Organizations In”, in Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia , J. Chambliss, (ed.), New York: Garland, pp. 475-79.
• Kohli, W., (ed.), 1995, Critical Conversations in Philosophy of Education , New York: Routledge.
• Kymlicka, W., 1995, Multicultural Citizenship , Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• Levinson, M., 1999, The Demands of Liberal Education , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lucas, C., (ed.), 1969, What is Philosophy of Education? London: Macmillan.
• Martin, J., 1985, Reclaiming a Conversation , New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
• Mehta, V., 1963, Fly and the Fly-Bottle : London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• Murphy, M., (ed.), 2006, The History and Philosophy of Education: Voices of Educational Pioneers , New Jersey: Pearson.
• Noddings, N., 1984, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• –––, 2007, Philosophy of Education , Boulder, CO: Westview, 2 nd . Edition.
• National Research Council (NRC), 2002, Scientific Research in Education , Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
• O'Connor, D., 1957, An Introduction to Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.
• Peters, R., (ed.), 1973, The Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Phillips, D.C., 1985, “Philosophy of Education”, in International Encyclopedia of Education, T. Husen and N. Postletwaite, (eds.), pp.3859-3877.
• –––, 1987, Philosophy, Science, and Social Inquiry , Oxford: Pergamon.
• –––, (ed.), 2000, Constructivism in Education: Opinions and Second Opinions on Controversial Issues , (Series: 99 th . Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2003, “Theories of Teaching and Learning”, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education , R. Curren, (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 232-245.
• –––, 2008, “Empirical Educational Research: Charting Philosophical Disagreements in an Undisciplined Field”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education , H. Siegel (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press.
• Reich, R., 2002, Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Rorty, A., (ed.), 1998, Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives , New York: Routledge.
• Rousseau, J-J., 1955, Emile , B. Foxley, (tr.), London: Dent/Everyman.
• Scheffler, I., 1960, The Language of Education , Illinois: Thomas.
• Siegel, H., 1988, Educating Reason: rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2007, “Philosophy of Education”, in Britannica Online Encyclopedia , [ Available online ].
• –––, (ed.), 2008, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press.
• Smeyers, P., 1994, “Philosophy of Education: Western European Perspectives”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 8), T. Husen and N. Postlethwaite, (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, 2 nd . Edition, pp. 4456-61.
• Smeyers, P., and Marshall, J., (eds.), 1995, Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein's Challenge , Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Smith, B., and Ennis, R., (eds.), 1961, Language and Concepts in Education , Chicago: Rand McNally.
• Snook, I., 1972, Indoctrination and Education , London: Routledge.
• Stokes, D., 1997, Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation , Washington, DC: Brookings.
• Stone, L., (ed.), 1994, The Education Feminism Reader , New York: Routledge.
• Ulich, R., 1954, Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Revised Ed.
• Winch, C., and Gingell, J., 1999, Key Concepts in the Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.
• PES (Philosophy of Education Society, North America)
• PESA (Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia)
• PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain)
• INPE (International Network of Philosophers of Education)
• UNESCO/International Bureau of Education: Thinkers on Education

autonomy: personal | -->Dewey, John --> | feminist (interventions): ethics | feminist (interventions): liberal feminism | feminist (interventions): political philosophy | -->feminist (topics): perspectives on autonomy --> | feminist (topics): perspectives on disability | Foucault, Michel | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | liberalism | Locke, John | -->Lyotard, Jean François --> | -->ordinary language --> | Plato | postmodernism | Rawls, John | rights: of children | -->Rousseau, Jean Jacques -->

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16.2 Sociological Perspectives on Education

Learning objectives.

• List the major functions of education.
• Explain the problems that conflict theory sees in education.
• Describe how symbolic interactionism understands education.

The major sociological perspectives on education fall nicely into the functional, conflict, and symbolic interactionist approaches (Ballantine & Hammack, 2009). Table 16.1 “Theory Snapshot” summarizes what these approaches say.

Table 16.1 Theory Snapshot

The Functions of Education

Functional theory stresses the functions that education serves in fulfilling a society’s various needs. Perhaps the most important function of education is socialization . If children need to learn the norms, values, and skills they need to function in society, then education is a primary vehicle for such learning. Schools teach the three Rs, as we all know, but they also teach many of the society’s norms and values. In the United States, these norms and values include respect for authority, patriotism (remember the Pledge of Allegiance?), punctuality, individualism, and competition. Regarding these last two values, American students from an early age compete as individuals over grades and other rewards. The situation is quite the opposite in Japan, where, as we saw in Chapter 4 “Socialization” , children learn the traditional Japanese values of harmony and group belonging from their schooling (Schneider & Silverman, 2010). They learn to value their membership in their homeroom, or kumi , and are evaluated more on their kumi ’s performance than on their own individual performance. How well a Japanese child’s kumi does is more important than how well the child does as an individual.

A second function of education is social integration . For a society to work, functionalists say, people must subscribe to a common set of beliefs and values. As we saw, the development of such common views was a goal of the system of free, compulsory education that developed in the 19th century. Thousands of immigrant children in the United States today are learning English, U.S. history, and other subjects that help prepare them for the workforce and integrate them into American life. Such integration is a major goal of the English-only movement, whose advocates say that only English should be used to teach children whose native tongue is Spanish, Vietnamese, or whatever other language their parents speak at home. Critics of this movement say it slows down these children’s education and weakens their ethnic identity (Schildkraut, 2005).

A third function of education is social placement . Beginning in grade school, students are identified by teachers and other school officials either as bright and motivated or as less bright and even educationally challenged. Depending on how they are identified, children are taught at the level that is thought to suit them best. In this way they are prepared in the most appropriate way possible for their later station in life. Whether this process works as well as it should is an important issue, and we explore it further when we discuss school tracking shortly.

Social and cultural innovation is a fourth function of education. Our scientists cannot make important scientific discoveries and our artists and thinkers cannot come up with great works of art, poetry, and prose unless they have first been educated in the many subjects they need to know for their chosen path.

Figure 16.1 The Functions of Education

Schools ideally perform many important functions in modern society. These include socialization, social integration, social placement, and social and cultural innovation.

Education also involves several latent functions, functions that are by-products of going to school and receiving an education rather than a direct effect of the education itself. One of these is child care . Once a child starts kindergarten and then first grade, for several hours a day the child is taken care of for free. The establishment of peer relationships is another latent function of schooling. Most of us met many of our friends while we were in school at whatever grade level, and some of those friendships endure the rest of our lives. A final latent function of education is that it keeps millions of high school students out of the full-time labor force . This fact keeps the unemployment rate lower than it would be if they were in the labor force.

Education and Inequality

Conflict theory does not dispute most of the functions just described. However, it does give some of them a different slant and talks about various ways in which education perpetuates social inequality (Hill, Macrine, & Gabbard, 2010; Liston, 1990). One example involves the function of social placement. As most schools track their students starting in grade school, the students thought by their teachers to be bright are placed in the faster tracks (especially in reading and arithmetic), while the slower students are placed in the slower tracks; in high school, three common tracks are the college track, vocational track, and general track.

Such tracking does have its advantages; it helps ensure that bright students learn as much as their abilities allow them, and it helps ensure that slower students are not taught over their heads. But, conflict theorists say, tracking also helps perpetuate social inequality by locking students into faster and lower tracks. Worse yet, several studies show that students’ social class and race and ethnicity affect the track into which they are placed, even though their intellectual abilities and potential should be the only things that matter: white, middle-class students are more likely to be tracked “up,” while poorer students and students of color are more likely to be tracked “down.” Once they are tracked, students learn more if they are tracked up and less if they are tracked down. The latter tend to lose self-esteem and begin to think they have little academic ability and thus do worse in school because they were tracked down. In this way, tracking is thought to be good for those tracked up and bad for those tracked down. Conflict theorists thus say that tracking perpetuates social inequality based on social class and race and ethnicity (Ansalone, 2006; Oakes, 2005).

Social inequality is also perpetuated through the widespread use of standardized tests. Critics say these tests continue to be culturally biased, as they include questions whose answers are most likely to be known by white, middle-class students, whose backgrounds have afforded them various experiences that help them answer the questions. They also say that scores on standardized tests reflect students’ socioeconomic status and experiences in addition to their academic abilities. To the extent this critique is true, standardized tests perpetuate social inequality (Grodsky, Warren, & Felts, 2008).

As we will see, schools in the United States also differ mightily in their resources, learning conditions, and other aspects, all of which affect how much students can learn in them. Simply put, schools are unequal, and their very inequality helps perpetuate inequality in the larger society. Children going to the worst schools in urban areas face many more obstacles to their learning than those going to well-funded schools in suburban areas. Their lack of learning helps ensure they remain trapped in poverty and its related problems.

Conflict theorists also say that schooling teaches a hidden curriculum , by which they mean a set of values and beliefs that support the status quo, including the existing social hierarchy (Booher-Jennings, 2008) (see Chapter 4 “Socialization” ). Although no one plots this behind closed doors, our schoolchildren learn patriotic values and respect for authority from the books they read and from various classroom activities.

Symbolic Interactionism and School Behavior

Symbolic interactionist studies of education examine social interaction in the classroom, on the playground, and in other school venues. These studies help us understand what happens in the schools themselves, but they also help us understand how what occurs in school is relevant for the larger society. Some studies, for example, show how children’s playground activities reinforce gender-role socialization. Girls tend to play more cooperative games, while boys play more competitive sports (Thorne, 1993) (see Chapter 11 “Gender and Gender Inequality” ).

Another body of research shows that teachers’ views about students can affect how much the students learn. When teachers think students are smart, they tend to spend more time with them, to call on them, and to praise them when they give the right answer. Not surprisingly these students learn more because of their teachers’ behavior. But when teachers think students are less bright, they tend to spend less time with them and act in a way that leads the students to learn less. One of the first studies to find this example of a self-fulfilling prophecy was conducted by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968). They tested a group of students at the beginning of the school year and told their teachers which students were bright and which were not. They tested the students again at the end of the school year; not surprisingly the bright students had learned more during the year than the less bright ones. But it turned out that the researchers had randomly decided which students would be designated bright and less bright. Because the “bright” students learned more during the school year without actually being brighter at the beginning, their teachers’ behavior must have been the reason. In fact, their teachers did spend more time with them and praised them more often than was true for the “less bright” students. To the extent this type of self-fulfilling prophecy occurs, it helps us understand why tracking is bad for the students tracked down.

Research guided by the symbolic interactionist perspective suggests that teachers’ expectations may influence how much their students learn. When teachers expect little of their students, their students tend to learn less.

ijiwaru jimbo – Pre-school colour pack – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Other research focuses on how teachers treat girls and boys. Several studies from the 1970s through the 1990s found that teachers call on boys more often and praise them more often (American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, 1998; Jones & Dindia, 2004). Teachers did not do this consciously, but their behavior nonetheless sent an implicit message to girls that math and science are not for girls and that they are not suited to do well in these subjects. This body of research stimulated efforts to educate teachers about the ways in which they may unwittingly send these messages and about strategies they could use to promote greater interest and achievement by girls in math and science (Battey, Kafai, Nixon, & Kao, 2007).

Key Takeaways

• According to the functional perspective, education helps socialize children and prepare them for their eventual entrance into the larger society as adults.
• The conflict perspective emphasizes that education reinforces inequality in the larger society.
• The symbolic interactionist perspective focuses on social interaction in the classroom, on school playgrounds, and at other school-related venues. Social interaction contributes to gender-role socialization, and teachers’ expectations may affect their students’ performance.

For Your Review

• Review how the functionalist, conflict, and symbolic interactionist perspectives understand and explain education. Which of these three approaches do you most prefer? Why?

American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. (1998). Gender gaps: Where schools still fail our children . Washington, DC: American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.

Ansalone, G. (2006). Tracking: A return to Jim Crow. Race, Gender & Class, 13 , 1–2.

Ballantine, J. H., & Hammack, F. M. (2009). The sociology of education: A systematic analysis (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Battey, D., Kafai, Y., Nixon, A. S., & Kao, L. L. (2007). Professional development for teachers on gender equity in the sciences: Initiating the conversation. Teachers College Record, 109 (1), 221–243.

Booher-Jennings, J. (2008). Learning to label: Socialisation, gender, and the hidden curriculum of high-stakes testing. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29 , 149–160.

Grodsky, E., Warren, J. R., & Felts, E. (2008). Testing and social stratification in American education. Annual Review of Sociology, 34 (1), 385–404.

Hill, D., Macrine, S., & Gabbard, D. (Eds.). (2010). Capitalist education: Globalisation and the politics of inequality . New York, NY: Routledge; Liston, D. P. (1990). Capitalist schools: Explanation and ethics in radical studies of schooling . New York, NY: Routledge.

Jones, S. M., & Dindia, K. (2004). A meta-analystic perspective on sex equity in the classroom. Review of Educational Research, 74 , 443–471.

Oakes, J. (2005). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom . New York, NY: Holt.

Schildkraut, D. J. (2005). Press “one” for English: Language policy, public opinion, and American identity . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schneider, L., & Silverman, A. (2010). Global sociology: Introducing five contemporary societies (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

education, community-building and change

Jiddu Krishnamurti and his insights into education

The Valley School’s birthday celebration. Established in 1978, itis one of the five schools of the Krishnamurti Foundation India

Jiddu Krishnamurti and his insights into education. Scott H. Forbes explores Jiddu Krishnamurti’s (1895-1986) emphasis on education as a religious activity. (From a presentation at the first Holistic Education Conference, Toronto, Canada, 1997)

contents : human nature ·  religion and religiosity ·  the nature of education ·  the intentions of education ·  participants in education ·  the physical nature of places of education ·  consequences for education ·  references ·  links ·  brief biography

For most of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s life what he said and wrote sparked both interest and controversy. His observations on religion, nationalism, tradition, organizations, and relationships often ran counter to the convention of the day. If they are less startling today, it is either due to the effect his insights have had on common consciousness or an indication of the extent to which he was ahead of his time. But Krishnamurti’s insights on education are still radical and frequently misunderstood or dismissed as impractical. This is probably due largely to the fact that Krishnamurti presents education as a religious activity in an age when most people still see it as preparation for succeeding in a secular world.

Throughout the ages sages have warned us that we can’t see what is true even when it is presented to us because that which is true isn’t what we expect or want to hear. The traditional western symbol for this is choosing Barabbas; choosing what is familiar or most like us over what is true or sacred. This is as true in educational matters as it is in religious ones. Modern education is so obviously failing to solve the world’s problems, is so rightly criticised for not meeting societies’ aspirations, and is so clearly unable to prepare people for the fundamental challenges of living. To solve these problems, we seem to need educational insights that marry the most profound learning possible with the everyday; the subtle with the mundane; or to put it another way, the sacred with the secular. I feel Jiddu Krishnamurti’s insights into education are such a marriage. I feel they are radical, that they meet the challenges of living at a profound level, and they do so at a time when such insights are desperately needed. Of all the many subjects that Krishnamurti addressed in his more than seventy years of writing books and speaking in public, I believe it is Krishnamurti’s insights into education that most people will eventually feel has had the greatest effect on the world.

Jiddu Krishnamurti’s interest in education was long standing and always passionate. In what is perhaps his first book, “Education As Service” (1912), we see his concern for education and the introduction of a few themes that remain in his work. We hear the voice of the seventeen year old Krishnamurti writing from his heartfelt experiences when he says in the foreword,

Many of the suggestions made in this little book come from my own memories of early school life;…. I have myself experienced both the right way of teaching and the wrong way, and therefore I want to help others towards the right way. (Krishnamurti 1912)

And for the rest of his life he did try to help others towards a better form of education.

Krishnamurti’s work is large, subtle, and complex; Krishnamurti did not explicitly define positions; instead, his understanding is interwoven through out his work. This is further complicated by the evolution in his manner of expression that occurred over his lifetime, so that two comments taken out of context and separated by decades seem to contradict each other (though, taken in context, they are not contradictory); and He did not present his insights in traditional intellectual forms, which would have made summarisation easier. Consequently, we are left with a kind of translation – translating Krishnamurti’s work, which is partly apophatic, into an expository presentation. And, as with all processes of translation, something is lost, and those who know the original see the loss, and rightly complain.

The topics which I feel I can not avoid are: 1.) Jiddu Krishnamurti’s approach to what is religious or religiousness or religiosity, 2.) his approach to the nature of human beings, and 3.) his approach to the nature of education. Unfortunately, it would not be possible to address the topic of this paper, without making at least some attempt at explicating these aspects of Krishnamurti’s work, so I’m afraid this is very much a case of ‘a fool rushing in where wise men fear to tread’.

Krishnamurti’s approach to the nature of the religious, religiosity, religiousness

It would be far easier to say what, for Jiddu Krishnamurti, the religious or religiousness or religiosity isn’t than to say what it is. One very specific thing that is isn’t is any part of any religion. Krishnamurti felt that what is sacred or truly religious could not be conditional, culture-bound or time-bound. Consequently, he felt that what is religious could not be contained by or subject to any dogma, belief, or authority. Krishnamurti’s approach to a religiousness that is free of religion would be an interesting subject for those concerned with the challenges of values, morals, or religious education in today’s pluralist world, but it is not a subject I can address here.

If that which is sacred cannot be related to dogma, ritual, buildings, authorities, or symbols, then what does man have that can make contact with the sacred? Krishnamurti felt that the bridge from the secular to the sacred is a particular consciousness. It is a consciousness that sees things as they are; one that is free of the distortions of conditioning and free of the limitations of thought (while still employing thought). It is a consciousness that has transcended the imperatives of the self or ego and so knows compassion or selfless love. It is a consciousness that knows silence and sees beauty and lives joy.

Jiddu Krishnamurti felt that the sacred is the foundation of all things, lies at the origin of all things, and so is that which is irreducible or can’t be broken into more fundamental elements. He felt that all things are part of a unity or integrated whole, and that that integrated whole is sacred. The word ‘integrated’ is used here as an adjective not a verb – it is not that things can be integrated or brought together, but rather that all things always are constituent or component parts that make up the whole in such a way that it is the whole is the sine quo non of the parts. The closest material analogy is perhaps a hologram – if a hologram is smashed, each fragment contains the whole hologram. Consequently, there can be no development of a part which does not affect the whole, and there can be benefit to a part this is detrimental to the whole.

As the integrated whole (or that which is religious or sacred) is always involved, it makes no sense to think of sequentially developing particulars first and the whole later (i.e. intellectual development first and a sense of the sacred later, etc.). The particulars are constituents of the whole and they must be dealt with together.

Krishnamurti’s approach to the nature of human beings

Krishnamurti’s work on the nature of human beings is vast since he arguably spent more than seventy years writing and speaking about the human condition. I must again contain my comments to just those few which seem necessary for the theme of this paper.

Jiddu Krishnamurti saw human beings as having different facets (like intellects, emotions, appetites, bodies, etc.) but the whole of which the facets are aspects is more important. Humans have minds as well as brains (more will be said on this later), and it is the consciousness that minds are capable of that can perceive what is religious – the integrated whole (though this should not be confused with some notion of omniscience or seeing everything), and it is to the full flowering of the mind that Krishnamurti felt education should direct itself. The human brain, for reasons too complex to go into here, normally works by fragmenting the whole, and one very important task that the brain needs to learn is to stop this fragmenting process when it is not necessary. Consequently, as possessors of both brains and minds, humans have the capacity of participating in the universe at many different levels, from the particular to the general. Like a Buddhist, one might consider the most real to be that which is most general or generative. Or, like a hard scientist, one might consider most real that which is most particular. For Krishnamurti, human beings have the capacity to venture to both limits and to unite them.

Krishnamurti’s approach to the nature of education

As much will be said throughout this paper on Krishnamurti’s perspective on education, I can confine my summary comments here to saying simply that education was seen as towards the fullest development of the full human being. From the full body of his work, we can conclude that, for Krishnamurti, education is 1.) educating the whole person (all parts of the person), 2.) educating the person as a whole (not as an assemblage of parts), and 3.) educating the person within a whole (as part of society, humanity, nature, etc.) from which it is not meaningful to extract that person. From the above it probably goes without saying, though it can not be said often enough, education is not about preparation for only a part of life (like work) but is about preparation for the whole of life and the deepest aspects of living.

Now that some attempt has been made at summarising Jiddu Krishnamurti’s approach to the nature of religiousness/religiosity, the nature of human beings, and the nature of education, I will try to support the main theme of this paper by presenting what Krishnamurti said about 1.) the intentions of education, 2.) the physical nature of the places in which education occurs, and 3.) the participants in education – the students and staff. I use the expression ‘educational centres’ instead of ‘schools’ as this is often the expression that Krishnamurti used, and because the educational centres that he founded were also meant to be places for adults to learn. In English, or rather in the English of England, schools are specifically places for younger students. To support my theme I will show how Krishnamurti described the three elements mentioned above (the intentions, the places, and the participants) in religious terms, which has the added benefit of seeing the relationship they have with one another. I believe these three elements are the focus of much, if not most, of Krishnamurti’s work on education.

1. The intentions of education

Krishnamurti repeatedly stated the intentions of the education centres he founded in very unequivocal terms, and in very religious ones.

… children… must be educated rightly… educated so that they become religious human beings. (Krishnamurti 1979) Surely they must be centres of learning a way of life which is not based on pleasure, on self-centered activities, but on the understanding of correct action, the depth and beauty of relationship, and the sacredness of a religious life. (Krishnamurti 1981b) (Letter dated 15th October 1980) These places exist for the enlightenment of man (Krishnamurti 1981b) (letter of 15th October 1979)

Part of what is religious (as stated previously) is having a consciousness that sees reality, that sees ‘what is’. The difference between understanding what one is and striving to become something that one isn’t is mirrored in the difference between wanting to discover ‘what is’ and striving to change ‘what is’. Jiddu Krishnamurti didn’t deny growth or change, in fact he applauded it. But meaningful growth and real material change without the all too frequent unfortunate side effects cannot be produced by just ensuring young people acquire knowledge and skills, and teaching them to conform to the strictures and demands of society in order to get on in life. In emphasising the latter, parents may comfort themselves that they are helping their children have material security, and schools may congratulate themselves on their examination results, but in Krishnamurti’s view they are only adding to the sorrows and violence of the world. He decries the fact that most education is to…

…acquire a job or use that knowledge for self-satisfaction, for self-aggrandisement, to get on in the world. Merely to cultivate technical capacity without understanding what is true freedom leads to destruction, to greater wars; and that is actually what is happening in the world. (Krishnamurti 1953a)

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education. (Krishnamurti 1948)

Krishnamurti often stated that the purpose of education is to bring about freedom, love, “the flowering of goodness” and the complete transformation of society. He specifically contrasts this to what he feels are the intentions of most schools which emphasise preparing young people to succeed materially in the society that exists (or a slightly altered one). Even though it is fashionable for schools to declare loftier goals, it is instructive to examine how much undivided attention is dedicated during the day to such lofty goals and how much time is given to preparation for earning a living. It is also instructive to examine what are felt to be the imperatives that shape the educational experience – things like the use of space, who and what determines pedagogic activities, the use of time, and what is assessed, by whom and for what.

As previously mentioned, a constant theme in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s declarations of the intentions of education is freedom, but freedom for Krishnamurti is more inner in character than political. Of course, there is a connection between psychological freedom and outward compulsion – it is difficult to help a student find the former in a climate dominated by the latter – but it is not political freedom that interests Krishnamurti. Rather he is interested in the deeper freedom of the psyche and the spirit, the inner liberation that he felt was both the means and the ends of education.

Freedom is at the beginning, it is not something to be gained at the end. (Krishnamurti 1953c) (Chapter 6) There is no freedom at the end of compulsion; the outcome of compulsion is compulsion. (Krishnamurti 1953b) If you dominate a child, compel him to fit into a pattern, however idealistic, will he be free at the end of it? If we want to bring about a true revolution in education, there must obviously be freedom at the very beginning, which means that both the parent and the teacher must be concerned with freedom and not with how to help the child to become this or that. (Krishnamurti 1953b)

For Jiddu Krishnamurti, the intentions of education must be the inner transformation and liberation of the human being and, from that, society would be transformed. Education is intended to assist people to become truly religious. These intentions must not be just pleasant sounding ideals to which one pays lip service, and they are not to be arrived at by their opposites. And the religious intentions are not for some eventual goal, but for life in educational centres from moment to moment.

2. The physical nature of the places of education

Krishnamurti felt that the physical nature of educational centres was very important. He maintained that we are affected or informed by and therefore educated by far more than we suspect, and this is especially true of young impressionable minds. I will focus on what I believe to be the three elements that Krishnamurti spoke of most concerning the physicality of educational centres – 1.) the aesthetics, which includes order, 2.) special areas that Jiddu Krishnamurti felt should exist in the centres he founded, and by extension we can assume he would feel should exist in all schools, and 3.) the atmosphere he felt should prevail and which he usually spoke of as part of the physical nature of the centres, though one can argue that they are material only in a very special sense. Again, in keeping with the theme of my paper, I will show that Krishnamurti spoke of these four elements in religious terms.

a) Aesthetics. The schools Krishnamurti founded are very beautiful places, and this is not by accident. Beauty is important, not just because it is pleasing, but because sensitivity to beauty is related to being religious and indispensable to the healthy growth of a child.

To be religious is to be sensitive to reality. Your total being – body, mind, and heart – is sensitive to beauty and ugliness, to the donkey tied to a post, to the poverty and filth in this town, to laughter and tears, to everything about you. From this sensitivity for the whole of existence springs goodness, love; …(Krishnamurti 1964) (chapter 23)

He himself was extremely attentive to details and critical of things that were badly done. He was very understanding if things could not be better because of real constraints, and he never pushed the administrators of his schools to produce anything that was beyond their means. However, if things were not good through slipshod handling, neglect or lack of sensitivity, then he felt it ran counter to an essential element in education as it ran counter to the religious life that the staff are meant to be living. To expect sensitivity to develop in a child when the staff are insensitive, is to teach a very strong lesson in hypocrisy. Like several holistic educators before him (i.e. Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Fröbel) Jiddu Krishnamurti felt that some very important things could not be taught by proscription, these things need to be lived in the presence of the learner for them to be learned. And, like Keats, whose poetry he greatly admired, Krishnamurti felt that beauty was related to truth.

Perhaps we should include in this discussion on aesthetics what Krishnamurti felt about nature and education. This makes sense in that for Krishnamurti, nature was both beautiful and a demonstration of order. The educational centres Krishnamurti founded are invariably in parks or countryside. This was not just because he felt that nature was pleasing, but because he felt that a relationship with nature had important implications for living sanely and to a relationship with the sacred. He would not, however, condemn as hopeless, inner-city schools that don’t have such luxuries, because nature was wholly available in the smallest part; a blade of grass, a house plant, or a gold fish.

That healing [of the mind] gradually takes place if you are with nature, with that orange on the tree, and the blade of grass that pushes through the cement, and the hills covered, hidden, by the clouds. This is not sentiment or romantic imagination but a reality of a relationship with everything that lives and moves on the earth. (Krishnamurti 1987) (entry dated 25th February 1983)

If you establish a relationship with it [nature] then you have relationship with mankind… But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity, with human beings. (Krishnamurti 1987)

b) Special areas that should exist in educational centres. Another physical aspect of the educational centres Jiddu Krishnamurti created, and another indication of the religiousness of education, was his insistence that the schools have special places for silence. He often spoke to the students of the importance of a quiet mind or silence so that they could observe their thoughts.

You see meditation means to have a very quiet, still mind, not a chattering mind; to have a really quiet body, quiet mind so that your mind becomes religious. (Krishnamurti 1981a) The mind of a religious man is very quiet, sane, rational, logical – and one needs such a mind… (Krishnamurti 1962)

Jiddu Krishnamurti usually asked that these special places not be on the periphery of the schools, but in the centre of the them. Like a sanctum sanctorum, they were to be the heart, the space that generated the rest of the school. Contrary to most conceptions of schools, Krishnamurti felt that action was to be on the periphery and the insight born of silence was to be at the centre.

c) Atmospheres. While atmospheres are generated by aesthetics, the setting, and the effect of special areas in educational centres, there are also atmospheres that are generated by the participants. At least part of the atmospheres generated by people can be deliberately generated. This atmosphere is another link in understanding the religiousness of education. At Brockwood (the school that Krishnamurti founded in England) Krishnamurti frequently talked about the importance of generating an atmosphere that would itself have an effect on students the moment they arrived. Long discussions were held with the staff at Brockwood about the nature of such an atmosphere and how it might come about. Jiddu Krishnamurti had no doubt that it was possible and necessary. It had more the ring of something religious than anything commonly associated with a school. It was something sacred that worked its own magic on people in a profound and transforming way. Without that real religious atmosphere, he felt that a school was empty, or worse, it was a parody of itself, a kind of Disneyesque impression of something real but with no real substance.

Such an atmosphere, though distinct from the people in the schools, could not be separated from the people. A place may carry an atmosphere, but it is the people who create it or destroy it. To illustrate this he would cite places that at one time were known to have had very special and powerful atmospheres but which were destroyed through neglect, incompetence or corrupt behaviour. Examples of this are some of the great cathedrals or temples that have become tourist industries or money making enterprises, and so have lost any sense of religiousness. They became lifeless and without meaning even though they maintained all the physical appearance of their former selves.

There was a very memorable discussion with Jiddu Krishnamurti at the end of his life when several representatives of different schools he founded in India, America, and England went for a walk with him. He asked us all what would be left in his schools to indicate that they were Krishnamurti schools if the name Krishnamurti was removed and if all his books, audio tapes and video tapes were gone; and if something was still there, what would sustain it. It was a question about the all important ineffable qualities, the atmospheres of the educational centres, and it was a question about what we were generating; and it was a question answered by a very uncomfortable and telling silence.

3. The participants in education

There are, generally speaking, two kinds of participants in educational centres: staff and students. Jiddu Krishnamurti felt that any adult that was regularly in one of the centres was a staff member (regardless of function) and because of their regular contact with at least the educational environment if not the students, then they were in the position of educators. Everyone, staff and students, had something religious about their natures just by virtue of being human, but they had something more than that by virtue of their being in education. Krishnamurti didn’t speak of them as religious figures (such as priests or accolades) but one thing that distinguishes participants in education from participants in some other social organizations (i.e. police officers, nurses, bankers, etc.) is that people in education must have religiousness central to their overall intention and central to the nature of the life they lived on a daily basis. As this is equally necessary to both staff and students, there can be no real hierarchy between them. There are, of course, differences between staff and students in their responsibilities and experience; but in all that is most important in education the staff and students are really in the same boat. Staff members may know more about academic subjects, or gardening, or administration and therefore have a certain authority in those areas, but these are not the central concerns of education. In the central concerns of education, which is to do with inner liberation, both the students and the teachers are learners and therefore equal, and this is untouched by functional authority.

Therefore I say, authority has its place as knowledge, but there is no spiritual authority under any circumstances… That is, authority destroys freedom, but the authority of a doctor, mathematics teacher and how he teaches, that doesn’t destroy freedom. (Krishnamurti 1975) In thus helping the student towards freedom, the educator is changing his own values also; he too is beginning to be rid of the “me” and the “mine”, he too is flowering in love and goodness. This process of mutual education creates an altogether different relationship between the teacher and the student. (Krishnamurti 1953c) (Chapter 6)

Jiddu Krishnamurti felt that the over-riding quality of an educator should be religiosity.

Because he is devoted solely to the freedom and integration of the individual, the right kind of educator is deeply and truly religious. He does not belong to any sect, to any organised religion; is free of beliefs and rituals… (Krishnamurti 1953c) (Chapter 6)

Because the educator is religious; he is concerned first with ‘being’, and then right ‘doing’ will follow from it. Krishnamurti describes this relationship between ‘being’ and ‘doing’ frequently, but perhaps nowhere more succinctly than in one of his talks in Bombay,

… it is not ‘doing is being’ but ‘being is doing’ (Krishnamurti 1956).

For Jiddu Krishnamurti, ‘doing’ derived from ‘being’ rather than ‘being’ deriving from ‘doing’ – the reverse of convention. Much more needs to be said than this paper permits about the consequences of reversing the roles of ‘being’ and ‘doing’, or even worse, of confusing them. Note the modern convention of a question like, “Who are you?” (a question about being) which is answered by, “I’m a lawyer, engineer, etc.” (a statement about doing). Suffice it to say that this reversal or confusion usually leads to a highly developed ‘doing’ (which is easier to accomplish) with impoverished ‘being,’ and Krishnamurti felt that dysfunction was the usual consequence of such imbalance.

When discussing the selection process for students and staff at his English educational centre, Krishnamurti always stressed the importance of the candidate’s ‘being’ – their deepest sensitivities, their goodness and intelligence (in his definitions of those words which had nothing to do with conventional morality or IQ), the depth of their questions about themselves and the world. Although he wanted both staff and students to be intellectually sound, he never stressed academic prowess, cultural abilities, or capacities as being more important than the willingness and ability to lead what he called a religious life’. In one memorable discussion, Jiddu Krishnamurti questioned the staff about all the qualities they looked for in prospective students (as it was all the staff together who chose new students and staff members). Krishnamurti then described himself as a boy. He said he had been vague, shy, dreamy and bad at all academics, but sensitive, full of wonder, trusting, and affectionate; and Krishnamurti asked if, according to the criteria the staff had just enunciated, they would have accepted him as a child. Again, a painful silence.

Our description of the students we were seeking for a Krishnamurti school seemed not to include the young Krishnamurti. How was this possible? It was because we as staff members were thinking too conventionally and traditionally, we were more interested in ‘doing’ than ‘being’, more interested in the measurable than the immeasurable; we were choosing what was most like us, we were again choosing Barabbas.

The consequences of Krishnamurti’s view of humanity for education

Earlier on in this paper, I tried to give a summary of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s view of the nature of a human being. It now remains to say just a few things about the relation of this view to what he felt were the consequences for education. I will concentrate on only two elements as they most directly support my contention that for Krishnamurti education was a religious activity. These two elements are: 1.) the distinction between mind and brain, and 2.) people need to be revealed to themselves not shaped by others.

Krishnamurti’s view that a human has both a brain and a mind puts him at odds with most modern perspectives and most learning theory. Although this article is too short to do justice to this topic, we can simplify the difference as follows: the brain is the material centre of the nervous system and the organ of cognition. It is therefore responsible for co-ordination of the senses, memory, rationality, intellectual knowledge, etc. The mind, which is not material, is related to insight (non-visual perception), compassion, and the profound intelligence that Jiddu Krishnamurti held as the real goal of life and therefore of education. Obviously one needs a brain that functions well (like one needs a heart or a liver that functions well) but the real source of acting rightly, of goodness, and of a religious life is the mind. In this unequal relationship between the two, a good brain can not ameliorate a mind, but a good mind does ameliorate the brain. The brain has an important role to play with the mind, and that role is freeing itself from its conditioning and from activities that inhibit the mind’s healthy functioning (i.e. hate, fear, pride, etc.); and helping the brain do this is one of the main functions of education (not accumulating knowledge).

The real issue is the quality of our mind: not its knowledge but the depth of the mind that meets knowledge. Mind is infinite, is the nature of the universe which has its own order, has its own immense energy. It is everlastingly free. The brain, as it is now, is the slave of knowledge and so is limited, finite, fragmentary. When the brain frees itself from its conditioning, then the brain is infinite, then only there is no division between the mind and the brain. Education then is freedom from conditioning, from its vast accumulated knowledge as tradition. This does not deny the academic disciplines which have their own proper place in life. (Krishnamurti 1985) (Letter dated 1st October 1982)

Contrary to the perspective that has shaped much in conventional education, Jiddu Krishnamurti felt that each person needs to explore themselves and reveal themselves to themselves rather than be shaped into something by others. This is not a new perspective, and again has links to the educational theories of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Fröbel, and Montessori.

The function of education, then, is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but to be yourself all the time. So freedom lies…in understanding what you are from moment to moment. You see, you are not [normally] educated for this; your education encourages you to become something or other… (Krishnamurti 1964) (Chapter 3) To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education. (Krishnamurti 1953c) (Chapter 1)

Krishnamurti felt that not only was a person’s nature and deepest aspects to be uncovered, but each person also has a unique vocation that needs to be discovered; what he/she really loves to do has to be found and pursued, and to do anything else is a deprivation of the worst kind, especially if such deprivation is in order to pursue success or other such cultural aspirations. The discovery of the natural vocation for an individual student and the student’s understanding what he really loves to do may not fit into the plans of the parents or society, but it is an important part of understanding oneself and, consequently, of education.

Modern education is making us into thoughtless entities; it does very little towards helping us to find our individual vocation. (Krishnamurti 1964) (Chapter 3) To find out what you really love to do is one of the most difficult things. That is part of education. (Krishnamurti 1974) (Part 1, Chapter 8) Right education is to help you to find out for yourself what you really, with all your heart, love to do. It does not matter what it is, whether it is to cook, or to be a gardener, but is something in which you have put your mind, your heart. (Krishnamurti 1974) (Part 1, Chapter 8)

I realize I have not said anything about how Jiddu Krishnamurti felt that any of the above could be put into practice. The theme of this paper is too small to attempt that, and yet still I feel I have bitten off more than I can chew – or perhaps it is just more than I could present in a digestible form. I have wanted to show that for Krishnamurti education was first and foremost a religious activity. In 1929 he stated what he felt was the central intention in his life,

I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing; to set man free. (Krishnamurti 1929)

For this Krishnamurti started schools, and for this reason only. We read the words of the young seventeen year old Krishnamurti who wrote,

If the unity of life and the oneness of its purpose could be clearly taught to the young in schools, how much brighter would be our hopes for the future! (Krishnamurti 1912) (Foreword)

Forty one years later he wrote,

If one becomes aware that there can be peace and harmony for man only through right education, then one will naturally give one’s whole life and interest to it. (Krishnamurti 1953c) (Chapter 6)

And that is exactly what he did.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1965). Education 1864. In Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson . New York: New American Library.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1912) Education As Service . Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing Society.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1929) The Dissolution of the Order of the Star , 3rd August, at Ommen, Holland.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1948) 5th Public Talk , 26th September, at Poona.

Krishnamurti,, Jiddu (1953a) 3rd Public Talk , 31st January, at Poona.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1953b) 6th Public Talk , 5th July, at Ojai, CA.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1953c) Education And The Significance Of Life, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1956) 5th Public Talk , 18th March, at Bombay.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1962) 2nd Public Talk , 7th June, at London.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1964) This Matter of Culture, London: Victor Gollancz.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1974) On Education , Pondicherry, India: All India Press.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1975) Dialogue on Education , at Ojai.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1979) 2nd Public Talk , 26 August, at Brockwood Park.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1981a) 2nd talk to students , 19th November, at Rajghat.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1981b) Letters To The Schools: Volume One . Den Haag, Holland: Mirananda.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1985) Letters To The Schools: Volume Two . Den Haag, Holland: Mirananda.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1987) Krishnamurti To Himself, London: Victor Gollancz.

Montessori, M. (1973) The Absorbant Mind, Madras: Kalakshetra Publications.

Sells, M. A. (1994) Mystical Languages of Unsaying, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

For an introduction to his work:

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1970) The Krishnamurti Reader (edited by M. Lutyens), London: Penguin/Arkana. Incorporates two of Krishnamurti’s books: The Urgency of Change and The Only Revolution .

Krishnamurti, Jiddu (1978) Beginnings of Learning , London: Penguin/Arkana.

Links to other resources on Krishnamurti and education

Visit the Krishnamurti Foundation’s J.Krishnamurti Online site. It has large collection of material about him and his approach and teachings: http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/index.php

Brief details of life

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986): born on 11 May, 1895, at Madanapalle, a small village in south India, Jiddu Krishnamurti was brought to England by Annie Besant (President of the Theosophist Society) and educated by her. She proclaimed him the Messiah and set up an organization (The Order of the Star in the East) to promote his teaching. In 1929, after experiencing considerable doubts about the role allotted to him, Jiddu Krishnamurti disbanded the organisation saying:

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organisation be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. (from The Krishnamurti Foundation Trust)

From then until his death in February 1986, he travelled round the world speaking as a private person, teaching – giving talks and having discussions.

About the Author : Dr. Scott H. Forbes is the executive director of Holistic Education, Inc. , a non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon. He guides the development of the Holistic Education Elementary School, directs the Teacher Development Program and heads the Holistic Education Research Unit. Scott’s intellectual work is being published under the title “Holistic Education: An Analysis of Its Ideas and Nature” (July 2003, Foundation for Educational Renewal).Previous to his doctoral work at The University of Oxford, Scott taught for 20 years (10 as Principal) at the Brockwood Park Krishnamurti Educational Centre in England.

Additional writings by Scott concerning Krishnamurti and education can be found in articles on freedom and values at: http://www.Holistic-Education.net/articles/articles.htm

the main article © Scott Forbes 1997

Acknowledgments : The picture of Jiddu Krishnamurti (believed to have been taken during the 1920s) is reproduced here in the belief that it is in the public domain. Sourced from Wikipedia Commons, it is a press photograph from the George Grantham Bain collection, which was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1948. According to the library, there are no known restrictions on the use of these photos.

The picture of the Valley Schools 33rd birthday celebrations is by Nagarjun Kansukuru and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence. It was sourced from Flickr. The Valley School, established in 1978, is one of the five schools of the Krishnamurti Foundation India.

First published in this form May 30, 2000.

Last Updated on October 19, 2019 by infed.org

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Chapter 1 - 'education and the significance of life'.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia. This is especially true in colleges and universities. We are turning out, as if through a mould, a type of human being whose chief interest is to find security, to become somebody important, or to have a good time with as little thought as possible.

Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult. Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be different from the group or to resist environment is not easy and is often risky as long as we worship success. The urge to be successful, which is the pursuit of reward whether in the material or in the so-called spiritual sphere, the search for inward or outward security, the desire for comfort - this whole process smothers discontent, puts an end to spontaneity and breeds fear; and fear blocks the intelligent understanding of life. With increasing age, dullness of mind and heart sets in.

In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion. This fear of life, this fear of struggle and of new experience, kills in us the spirit of adventure; our whole upbringing and education have made us afraid to be different from our neighbour, afraid to think contrary to the established pattern of society, falsely respectful of authority and tradition.

Fortunately, there are a few who are in earnest, who are willing to examine our human problems without the prejudice of the right or of the left; but in the vast majority of us, there is no real spirit of discontent, of revolt. When we yield uncomprehendingly to environment, any spirit of revolt that we may have had dies down, and our responsibilities soon put an end to it.

Revolt is of two kinds: there is violent revolt, which is mere reaction, without understanding, against the existing order; and there is the deep psychological revolt of intelligence. There are many who revolt against the established orthodoxies only to fall into new orthodoxies, further illusions and concealed self-indulgences. What generally happens is that we break away from one group or set of ideals and join another group, take up other ideals, thus creating a new pattern of thought against which we will again have to revolt. Reaction only breeds opposition, and reform needs further reform.

But there is an intelligent revolt which is not reaction, and which comes with self-knowledge through the awareness of one's own thought and feeling. It is only when we face experience as it comes and do not avoid disturbance that we keep intelligence highly awakened; and intelligence highly awakened is intuition, which is the only true guide in life. 7 Now, what is the significance of life? What are we living and struggling for? If we are being educated merely to achieve distinction, to get a better job, to be more efficient, to have wider domination over others, then our lives will be shallow and empty. If we are being educated only to be scientists, to be scholars wedded to books, or specialists addicted to knowledge, then we shall be contributing to the destruction and misery of the world.

Though there is a higher and wider significance to life, of what value is our education if we never discover it? We may be highly educated, but if we are without deep integration of thought and feeling, our lives are incomplete, contradictory and torn with many fears; and as long as education does not cultivate an integrated outlook on life, it has very little significance.

In our present civilization we have divided life into so many departments that education has very little meaning, except in learning a particular technique or profession. Instead of awakening the integrated intelligence of the individual, education is encouraging him to conform to a pattern and so is hindering his comprehension of himself as a total process. To attempt to solve the many problems of existence at their respective levels, separated as they are into various categories, indicates an utter lack of comprehension.

The individual is made up of different entities, but to emphasize the differences and to encourage the development of a definite type leads to many complexities and contradictions. Education should bring about the integration of these separate entities - for without integration, life becomes a series of conflicts and sorrows. Of what value is it to be trained as lawyers if we perpetuate litigation? Of what value is knowledge if we continue in our confusion? What significance has technical and industrial capacity if we use it to destroy one another? What is the point of our existence if it leads to violence and utter misery? Though we may have money or are capable of earning it, though we have our pleasures and our organized religions, we are in endless conflict.

We must distinguish between the personal and the individual. The personal is the accidental; and by the accidental I mean the circumstances of birth, the environment in which we happen to have been brought up, with its nationalism, superstitions, class distinctions and prejudices. The personal or accidental is but momentary, though that moment may last a lifetime; and as the present system of education is based on the personal, the accidental, the momentary, it leads to perversion of thought and the inculcation of self-defensive fears.

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security, and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear. Such a training must inevitably bring confusion and misery to ourselves and to the world, for it creates in each individual those psychological barriers which separate and hold him apart from others.

Education is not merely a matter of training the mind. Training makes for efficiency, but it does not bring about completeness. A mind that has merely been trained is the continuation of the past, and such a mind can never discover the new. That is why, to find out what is right education, we will have to inquire into the whole significance of living.

To most of us, the meaning of life as a whole is not of primary importance, and our education emphasizes secondary values, merely making us proficient in some branch of knowledge. Though knowledge and efficiency are necessary, to lay chief emphasis on them only leads to conflict and confusion.

There is an efficiency inspired by love which goes far beyond and is much greater than the efficiency of ambition; and without love, which brings an integrated understanding of life, efficiency breeds ruthlessness. Is this not what is actually taking place all over the world? Our present education is geared to industrialization and war, its principal aim being to develop efficiency; and we are caught in this machine of ruthless competition and mutual destruction. If education leads to war, if it teaches us to destroy or be destroyed, has it not utterly failed?

To bring about right education, we must obviously understand the meaning of life as a whole, and for that we have to be able to think, not consistently, but directly and truly. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. We cannot understand existence abstractly or theoretically. To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.

Education is not merely acquiring knowledge, gathering and correlating facts; it is to see the significance of life as a whole. But the whole cannot be approached through the part - which is what governments, organized religions and authoritarian parties are attempting to do.

The function of education is to create human beings who are integrated and therefore intelligent. We may take degrees and be mechanically efficient without being intelligent. Intelligence is not mere information; it is not derived from books, nor does it consist of clever self-defensive responses and aggressive assertions. One who has not studied may be more intelligent than the learned. We have made examinations and degrees the criterion of intelligence and have developed cunning minds that avoid vital human issues. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.

Education should help us to discover lasting values so that we do not merely cling to formulas or repeat slogans; it should help us to break down our national and social barriers, instead of emphasizing them, for they breed antagonism between man and man. Unfortunately, the present system of education is making us subservient, mechanical and deeply thoughtless; though it awakens us intellectually, inwardly it leaves us incomplete, stultified and uncreative.

Without an integrated understanding of life, our individual and collective problems will only deepen and extend. The purpose of education is not to produce mere scholars, technicians and job hunters, but integrated men and women who are free of fear; for only between such human beings can there be enduring peace.

It is in the understanding of ourselves that fear comes to an end. If the individual is to grapple with life from moment to moment, if he is to face its intricacies, its miseries and sudden demands, he must be infinitely pliable and therefore free of theories and particular patterns of thought.

Education should not encourage the individual to conform to society or to be negatively harmonious with it, but help him to discover the true values which come with unbiased investigation and self-awareness. When there is no self-knowledge, self-expression becomes self-assertion, with all its aggressive and ambitious conflicts. Education should awaken the capacity to be self-aware and not merely indulge in gratifying self-expression.

What is the good of learning if in the process of living we are destroying ourselves? As we are having a series of devastating wars, one right after another, there is obviously something radically wrong with the way we bring up our children. I think most of us are aware of this, but we do not know how to deal with it.

Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves. The individual is of first importance, not the system; and as long as the individual does not understand the total process of himself, no system, whether of the left or of the right, can bring order and peace to the world.

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JIDDU KRISHNAMURTHI'S PERSPECTIVE ON EDUCATION AND ITS RELEVANCE TODAY

One of the greatest exponents of education philosophers of the 20th century. His contribution is still relevant to our contemporary system of education in India.

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This paper presents insights for philosophical counseling rooted in the thought of Jiddu Krish-namurti, a modern Indian thinker. This paper does not suggest that Krishnamurti was a philosopher or philosophical counsellor, even though his words inspired many towards personal transformation. Rather, the attempt here is to suggest that a cogent approach to philosophical counseling may be rooted in the thought of Krishnamurti. To develop this proposition, this paper explicates the ideas of illusory self, images and experience from Krishnamurti's thought as these hold relevance to the practice of philosophical counseling. Krishnamurti believes that self is an illusion created of mental images that tend to become so powerful over time that they hinder our genuine engagement with people and the world. This genuine engagement with others and the world is possible only through a non-judgmental state of mind which Krishnamurti calls 'choiceless aware-ness'. This state of mind involves observation devoid of the usual psychological processes, such as, comparing, contrasting, and evaluating. The paper further elaborates on the proposition of mental images being at the core of psychological suffering. Subsequently, the paper explicates the underlying assumptions of the system of philosophical counseling based on the thought of Krishnamurti followed by a detailed discussion on the implications and practical considerations. This discussion is centered around the possibility of using philosophical counselling in deconstructing the images and discovering one's true self to give a direction to one's life. This paper ends with some concluding remarks that highlight the special relevance that Krishnamurti's ideas may hold when applied to philosophical counseling in present times.

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The purpose of this qualitative research study, which utilizes a phenomenological inquiry method, is to inquire into the awareness of what it means to be a whole teacher from the perspective of the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, a philosopher/spiritual teacher. Four participants (teachers) were interviewed from the Oak Grove School, an alternative, holistic school founded by Krishnamurti in 1974. This inquiry probed into teachers‘ thinking, teachers‘ lives, teachers‘ inner lives, teachers‘ contemplative practices, teachers‘ calling/vocation and teachers‘ pedagogy. The findings of this inquiry reveal the awareness that exists among the participants with regards to their understanding of Krishnamurti‘s educational philosophy and the way in which this philosophy has shaped their lives and the lives of their students (both implicitly and explicitly) The findings from this research further show that Krishnamurti‘s philosophy has certainly had an impact on the participants‘ wholeness. ...

shudufhadzo sikhauli

This unit deals with the concept of ‗Meaning , Scope, Nature and Functions of Philosophy of Education' and hence by the end of the unit you will be able to:

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􀁔􀁨􀁥􀀠􀁰􀁲􀁥􀁳􀁥􀁮􀁴􀀠􀁡􀁲􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁬􀁥􀀠􀀢􀁍􀁡􀁮􀁡􀁧􀁩􀁮􀁧􀀠􀁐􀁲􀁯􀁤􀁵􀁣􀁴􀀠􀁖􀁡􀁲􀁩􀁥􀁴􀁹􀀠􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁁􀁵􀁴􀁯􀁭􀁯􀁢􀁩􀁬􀁥􀀠􀁓􀁵􀁰􀁰􀁬􀁹􀀠􀁃􀁨􀁡􀁩􀁮􀀭􀀠 􀁁􀁮􀁡􀁬􀁹􀁳􀁩􀁳􀀠􀁯􀁦􀀠􀁈􀁥􀁲􀁯􀀠􀁈􀁯􀁮􀁤􀁡􀀠􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠􀁂􀁡􀁪􀁡􀁪􀀠􀁁􀁵􀁴􀁯􀀠􀁃􀁯􀁭􀁰􀁡􀁮􀁩􀁥􀁳􀀢􀀠􀁥􀁸􀁡􀁭􀁩􀁮􀁥􀁳􀀠􀁴􀁨􀁥􀀠􀁰􀁲􀁡􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁥􀁳􀀠􀁲􀁥􀁬􀁡􀁴􀁩􀁮􀁧􀀠􀁴􀁯􀀠􀁴􀁨􀁥􀀠􀁈􀁥􀁲􀁯􀀠 􀁈􀁯􀁮􀁤􀁡􀀠􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠􀁂􀁡􀁪􀁡􀁪􀀠􀁁􀁵􀁴􀁯􀀠􀁄􀁥􀁡􀁬􀁥􀁲􀁳􀀠􀁯􀁮􀀠􀁴􀁨􀁥􀁩􀁲􀀠􀁳􀁵􀁰􀁰􀁬􀁹􀀠􀁣􀁨􀁡􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁰􀁲􀁡􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁥􀁳􀀮􀀠􀁔􀁨􀁩􀁳􀀠􀁡􀁲􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁬􀁥􀀠􀁣􀁲􀁩􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁡􀁬􀁬􀁹􀀠􀁥􀁸􀁡􀁭􀁩􀁮􀁥􀁳􀀠􀁳􀁵􀁰􀁰􀁬􀁹􀀠 􀁣􀁨􀁡􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁡􀁧􀁥􀁭􀁥􀁮􀁴􀀠􀁰􀁲􀁡􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁥􀁳􀀠􀁡􀁤􀁯􀁰􀁴􀁥􀁤􀀠􀁢􀁹􀀠􀁤􀁥􀁡􀁬􀁥􀁲􀁳􀀠􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁧􀁥􀁮􀁥􀁲􀁡􀁬􀀠􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠􀁣􀁯􀁭􀁰􀁡􀁮􀁹􀀠􀁰􀁲􀁡􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁥􀁳􀀠􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁰􀁡􀁲􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁵􀁬􀁡􀁲􀀮􀀠􀁔􀁨􀁥􀀠 􀁳􀁵􀁰􀁰􀁬􀁹􀀠􀁣􀁨􀁡􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁭􀁥􀁴􀁲􀁩􀁣􀁳􀀠􀁡􀁲􀁥􀀠􀁣􀁡􀁬􀁣􀁵􀁬􀁡􀁴􀁥􀁤􀀠􀁷􀁩􀁴􀁨􀀠􀁴􀁨􀁥􀀠􀁤􀁡􀁴􀁡􀀠􀁣􀁯􀁬􀁬􀁥􀁣􀁴􀁥􀁤􀀠􀁡􀁴􀀠􀁤􀁥􀁡􀁬􀁥􀁲􀀠􀁰􀁯􀁩􀁮􀁴􀀮􀀠􀁔􀁨􀁥􀀠􀁣􀁡􀁬􀁣􀁵􀁬􀁡􀁴􀁥􀁤􀀠􀁲􀁥􀁳􀁵􀁬􀁴􀀠􀁩􀁳􀀠 􀁣􀁯􀁭􀁰􀁡􀁲􀁥􀁤􀀠􀁴􀁯􀀠􀁡􀁳􀁣􀁥􀁲􀁴􀁡􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁰􀁥􀁲􀁦􀁯􀁲􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁣􀁥􀀠􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠􀁰􀁲􀁡􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁥􀁳􀀠􀁡􀁤􀁯􀁰􀁴􀁥􀁤􀀠􀁢􀁹􀀠􀁲􀁥􀁳􀁰􀁥􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁶􀁥􀀠􀁳􀁵􀁰􀁰􀁬􀁹􀀠􀁣􀁨􀁡􀁩􀁮􀁳􀀮􀀠􀁔􀁨􀁩􀁳􀀠􀁡􀁲􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁬􀁥􀀠 􀁥􀁸􀁡􀁭􀁩􀁮􀁥􀁳􀀠 􀁰􀁲􀁡􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁥􀁳􀀠 􀁯􀁦􀀠 􀁈􀁥􀁲􀁯􀀠 􀁈􀁯􀁮􀁤􀁡􀀠 􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠 􀁂􀁡􀁪􀁡􀁪􀀠 􀁁􀁵􀁴􀁯􀀠 􀁣􀁯􀁭􀁰􀁡􀁮􀁩􀁥􀁳􀀠 􀁢􀁹􀀠 􀁤􀁥􀁶􀁥􀁬􀁯􀁰􀁩􀁮􀁧􀀠 􀁭􀁥􀁴􀁲􀁩􀁣􀁳􀀠 􀁲􀁥􀁬􀁡􀁴􀁥􀁤􀀠 􀁴􀁯􀀠 􀁰􀁲􀁯􀁤􀁵􀁣􀁴􀀠 􀁶􀁡􀁲􀁩􀁥􀁴􀁹􀀬􀀠 􀁮􀁥􀁷􀀠 􀁰􀁲􀁯􀁤􀁵􀁣􀁴􀀠 􀁴􀁩􀁭􀁥􀀭􀁴􀁯􀀭􀁭􀁡􀁲􀁫􀁥􀁴􀀬􀀠 􀁡􀁦􀁴􀁥􀁲􀀠 􀁭􀁡􀁲􀁫􀁥􀁴􀀠 􀁰􀁥􀁲􀁦􀁯􀁲􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁣􀁥􀀠 􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠 􀁵􀁮􀁣􀁥􀁲􀁴􀁡􀁩􀁮􀀠 􀁤􀁥􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠 􀁭􀁡􀁩􀁮􀁴􀁥􀁮􀁡􀁮􀁣􀁥􀀠􀁥􀁴􀁣􀀠􀁰􀁲􀁡􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁥􀁳􀀠􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁲􀁥􀁳􀁰􀁥􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁶􀁥􀀠􀁡􀁵􀁴􀁯􀁭􀁯􀁢􀁩􀁬􀁥􀀠􀁳􀁵􀁰􀁰􀁬􀁹􀀠􀁣􀁨􀁡􀁩􀁮􀁳􀀮􀀠􀁔􀁨􀁥􀀠􀁲􀁥􀁳􀁵􀁬􀁴􀁳􀀠􀁯􀁦􀀠􀁡􀁢􀁯􀁶􀁥􀀠􀁭􀁥􀁴􀁲􀁩􀁣􀁳􀀠􀁡􀁲􀁥􀀠 􀁣􀁯􀁭􀁰􀁡􀁲􀁥􀁤􀀠􀁷􀁩􀁴􀁨􀀠􀁤􀁩􀁭􀁥􀁮􀁳􀁩􀁯􀁮􀀠􀁯􀁦􀀠􀁥􀁦􀁦􀁩􀁣􀁩􀁥􀁮􀁣􀁹􀀠􀁯􀁲􀀠􀁲􀁥􀁳􀁰􀁯􀁮􀁳􀁩􀁶􀁥􀁮􀁥􀁳􀁳􀀠􀁯􀁦􀀠􀁳􀁵􀁰􀁰􀁬􀁹􀀠􀁣􀁨􀁡􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁡􀁧􀁥􀁭􀁥􀁮􀁴􀀠􀁰􀁲􀁡􀁣􀁴􀁩􀁣􀁥􀁳􀀮 􀁐􀁲􀁯􀁤􀁵􀁣􀁴􀀠 􀁖􀁡􀁲􀁩􀁥􀁴􀁹􀀬􀀠 􀁎􀁥􀁷􀀠 􀁐􀁲􀁯􀁤􀁵􀁣􀁴􀀠 􀁔􀁩􀁭􀁥􀀭􀁔􀁯􀀭􀁍􀁡􀁲􀁫􀁥􀁴􀀬􀀠 􀁁􀁦􀁴􀁥􀁲􀀠 􀁍􀁡􀁲􀁫􀁥􀁴􀀠 􀁐􀁥􀁲􀁦􀁯􀁲􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁣􀁥􀀬􀀠 􀀠 􀀠 􀀠 􀀠 􀀠 􀀠 􀀠 􀀠 􀀠 􀀠 􀁕􀁮􀁣􀁥􀁲􀁴􀁡􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁄􀁥􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠􀀦􀀠􀁓􀁥􀁡􀁳􀁯􀁮􀁡􀁬􀀠􀁄􀁥􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠􀁡􀁮􀁤􀀠􀁓􀁵􀁰􀁰􀁬􀁹􀀠􀁃􀁨􀁡􀁩􀁮􀀠􀁐􀁥􀁲􀁦􀁯􀁲􀁭􀁡􀁮􀁣􀁥

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A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

The Functionalist Perspective on Education

Functionalists focus on the positive functions of education – creating social solidarity, teaching core values and work skills and role allocation/ meritocracy

Table of Contents

Last Updated on September 12, 2023 by Karl Thompson

Functionalists focus on the positive functions performed by the education system. There are four positive functions that education performs:

Education Creates Social Solidarity

We have social solidarity when we feel as if we are part of something bigger. Emile Durkheim argued that school makes us feel like we are part of something bigger. This is done through the learning of subjects such as history and English which give us a shared sense of identity. Also in American schools, children pledge allegiance to the flag.

Durkheim argued that ‘school is a society in miniature.’ preparing us for life in wider society. For example, both in school and at work we have to cooperate with people who are neither friends or family – which gets us ready for dealing with people at work in later life.

Learning specialist skills for work

Durkheim noted that an advanced industrial economy required a massive and complex Division of Labour. At school, individuals learn the diverse skills necessary for this to take place. For example, we may all start off learning the same subjects, but later on we specialise when we do GCSEs.

The most obvious examples of this function of education are in the compulsory sector, especially with vocational education where students learn the specific skills required for particular professions – everything from engineering and construction to media and IT technicians and beauty therapy.

Durkheim believed that one of the most impressive things about modern education systems was that they simultaneously taught us core values and a sense of belonging to the whole (See below) while at the same time they teach us the DIFFERENT and DIVERSE skills that a modern economic system requires to function.

Education teaches pupils core values

Talcott Parsons argued that education acts as the ‘focal socializing agency’ in modern society. School plays the central role in the process of secondary socialisation, taking over from primary socialisation. He argued this was necessary because the family and the wider society work in different principles and children need to adapt if they re to cope In the wider world.

In the family, children are judged according to what he calls particularistic standards by their parents – that is they are judged by rules that only apply to that particular child. Individual children are given tasks based on their different abilities and judged according to their unique characteristics. Parents often adapt rules to suit the unique abilities of the child.

In contrast in school and in wider society, children and adults are judged according to the same universalistic standards (i.e they are judged by the same exams and the same laws). These rules and laws are applied equally to all people irrespective of the unique character of the individual. School gets us ready for this.

The above ties in quite nicely with the modernisation theory view of development – achieved status is seen as a superior system to the ascribed status found in traditional societies. 

Role Allocation and meritocracy

Education allocates people to the most appropriate job for their talents using examinations and qualifications. This ensures that the most talented are allocated to the occupations that are most important for society. This is seen to be fair because there is equality of opportunity – everyone has a chance of success and it is the most able who succeed through their own efforts – this is known as meritocracy.

Functionalists believe that meritocracy is extremely important for peace in society because people will only accept status and wage differences if those in lower status jobs believe they themselves had (or have) a fair chance to climb the ladder and get a higher status and better paid job themselves.

Positive evaluations of the Functionalist view on education

School performs positive functions for most pupils most of the time – even though students might not want to go to school sometimes and not necessarily enjoy school some of the time, the majority come out after 13 years of formal schooling as reasonable human beings.

There does seem to be a link between education and economic growth, suggesting a good education system benefits the wider society and economy. All countries in Western Europe have very good education systems while many poorer countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have many more problems with their education systems, such as low attendance rates.

Exclusion and truancy rates are relatively low, suggesting there is very little active resistance to schooling.

Schools do at least try to foster ‘solidarity’ – through PSHE lessons and teaching British Values for example.

Education is more ‘work focused’ today – increasing amounts of vocational courses. If you look at post-16 education especially there is a lot of diverse courses offered and it it is difficult to see how technologically advanced post-industrial economies could function without a thriving post-16 and university sectors.

Schooling is more meritocratic than in the 19th century (fairer)

Criticisms of the Functionalist View of Education

It is usual in A-level sociology to criticise one perspective using other perspectives, but in the case of Functionalism there are many more stand alone criticisms that we can make!

Marxists argue the education system is not meritocratic – wealthier students from higher socio-economic backgrounds still, in 2022, get better results than poorer students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, this is true within the state school system , but the largest difference in achievement is between the 7% of very wealthy students who attend fee paying independent schools and the 93% who attend state schools.

HOWEVER, there is evidence that a disadvantage gap opened up during school lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, with poorer students falling further behind than richer students, this actually suggests that when schools are open as usual, they at least narrow that achievement gap to an extent!

Marxists would also argue that the Functionalist view of education is ideological – the fact that it focuses on the postive functions of education means it reflects the views of the powerful – the education system tends to work for them and they suggests there is nothing to criticise.

The Functionalist perspective on education was developed in the late 19th century (Durkheim) and the 1950s (Parsons) – during modernity, but with the shift to postmodernity society has changed and the British school system seems to have adapted with it.

For example, schools today focus more on developing the individual rather than teaching duties and responsibilities that individuals should adopt towards society – it’s more about the individual and less about solidarity (following the shift from modern to postmodern society)

Functionalism ignores the negative sides of school – e.g. bullying and there are a minority for who it doesn’t work, such as those permanently excluded. If we were to do the kind of in-depth research Interactionists prefer we might find that a significant minority of children are harmed during school in more subtle ways.

It is difficult to argue that schools performed any of the above four functions during the disruption caused by the government’s response to the pandemic, especially not being judged by universalistic standards (no standardized exams) or meritocracy (because private school teachers inflated their students’ grades more than state school teachers).

Video summary of the Functionalist Theory of Education

Contemporary Evidence to Evaluate Functionalism (2022 update)

Students need to be able to evaluate sociological perspectives using contemporary evidence and a lot has happened in the last few years, most of the evidence suggesting that the Functionalist view of education is extremely limited in helping us to understand the role of education in society.

Below I consider five pieces of contemporary evidence mainly from 2020-2022 and what they suggest about some of the key ideas of Functionalism as applied to education.

The shift to the Ebacc

The government plans to make 90% of pupils sit GCSEs from with the Ebacc suite of subjects by 2025. This will result in a more similar experience of education for 14-16 year olds studying towards GCSEs and the Ebacc as the Ebacc consists of a relatively narrow range of subjects: English, maths, the sciences, history or geography and a language.

On the surface this move away from allowing students to have more choice in what they study could lead to more of a shared collective conscience and thus solidarity and value consensus as students are taught a higher proportion of rational (e.g. a lot more science) and critical subjects – so more students might finish their GCSEs thinking more similarly.

The ArtsProfessional blog points out that this will result in more students from more deprived backgrounds studying subjects NOT on the approved Ebacc list because such students are more likely to do seven rather than nine GCSEs – and they have to do seven from the list above as part of the Ebacc. This means we could have poorer students being excluded from creative subjects and P.E. because these aren’t on the list, while richer and more able students do the seven Ebacc subjects plus two or three other GCSEs of their choice.

It’s also likely that more able and affluent students will get better results in their Ebacc and have a more rounded subject base because of their additional subjects, while less able and poorer students end up with only Ebacc GCSEs and weaker results.

So the net effect of making students sit a narrower range of subjects is an increase in the inequality of outcomes along class lines, which goes against the idea of meritocracy as it reproduces class inequality.

The Problem with PREVENT and British Values

The requirement to teach British Values in schools started in 2015 and emerged out of the PREVENT agenda, which required schools to intervene when they suspected (mainly Muslim) children were being radicalised and drawn into terrorism.

The government defines British values as democracy, respect for the rule of law, individual liberty and tolerance and respect for those with different faiths – and the theory behind getting students to think about what ‘being British’ means is that it might to create a new tolerant and respectful national identity based on these values and help prevent radicalisation and terrorism.

OFSTED’s vision is that British Values are embedded into the curriculum and taught through several critical thinking subjects such as history and english – through which students learn about the historical struggles for democracy and the emergence of civil society. Ideally, students would also be taught to think about whether these values are universal beyond Britain.

However, according to a 2018 article in the Conversation it is highly unlikely that the requirement on schools to teach British Values is going to promote Value Consensus in any meaningful way.

Some schools, for example, confuse British Values with British stereotypes and get students to do projects such as doing collages of what Britishness in involving pictures of the Queen (or now King) and fish and chips, which hardly promote critical thinking.

A second problem is that these values are so general that each of them can be interpreted in many different ways, and they are also full of contradictions.

For example, there are different forms of democracy, other than our first past the post system, and ‘individual liberty’ is context dependent and clearly has its limits, but where? And as to the rule of law: Boris Johnson didn’t even respect that during lockdown so that is laughable. Hence any discussions around what the specifics of these values should mean could potentially reveal or even open up divisions between pupils.

There is also a problem that the whole PREVENT and British Values agenda emerged as a response to Islamic fundamentalism – it could potentially lead to further marginalisation of Muslim children in schools as the implicit message is that it’s mainly targeted at making Muslim children conform to this new Britishness (whatever that is!)

The EU Referendum in 2015 firmly split the UK population down the middle, with approximately half the population voting to stay in the EU and half voting to leave.

This is the only time that the UK Population has been offered the chance to vote directly on a specific social policy and the fact that it divided the nation in half suggests that there is no meaningful value consensus around the idea of how Britain should relate to the wider world.

And clearly if there is no value consensus in adult society, schools have roundly failed to foster any sense of value consensus on this issue during the last five decades!

Graduate Labour Market Statistics

The 2021 Graduate Labour Market statistics suggest some broad support for education performing the role allocation function, where a tiered education system sifts and sorts people into higher and higher skilled roles.

86.7% of graduates were employed in 2021 compared to 67.2% of non-graduates:

And graduates were three times as likely to be in ‘highly skilled’ jobs compared to non-graduates, suggesting that going to university successfully sifts most graduates into higher skilled jobs.

HOWEVER there are still around 25% of graduates who end up in lower skilled jobs so clearly the system isn’t that effective, and it’s also clear that going to university is NOT the only way to secure a higher-skilled job.

Apprenticeships

According to the 2021-22 apprenticeship data The total number of people doing apprenticeships in 2021-2022 was approximately 750 000, with the main sectors being health and social care and business administration.

The majority of people doing apprenticeships are under 25 and this suggests that apprenticeships are working alongside more traditional further and higher education institutions (colleges and universities) to further perform the function of role allocation.

The numbers of people doing apprenticeships certainly aren’t sufficient to suggest that apprenticeship, work based learning is undermining the role allocation function being performed my colleges and universities.

Test Yourself

Sociology of education revision bundle.

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision notes bundle – which contains the following:

• 34 pages of revision notes
• mind maps in pdf and png format – 9 in total, covering various topics within the sociology of education
• short answer exam practice questions and exemplar answers
• how to write sociology essays, including 7 specific templates and model answers on the sociology of education

Signposting/ Related Posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying the education topic, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course.

The Functionalist perspective on education is usually the first discrete topic taught within the sociology of education module.

After reading this post you might like to read this Evaluations of Functionalism post which discusses the strengths and limitations of this perspective in more depth

After Functionalism students usually study The Marxist Perspective on Education which criticises much of what Functionalists say about the topic.

A related perspective is  The New Right View of Education which is usually taught as an updated and modified version of Functionalism, more relevant to society today.

You might also like this summary of perspectives on education grid , although you might need to squint to see it (update pending!)

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12 thoughts on “The Functionalist Perspective on Education”

Hi – they’re from a BBC documentary – ‘who gets the best jobs’?

Hi I was wondering if you could please tell me where you got the following statistics in your post = “Those with degrees earn 85% more than those without degrees” and “7% of private school kids get >50% of top jobs” All I need is the source and date for my homework, please. Thank you

They basically believe inequalities are also functional.

is there anything in the education system that a functionalist would see as negative or do they believe that there is no down side to it, such as social inequalities?

It is a myth in disorder. The causal factor is that men miss abrogate the truth and correct way of doing things. For instance, PNG is ingrained with a culture of “its whom you know” rather than “what you know” systemically and systematically.

That’s a nice ‘in the words of a functionalist’ explanation! Remember that this view is a myth according to Marxists.

I think I have answered this question. Have you realized that the education system has always been meritocratic? Individuals get rewarded for their talents as what they do is transparent enough for all to see and not because of age or how long they have been in the system that matters.

EASY TO UNDERSTAND

yeah its true the points are correctly explained are eas to understand

Hi – to get you started… the basic stance of Functionalism is that institutions are necessary to social harmony and generally perform positive functions, the Marxist line is that they exist for the benefit of the elite, and enable them to maintain control over the masses.

i need help on this question;

explain how sociological perspectives help us understand the existence of social institutions.

thank you I am now a changed individual. your points are self explanatory

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An English Blog for Teachers and Students

Monday 20 September 2021

Essay on the function of education (by jiddu krishnamurti).

            Jiddu Krishnamurti is a great philosopher, speaker and a writer. He was selected and nurtured at the young age by the Theosophical society headed by Annie Besant to become the World Teacher.   But he spirit grew independently and did not want anyone to follow him. in 1929, he dissolved the Order of the East and said, “The moment you follow someone, you cease to follow truth.” His views on education are as revolutionary as his spirit. In this work, he reveals the purpose of education in connection with understanding life, intelligence, learning, attention, inward freedom and creation of new society.

The Purpose of Education:

            J. Krishnamurti raises the question – Are we educated only to pass the exam and get a job, then for getting married and becoming more and more like machines? Should we study just to be proficient in Maths and Physics? He suggests not to study for life but to study life. Education is to understand the whole process of life – to discover for yourself   what is real. Today man is conditioned by religion, beliefs, ideas, tradition, and society. According to him, the function of education is to help man to live freely without fear.

What Affects and Develops Your Intelligence?

In his words, Intelligence means the capacity to think freely without fear, without a formula, to find out for yourself what is true. An intelligent mind is always clear, simple and direct but what affects it is ambition. Both spiritual ambition and worldly ambition produce anxiety and fear. Once a person is frightened, he can never be intelligent. When a person grows, he is afraid of several things – afraid of exam, placement, living, getting a child, losing a job, promotion, death, what the wife or husband would say, etc. Krishnamurti states, “Most of us have fear in one form or another; and where there is fear there is no intelligence.”

What Does Attention Mean?:

            Attention comes to a person only when the person is interested in something, only when he loves to find all about it. Once attention comes, then the whole mind is there and whole being is there. But what happens in classroom? The student stares at the window. The teacher compels him to pay attention to the subject. Throughout his life, a person is interested to do something, but he is compelled to do something else against his will. Religion, education, parents, society, tradition and everybody stand against him. But the function of education is to help the student to find what he loves to do from the beginning to end of his life.

About Learning, Inward Freedom and the New Society:

            According to Krishnamurti, learning is not restricted to class room and teacher. It is a lifelong process, He says, “When you are really learning you are  learning throughout your life and there is no one special teacher to learn from.” Because a person learns from everything – a dead leaf can teach him impermanency, a bird in flight can teach him freedom, and so on. The function of education is not to try to fit a student   into the rotten society but to give him complete inward freedom to grow independently and create a new society. Only a person in constant revolt inwardly against tradition, against his own bondage can discover what is true and create such a New Society.

2 comments:

Very nice 👍

Super ❤❤❤

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