Philosophy of Education

It has been said, perhaps in jest but certainly in truth, that philosophy is its own first problem. That is surely the case if the first problem of any discipline is to provide a clear-cut definition of its field of inquiry. Philosophy is as old as, or older than, science; but there is as yet no such definition. It is sad but true that a great deal of philosophic energy, or at least a great deal of the energy of philosophers, is spent trying to define just what philosophy and the philosophy of education is or should be.

To ignore the philosophic dimension is to condemn the educative process to a blind intellectual wandering, devoid of a rudder for guidance, bound by the tradition of tradition, and haltered by habit. To ignore the scientific dimension is to divorce education from reality, to deny it the radar-like guidance of scientific generalizations, base actions on decisions starved for facts, and condemn it forever to rule-of-thumb, by-guessand-by-golly procedures. Just as philosophy and science cannot be separated (although they can and must be distinguished) neither can the philosophy of education be separated from the science of education.

Ends and means in education cannot be organically separated, although they can be logically distinguished for purposes of analysis, or brutally torn asunder through ignorance. They are cut from the whole cloth of education, a cloth that can be tailored into the cloak of learning only when philosophic thought and scientific methodology combine to give pattern and material to education. In this way science provides the necessary factual background for education and the philosophy of education.

Before the sciences of human behavior matured, and before reliable information about schools and education became available, often philosophy alone provided the sole intellectual basis for mapping out a program of instruction. Without sufficient factual information to plot a chart of how people learn, or to help decide what people should learn, educators had to rely on the dead-reckoning of intuition, pure reason, and personal experience. They came to rely heavily on a personalized philosophy of education. In this sense educational philosophy provided some kind of substantive thinking about teaching and learning, and it set a precedent for the type of educational theory used in recent times to undergird practices in such areas as curriculum, administration, supervision, and methodology.

The first alternative, in which philosophy of education is defined in terms of its "own" subject matter, is very appealing. The trouble is that there is no great consensus among philosophers or educators as to just what this subject matter does, or should, consist of. Some, perhaps the heirs of the medieval view that philosophy is queen of all the sciences, refuse to be pinned down and insist any subject matter is ultimately philosophical, that any subject matter carries some implications for education. Others, perhaps overly impressed by the sciences' desertion of the queen, have reduced her to an intellectual harlot who serves only a sterile function in the analysis of verbal intercourse; philosophy of education thus becomes one of the handmaidens of the harlot queen, along with philosophy of science, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, etc.

Perhaps it would be possible to categorize philosophies of education in terms of bodies or sets of different questions and different answers so that each philosophy of education would have a unique set of questions and answers. This is possible, naturally, but then it might be concluded that philosophy of education is either the sum of all the questions asked (and the material giving birth to them), the sum of all the answers given (and the methods yielding them), or both. But these definitions of philosophy of education might be so vague as to be meaningless: how would one differentiate philosophy of education from other disciplines, on this view?