Beyond Liberal Education: Essays in Honour of Paul H. Hirst

BEYOND LIBERAL EDUCATION

The collection of essays by philosophers and educationalists of international reputation, all published here for the first time, celebrates Paul Hirst’s professional career. The introductory essay by Robin Barrow and Patricia White outlines Paul Hirst’s career and maps the shifts in his thoughts about education, showing how his views on teacher education, the curriculum and educational aims are all interrelated. Contributions from leading names in British and American philosophy of education cover themes ranging from the nature of good teaching to Wittgensteinian aesthetics. The collection concludes with a paper in which Paul Hirst sets out his latest views on the nature of education and its aims. The book also includes a complete bibliography of works by Hirst and a substantial set of references to his writing. Robin Barrow is Professor and Dean of Education at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. Patricia White is Research Fellow in Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, and currently Chair of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.

BEYOND LIBERAL EDUCATION Essays in honour of Paul H.Hirst

Edited by Robin Barrow and Patricia White

London and New York

First published 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1993 Robin Barrow and Patricia White All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any for or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Beyond liberal education: essays in honour of Paul H.Hirst/ edited by Robin Barrow and Patricia White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-09294-9 1. Hirst, Paul Heywood. 2. Education—Philosophy. 3 Education, Humanistic. I. Hirst, Paul Heywood. II. Barrow, Robin. III. White, Patricia, 1937– LB880. H592B49 1993 93–18755 370'.1–dc20 CIP ISBN 0-415-09294-9 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-03178-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20126-4 (Glassbook Format)

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgements

vii ix

INTRODUCTION Robin Barrow and Patricia White

1

1 GOOD TEACHING Mary Warnock

16

2 TRUTH AND LIBERAL EDUCATION David E.Cooper

30

3 LIBERALEDUCATIONANDVOCATIONAL PREPARATION Richard Pring

49

4 PAUL HIRST’S STRUCTURE, OR, THE USES AND ABUSES OF AN OVERWORKED CONCEPT Denis C.Phillips

79

5 THE CURRICULUM: THE TIMELESS AND THE TIMEBOUND Ivan Snook

94

6 CURRICULUM AND THE MIRROR OF KNOWLEDGE Jane Roland Martin

107

7 MORAL AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION: HIRST’S PERCEPTION OF THEIR SCOPE AND RELATIONSHIP Brian Crittenden

129

v

8 WITTGENSTEIN’S SPECULATIVE AESTHETICS IN ITS ETHICAL CONTEXT R.K.Elliott 150 9 THE ARTS, WELL-BEING AND EDUCATION John White

169

10 EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICES Paul H.Hirst 184

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS BY P.H.HIRST

200

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS MAKING CRITICAL REFERENCE TO THE WORK OF P.H.HIRST

205

Index

212

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CONTRIBUTORS

David E.Cooper is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, King’s College, University of London. Brian Crittenden is Professor of Education at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. R.K.Elliott is Emeritus Reader in Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. Paul H.Hirst is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and currently Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, University of London. Jane Roland Martin is Professor of Philosophy, Emerita, at the University of Massachusetts/Boston, USA. D.C.Phillips is Professor of Education, and, by courtesy, of Philosophy, at Stanford University, California, USA. Richard Pring is Professor of Educational Studies, and Director of the Department, at the University of Oxford. Ivan Snook is Professor of Education at Massey University, New Zealand. Baroness Warnock is a Fellow and the former Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. John White is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors wish to express their special thanks to Surjeet Siddoo (Simon Fraser University) and Suzanne Chawner (Institute of Education, University of London). Also to Patrick Keeney (Simon Fraser), who provided considerable help with the bibliography of works relating to Paul Hirst, and to Geoff Madoc-Jones (Simon Fraser) who helped with the Introduction.

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INTRODUCTION Robin Barrow and Patricia White

The essays collected in this volume have all been written specifically for it. They therefore constitute a tribute both to Paul Hirst the man, widely and affectionately esteemed for his civilized mien, good humour, sharp wit and graciousness, and to his work, which has had an extraordinary and extremely important impact on educational thought and practice for the last three decades. Indeed, it is not too much to say that, in conjunction with Richard Peters, his was the dominant voice in English-speaking philosophy of education during the 1960s and 1970s. Nor is it likely that his contribution to educational discourse will have any less relevance in the years to come, since he has always had the happy knack of focusing on fundamental issues of perennial importance. Whether one agrees with it or not, in whole or in part, his work on religious and moral education, the nature of knowledge, curriculum and, more recently, teacher education, consistently raises arguments and ideas that will always need to be given serious attention. While the remainder of this introduction will provide a more detailed consideration of the pattern of Professor Hirst’s personal career and scholarly development, as well as summarise the focus of the various contributions, it is appropriate to say at the outset that for many people his personality and role as a leader in his professional field have been of equal importance to his scholarly contribution. A Festchrift is not always an easy task to undertake, but in this case the task was made easier by the evident enthusiasm and respect for its subject that all contributors feel, even when, as is often the case, they are at issue with the substance of some part of Hirst’s work. 1

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PAUL HIRST’S CAREER The bare chronology of Paul Hirst’s education and professional career is easily related. Educated at Huddersfield College and Trinity College, Cambridge, Paul Hirst taught mathematics for seven years before joining the staff of the University of Oxford Department of Education. While at Oxford, work in the philosophy of mathematics led him to the wider field of the analytical philosophy of the day. In 1959 he was appointed Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education of the University of London. This was followed by his election to the Chair of Education at King’s College, University of London, in 1965. In 1971 he became Professor of Education in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Wolfson College. These bare pegs of names and dates, however, support a whole skein of enduring concerns which constitute Paul Hirst’s unique contribution to educational thought and practice. A dominant strand in that skein is his passionate enthusiasm for teaching. It deserves first mention for its importance in his professional life and for its sheer excellence. All the tired adages about those who can’t teach ending up as teacher educators are in this case most certainly false. Brilliant as a performer on the lecture platform, with a keen sense of what is appropriate to context and occasion, Paul Hirst is equally at home in the small seminar, putting a question which deftly sets out what is at stake and illuminates the murkiest of academic occasions. This determination to get to the bottom of a problem, often revealed in a series of ever more probing questions, has given several generations of students of education all over the world an insight into the power and fascination of philosophy. They, as well as academic colleagues, have also benefited more personally when this powerful gaze has been directed to their work, for Paul Hirst devotes generous amounts of his time to responding in detail to requests for comment on work in draft form. People all over the world will have experienced mixed feelings when they have received ten or so pages in that familiar, closely written flourish, punctuated by a neat numbering system, which dissects their work, pointing out obscurities, the possibility of multiple interpretations, or failures of argument at crucial points. Finally, whatever the initial mix of feelings, they are always replaced by gratitude for the penetrating scrutiny the work has received. 2

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As passionate as Paul Hirst’s enthusiasm for teaching, and intimately connected with it, is his desire to sort out confusions and contradictions and to fathom out what there are good grounds for believing. It would, of course, be an odd academic in any discipline, not least philosophy, for whom this wasn’t a central goal. Academic life, however, has its temptations which can get in the way of the pursuit of understanding. Human weaknesses like laziness and the desire not to appear foolish, as well as institutional pressures to publish and over-extend oneself in conference attendance, committee work and so on, can erode the desire for understanding, so that, instead of being an overmastering passion, it becomes something to be pursued when convenient. Paul Hirst, however, suffering as much from institutional pressures as anyone, has never lost this passion. This quest for understanding is not simply undertaken via books and papers and in libraries but by an avid pursuit of ‘live’ philosophy. For Paul Hirst is, and always has been, a keen attender of lectures and seminars, during the times he was teaching in Cambridge, Oxford and London, as well as during his periods in other academic institutions around the world. This passion to get to the bottom of things, drawing on the latest work in the discipline, means that any of Paul Hirst’s papers or books need to be treated as work in progress. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that, as we shall see in the next section, there are considerable shifts in Hirst’s views on all the main topics on which he has written, for he is quite ready radically to revise his earlier treatments of topics as a result of a deepened understanding of the complexities of the issues which preoccupy him. Teaching and the pursuit of greater depths of understanding take their places alongside other equally salient aspects of Paul Hirst’s professional life. At Cambridge he was involved in departmental and faculty committees, as well as for four years being a member of the powerful General Board of the Faculties. Since 1975 he has worked unstintingly on many committees of the Council for National Academic Awards, sometimes as Chairman or Vice-Chairman, work which, together with his scholarly work, was recognised by the award of an honorary doctorate by the CNAA in 1992. For six years he was a member of the Education Sub-Committee of the University Grants Committee and for three Chairman of the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers. He was a member of the Committee of 3

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Inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups, chaired by Lord Swann, and co-directed a research project into school-based training in the Postgraduate Certificate of Education. In addition he was a member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and has held a number of important offices in the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, including those of Secretary and Chair. This selective list of university and other committees and involvement in research illustrates the broad range of Paul Hirst’s professional responsibilities. The bare list, however, fails to reveal the commitment and application with which he has devoted himself to these responsibilities. It is not uncommon for academics to give a dismissively low priority to committee work, but Paul Hirst has a keen appreciation of the significance of such work for the life of institutions and gives it no more and, more importantly, no less than the attention it deserves. Academic and government institutions have valued his sane and balanced attitude to educational policy-making at all levels. They have appreciated his willingness to take endless pains to ensure that he is always properly briefed for any decision, his keen sensitivity to the way in which policies impinge, sometimes in unpleasant and unobvious ways, on individual people, and his alertness to practical detail. The teaching and research have not been completely hived off from this involvement in decision-making. At many points the philosophical writing is enriched by the experience of, and reflection on, this practical involvement. Sometimes, indeed, Hirst explicitly draws attention to this, and, as the following section indicates, his experience in the practice, or perhaps practices, of the educational world, refracted through philosophical critique, figures prominently in his writings. In several cases there are intimate connections between the activities of the professional life and the topics which occur as continuing themes in his books and papers.

THE THEMES IN HIRST’S WORK The major themes in Paul Hirst’s books and papers have been the nature of knowledge and its significance for curriculum planning, the relationship between educational theory and 4

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practice, and, in consequence, the place of philosophy in teacher education, aesthetic, moral and religious education. Tangible evidence of the stimulating quality of Paul Hirst’s work is provided by the theses, books and papers of many colleagues and students all over the world working in philosophy of education, and also more broadly in educational studies, who have chosen critically to explore and develop Hirst’s ideas in all these areas. In this volume the selective bibliography of writings about Paul Hirst’s work shows, very concretely, the significance which academic colleagues and policy-makers have accorded to his scholarly output and which is one of the main reasons for this celebratory book of essays. Before we briefly comment on some of the continuing themes and their development in Paul Hirst’s work over some thirty years, a few general remarks will give that work a context and illuminate its broad character. Philosophy of education is not a logically self-contained domain. Just as political philosophy in its discussions of a notion such as democracy cannot ignore those systems in the real world which call themselves democracies, so in this area any argued case has to take into account the practical realities of what is involved in educating and educational policy-making. But this leaves anyone working in philosophy of education open to two potential broadsides: that theirs is a conservative position based on the contingencies of education as it happens to be or, alternatively, that theirs is an idealistic model which has scant regard for the realities of school and classroom. In either case the force of the objection is to raise the question of why anyone should take any notice of the position advocated. In our view it is one of the strengths of Paul Hirst’s work, as exemplified not only in the chapter in this volume but also in his essays, for instance, on the forms of knowledge and teacher education, that it draws on experience and knowledge of education and teacher education and at the same time offers the tools for a stringent critique of such practice. In so doing it exemplifies, often explicitly, the very relationship of dialectical exchange Hirst now seeks to describe as that correctly obtaining between theory and practice. That said, it is appropriate to begin our brief discussion of three major themes in Paul Hirst’s work with that of the relationship between theory and practice. It is perhaps surprising to find this, rather than Hirst’s influential forms of knowledge theory, in the 5

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foreground in this way. The reason is, as we hope to show, that Hirst’s views on the theory and practice question and their subsequent revisions play a pivotal role in relation to his other views, including those on the aims of education and the curriculum which are the subject of his chapter in this volume. In his earliest writings on this topic Hirst (Hirst, 1963, 1965a) was concerned with the development of practical theory from the theoretical disciplines (philosophy of education, sociology of education, psychology of education) in the interests of establishing rational educational practice. Even in his early writings Hirst (1965a) was clear that there was no move directly from the disciplines to practice, but in time (Hirst, 1983) he came to the view that it was, not just difficult, but logically impossible to derive practical principles from the disciplines. Practical theory must be generated from practice by the progressive refinement of practice in the light of its own internal goals. In constructing a more rational practice we construct, then, from the bottom up. The role of the disciplines is to aid this process by offering fundamental critique. Progressively to establish a more rational educational practice will require self-critical, reflective practitioners keen to seek out ‘more deep and wide-ranging levels of presupposition, using the disciplines to maximum degree’ (Hirst, 1983:28). In his rejection of the rationalist model and his positive suggestions about the form educational critique must take Hirst is clearly influenced by work in contemporary philosophy. His insight that the old rationalist model is not adequate to characterise the theory and practice relationship shows the influence of philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor and John Kekes. His claim that in attempting to make our educational practice more rational we have no option but to engage in wide-ranging, reflective and reconstructive analysis suggests some influence from Critical Theory, and in particular Habermas, although Hirst is understandably wary of the more rationalistic aspects of this work. Taken together, these influences bring in their wake a change in Hirst’s view of the significance of philosophy of education in teacher education, particularly in its initial stages. On Hirst’s latest view—and this brings us to our second theme of the place of philosophy of education in teacher training—initial teacher training is very much concerned to induct new entrants into the complex and sophisticated practice of education. Since, 6

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however, professionalism demands reflective practitioners disposed and able to assess the adequacy of the ends the practice is currently setting and the means for achieving them, Hirst endorses the idea, currently much in vogue, of the reflective practitioner. However, he brings (Hirst, 1990) useful precision to the idea of what the reflective practitioner should be reflecting about, something often left vague in other treatments, in suggesting that three levels of reflection are involved. The first involves teachers in reflection on their practice in relation to the given principles and criteria which are currently taught as professional knowledge. But for their practice to be defensible, teachers will need to reflect critically, at a second level, on the adequacy of those principles and criteria themselves. But then, thirdly, still further questions can be raised about the more general beliefs and values about human nature, human society and so on, which inform the principles and criteria of current professional knowledge. The levels of reflection figure to different degrees in pre-service and in-service teacher education. Pre-service education will concentrate on making teachers reflective about their practice at the first level, whilst gradually encouraging them to reflect at the second level on the adequacy of the principles with which they are working, and aiming to acquaint them with the significance of more far-reaching reflection at the third level. Thus philosophy of education will make only a fleeting appearance in pre-service teacher education, coming into its own in in-service education, as experienced teachers subject their practical principles, and also the empirical and value frameworks within which they are working, to rigorous examination. A third broad theme in Paul Hirst’s work, the nature of educational aims and objectives, is found in his widely influential work on the nature of knowledge and the objectives of a liberal education, first set out in the paper ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’ (1965b) and further revised and developed in the collection Knowledge and the Curriculum (1974a). Its impact on educational thought is apparent from the number of treatments of it listed in the bibliography of writing about Paul Hirst. That it continues to fascinate is clear from the number of contributors to this volume who have taken it as their starting-point, though by no means an uncontroversial one. The title of this collection indeed reflects not only Paul Hirst’s intellectual development but also 7

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the stimulus his writings on liberal education have given to others, including some present contributors, to transcend the boundaries within which he worked. Hirst’s thought in this area, however, needs to be taken not in isolation but in the context of the whole body of his work for its status and significance properly to be appreciated. It should, above all, be considered in the light of his work on the theory and practice relationship. In early work on that relationship, as we have indicated, theoretical knowledge as exemplified in the disciplines of philosophy of education, psychology of education and so on was the foundation of rational educational practice. By a parallel process of reasoning, theoretical knowledge was held to be foundational in determining the aims of education (or at least of liberal education) itself. The nature of theoretical knowledge should, if curriculum planning were to be rational, determine the character of the educational objectives sought, and, since knowledge could be shown to be structured into different forms, any rationally defensible education must necessarily reflect this structure in the breadth and character of its objectives. The thesis, then, offered guidance on some of the central questions of curriculum planning, including the necessary content of the curriculum and what might constitute breadth and balance in a curriculum. It was not to be interpreted simplistically with the various distinguishable forms of knowledge each having curriculum slots. The nature of knowledge would rather determine the ultimate objectives which any curriculum would seek to achieve by methods which took into account the nature of the learners, relevant features of the context, and so on. Foundational to rational curriculum planning on this view is the idea that theoretical knowledge is basic to the curriculum achievements that should most concern us. With the shifts in Hirst’s thought sketched above, however, theoretical knowledge is dethroned. Practical knowledge now becomes more fundamental than theoretical knowledge, which can therefore no longer be the determinant of ultimate educational objectives. Not that Hirst no longer holds that there are distinctive forms of knowledge. He still holds different forms of theoretical knowledge to be distinguishable in terms of their logical features and truth criteria. They are, however, not the foundation for 8

INTRODUCTION

rational personal development, which Hirst now sees as the central aim of education. As he puts it in his chapter in this volume: my argument now is not merely for the priority of practical knowledge in education, but rather for the priority of personal development by initiation into a complex of specific, substantive social practices with all the knowledge, attitudes, feelings, virtues, skills, dispositions and relationships that that involves. It is those practices that can constitute a flourishing life that I now consider fundamental to education. Views on what constitutes a flourishing life can differ, and Hirst accepts that conceptions of the good life, and therefore the goals of education, will vary between groups and societies. He is not, however, committed to accepting that any practice which happens to exist is a successful one, or that education is simply a matter of immersion in substantive practices. Worthwhile education involves critical reflection on practices in the light, inter alia, of the wants which any practice attempts to satisfy, and also embraces more wide-ranging considerations like the view(s) of human nature and social structure a practice may presuppose. Thus theoretical knowledge, even if toppled from its foundational position, still has an important role in education for a flourishing life. Currently we can see education systems in many parts of the world engaged in rigorous and fundamental critique of their established practices. In some places the concern is to transform totalitarian practices, in others radically to overhaul sexist and racist ones. Hirst’s account of the nature of educational practices, and thus the form their critique must take, provides insight into why such changes, which necessarily involve changes in attitudes, feelings and relationships, as well as beliefs, are characteristically slow and, often, painful. More positively, it offers us a sketch of the kind of educational practice needed to carry forward such a critique. We have said nothing in this section about Hirst’s often controversial work over many years on aesthetic, moral and religious education. In the next section, however, something of the power and interest of his ideas in these areas emerges. We also look forward to further developments here, as Hirst indicates 9

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at the end of his chapter in this book that there is work in progress on the significance of his changed views on the relative priority of theoretical and practical knowledge for aesthetic, moral and religious education. Finally, two comments about the style of Paul Hirst’s writing. It is extremely abstract and the more concretely-minded may often long for an example to cash the abstract ideas. But trying to understand his work is an instructive process. The abstraction demands illustration and, as one struggles to interpret the ideas and claims by mentally fitting to them possible examples, one achieves a deeper insight into the issues by the fact of having oneself to make the text concrete. One’s sense that the struggle is leading somewhere important connects interestingly with the optimistic tenor of all Paul Hirst’s work. He is consistently hopeful about what we might achieve through our corporate efforts to establish defensible educational practices. This confident stance can only hearten those engaged in education, and the philosophy of education, and thus, as all his professional life has done, contribute to the flourishing of those practices.

AN OVERVIEW OF THIS BOOK The opening chapter, by Mary Warnock, is of a general nature, as befits a volume dedicated to an individual with Hirst’s broad interest in education and teaching. While she does not specifically refer to Paul Hirst’s writings, Baroness Warnock’s concern for good teaching, and her insistence that it cannot take place in a moral or political vacuum, echoes Hirst’s own basic attitude to education. In exploring the question of the source of the good teacher’s authority, Warnock emphasises three factors: authority derived from superior knowledge and experience, authority derived from moral character, and authority derived from the ability to develop a trusting relationship with students. Reference to the first two sources of authority may seem timely to some, in view of the current tendency to stress the third, sometimes to the apparent exclusion of the others. But Warnock is at least as concerned to make the point that the teacher can only exhibit these characteristics if supported by an overall institutional setting that values and encourages them. To that end, she advocates a change from the model of teacher preparation that is 10

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predominantly based on universities and colleges to one based on the school. Though many readers will doubtless feel that there is much that needs to be examined and argued about before adopting such a change, it is undeniable that some such view is currently much in vogue and that it harmonises with some of Hirst’s own recent work on teacher education. The next two chapters are both directly related to Hirst’s famous and extremely influential work on liberal education and the nature of knowledge. As long ago as 1973, in a conference on ‘Philosophy and the Teaching of the Arts’ held at Madeley College of Education, Hirst was directly challenged on the question of what theory of truth lay behind his argument about forms of knowledge, with some participants at least believing that his view of truth was questionable and his thesis on knowledge consequently vulnerable. David Cooper agrees with the view that particular conceptions of truth inevitably lie behind particular philosophies of education, and, accordingly, seeks to examine the conception that lies behind Hirst’s advocacy of liberal education. Professor Cooper contrasts what he takes to be Hirst’s view (characterised as ‘immanent’) with Plato’s transcendent view. But perhaps the most interesting part of his argument is his pinpointing of what he calls ‘the full drama of the issue which divides Hirst and Plato’. For, while it is possible to convey something of Hirst’s view of truth (and Cooper does it characteristically succinctly), the arresting question he raises is why one should value truth as conceived by Hirst. The answer given is that truth thus conceived (‘warranted assertability whose source is public agreement in judgements’) is something ‘the aiming at which is integral to a fulfilled human existence’. Readers may care to compare Cooper’s view with the very different view put forward by Jane Roland Martin in a subsequent chapter, but whether one is convinced or not, the debate is clearly crucial. Richard Pring bravely tackles the other main criticism that has bedevilled the forms of knowledge thesis (if we ignore specific arguments about particular putative forms): that it is exclusively concerned with allegedly intrinsically worthwhile understanding, and, as such, ignores questions of utility and, by extension, becomes elitist, irrelevant and impractical. G.H. Bantock once attempted to argue that for some (‘the folk’, ‘the masses’) access to another type of intelligence was possible by means of other, 11

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non-academic, routes such as dance. Professor Pring, surely more reasonably, sets out to re-examine the liberal ideal in order to accommodate plausible vocational and practical concerns, without sacrificing the specifically educational ideal that seems a necessary part of its attraction to many. Both Pring’s and Cooper’s chapters may then be seen as attempts to modify and advance Hirst’s basic contentions about knowledge and liberal education. The following three chapters move on from broad questions to do with Hirst’s epistemology and educational ideal to tackle a variety of more specifically curricular questions that arise out of them. Denis Phillips, in focusing on Hirst’s concept of structure, might seem to be dealing with a very abstract issue. So, in one sense, of course he is, but his concern, presented with his usual wit and wealth of example, is of considerable practical importance: if ‘structure’ is to be one of our watchwords (as it clearly was for Hirst, according to Phillips, when he argued that what essentially characterised a form of knowledge was a distinct logical structure), then we need to know what exactly constitutes structure. Phillips candidly confesses that he was never, and is not now, entirely satisfied with Hirst’s implicit answer, but he gives credit for the fact that the question was raised at all. Ivan Snook, in a way, takes up a theme in Cooper’s earlier chapter on the nature of truth, when he addresses directly the question of whether knowledge should be seen as timeless or timebound. The core of his argument is that polarisation between such views is part of the trouble. The practical conclusion he draws is that, since there are both ‘perennial’ and ‘contextual’ aspects of the curriculum, the teacher, while recognising the restraints that human interests and physical properties of the world place upon understanding (and hence, one might say, upon certain aspects of disciplined enquiry), must be alert to the particular historical and social context in which he or she and the students are operating. Jane Roland Martin certainly echoes, perhaps one might say amplifies, the last point in a chapter that directly challenges what she sees as an ethno- and gender-centric hegemony. When Hirst’s chapter on liberal education and the nature of knowledge first appeared, a common misunderstanding was that, in claiming that there are a certain number of logically distinct forms of knowledge, he was advocating a traditional subject-based curriculum. In point of fact he explicitly denied this in making 12

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the points, first that a form of knowledge could not necessarily be identified with the school subject of the same name, and, secondly and more important, that his concern was with an epistemological question and not the further practical question of the best way to organise the structure (pace Phillips) of such knowledge in curricular terms. (Indeed one view of Hirst’s most recent thought, as evidenced in this volume, is that it is precisely his earlier emphasis on detached abstract philosophical reasoning that he wants to get away from.) Jane Roland Martin’s spirited attack on what she sees as contemporary attempts to resurrect and defend a threatened ‘white man’s culture’ might call that debate to mind, were it not for the fact that she recognises that Hirst was careful to avoid embracing a false dichotomy between knowledge as a unity and knowledge as ‘a chaos’. Nonetheless, by implication, her chapter, with its heavy emphasis on perspectives and interests that have been and still are commonly excluded from the curriculum, and with its total endorsement of Rorty’s view that Western philosophy is based upon an untenable notion of mind being a mirror turned on nature, strongly suggests that the very idea of there being forms of knowledge is, at worst, simply false, and, at best, provides no significant help in the task of designing and developing the curriculum. As such it provides an interesting continuation of her earlier remarks in ‘Needed: a Paradigm for Liberal Education’ (1981). Taken together, the contributions of Pring, Phillips, and, to a more marked extent, Martin, Snook and Cooper, suggest that the issue of how much, if at all, there is a logical basis for our view of knowledge remains a dominant one —and reminds us of how astute Hirst was to focus on precisely that issue. Brian Crittenden alone chose to write about moral and religious education, referring to another of Hirst’s influential books, Moral Education in a Secular Society (1974b). Professor Crittenden’s chapter pursues a question that has long fascinated philosophers and educationalists alike: do morality and religion constitute areas of rational enquiry in which there are distinct criteria for distinguishing true and false propositions? He focuses on Hirst’s claims in this area, concluding that he sees religion, unlike morality, as something that cannot be taught in the common school as one of the domains of public knowledge. In the course of his detailed argument, we see once again the centrality to an assessment of almost any of Hirst’s work of questions to do with the nature of 13

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truth. To anticipate and to avoid further repetition, we will say here that such questions lie behind the next two chapters and also Hirst’s own contribution to this volume. Next come two chapters devoted to aesthetics and aesthetic education. In his chapter, R.K.Elliott’s chief concern is to reconstruct Wittgenstein’s early views on aesthetics from their rather fragmentary sources. He suggests that Wittgenstein’s early thought in ethics and aesthetics is systematic in the German Idealist nineteenth-century manner and that Tolstoy’s version of the Christian gospel is the key to the understanding of Wittgenstein’s ethics. Wittgenstein’s aesthetics is shown to be, in the end, indistinguishable from his ethics, and as ‘mystical’ in the traditional sense of the word. Wittgenstein’s later aesthetics, which Elliott describes as ‘critical’, exposes the presuppositions of the earlier ‘speculative’ aesthetics, but Wittgenstein seems not to have regarded it as simply displacing the earlier aesthetics. Elliott’s conclusion is that aesthetic education concerns not only the acquisition of concepts and skills requisite for appreciation, but also the aesthetic in its existential significance. If there is one alleged form of knowledge that has caused more argument than any other it is probably what Hirst called ‘Literature and the Fine Arts’ (the very name, with its juxtaposition of art forms as seemingly different as novels, sculptures, paintings and music, causing some perplexity). Put simply, the problem, at least as seen by many, lies in this juxtaposition of literature and other non-propositional art forms. The difficulty is only slightly alleviated by Hirst’s explanation that the propositions in all cases are to be associated with the artefact itself (e.g. the symphony, the statue, the book as a book, rather than as a collection of verbal propositions). John White, predictably, given his own well-known philosophical position, has some difficulty with the fundamental Hirstian claim that ‘literature and fine arts’ constitute a form of knowledge. However, his chapter, proceeding by way of a review of a number of alternative aesthetic theories, is concerned to go beyond any such initial disagreement in order to examine how strong a case can be mounted for including ‘sensuous engagement’ with works of art in the curriculum, and in particular whether such engagement can be seen as an essential part of human flourishing. Both R.K. Elliott’s and John White’s chapters, in their concern with the significance of the aesthetic in human life, have

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affinities with Paul Hirst’s concern, in his latest writings, with human flourishing as fundamental to education. In this way we come to the final, and inevitably one of the most intriguing, chapters. For, in the chapter we have already alluded to, Paul Hirst himself presents an up-to-date statement of his philosophical position and current views on the nature of education and its aims. In this essay Paul Hirst’s intellectual vitality and commitment to education are as evident as they were in his writings in the 1960s. We look forward, therefore, to many more papers from him, extending, developing and exploring new facets of his current thinking. We may even perhaps anticipate work— who knows? —which, as earlier, transcends the framework of his present position in a characteristic quest for greater understanding of knowledge and practice in education.

REFERENCES Hirst, P.H. (1963). ‘Philosophy and Educational Theory’, British Journal of Educational Studies, November. Hirst, P.H. (1965a). ‘Educational Theory’, in Tibble, J.W. (ed.) The Study of Education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hirst, P.H. (1965b). ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’, in Archambault, R. (ed.) Philosophical Analysis and Education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hirst, P.H. (1974a). Knowledge and the Curriculum. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hirst, P.H. (1974b). Moral Education in a Secular Society. London: University of London Press. Hirst, P.H. (1983). ‘Educational Theory’, in Hirst, P.H. (ed.) Educational Theory and its Foundation Disciplines. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hirst, P.H. (1990). ‘The Theory and Practice Relationship in Teacher Training’, in Wilkin, M., Furlong, V.J. and Booth, M. (eds) Partnership in Initial Teacher Training: The Way Forward. London: Cassell. Martin, J.R. (1981). ‘Needed: a Paradigm for Liberal Education’, in Soltis, Jonas F. (ed.) Philosophy and Education—80th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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1 GOOD TEACHING Mary Warnock

Anyone as devoted as Paul Hirst has always been to the education of teachers must necessarily be concerned with good teaching, what it is and how to achieve it. There was a time, indeed, in the 1960s when the very concept of teaching became suspect. There was a temporary obsession with equality in the school and classroom, as well as in the university and seminar room, and this equality was supposed to be non-hierarchical and above all non-authoritarian. Teachers were not supposed to impose their version of knowledge on the class. Thus the idea of learning became more important than that of teaching; a kind of Deweyeyed democracy was fashionable, and teachers were to be re-defined as enablers, allowing learning experiences to occur for those nominally under their charge. I do not intend to go into the sad history of this phase of British education, except to notice that such ideas are not wholly dead; nor could they be, since those trained in the 1960s are now themselves senior teachers, or heads. But at any rate now, at the beginning of the 1990s, teaching has come back. Professional teachers are frequently blamed for not doing enough of it, not imposing discipline, not exercising the authority they should. In the following pages I want to explore among other ideas the idea of the authority of the good teacher. But there are certain preliminary distinctions to be drawn. Now that the Funding Councils are to distribute money partly on the basis of a claim to especial excellence in teaching, it has become necessary to try to identify criteria of goodness in teaching at an institutional level. And, as schools will be increasingly subject to comparative judgements, judgements made both by parents and by local or central funding authorities, the same

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kind of institutional criteria for good teaching will be applied to schools. Yet it remains true that it is individual teachers who are trained and educated to teach well; and teaching is, and will always be, in part at least, a transaction between individuals. Though there are institutional values, these are necessarily both derived from and sustained by the imagination, knowledge and professional conscience of individuals. I want therefore to start by considering what a good teacher is, as an individual (while recognising that to consider a teacher apart from an institution within which he or she works is an abstraction). I shall then go on to consider what characteristics institutions must have, if they are to make it possible for teachers properly to exercise their individual abilities. Finally I shall look at the consequence of such institutional requirements for the proper education of teachers. First, then, the individual. Most of us have an image of a good teacher, drawn usually from experience. The most important thing that such remembered teachers have in common is their ability to hold the attention, and a kind of manifest hopefulness that their pupils will be able to understand what is being explained, the new fact or practice to which they are being introduced. In principle it might seem that a good teacher will not necessarily teach what is good. Just as a skilled doctor, as Plato argued, could equally be a skilled poisoner, so it might be thought that a skilled teacher could teach anything, for good or ill. Yet in fact the content of the curriculum is of fundamental importance to teachers. They will be unable to perform well unless they believe in the purpose of what they are teaching. They must not only know what the point of it is supposed to be, but they must ‘internalise’ the aims so that they can work towards them systematically and with enthusiasm. I believe that it is the fear that this will be impossible that has made some people suspicious of the National Curriculum. They have argued that a curriculum imposed by some central authority will turn teachers into mere mechanical functionaries. I do not believe that this is a necessary consequence of adopting a common curriculum, for there is a considerable consensus about what the content of such a curriculum should be, and teachers will not be treading a wholly new path, quite different from that which they would choose. (The effect on them of compulsory testing at fixed ages is another matter. But fortunately I have no reason to discuss this here.) What good teachers will do is to make 17

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what they teach seem worth learning. They will never bore their pupils. This is not a trivial point. The appalling record that we have in this country in staying-on rates at school is to a large extent explained by the boredom pupils experience there. They sense that what goes on at school is a kind of ritual, unreal and of no concern to them. Good teachers will make the curriculum accessible to pupils, by whatever means they choose, and will give pupils the satisfaction of aims successfully achieved, aims which they, the pupils, can grasp as worth pursuing. Let us consider some of the means by which access to the curriculum can be assured, the pupils’ attention held. In order to be able to teach well, teachers must have authority to take charge of their pupils’ learning (though necessarily with their active cooperation). People may be given authority to do this, that or the other; but the exercise of authority must ultimately depend on those who exercise it. They are the authors. They must possess their own ‘auctoritas’ or the delegation of authority to them will simply not work. Both here and in America one frequently hears complaints that teachers have lost their authority, and it is sometimes alleged that this loss is so severe that teaching has become almost impossible in primary and secondary schools. Teachers themselves complain of this; and in so doing they are bemoaning something about themselves. No amount of sociological explanation and no amount of sympathy with teachers will make loss of the ability to teach less deplorable. If we are to find out how to restore authority to teachers, and thus encourage good teaching, we must explore the nature of that authority itself and what its source should be. One very obvious source of authority for teachers is that they are older than their pupils and therefore know more and have more entitlement to speak of what they know. They can also do more and do it better. It may be said that children no longer have any sense of this natural hierarchy, and none of them believes that age carries any authority whatsoever. We all know about assaults on teachers even by four-year-olds; and we are all aware of the terrifying violence to which teachers are subjected by older pupils. But it is no good demanding, as some union members do, that government should intervene to stop such outrages; still less should we contemplate returning to the use of the cane, a poor weapon to use if the lesson to be taught is the avoidance of 18

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violence. It is however certainly true that heads and governors need clear powers to exclude violent pupils from school so that they become the responsibility of parents and the police. It is also true that four-year-olds who kick their teachers or attack them with scissors should be severely punished in a way they will understand and dislike. But the authority which derives from superior knowledge and experience is different from such measures as these; and the greater the genuine authority the fewer such measures will be needed. Teachers should have the ability to speak as ‘authorities’ about whatever it is that they teach. Good teachers will enjoy their subject; but above all they will be able to organise it, see how to arrange its elements so as to make them intelligible, and show their pupils how the subject connects with other subjects that they may learn. So certain must the teachers be themselves that what they are teaching is worthwhile that they can persuade or cajole their pupils into learning the parts of it that they may think boring or pointless, by showing them that these points too are necessary to the desirable end. It is now increasingly recognised that people need to be taught if they are to learn and that teaching may take a variety of different forms. Because of the greater emphasis on acquiring skills as opposed to imbibing abstract knowledge, methods of teaching are permitted to be various. For in the process of becoming able to do something there may be need for constant practice; and good teachers are those who encourage and help their pupils in their practice, whether the skill to be acquired is that of playing an instrument, speaking a foreign language, or writing in intelligible English, or carrying out numerical calculations. The aim in such cases is to make pupils competent in the particular field; and it is the duty of teachers to give pupils all the help, the tips and the outcome of experience that they can. The notion that pupils should have to find out for themselves how to multiply, or improve their embouchure or spell words correctly is absurd, and fortunately is falling into disrepute. Good teachers will now be allowed to teach the tricks of the trade, and also to test their pupils both in order to inspire them to improve, and in order to find out how far they have got. The matter of testing, or pupil-appraisal, is crucial to good teaching. Children (and grown-ups) are competitive. At one time it was thought that the competitive spirit was wrong, and inimical 19

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to true education. I believe that it is increasingly seen that the spirit of competition must be harnessed by teachers in such a way as to ensure that their pupils want to do as well as they possibly can, not for the sake of high aims which the teacher may perfectly sincerely be working towards, but for the sake of the low aims of beating the examiners, doing better than the parallel form, proving to school or home that you are not such a fool as they seem to think. Competition and testing were at one time thought bad, in that they were divisive. But the old system of distinguishing pupils into those who would take O level and those who would take CSE was far more divisive, and was hated by pupils themselves and by parents on those grounds. But children are generous about one another; and if there are frequent tests (let us say of spelling) and if some people always come top, that does not provoke bitterness on the part of the others. On the contrary, in my experience they are proud to say that their mate in class is ‘brilliant’. It is important however to recognise that if there is to be competitiveness (as I believe there must be, and the good teacher will foster it), the competitions must be as far as possible between those who are, in terms of the skills tested, at least potentially equals. This entails that there must not be ‘mixed ability teaching’ but that, on the contrary, those who are academically, or in terms of practical competence, at the bottom of the pile, should have more teaching devoted to them and should be singled out for special help, being given to tackle in the first place those aspects of the curriculum in which their special needs are likely to become apparent. Good teachers, because their overriding aim will be to help their pupils along the curriculum path, will be permitted to recognise the difference between the needs of their pupils, and make provision in their teaching for a vast variety of different abilities, and consequential educational needs. And this means, incidentally, that they will be as alert to the special needs of the outstanding pupil as to those of the slow learners. I have spoken of good teachers being ‘allowed’ to distinguish between the educational needs of their pupils; and this could take us on to the second main division of the subject, the institutional characteristics that make good teaching possible. But first I want to draw attention to the two main features of the good teacher as 20

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we all remember him or her. Holding the attention of the pupils has been mentioned already. This often, as I have suggested, is done by actually helping pupils to master a skill, to be able to see for themselves that by persistence and practice they are getting better at doing something they could not do before, and thus to take increasing pleasure in it. For what I have referred to as boredom may equally be called frustration: there is nothing so calculated to make one give up in despair as the sense of no progress. Good teachers, especially if they can use some helpful and carefully graded tests, can bring such frustration to an end, in many cases. But there is another way of holding the attention. In our newfound enthusiasm for the teaching of ‘skills’ we must not forget that we also all need to be told stories. (This is especially true of children, but it is also true of those of us who in some respects resemble children.) Here the authority of teachers has to consist in their both knowing the story and being able to tell it, as traditional spell-binders. I am using the idea of a story in a broad sense. Story-tellers may tell us how it is now, how it was in the past and how it may be in the future. The essence of teaching is to help people to see the world as intelligible (and therefore perhaps to see themselves in the world not as mere passengers, carried along by hidden and mysterious forces, but as able to intervene, to change things and to control). It is for this reason then, to show to their pupils that there is some manner in which the world can be rendered intelligible, that teachers must be story-tellers. They can fulfil this role not by constant problem-setting and solving, but largely by talking, answering questions, allowing their pupils to explore themselves, their pasts and their futures by the exercise of imagination. Teachers are actors. They have to present a drama whose significance is constantly implied and must seem significant to their pupils just because it involves them, appealing essentially to their imagination. History is obviously one way of making this presentation; and so is literature. But science, mathematics and languages are just as proper stages for actor-teachers to use in order to induce in their pupils a feeling of coherence and significance, to catch and then free their imagination. In this sense the authority of teachers is real and cannot be denied, any more than can the authority of good actors. We are forced to listen. Like the ancient mariner, they stop us in our tracks, even though we thought we had something better to do than listen to them. 21

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The authority of teachers then must derive largely from themselves. It must come from their being older than their pupils, and from their ability to present themselves and, like actors, command attention through the force or uniqueness of their own personae. Moreover the good teacher will be quite prepared to teach a specific ethos, a preferred way of behaving, as well as specific skills and understanding. Just as authentic writers have a ‘voice’ by which somehow we come to know them (even though we cannot separate the voice from what they tell us) so good teachers have a way of being, or a way of explaining things, which comes over along with their more specific teaching. It is daunting, but nevertheless a fact, that teachers have moral as well as intellectual effects on their pupils. I do not mean to imply that teachers should always be ‘drawing morals’ from their subject-matter. But I do suggest that teachers, as well as priests, politicians, doctors, or directors of companies, have to exercise moral judgement in the course of their professional lives and that they, more perhaps than those who are members of other professions, simply because their pupils are young and ignorant, more often than the others have to explain their moral principles and speak up explicitly in favour of fairness, generosity, honesty, industriousness or charity. If there were a student who was ashamed or afraid to adopt a clear moral position and explain it, who dreaded, as many people do, being accused of adopting a high moral tone, then I would strongly urge that student not to go in for teaching as a career. The first priority in moral teaching is by example, by an instant readiness to intervene and expostulate when manifest wrong is done by one child to another, or between children and grownups. Fairness, truthfulness, punctiliousness about fulfilling obligations, kindness, unselfishness, these are the classroom virtues which good teachers must at all times practise and try to get their pupils to admire so that they will practise them too. In the case of such virtues as these I suppose no teacher would be afraid to seem moralistic. The difficulty comes when the interest of children must be engaged in broader matters, outside the classroom or games field. Teachers cannot, and should not, appear neutral between all different points of view. For in many cases neutrality can be interpreted as indifference. Yet if they are not neutral they are liable to the accusation of indoctrinating their 22

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pupils, or of becoming over-political. The very people who complain that teachers have lost their authority are those who most vociferously accuse them of abusing their authority if they express political opinions in the classroom. For my part I believe that it is impossible to separate morals from politics. Political decisions more often than not can be seen to be based on a moral principle. Since no one would advocate a teacher’s being neutral on matters of morality, matters of right and wrong, I conclude that at least on some issues good teachers will have to express their own political opinions, since these matters will also be moral matters. Though there is no sharp line to be drawn here, good teachers when dealing with something that actually divides political parties, or religious codes, will take care to make it clear that the arguments they give are those which support one point of view, and that there are people who adopt a different view. This they cannot be expected to do in cases of agreed common morality, such as the wrongness of bullying or beating people up. The very distinction they draw between those cases where they are and those where they are not prepared to speak as moral absolutists will demonstrate the wisdom and good sense of the good teacher. All this is a lot to ask. For the authority of teachers must come from their being the kind of people whom their pupils can trust, both intellectually and with regard to their character. They will be steady, completely reliable and consistent. In addition, in my view, they must as far as they can be enthusiastic, hopeful and funny. However we must not sentimentalise the glories and the high vocationalism of being a good teacher, or of being able singlehanded to exercise a heroic actor-like control over a captive audience, though such may in fact be the rewards of good teaching. Many who enter the teaching profession do so from high motives, a mixture of commitment to their subject and a genuine desire to share it, and other values, with their pupils, and open their imaginative eyes to the good things they themselves have perceived. But when they get into the classroom they find things are far from what they had hoped. The main complaint of these beginning teachers is that they are left on their own. They have to sink or swim, and there is no one on the staff who has the time to help them. Many of them have, to their dismay, discovered this isolation in their post-graduate training sessions at school. It is absolutely essential for good teaching that the institution in which 23

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teachers work should be so structured that this kind of isolation cannot occur. There is no guarantee of good teaching except a commitment to teaching by the whole institution, and by its placing good teaching at the top of its list of priorities. It is reasonable for an institution to do this, since increasingly it is whole institutions that will be judged according to a standard of good teaching, whether by parents, funding agencies or the outside world. Such institutional judgements cannot, it is true, be wholly separated from the judged merits of individual teachers; and when the compulsory assessment of teachers begins, the relation between the institutional standard and the standard of its members will be closer still. Nevertheless, for teachers to flourish and improve within it, an institution needs not only to have means of assessment of teachers, but, more important, ways of helping and supporting its teachers at every stage of their careers. There is not yet a large body of research concerned with the difference it makes to an institution if teaching is put at the top of its list of priorities, though I suspect that in future we shall see many such studies. However, in Michael Rutter’s 1970s study of some comprehensive schools in London (Rutter et al., 1979) the schools that came out best (providing satisfaction to both students and parents, showing the highest proportion of leavers in employment and the fewest hours of truanting) were schools where teaching was thought of as a team activity. This does not mean necessarily ‘co-teaching’. It entails rather that members of the teaching staff feel free to consult each other, to go into each other’s lessons in certain circumstances, to discuss problems regularly. Senior teachers have a particular responsibility for new members of the staff. Above all there is consistent and well thought-out policy with regard to discipline, homework, the marking and return of work to students and other matters. The ethos of the institution, in these good schools, is positive and hopeful. Pupils are praised wherever possible and there is no violence, either physical or verbal, against the pupils. What is revealing in this study is the crucial importance to an institution of its overall agreed attitude to its pupils, an attitude both of hope and charity based on a genuine desire to do the best possible for these pupils (often, in Rutter’s study, from deprived homes) in terms of what will happen to them after school. A commitment to the life-chances of one’s pupils is a mark not only 24

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of a good individual teacher but also of a good institution. The other indispensable ingredient is consistency of policy, and open discussion among the staff of what this policy should be. And finally there is confidence and mutual respect sufficient to enable members of the staff to ask one another for help, advice and support. I believe that a sensitively worked-out system of assessment of teachers will greatly help to bring about a change in this last respect, but that in some schools it will amount to a revolution in attitude, and will need extremely skilful and committed leadership from the head and senior staff. It is relatively easy to set up ‘mechanisms’ for consultation between different levels within an educational institution. These mechanisms may take the form of faculty or departmental meetings or regular meetings between the head and heads of department, or (less easy to manage) governors and staff. But such ‘mechanisms’ may too easily become formalised, or ritualised— producing, mechanically, reports which are not acted on, and which leave attitudes unchanged. It is only an openness of communications based on a mixture of the formal with the informal that will work. Informal communications within an institution, though often helpful, are dangerous in that they can degenerate into gossip, and can always leave some people outside the circle of talk or memoranda. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the channels of formal communication should be in place and be used as a means of disseminating bright ideas that may have started their life in a less formal way. There is another way in which institutions must be prepared to show themselves devoted to the ideal of good teaching as a top priority, and that is by listening to (and talking to) those sometimes depressingly referred to as ‘clients’ or even ‘consumers’ (neither word is quite right). These are pupils, former pupils, parents and those who will receive the students at the next stage of their career, whether employers or those engaged in further or higher education. It is difficult and expensive to set up regular lines of communication with all these groups. But the regular use of questionnaires and occasional seminars or conferences, where the issues of what people have learnt, how they have learnt it, where the teaching has proved less than good, can be responsibly discussed (with, if possible, more than anecdotal evidence), would, I believe, be extremely useful. They might do more than demonstrate a willingness to talk about teaching; they might 25

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actually produce some practical suggestions which the institutions could use. Seeking finance for such consultations should be an important concern for school governors, and one where industrial or commercial sponsorship might reasonably be expected. We have moved a long way, mercifully, from some of the old attitudes towards teaching. In those days teaching in primary school was regarded widely as ‘a doddle’, something anyone could do, suitable mainly for women, and rewarded by long holidays; teaching in secondary school was held to be properly undertaken only by those who loved their subject but were not bright enough to undertake research or remain in the university; teaching in higher education was regarded as always secondary to research. Though probably few people held all of these opinions, yet their cumulative force was strong. The training of teachers was therefore thought to be a necessary evil. It had to be gone through if the teacher was to work in a maintained school; but the content of the course was immaterial. Either you were a ‘born teacher’ or you shouldn’t really be in the business. The plight of our school children, many of them apparently leaving school after eleven years having learnt nothing, has changed this casual and dismissive view of teaching. It is now generally agreed that since teachers have such a crucial and difficult task to carry out, for the sake of society as a whole, they must be properly trained, just as, for instance, nurses, doctors or solicitors must. I have argued that the good teacher cannot exist except in the context of a good institution, where teaching is taken seriously. It seems to me to follow from this that teachers must be taught how to teach within the context of that very kind of institution which will provide the context. They must be trained in schools, and not outside. Moreover, it must be teachers themselves who establish both the curriculum for the training of teachers and the means of helping students to pursue that curriculum, and of assessing them as they go through their apprenticeship. There is considerable evidence that things are moving in this direction (see, for example, Graham, 1990 and HMI). Teachers should themselves be involved in the selection of candidates, supervising students and in the lectures and seminars they will need for the theoretical part of their courses (to be held, most probably, in university or polytechnic departments). This will mean a change in the nature of university and polytechnic departments of educational studies, 26

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and it is understandable that members of such departments should be wary of a scheme which seems to diminish their powers and make nothing of their expertise. Nevertheless they should recognise that there will be a future role for them in establishing both undergraduate degrees with an educational component, and research degrees and taught post-graduate courses in education; and that their sphere of influence could in fact be increased if their principal role in the post-graduate training of teachers were to be confined to the accrediting of certificates, and the collaboration with schools at a practical level, but largely in the interests of research. In any case I believe that the doubts of the university departments should not be taken as fatal. It is time that the needs of teachers are put first in the necessary redesign of teacher training. One of the advantages of teacher training’s becoming predominantly school-based would be that it would fit in with the development of continuing training and up-dating of existing teachers, who could be encouraged either to embark on further training courses in their own schools, or at least could be assured that there were those within a school who would be interested in and knowledgeable about possible career development of teachers already in post. A second and important advantage would be that, for teachers themselves, there would be a way forward in their own career which would not necessarily entail their leaving the classroom and taking to administration. There would develop a new kind of senior and responsible teacher in schools who would partly retain classroom responsibility, and partly take on a new responsibility for the organisation and supervision of in-school training. This would be a tremendous advance, because it would both halt the drain away from the classroom of the best and most ambitious people, and also demonstrate that the training of new teachers (or the enhancement of the abilities of those who had been at it for some time) was genuinely taken just as seriously as the administering of a school as a whole. A third advantage, and the most important of all, would be the gradual change that would be effected in the public image of teachers. Other professionals, doctors, for example, or lawyers, are thought worthy of respect because they are autonomous, establishing and maintaining their own standards, carrying out their own training, setting out standards of performance, and ultimately carrying the responsibility of admitting people to the 27

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privileges of belonging to their own profession, and striking them off the register in the case of gross dereliction of duty. For such a change to come about the first step would be the establishment of a General Teaching Council where standards would be explicitly set out, and from which policy on the training of teachers would emanate. The revision of teacher training and the setting up of such an authoritative council seem to be intimately linked. In the long run I would hope that no one might teach in a school who had not undergone training and attained a certificate and a licence to teach from the General Teaching Council. Those who teach in higher and further education should be able to gain certificates of competence through the Council, and should in some way be given credit for so doing. (It is probably unrealistic and undesirable to insist that all should obtain such a certificate before embarking on a university or polytechnic career, partly because of the complicated relation inevitable in higher education between teaching duties and research.) For good teaching to be possible and a matter of pride to the profession a degree of professional autonomy is essential. And this can come about only by the establishing of a Teaching Council with the consequent responsibility for training being laid on the profession itself. It must necessarily diminish the status of teachers in the eyes of the public if they have to have their standards set and monitored by a body or bodies other than themselves. This is not to say that the teaching profession must become more inwardlooking and self-absorbed. Far from it. I have suggested ways in which good institutions will constantly look towards their ‘clients’ for up-to-date information of what is needed from them. They will have to take this information into account in their plans for training and for assessment. Good teachers will increasingly be teachers who can put their pupils on a road that will lead to satisfaction, and service to the community, after education is over. This leads to a final point. Everything that I have suggested about the definition of good teaching, and about ways to make good teaching possible, is to be taken within the context of a specific view of education, what it is and what its aims are. There is no such thing as good teaching in a moral or political vacuum. Teachers who exercise that proper authority without which I have argued they will not be able to teach well will be seen to possess authority partly because of qualities of their own personae, partly because it will be recognised that they are capable of helping their 28

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pupils along an educational path whose goal is more or less agreed. Good teachers, above everything, want success for their pupils (not necessarily in monetary terms, but in terms of being able to do things they want to do). In the 1990s this entails a commitment to the proposition that every child has a right to education. If one of the chief virtues of a good teacher is the virtue of hope (and this is an institutional virtue as well) then this must mean the belief that there is no one who is ineducable, however long or hard the road of education may be. There is a kind of egalitarianism built into the law which lays down that all children must receive education. Good teaching must take place in the context of that law. In varying ways institutions and individuals within them must be seen to be committed to expanding the scope of education, as well as to improving the competence and understanding of those pupils whom they teach at present. There is a political dimension to this commitment which cannot be overlooked.

REFERENCES Graham, Duncan (1990). ‘The New Teacher: Schools and the National Curriculum’, Education Today, 40 (4). London: Longman. HMI (1990). Perspectives on Teacher Education: Other Trainers’ Views. London: HMSO. Rutter, Michael, Maughan, Barbara, Mortimer, Peter, and Ouston, Janet (1979). Fifteen Thousand Hours. Secondary Schools and their Effects on Children. London: Open Books.

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2 TRUTH AND LIBERAL EDUCATION David E.Cooper I The motto for this chapter might be Heidegger’s gnomic remark, ‘The essence of “education” is grounded in the essence of “truth”’.1 Faithful or not to his intention, I interpret the motto to mean at least this: a philosophy of education is, or should be, informed by a conception of truth. Better perhaps: philosophies of education are always deeply influenced, for the most part covertly, by such conceptions, and it is important that these influences be made explicit. Notice that we are speaking of conceptions of truth, and not of what is taken to be true rather than false. It goes without saying that educational aims and practices will be affected by what is taken to be true. A creationist and an evolutionist will differ over science and education, but this is the result of differences over biological theory and need involve no disagreement as to the nature of truth. This said, there can surely be important connections between a conception of truth and what is taken to be true and false. Someone who equates the class of true and false sentences with that of verifiable and falsifiable ones might deny that religious beliefs, say, can be true (or false). Some conceptions of truth make it sensible to regard paintings as true or false; others do not. There are several general considerations which prima facie support our motto, of which I mention two. First, nearly everyone agrees that education has to do with knowledge. Some would say that education is, in large part, initiation into knowledge. Now, on a familiar characterisation, knowledge is justified true belief. The bulk of the literature on education and knowledge has 30

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concentrated on the ‘justification’ element. One thinks of the attempt to distinguish education from indoctrination in terms of the latter’s lack of concern for justification of the beliefs being transmitted to pupils; or of accounts of moral development in which various stages are distinguished according to the kinds of justification children are able to give for their moral beliefs. But since a belief must be true to count as knowledge, one would expect that a given conception of truth would shape a person’s view of what counts as knowledge, and so of what should be taught. Someone whose conception includes the possibility of moral truth, for example, will deny that there can be moral knowledge, and perhaps that there should be such a thing as moral education. A second consideration arises from the educational concern to foster ‘autonomy’ and ‘authenticity’. These involve a capacity for self-conscious, critical reflection on the body of one’s beliefs. One aspect of this is reflection upon the status of various truths in that body. For example, do scientific truths correctly describe the world, or does their truth reside elsewhere—in their pragmatic ‘pay-off in coping with the world, say? Are they paradigms of truth, to which all other truths must approximate if they are to deserve the name; or are scientific truths derivative from truths of a more fundamental nature? If reflection on such questions is part of an education for ‘autonomy’, then the lines which teachers and educationalists take on them must be informed by conceptions of truth. Despite these and other prima facie connections between educational theory and theory of truth, there has been surprisingly little discussion of them within the literature.2 So our motto is best regarded as a hypothesis: if you consider any significant philosophy of education closely, you will find that it is informed, however implicitly, by a conception of truth. Moreover, focusing on the conception in question casts illumination on the philosophy. What would otherwise be puzzling elements in it fall into place; avenues of fruitful comparison and contrast with other philosophies are opened up; the philosophy is seen to have a deeper grounding than at first sight—and so on. There is a wide field for research here, as wide as the range of significant philosophies of education. In this chapter, I take as the main ‘test case’ Paul Hirst’s idea of liberal education. But it is useful, for purposes of further confirmation and of comparison, to consider a second case—that of Plato’s views in The Republic. I 31

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do not, of course, light upon Plato by accident. Hirst, while acknowledging an important debt, expressly contrasts his idea of liberal education with an earlier, Greek one, whose main representative was Plato. Our motto guides us to examine these different ideas of liberal education in the light of the different conceptions of truth which inform them. The expectation is that this will deepen understanding of what is at issue between them.

II Before I proceed to discussion of these ideas of liberal education, I must spend some time—less than I would wish—explaining what I have in mind by a ‘conception’ of truth. (This will involve some fairly technical considerations, and some readers may prefer to go straight to Sections III and IV where what I have in mind may, as it were, show itself through examples—returning later to the present section.) Put ostensively, what I have in mind are, inter alia, pragmatist, coherence, correspondence, and consensus accounts of truth. But what are these conceptions of, exactly? Of no one thing, some would argue. Whereas the correspondence theory tells us what truth is, the others are best regarded as characterisations of the evidential grounds on which a proposition is accepted as true. It ‘works’, say, or it harmonises better than its rivals with an already established scheme of beliefs. This is too simple, however. While the various accounts can be formulated so as to be answers to different questions, they can also be presented in such a way as to be genuine rivals. But rival accounts of what? What is a conception of truth trying to achieve? The aim is not that of defining ‘true’, if by that is meant providing a gloss or paraphrase. People sometimes think that a correspondence account can be the only acceptable one, since ‘“P” is true’ is paraphrasable by ‘“P” corresponds to the facts’, but not by ‘“P” works’ or ‘“P” coheres well with other sentences held true’. A correspondence theory of truth, however, does not consist in a banal paraphrase. Rather it is a particular and contentious kind of analysis of what it is for a proposition to ‘correspond to the facts’: an analysis in terms of propositional constituents naming constituents of a fact and of structural isomorphism between proposition and fact.3 It is perfectly possible to accept (as one surely 32

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must) the paraphrase of ‘true’ by ‘corresponds to the facts’ whilst rejecting any such analysis of it. Pragmatists et al. will have their own accounts to offer of what is, for them, this philosophically neutral, if dangerous, way of paraphrasing ‘true’. There are, to be sure, more technical notions of definition, and one of the best-known accounts of truth, Tarski’s, provides such a definition. A Tarskian ‘definition’ is a set of axioms and rules which entail, for each sentence of a language under study, a correct statement of the sentence’s truth-conditions. (For example, if the language is German, such statements as ‘“Schnee ist weiss” is true if and only if snow is white’.) Now none of the conceptions I listed need take issue with such a ‘definition’. Admittedly, Tarski’s axioms—with their talk of objects ‘satisfying’ predicates —may suggest (and are intended by Tarski to suggest) that truth is a function of relations between linguistic and extra-linguistic items, and in that way lend succour to ‘realist’ views of truth, like the correspondence conception (Tarski, 1952). But the pragmatist, coherentist etc. worth their salt will interpret such talk in their own terms, so as to avoid any necessary commitment to an offending ‘realism’. Someone might say that a conception of truth surely aims to specify what it is for a sentence (belief etc.) to be true, what makes it true. But it is hard to prevent this proposal collapsing into one or other of the previous ones. Taken one way, the question ‘What is it for a sentence to be true?’ is a request for a paraphrase, inviting answers like ‘For it to say how things actually are’. Taken another way, it is not a question that can be asked about sentences en bloc, but only about each individual sentence. It is then a request for a statement of the sentence’s particular truth-conditions—together, perhaps with an account, Tarski-style, of why, given the make-up of the sentence, it has just those truth-conditions. Whichever way the question is taken, answers to it will not distinguish the various conceptions of truth which I listed from one another. Nor, I think, is the point of a conception of truth to characterise what a speaker is doing, what ‘speech act’ he performs, when he calls a sentence ‘true’. It may be that he is best described, in most cases, as ‘endorsing’ or ‘reaffirming’ a proposition: but this no more settles the nature of truth than the observation that ‘good’ is typically used to ‘commend’ settles the nature of the good. Some people, of course, have suggested that there is nothing more to say about truth beyond the ‘endorsing’ role of ‘true’, just as they 33

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have held that understanding of the good is virtually exhausted once the role of ‘good’ as an expression of ‘commendation’ is recognised. But these are highly contentious, indeed implausible, claims which do not follow from the bare observation of typical roles in speech acts. Now let me try to be more positive. Michael Dummett (1958– 9) has rightly pointed out that an adequate account of truth should make it clear that and why truth is a desideratum. Truth, he suggests, may be compared to winning. One no more provides a complete account of truth by specifying the conditions under which individual sentences are true than one explicates the concept of winning by specifying how individual games are won (by checkmating, scoring the most points, etc.). For this would leave it totally obscure why truth (winning) should matter to speakers (players). Fundamental to civilised, intelligent human life are certain linguistic and epistemic practices which could be summed up as ‘aiming at truth’. People are concerned that what they and their fellows say should, by and large, be true; that what they act upon should not be mere guesses, but beliefs for whose truth they have some warrant; and that where beliefs conflict, whatever their individual warrant, adjustments be made within the body of these beliefs, so that they might all be true together. So fundamental are such practices that a person who is indifferent to them is hardly intelligible to us. Making sense of a person is a matter of recognising his behaviour and utterances as informed by beliefs which he holds true and has some warrant, generally, for so holding. The maddest people do not so much hold wildly false beliefs as opt out of any concern for the truth of what they say or act upon. A conception of truth, as I intend it, is an account of truth focused on explaining the practices of ‘aiming at truth’, on clarifying why truth is a desideratum. A conception fails if it fails in these tasks. Suppose we identify a certain relation between words and world. It will be wrong to equate this with truth if it is impossible to grasp why we should aim at such a relation in our talk. (‘Anti-realists’ hold that the kind of relation postulated by correspondence theories is one which, even if it can obtain, is not generally recognisable as obtaining, and hence cannot be one to aim at. Victory can be aimed at only if we can know when we have won.) 34

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A conception of truth specifies a complex relationship between (at least) the following:4 people, the sentences they assert (or beliefs), and the world. The relationship is one whose desirability is deemed evident and explanatory, therefore, of why truth is aimed at. For the pragmatist, people have practical purposes in the world, truth being a function of the contribution to those purposes made by certain beliefs (via lending order to experience, predicting its future course, etc.). A coherentist locates truth in a more specific virtue. Whatever benefits beliefs should yield, they fail to yield these unless they harmonise with one another: and ‘aiming at truth’ is precisely the attempt to acquire those beliefs which integrate best with ones already acquired. Correspondence theories have in mind a relationship which is desirable not because of its welcome consequences, but because, outside of it, human beings would be unfaithful in their representation of how reality, independent of human perspectives, is. They would be guilty of self-deception or denizens of an illusory world. (An early version held that the truth-conferring correspondence was with the thoughts of God. ‘Aiming at truth’ was an aspect of the obligation to approximate to the divine nature.) Those who deny that people can relate, knowingly at least, to an ‘independent’, pristine world (if such there be), naturally reject such a picture of epistemic virtue and vice. Much of this chapter will revolve around such a dispute. There is much more that should be said about conceptions of truth—about their interrelationships (must they all be rivals?), their connections with specifications of truth-conditions for individual sentences, and so on. But what I have said must suffice as we now turn to two such conceptions and the philosophies of liberal education which, according to our motto, they ‘ground’.

III Some would query whether the education proposed by Plato is a liberal one at all. Does he not see it as training, of character and for a vocation? (We are talking here of the education of the future philosophers, especially the stages beyond those where everyone else’s stops.) But, first, Plato would think it artificial to separate education that aims at knowledge and understanding from a process of 35

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character training. This is because he subscribes to the Socratic doctrines of the unity of the virtues and of knowledge as virtue. Right character, as possession of the virtues, is inseparable from attainment of the particular virtue of wisdom. As for the charge of vocationalism, educating for philosophical kingship is so unlike anything we now have in mind by ‘vocational training’ that the expression sounds comically anachronistic. Moreover, it is the fifteen years spent serving in subordinate office that constitute professional training for government, not the study of Mathematics and dialectic which belong in the ‘higher’ stage of the philosopher’s education, and whose purpose is a certain kind of ‘pure’ knowledge (episteme). Far from saying that this education should immerse the student in practical, governmental dealings, Plato is pessimistic about the chances of getting the man who has attained episteme to engage in such matters. (This is one of the main points in the allegory of the cave.) The role of Plato’s conception of truth, and of the philosopher’s distinctive grasp of truth, is generally overlooked by educationist commentators. R.S.Peters and Robin Barrow, for example, do not mention it. Barrow (1975:30) thinks the philosopher is distinguished, intellectually, only by a ‘high degree of conceptual thought’; while Peters (1977) submerges a concern for truth among a host of other ‘intellectual virtues’. In fact, it is impossible to understand either the central aim of a Platonic education or the reasons behind his particular proposals unless that role is thoroughly appreciated. It is quite wrong to hold, with Barrow, that Plato’s central educational aim is ‘exactly the same’ as his political one, ‘the creation of a community in which individuals shall live together on fair terms, in happiness and harmony’ (1975:176). This would mean that the rationale for the philosopher’s education is simply its benefit for the polis. But Plato is clear that the creation of the just polis is as much for the sake of philosophers as their education is for the sake of it. ‘We have bred you [philosophers] both for your own sake and that of the whole community’ (520b).5 One of Plato’s main complaints about ‘unjust’ societies is that they are ‘not good enough for the philosophical nature, with the result that it gets warped…like a foreign seed sown in alien soil’ (497 b). One is apt to forget, during the ‘political’ Books of The Republic, that Plato’s over-arching concern is with the nature and flourishing, not of ‘the just state’, but of ‘the just individual’, in 36

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whom the parts of the soul are properly harmonised. It is much too bland (besides sounding anachronistic), however, to suppose, with Peters, that this is a concern for a person’s ‘mental health’, or the ‘integration of [his] personality’. This ignores the very special character of the ‘health’ sought by the philosopher, which owes to a wisdom that is the natural end of all human desire: ‘the desire’, as described in The Symposium, ‘for the perpetual possession of the Good’ (1987:86). The ‘possession of the Good’, or knowledge of the Form of the Good, is not only the natural, ultimate goal of desire, but the explicit aim of Platonic education. But why should this knowledge be goal and aim? Quite simply, because only he who attains it is ‘in contact not with a reflection, but with the truth’ (1987:95). The further question of why this ‘contact with the truth’ is imperative directs us to Plato’s conception of truth. This conception has, for modern readers, a strange feature. For Plato, and perhaps the Greeks generally, truth is not, in the first instance, a property of sentences, beliefs, or other purported representations of reality.6 Rather, it is a property of reality itself. Some objects are ‘far truer than’ others (515 d); and it would be ‘absurd to look for exact truth’ in some things (530 b). Doxa (opinion) cannot possess as high a degree of truth as noesis (reason and knowledge) precisely because it pertains to objects (physical things, sense-data etc.) which are less true than the objects of noesis (mathematical entities, Forms). Knowing truths is acquaintance with the true. It results from a ‘turning away’ from less true objects, ‘the world of change’, towards that ‘brightest of all realities’, the Form of the Good. This ‘turning around of the mind’ is the techne of the educator (518 d). An aspect of this ‘turning around’ which needs stressing is that as a person comes ‘in contact with the truth’, he becomes more like the true world. He comes to partake in its ‘immortality’, so that his ‘divine quality…appear(s) quite clearly’. The lives of those who do not make this contact ‘stand revealed as merely human’ (497 c). The reasoning, in part, is this: the totally true is absolute, dependent upon nothing outside of itself for how it is. In particular, it is not dependent, in the way of phenomena and physical objects, upon the vagaries of human perspectives and perceptual apparatuses. The Form of the Good is absolute, and wholly true, since it is ‘the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their being and reality’ (509 b). As a person 37

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proceeds towards knowledge of this ‘source’, therefore, his mind becomes increasingly less dependent in its understanding on the contingencies of perception and perspective. He is transcending the ‘merely human’. He comes vicariously to share in the divine, absolute nature of the most real world. Plato’s account, then, finally yields a version of correspondence theory. Grasp of truth is a matter of the mind’s acquainting itself with, and making itself like, absolute reality. Truth is a desideratum independently of the political and psychological benefits which knowledge of it furnishes. It is desirable because, in coming ‘in contact with the truth’, a person transcends the ‘merely human’, achieving the ultimate goal of desire—an identity or correspondence with the divine and immortal. There are several proposals in Plato’s educational programme which are puzzling unless the ‘grounding’ of the programme in his conception of truth is recognised. Consider, first, the great length of the philosopher’s education, and its restriction to a small ‘elite’. If the aim of this education were ‘mental health’ or ‘greater concern for general welfare’, these features would be odd: for surely such aims could be set for most people, and before the ripe old age of thirty-five. But the proposals fall into place when we recall that education is progress in transcending one’s ‘merely human’ nature and towards a vision utterly unfamiliar to the common mind. Such progress is arduous, and only for the few. Consider, next, the abstract nature of the disciplines pursued by the future philosophers during the ‘higher’ stage of their education—mathematical subjects and dialectic. There is little or no room for more empirical studies. It is inadequate to put this down to a peculiarly narrow view, on Plato’s part, of how a ‘high degree of conceptual thought’ is promoted. The explanation is that this stage of education aims to free the mind from its immersion in the empirical world for entry into a world neither physical nor accessible to the senses. Mathematics and dialectic serve to wean the mind away from its familiar diet, making it, as Jainists might say, less gross and more light, so that it is more suited ‘to bear to look straight at reality’ (518d). Finally, there is Plato’s notorious advocacy of censorship and the promulgation of myths during the educational process. Some commentators have concluded that, if Plato is so willing to sacrifice knowledge and truth for the sake of Realpolitik, his commitment to these cannot be honest. But it is Plato’s belief that censorship 38

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and myth may, however indirectly, help promote the ‘turning around of the mind’ towards the true, as he conceives of this. The opinions censored or masked through myth are opinions: they belong, that is, at a level where truth of a significant degree is anyway unattainable. The sacrifice of low-grade truth at this level is a small price for removing obstacles in the way of ascent from the cave. Cardinal Bellarmine employed a not dissimilar argument for silencing Galileo: and whatever one’s criticisms of Bellarmine, and of Plato, these should not include a charge of indifference towards the truth. As they saw it, one must put up with falsehoods at a certain level if these point towards a truer reality.

IV According to Paul Hirst’s concept of liberal education, ‘knowledge and understanding alone should be the aim but across the range of the different forms of knowledge we have’ (96).7 Lacking all such knowledge and understanding, a person cannot count as rational. Indeed he scarcely counts as a person, since he could not have ‘come to have a mind in a fuller sense’ (40). Truth plays an explicit and emphatic role in this concept of liberal education. Not only is the knowledge in question that of knowing truths (as against, say, know-how), but it is in terms of the variety of ways of testing for truth that the forms of knowledge are differentiated. Indeed, the truth-test criterion comes to subsume the various other criteria Hirst originally proposed for distinguishing forms. For instance, we no longer need a separate criterion of distinctive concepts since ‘a classification of the true propositions has thereby also provided a classification of the concepts applied in those propositions’ (91). It does not follow, however, that any particular conception of truth is at work. Someone might think that Hirst need have nothing more specific in mind by ‘true’ than the man in the street has; that what is essential in his argument for liberal education is truth and its varieties, not the nature of, or concept of, truth. But this would be wrong. Hirst’s concept of liberal education, I claim, rests heavily on a certain conception of truth. In claiming this, am I simply reiterating Hirst’s own view of his enterprise, or am I telling him how he ought to view it? Well, let me exploit a useful term and say I am ‘reconstructing’ his position. The 39

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development of my claim is no mere parroting, certainly, of Hirst’s own statements; but I hope that it accords with, and brings into sharper relief, a crucial dimension of his thought. For one second, Hirst sounds as if he might wish to avoid any particular conception of truth. ‘What is it for an expression to be true? …How do we give an account? To this I think we must answer that the notion of truth cannot be analysed into other notions’ (159). I am not certain what he intends by this remark. Given his rejection of referential accounts of meaning, he cannot intend, in the style of G.E.Moore, that ‘true’ is the name of a simple property. Perhaps his point is that no paraphrase of ‘true’ can be given which is both correct and illuminating. ‘States a fact’ may be correct provided that no theoretical weight is put on the idea of a fact: but then it would be unilluminating. Once weight is applied, it will then be a matter of contention whether the paraphrase is correct. Hirst, anyway, does not intend his remark on unanalysability to exclude further discussion of how truth should be understood. This is just as well, for Hirst needs to engage in further discussion and cannot remain content with the man in the street’s sanguine indifference as to the nature of truth. One reason is that he is willing to ascribe truth to items which many would not regard as possible bearers of truth-value: notably, to works of art (157 ff.). There are accounts of truth which cannot accommodate such ascriptions: for example, the ‘redundancy’ theory according to which the meaning of ‘“P” is true’ is that of an assertion of plain ‘P’. A painting, not being a sentence, cannot be an instance of ‘P’ here. For the same reason, it is hard to envisage what a coherence account of the truth of paintings might look like. Hirst, then, needs to defend a conception of truth which would legitimate such contentious ascriptions of truth-value. Furthermore, he owes an answer to the familiar criticism that some, at least, of his forms are at best forms of experience, not knowledge.8 Propositions belonging to different forms, it has been argued, are distinguished not by different kinds of truth-test, but by registering different perspectives—moral, religious, etc. —on the world. This issue is made acute by Hirst’s insistence that the forms are not a priori structures of intelligible thought, but simply regimentations of the criteria ‘to be found at present in our conceptual schemes’ (92, my italics). Some people are bound to wonder why, if these criteria are liable to shift and are not secured 40

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on any transcendental grounds, they should be regarded as criteria of truth and knowledge at all; or why, if they are stipulatively defined in terms of such criteria, truth and knowledge should be desiderata, let alone the sole aim of a liberal education. Hirst is, in fact, well aware of his obligation to provide at least part of what is needed by way of a conception of truth. To begin with, he is anxious to disown one important type of conception, the correspondence account. Not only, he argues, does such an account incoherently assume that ‘we can judge what is the case …prior to judging any statements to be true’, but it treats the idea of truth as coming into play, as a matching exercise, only after language is in place (148). That must be wrong because, as we will soon see, no language could be in place without recognition by its speakers of true and false applications of its expressions. We are at least able, then, to say enough about truth to recognise the faults in one popular conception. But Hirst thinks we can do a good deal more. We can, so to speak, map the concept by locating it in proximity to other related notions: notably, those of meaning and agreement.9 Assertoric sentences are not the only type found in a natural language, but it is reasonable to think that these must form the basis for a theory of meaning. For Hirst, the meanings of most terms may be seen as a function of their roles in making statements. And, as for Donald Davidson, this role, is crucially, that of determining the truth conditions of the sentences in which they occur. Thus ‘meaning and the existence of truth criteria are clearly tied together’ (65). There now comes an essential step. If contribution to truth conditions fixes meanings, and if meanings of terms are to be grasped by speakers, then the truth conditions of some sentences must actually be recognised by us as obtaining when they do obtain. As Hirst puts it, it would be impossible to understand a term occurring in a certain kind of proposition ‘without our actually being able to judge any propositions of that kind true or false’ (88). This is why he thinks that, if religious terms are cognitively meaningful, there must be religious knowledge not just belief. Some applications of the terms would have to be recognisably true ones. The question now arises, what must truth conditions be if the truth conditions of some sentences have to be recognised as obtaining when they do? The answer Hirst gives—though he does not use this particular terminology—is that they must be 41

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conditions of ‘warranted assertability’, as Dewey and Dummett call it. They must, that is, be conditions the encountering of which provides us with justification for making assertions and applying terms. But how, exactly, do conditions I encounter and experience warrant me in making a particular assertion? Not by providing evidence that the world, independently of how it is encountered and experienced, matches the assertion. That would be the answer of correspondence theorists: one which, by allowing for the logical possibility that assertions never truly fit reality, would make truth useless as a determinant of meaning. The alternative answer must, it seems, be this. I am warranted in asserting ‘P’ under such-and-such ascertainable conditions in virtue of an agreement among speakers of my language on the application of terms—an agreement which entails that, under these conditions, ‘P’ constitutes a proper application. This is Hirst’s answer. ‘The meaning of our symbolic systems…comes from the underlying agreement that is possible in judgements about when it is the case that an object is red [etc.]’ (159). Few people, of course, deny the importance of agreement for the functioning of language. But it is tempting to think that this is an agreement simply about meanings (definitions, perhaps) and not about what is true or false. Yet as Wittgenstein, whom Hirst quotes with approval here, saw, agreement about meanings, if it is to issue in mutual intelligibility, must involve agreement in judgements about when words are being truly applied. It is not, of course, that ‘“P” is true’ means ‘We are agreed that P’. It is rather that an agreement in judgements about the correct application of the words in ‘P’ enables us, under the conditions required by the agreement, to hold that ‘P’ is true. In sum: in calling a sentence ‘true’, we register our warrant for asserting it in the conditions which recognisably obtain. That warrant is furnished by underlying agreements as to the conditions under which words are correctly applied. There are different forms of knowledge because there are different kinds of conditions warranting our assertions. The beneficiary of a liberal education is a person able to appreciate the nature and variety of the warrants whose source is found in the agreement in judgements of speakers of his language. Whatever the merits of this position, there is something missing from it considered as a conception of truth, in the sense proposed in Section II. It does not bring out why truth, as characterised by Hirst, should be a desideratum. Admittedly it sounds odd to 42

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question the desirability of having warrants for one’s assertions. But this may be due to the assumption, regarded as illicit by Hirst, that such warrants are evidence for a correspondence between assertions and a language transcending reality. Once it is borne in mind, however, that the source of these warrants is agreements among speakers which, lacking any necessary or a priori grounding, belong among the contingencies of history, the question is no longer odd. At any rate, it is no longer obvious why the pursuit of truth should be so desirable; no more obvious, perhaps, than why one should subscribe to morality, when that is understood in terms of currently prevailing norms whose source is a historical, contingent agreement among one’s fellows. Does Hirst have a way of completing his conception of truth so as to respond to such worries? Can he show why truth is a desideratum?

V At first blush, Hirst does not so much fail to answer why truth is a desideratum as reject the cogency of the question. This seems to be the implication of his deployment, Peters-style, of a ‘transcendental argument’ to the effect that questioning ‘the pursuit of any kind of rational knowledge is in the end selfdefeating, for the questioning itself depends on accepting the very principles…called in question’ (42). The value of ‘aiming at truth’, it seems, cannot be cogently questioned, since one would be aiming at it in any serious resolution of the question. Since the difficulties with this style of argument are well-known, I shall be brief. At least in our kind of culture, ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ have a powerful, positive force. This makes it sound strange when someone challenges the value of truth and knowledge tout court. But it need not be strange to make this challenge when they are understood in a particular way. (Indeed, Hirst does just this vis-à-vis the Greek understanding of the concepts.) Someone who questions the importance of adherence to ‘publicly accepted criteria’ can intelligibly express himself by questioning the value of truth and knowledge when these have been characterised in terms of such criteria. Moreover, it need not be ‘self-defeating’ to make limited use of principles of rationality in order to question their wider role and 43

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value in life. Someone who holds that adherence to publicly accepted criteria stultifies the free, creative life of the spirit is not being absurd, even when he appeals to these criteria in support of his claim.10 Nor is it paradoxical when the Zen philosopher argues for abjuring rational discussion and procedures so as to clear the mind for the experience of satori. Whatever the fate of the ‘transcendental argument’, I do not believe that Hirst is faithful anyway to its dismissal of questions about the value of truth and knowledge. There lurks in his writings a line of argument for why we should ‘aim at truth’. This is best identified through a contrast with the very different one followed by Plato. Hirst himself specifies at least two points of departure from the Greek concept of liberal education. Unlike theirs, his concept is ‘no longer backed by metaphysical realism’ (43). Nor does his rest, like theirs, on regarding knowledge as the natural end or eros of mind: rather, the attainment of knowledge, ‘across the range of the different forms’, is constitutive of having a developed mind. As far as it goes, this is an accurate enough description of the differences. But it does not bring out the full drama of the issue which divides Hirst and Plato. Put more dramatically, the issue is that of the fulfilled human existence. The two philosophers are representatives, respectively, of what might be called the ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’ wings in the battle over this issue —a battle which, in its many phases, runs through intellectual history, from the debates among the earliest schools of Indian thought to our present century. The champions of ‘immanence’, very roughly, look for the fulfilled existence within, or nearby, the everyday social practices of ordinary men and women—in sexual relations, friendship, work or whatever. At a more intellectual level, fulfilment is sought in those studies, including the sciences, which are disciplined regimentations and extensions of the kinds of knowledge shared by nearly everybody. (It should be noted, though, that some ‘immanentists’ decry the intellectual and the reflective, admiring instead that simple, practical ‘know-how’ which manifests a person’s intimacy with the Lebenswelt.) A paradigmatic champion of ‘immanence’ might be Karl Marx, for whom the fulfilled life is one of creative work in the community of one’s fellows; and for whom 44

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‘transcendental’ yearnings are symptoms of a malaise caused by degrading conditions of work and social intercourse. (It is not unusual for ‘immanentists’ to regard philosophy, metaphysics at least, as a sickness from which a person must be cured if his life is to flourish.) The champions of ‘transcendence’, again very roughly, look for fulfilment in what transcends the ‘merely human’: in progress, perhaps, towards acquaintance with a realm quite outside everyday experience; or in retreat towards an inner sanctum where a person is freed from normal human desires and from concerns for what usually passes for knowledge. Such, of course, are the paths we are encouraged to follow by many religions, but also, for example, by those writers who actually called themselves ‘Transcendentalists’ —Emerson, Thoreau, and their friends. For these writers, the study of nature is not fulfilling because it extends and disciplines familiar knowledge, but because it acquaints us with a repository of symbols, indicative of the rhythms of a supra-sensible realm to which we should aspire. Brief and crude though my characterisations of these opposing tendencies have been, it is surely clear that in Plato’s thought we have an instance—the greatest instance, arguably—of the ‘transcendent’ tendency. This is nowhere clearer than in his belief that, in aiming at truth, a person passes beyond the ‘merely human’; so far beyond that it is nigh on impossible to persuade him, at the risk of his soul, to return to the cave, the everyday social world. So distanced has the philosopher become from the practices and outlook of his fellows that he will be at best scoffed at, and at worst murdered. In a manner whose possibility Plato never adequately explains, the mass of men must be educated so that, without themselves attaining to knowledge of the true, they can at least appreciate the value and utility of the philosopher’s attainment. Paul Hirst may be read as a representative of a certain ideal of ‘immanence’. Despite criticising the Greek idea of truth and knowledge as a natural goal of desire, he is himself not without a notion of a fundamental human need to which the pursuit of truth answers, and whose satisfaction is a component in the fulfilled life. This is the need for fellowship, for integration into the public practices of one’s contemporaries. It is in the satisfaction of this need that a person achieves full status as a human being. 45

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The pursuit of truth is a crucial ingredient in the satisfaction of this need since, on Hirst’s understanding, this is precisely the endeavour to partake in a ‘framework with public criteria’ through which one’s life is ‘patterned and ordered’ and takes on a shape (40). By sharing in this framework, we do what is natural: for, like it or not, we find ourselves ‘within a setting that being given, we cannot escape, and which is in large measure not of our creating’ (93). There is, therefore, something at once alienating and rather pathetic in the attempt to step outside the framework of public criteria. One thinks of Abraham, in Kierkegaard’s retelling of the biblical story, who claims to be bound by a moral duty that necessarily conflicts with the duties recognised by his family and people. The penalty he pays is silence and exile. Unable to communicate his moral sense to anyone, he is set apart from his fellows (Kierkegaard, 1985). The man who refuses to perform in what Wittgenstein called ‘the scene of our language game’ is no longer an actor in the play of society. By refusing the scene, he not only sets himself apart from others, but in doing so debars himself from achieving that selfmastery which requires a smooth and skilled, ‘patterned and ordered’, participation in the physical, moral and intellectual practices of his society.11 Hirst’s embrace of an ideal of ‘immanence’ makes it readily intelligible why he should so warmly endorse Michael Oakeshott’s remarks on ‘the conversation of mankind’. This essentially public conversation is justified not because of any ‘extrinsic profit’ it yields, nor because it leads to knowledge of how things ‘really’ are outside the terms of the conversation. Rather, it is a partnership among people which ‘gives place and character to every human activity and utterance’ (52–3). 12 To be entirely outside the conversation is to be outside humanity, exiled in a region where discourse has been replaced by silence or gibberish. For Hirst, as for Oakeshott, ‘education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation’ (52). I have endeavoured, in this chapter, to show how that conclusion about education is ‘grounded’ in a certain conception of truth: in an understanding of truth as warranted assertability whose source is public agreement in judgements, and as something the aiming at which is integral to a fulfilled human existence. Paul Hirst’s approach to education will abide for as long as the ideal of ‘immanence’ which it expresses. 46

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NOTES 1 ‘Platon’s Lehre von der Wahrheit’, Wegmarken, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967, p. 220. The original German runs, ‘Das Wesen der “Bildung” gründet im Wesen der “Wahrheit”’. ‘Essence’ seems the appropriate translation of ‘Wesen’ and, in the context, ‘Bildung’ seems to refer to education. 2 Paul Hirst is a partial exception, but there are few others. Even John Dewey, whose educational proposals are clearly rooted in his pragmatist conception of truth, says very little of an explicit kind about the connection. A recent book by E.P.Brandon, Do Teachers Care about Truth?, London: Allen & Unwin, 1987, is much more concerned with the importance of truth (i.e. what is true) in teaching than with conceptions of truth. 3 For two classic correspondence theories, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, and Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1967. 4 ‘At least’, since on some conceptions, more terms in the relationship might figure. For instance, someone who thinks truth is relative to say, ‘cultures’, may want to include these in the relationship (unless he thinks that a ‘culture’ can be analysed in terms of relations between people). 5 Page references in the text are to the pagination of the Stephanus edition of 1578, given in the margins of the Penguin (1986) and most other translations. 6 But there have been philosophers in our century, too, for whom assigning truth to sentences etc. is in some sense derivative. For Frege, a true proposition is one which refers to The True; for Heidegger, the truth of a sentence which ‘discloses’ presupposes a more ‘primordial’ truth, that of the ‘disclosive’ comportment of Dasein (human being, roughly) towards the world. 7 Page references in the text are to Paul H.Hirst, Knowledge and the Curriculum, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. 8 See, for example, Anthony O’Hear, Education, Society and Human Nature, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 92ff. 9 Hirst mentions objectivity as another such notion, but I find his discussion of this confusing, appealing as he does to ‘the relationship between words and…what is “given”’ (94). Even with the scare quotes, this is too reminiscent of a theory of truth Hirst wants to reject. As the discussion proceeds, it turns out, I think, that objectivity is to be understood in terms of agreement. 10 Relevant here is R.K.Elliott’s ‘Eduction and Human Being’, in S. Brown (ed.), Philosophers Discuss Education, London: Macmillan, 1975. See also my Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s Educational Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983: Ch. 4.

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11 12

For an elegant account of this Wittgensteinian point, see the final chapter of Stephen Mulhall, Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects, London: Routledge, 1990. Hirst was quoting from Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and other Essays, London: Methuen, 1962, p. 199. ‘Immanence’, incidentally, is a term of which Oakeshott is fond.

REFERENCES Barrow, Robin (1975). Plato, Utilitarianism and Education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dummett, Michael (1958–9). ‘Truth’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 59. Kierkegaard, Søren (1985). Fear and Trembling. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Peters, R.S. (1977). ‘Was Plato nearly Right about Education?’, in his Education and the Education of Teachers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Plato (1986). The Republic, tr. D.Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Plato (1987). The Symposium, tr. W.Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tarski, Alfred (1952). ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth’, in L.Linsky (ed.), Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. University of Chicago.

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3 LIBERAL EDUCATION AND VOCATIONAL PREPARATION Richard Pring INTRODUCTION Paul Hirst’s essay, ‘Liberal education and the nature of knowledge’ (1965) was written within an educational and philosophical tradition which linked what we mean by education to the nature and division of knowledge. Roughly speaking, the argument was as follows. ‘Education’ picks out a range of activities which have this in common: they aim to help people acquire, through learning, mental qualities which are considered to be worthwhile, and any characterisation of these worthwhile qualities must be spelt out in terms of the different ways in which we make sense of experience. An understanding therefore of educational activities involves insights both from ethics and from the philosophy of knowledge. On the one hand, ‘education’ is an evaluative term (it picks out those activities which are judged to be worthwhile) and, on the other, it picks out a specific sort of worthwhileness—namely, the improvement of the mind through the greater capacity to think, to reason and to understand. It follows that the liberally educated person is one who, thus initiated into the different forms of understanding, has developed a ‘cognitive perspective’; who has acquired the different concepts, mastered the different modes of enquiry and internalised the different standards of judgement whereby true propositions are distinguished from false, valid arguments from invalid, and correct judgements from erroneous ones. The description of education as liberal simply emphasises this cognitive dimension—the liberation from ignorance, the capacity thus engendered for participating in a broad range of knowledge-based activities, and the empowerment that arises from the insights into different ways of understanding. 49

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‘Liberal education’ was thus contrasted with a narrow and exclusive focus upon specific areas of knowledge. It was seen as a bulwark against those so-called educational programmes which, in neglecting the ‘cognitive perspective’, promote indoctrination or give prominence to socialisation or aim simply at the pursuit of happiness. Thus conceived, the idea of liberal education required that close attention be paid to the logical as well as to the psychological basis of learning. Hirst’s essay was, therefore, important for two reasons. First, it reasserted an important philosophical point at a time when too often it was in danger of being forgotten, namely, that education, especially in its most liberally conceived form, is centrally concerned with the development of the mind and that such development must be characterised in terms of a well-founded epistemology. Second, it set out an agenda for curriculum planning based on this philosophical point, namely, that one should first identify the central concepts, modes of enquiry and distinctive truth-tests of the different forms of knowledge as the basis for establishing curriculum aims, for in failing to grasp these the potential learner would be excluded from the world of learning. To agree with this philosophical point (as I do) and to welcome the agenda set (as I did) does not entail total agreement with Hirst’s analysis. First, Hirst’s account is one of several within a tradition of critical examination of ‘liberal education’ in which Newman, J.S.Mill, Huxley, Sidgwick and Arnold (to name but a few: see White, 1986) demonstrated the different ethical positions which might be adopted and the different ways in which knowledge might arguably be structured. There is no obvious solution to these philosophical problems. Second, despite the current national schemes for the curriculum (with attainment targets and programmes of study for each subject), only scant attention has been paid to the logical structure of the different forms of knowledge—Hirst’s agenda has been acknowledged but not followed. Third, the social circumstances within which liberal education is defined do themselves change—requiring reexamination of the very concept. Indeed, there has been growing pressure for vocational training, not simply as an adjunct of liberal education, nor indeed simply for those considered unsuitable for it, but as an integral part of the liberal education programme. It is as though Newman’s gentleman needs ‘to perfect the intellect’ not only in the acquisition 50

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of the different forms of knowledge but also through the application of useful knowledge, through practical ‘know-how’ in the world of business, through the virtues of enterprise and entrepreneurship, through the espousal of social dispositions such as citizenship, and through the formation of appropriate social skills. Sometimes, as we shall see, this vocationalism reflects contempt for the liberal ideal. More often, however, and more interestingly from the philosophical angle, the attempt is not to abandon the liberal ideal but to re-appraise it in the light of changing economic and social and moral conditions. In this chapter I re-examine the concept of liberal education as it is subjected to these changed circumstances and pressures. Can it embrace ‘utility’ as well as intrinsic worthwhileness? Can it be extended to all young people even though, measured against liberal ideals, they are so often classified as failures? Can ‘liberal education’ also serve the purpose of social welfare and social cohesion—taking on board explicit government aims of shaping society and its citizenry in a particular way? To do this, I shall characterise ‘liberal education’ in a ‘pure form’, that is, in a way wherein education is seen as an initiation into forms of understanding which requires no external justification and which best takes place far removed from considerations of utility. A sharp division is thus drawn between education and vocational preparation. Second, I shall point to the criticisms currently levelled against such a view of liberal education—nonphilosophical criticisms perhaps but ones which a philosophical account needs to take note of. Third, I shall point to the emerging vocational alternative—and assess the validity of its educational claims. Finally, I shall attempt to reassess our understanding of liberal education and to see how far the vocational criticisms can be met.

THE LIBERAL IDEAL Michael Oakeshott said in his essay, ‘Education: The Engagement and its Frustration’, that ‘education in its most general significance may be described as a specific transaction which may go on between the generations of human beings in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world they are to inhabit’ (Oakeshott, 1972). 51

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For Oakeshott, we inhabit a world of ideas—those ideas determining how we experience the world, how we shape it to our needs, how we identify ourselves and others within it. Moreover, those ideas are learnt—initially from our parents and immediate community, but then from books, from conversations with others, from the appreciation of works of art, from activities that we share with others, from belonging to institutions which embody a particular set of ideas—of democracy, say, or of the sacramental life. These ideas, through which we understand and explore further our own selves and our very nature, have to be learnt. That learning can be light and superficial; or it can, often with great difficulty, be profound and far-ranging. Each of us participates differently in this world of ideas. We each have what Oakeshott calls our own self-enacted histories— our own individual perceptions of the world resulting from the process of learning (the specific transactions) we have undertaken. But those individual perceptions will arise from sources which are publicly accessible. For example, what I learn from participating in a democratic institution may be different from that of the next person, but there is enough in common between our separate experiences to enable a ‘conversation’ to take place about those democratic values—and the conversation itself becomes a part of my self-enacted history. Or again, what I learn from reading a novel may be different from that of the next reader, but there is a text that, in our dialogue with each other, remains a touchstone of our respective understandings. The metaphor of ‘conversation’ is central to Oakeshott’s description of the educational transaction. And this conversation contains many voices—not only ‘the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’ but also that of history, of philosophy, of science, of the arts. Each voice has developed—through reflection, argument, criticism, imaginative speculation—from generation to generation, and these voices, making up the conversation, are an inheritance that we enter into only through the process of learning. Moreover, they are voices that can be muffled, silenced, indeed lost, and to maintain the conversation, or even to enhance it, is the responsibility of each generation through the initiation of the next into the art of conversing. And perhaps we may recognise liberal learning as, above all else, an education in imagination, an initiation into the 52

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art of this conversation in which we learn to recognise the voices; to distinguish their different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational relationship and thus to make our ‘debut dans la vie humaine’. (Oakeshott, 1975) In initiating young people into this conversation—in enabling them to ‘recognise the voices’ and ‘to distinguish their different modes of utterance’—one needs to take them on one side, to remove them from the distractions of everyday life, to forget the pressing needs of the ‘here and now’, and to give them the space and the time and the leisure to learn the art of conversation and to participate in it. You can only hear the voice of poetry in peace and quiet. Schools and universities should be more like monasteries than market places. Oakeshott’s account of liberal education supported the belief, prevalent in much of higher education and in many of our schools, that the various traditions of understanding and imagination, captured within specific intellectual disciplines, constituted the sources upon which the teacher must draw in the education, as opposed to the socialisation or the training, of the next generation. The teachers’ task was essentially that of mediating different cultural traditions through which human kind had come to explore and to understand its own nature. These traditions were indeed selective. They had sieved out many minor voices competing for attention, mainly (they would claim) through the process of criticism and argument whereby the genuine is distinguished from the counterfeit, the authentic from the sham, the profound from the superficial. And this was as much the case in music, in art, in dance, as it was in science or in history or in mathematics. The job of the teacher is to mediate those selective traditions and to initiate their students into them—for these are the ‘best that has been thought and said’. In that respect one can see the connections between the liberal education of Oakeshott and the educational ideas of Newman, for whom ‘liberal education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence’ (1852:121). And this intellectual excellence he called ‘by the name of philosophy, philosophical knowledge, enlargement of mind, or illumination’. 53

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For Newman, then, liberal education was based firmly on the nature of knowledge, learnt not as a set of inert and discrete ideas but as disciplines of active thinking, internalised and interconnecting with each other. And this idea of liberal education has dominated the formation of our educational institutions at every level and the shape and content of the learning promoted by them. It is reflected in the writings of Anthony O’Hear who, in his paper ‘The Importance of Traditional Learning’ (and subsequently in his many critical comments on what is occurring in schools), argues While still wishing to insist that education ought to be a liberalising process for the learner, fully engaging the learner and his faculties, and enabling him to stand out against the narrow seductions and demands of the present fashion and cliche, consideration of work by writers such as A.MacIntyre, C.Taylor, B.Williams, and M.Oakeshott, has made me realise the extent to which the proper and effective exercise of reason must take place against the background of inherited forms of thought and experience. (O’Hear, 1987) What O’Hear inveighs against are, first, the pursuit of utility and relevance in education, and, second, the investment in the learner of the responsibility for ‘assessing for themselves the cultural and political values inherent in the culture and politics of present and past.’ For O’Hear, within that tradition of liberal education spelt out by Newman and Oakeshott, what should be learnt is determined by inherited intellectual and cultural traditions, and how one should learn is determined by the nature of the apprenticeship necessary for initiation into those traditions. Such an apprenticeship is long and arduous, to be conducted by people who themselves are immersed in those traditions and to be conducted in places untainted by commercial and utilitarian pressures. For O’Hear, as for Oakeshott, this is essentially a transaction—a transaction between teacher and pupil, between an authority within a tradition and a neophyte seeking entry. To this apprenticeship many will be called, but few chosen. A summary of the main features of this notion of liberal education, which, until comparatively recently, prevailed in our universities and in our schools, would be as follows: 54

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1 2

3

4

5

What should be learnt is rooted firmly within intellectual disciplines. To be educated is to be initiated into these disciplines—that is, to have grasped the basic concepts, acquired the essential skills, mastered the techniques of enquiry, developed the moral habits of these fundamental ways of knowing the world and of shaping experience (the historical, philosophical, scientific, aesthetic and poetic voices that Oakeshott speaks of). The point or the value of the apprenticeship into the intellectual traditions, through which we come to understand and to shape our experience, requires no further justification than reference to their own intrinsic value. The cultivation of the intellect (to use Newman’s words) or the participation in the conversation between generations (to use Oakeshott’s) is intrinsically worthwhile. Indeed, to answer the question, ‘Why is it worthwhile?’,would, if seriously addressed, require participation in that very conversation. That initiation is a hard and a laborious task. It requires a time and a place set apart. It needs, in other words, schools and universities separated from the world of business and usefulness. The control and the direction of that conversation, and thus of the initiation into it, must lie in the hands of those who are authorities within it—certainly not government or industry or the community at large.

This view of liberal education finds little place for useful knowledge as such or for the promotion of virtue. Even Newman, moral crusader though he was, insisted upon a clear distinction between the nurturing of intellectual excellence, which was the intrinsic purpose of liberal education, and the promotion of moral good, which was not. ‘Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another. …Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal education makes not the Christian, nor the Catholic, but the gentleman’ (Newman, 1852:120). All this is reflected in an understanding of university and of school education which, if not universally agreed, was certainly dominant until recently. Universities, though funded mainly from central government, had no truck with external interference in 55

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what should be taught or in how students should be assessed. Research, too, was in the main determined by the research interests of the faculty and by the research problems arising from within the respective disciplines. Furthermore, what was selected for students to learn was determined not by subsequent usefulness but by that core of studies generally recognised by scholars to be central to an understanding of that discipline at this stage of its evolution. In that respect, the undergraduate programme might reflect the research interests of the department. In the study Higher Education and the Preparation for Work, the position is described thus: The first, classic, model is that of the self-regulating Higher Education Institution. It sustains its own values and ways of working, but at the same time gives maximum freedom to its basic units (the subject departments) to act as members of the ‘invisible colleges’ within their own disciplines. It is not innocent of the connection with the external environment but, by virtue of the unconditional grants on which it survives, is able to determine the academic criteria by which it will admit new activities. It may thus be permeable or responsive to external influences but only on its own intellectual and moral terms. Both its ability to resist outside encroachments and its inability to move decisively in favour of outside influences are enhanced by the distribution of power between the central institution and its largely freestanding basic units. (Boys et al., 1988:14) This intellectual autonomy of universities is reflected in the nature of the transaction between teacher and students in schools. Generally speaking, the secondary school curriculum had changed little since the 1904 regulations which divided it into roughly the same subject categories as those which typified the average university. Success in those subjects gave entry to those ‘basic units’ which, together, constituted the conversation within higher education. The curriculum was based on a particular selection from that culture—a selection from the current state of knowledge as that was reflected in university departments and thereby in the 18 plus examinations on whose boards the university departments 56

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were represented. Government, employers and parents had no voice in what should be taught. Indeed, Sir David Eccles, when Minister of Education in the early 1960s, referred to the secret garden of the curriculum, a garden tended entirely by the professionals, where politicians dare not tread.

CRITICISMS OF THE LIBERAL IDEAL There have, in recent years, been criticisms of this idea of liberal education. They arise from a variety of sources and anxieties, not in themselves of any philosophical significance, but with implications for the values which education should be promoting and for the kind of knowledge that should be acquired. Too many are excluded from the conversation Success eludes too many. Of the 25 per cent of 16-year-olds who embark on ‘A’ level courses (‘the jewel in the crown’, ‘the gold standard’ of our educational system), over 30 per cent will either drop out or fail in any one subject. Of the other 75 per cent of 16-yearolds, the majority will terminate their education at the first opportunity, having experienced little but failure in the attempts by the school to initiate them into ‘the conversation of mankind’. They will enter the world of work little touched by the voices of poetry or history or science. For these, a different schooling is sometimes recommended: either one that is based on the more limited conversations of the respective local and folk culture or one which provides a training for the world of work. They are excluded from the liberal ideal either because they are incapable of appreciating it or because they choose not to adopt the values it represents. Therein lies the criticism. What sort of conversation is it which, dealing with issues that affect us all, excludes so many people? Ought not the topics of conversation to be extended to those which the majority find an interest in? And should not questions about the relevance of education to their future lives (the central concern of most young people) be regarded as legitimate within that conversation? The liberal ideal excludes so many and, unexamined, will continue to do so, for ‘relevance’ is seen as an irrelevant consideration in an activity which is engaged in for its own sake and for no external ends. 57

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Behind this criticism lies a question about the sources upon which the teacher might draw in extending the powers of the mind yet remaining within the bounds of liberal education—those alternative sources being the learner’s own experience brought into the classroom (however unexciting that may seem), the commonsense knowledge and opinions of the learner (however unacceptable they may appear), the cultural interests of the student (however distant they may be from ‘the best that has been thought and said’ in the approved syllabuses). The conversation is irrelevant to economic needs One major criticism of the educational system at every level has been that it is not preparing young people adequately for the world of work and that in consequence this country is lagging behind its main competitors in the economic race. This criticism takes several forms. On the one hand, it is directed against the poor standards of literacy and of numeracy of so many school leavers. But, more important, it is directed against the content and process of learning, and the attitudes, which are encouraged by liberal education. Indifference to the economic and industrial base of our society, and thus to the very institutions which sustain the liberal ideal, is seen as the hall-mark of the educated person— well versed in those studies which have been part of the conversation of mankind but ignorant of the useful knowledge necessary to sustain it. Subjects are pursued without reference to their industrial and commercial application; the ‘purer’ the subject (that is, the less applied) the higher is its status; and seats of learning are too often deliberately moved from the world of industry and commerce. To quote one Oxbridge physicist in the Brunel study: ‘by solving industry’s problems we could undermine our ability to attract the best minds in research’ (Boys et al., 1988:58). Indeed, Wiener argues in his book, English Culture: the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981), that in the long tradition of liberal education there is a deep aversion to industry and to commerce, to the particular virtues associated with them such as enterprise and entrepreneurship, and to the kind of learning arising from ‘doing’ and ‘making’. It is as though the conversation not only contains important gaps but also is conducted in such a way and in such places and by such teachers as to make the products of it less, rather than more, capable of working effectively in the world 58

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outside the education system. For example, the absence of technology in the curriculum has been decried in several major reports during the last century. But for some strange reason technology has for ever been seen as a vocational occupation and thus excluded until very recently from the liberal education curriculum. The conversation is irrelevant to social needs A further, though less strident criticism, has been the disconnection between the academic interests pursued at school or university and the social and moral values which some think that the educational system should be promoting. The cultivation of the intellect, as Newman argued, does not serve any particular social or moral purposes. Not only is the voice of morality more confused than that of science or of history, but also, even when moral reasoning suggests a course of action, it is not the job of education to ensure the appropriate dispositions or virtues for that course of action to be followed. There are, of course, differences within the liberal tradition. Although John Stewart Mill, in his inaugural address to the University of St Andrews, also argued that university education was concerned with those general truths which every generation owes to the next (‘that on which its civilisation and its worth principally depend’) and with that culture ‘which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising, the level of improvement which has been attained’ (Mill, 1867), nonetheless, he argued too that such a cultivation of the intellect would lead to social improvement. Cultivated persons would be more sensitive to moral and aesthetic considerations; they would find inspiration in the achievements of previous generations; and they would help create that informed public which would guarantee wiser social policy. One could say, of course, that empirical evidence is not altogether conclusive on this point. But even if it was, it is not clear that the critics of liberal education would be satisfied because they often seek from education something more tangible than general improvement. They have more specific social values and skills in mind—such as a sense of citizenship, such as loyalty to the state and to its institutions, such as the spirit of enterprise and competition essential to economic success, and such as commitment to legal and family values. Indeed, the schools have 59

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taken on very specific responsibilities for education and training in such matters as drug abuse, contraception and AIDS—not the subjects of general education which Newman, Mill or Oakeshott had in mind. And why not? Presumably such specific focus is not part of that conversation between the generations of mankind. It is not in itself concerned with that cultivation of the intellect and that initiation into a moral tradition which equips the individual to argue about and to reflect upon such matters in the light of general principles. The conversation is directed entirely from within There is objection too to the lack of public direction over a publicly endowed activity. The society which pays the bill would like some control over the agenda. It is not convinced that the direction of the conversation—either that of the teacher or that of the researcher— should be determined only by the problems and the solutions arising from within the subject. The autonomy of the academic authority is questioned, first because society wishes to see tangible results from the academic activity (useful research) and second because the selfperpetuating conversation might exclude topics and considerations which society believes should be talked about and studied.

THE VOCATIONAL ALTERNATIVE Vocational education is a fairly elastic term and it covers many different ways in which the relationship between education and preparation for the world of work might be understood. But, whatever the distinctions to be made within ‘vocational education’, there are important differences between this general concept on the one hand and the liberal ideal on the other. There is a significant shift in the language through which the transaction between teacher and learner is to be understood—and one which philosophers of education have yet to address. Vocational preparation signifies the acquisition of skills, qualities, attitudes and knowledge that are judged to be important for entry into the world of work—either because the economy needs them (trained engineers, say) or because the individual would otherwise be less able to make sense of that world and to make personal profit within it. It can be pitched at different levels of generality—from the encouragement of more young people to study science (because the 60

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economy needs more trained scientists) to the skewing of the science syllabus towards its industrial application, or from the promotion of highly generalised and transferable skills to the training in specific job-related competencies. But, whatever the level of generality, there is this in common, namely, the shaping of the transaction between teacher and learner by considerations other than those which are internal to the intellectual disciplines themselves. There is an undermining of the autonomy which previously belonged to the educational and the academic communities. This is reflected in the 1987 White Paper: Meeting the needs of the economy is not the sole purpose of higher education, nor can higher education alone achieve what is needed. But this aim must be vigorously pursued. The achievement of greater commercial and industrial relevance in higher education activity depends on much closer communication between academic staff and people in business at all levels. These connections can lead to more suitable teaching, to research and technology transfer. They also help to foster the positive attitudes to enterprise which are crucial for both institutions and their students…. The government and its central funding agencies will do all they can to encourage and reward approaches by HE institutions which bring them closer to the world of business. (DES, 1987) Following this White Paper, the government announced its Enterprise in Higher Education initiative (EHE). Funds would be made available to higher education institutions on conditions that their courses and the methods of teaching met broadly conceived vocational criteria, that is: to enable HE institutions to embed activities that promote enterprise into the work of the institutions…every person seeking a HE qualification should be able to develop competencies and aptitudes relevant to enterprise…these competencies should be acquired at least in part through project based work designed to be undertaken in a real economic setting and they should be jointly assessed by employers and the HE institutions. (DES, 1987) 61

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One might make the following points about the more vocationally oriented curriculum: 1

2

3 4 5

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The value of the educational encounter between teacher and student lies partly in the external purposes which it serves— in particular the economic well-being either of the individual or of society generally. Therefore, the curriculum must be planned in terms of specific objectives which arise, not from within the intellectual disciplines themselves, but from an analysis of what the economy needs or what skills certain occupations demand— hence the growing insistence upon clearly defined and easily measured competencies. The content of the curriculum, aimed at achieving these objectives, must be relevant to industry and commerce. The context of learning must be, as far as possible, in a realistic economic setting. The educational experience as a whole should foster attitudes and dispositions such as entrepreneurship and enterprise not normally associated with the more detached frame of mind of the liberally educated person. People from outside the academic and educational communities must be partners in the establishment of these objectives and in assessing whether or not they have been reached.

With this vocationalising of education, certain features of the liberal ideal are being challenged to a degree that is not fully appreciated. There is an implicit disdain for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, for the engagement in that conversation between the generations of mankind which has no end beyond the engagement itself. And no longer are the guardians of standards the authoritative voices within that conversation. For those reasons the distinctive forms of knowledge, which, in the competing accounts of liberal education, determined the logical structure of the process of learning, no longer provide the prime sources upon which the teacher should draw in the cultivation of the intellect. Instead, these sources are also externally agreed competencies, disconnected from the world of ideas which is the central concern of liberal education. Personal development 62

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becomes personal effectiveness; understanding and appreciation give way to skills and competencies; the process of learning becomes subservient to the measurable product. Indeed, the gaining of qualifications—the National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) for example—may require no course, no transaction between teacher and learner, since what is learnt is logically disconnected from the process of learning. All that the candidate needs to do is to submit himself to the particular tests of competence. The consequence of this is reflected in the conceptual confusion surrounding the introduction of ‘core skills’ into courses, and the assessment of these, both in schools and in higher education. The core skills, described in a report of the National Curriculum Council, are those of communication, numeracy, problem-solving, personal effectiveness and information technology. These skills are proposed for the pre-16 curriculum, the A levels and the enterprise-promoting degrees in order that an otherwise purely liberal education might be vocationalised. They will, so it is argued, help bridge the academic/vocational divide. Is this not, however, a case of ‘the engine of language idling’? The paradigm case of a skill is the ability, learnt and perfected through constant practice, to engage in a limited activity in fairly predictable circumstances, and to do so in such a way as to meet certain standards of performance. It involves techniques, certainly, but these are internalised and applied tacitly, without reference to the rules of behaviour implicit within them. The plasterer has acquired, through constant practice and no doubt under guidance from a master craftsman, the techniques for applying plaster to certain kinds of surface. So skilful does he become that, in the application of the plaster, he need give little thought to the activity—though remaining critical of the standards implicit within it. However, the transfer of this terminology to the activities of the mind—to the mental ‘skills’ of reasoning, say—has its limitations. One can think certainly of particular ‘moves’, as in chess, which are improved through practice, which have their own built-in standards of validity, and which are so internalised as to be reproduced in appropriate circumstances without reflection or effort. But the bringing together of many such ‘skills’, the selection of circumstances in which their application is appropriate, the direction of the overall argument, the grasp of the significance of what has been said, are not themselves skills. These require judgement, insight, 63

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appreciation of the ideas through which we describe and evaluate experience. Effective communication is much more than a skill, although it involves very many mental and physical skills which can be learnt and improved through practice (how to project the voice, for example, or how to maintain eye contact). The effective communicator has something of significance to communicate, and an intelligent understanding not only of the context but also of the subject-matter to be communicated. Education produces something other than the skilled PR man. Communication requires inhabiting that world of ideas, an intelligent grasp of those different forms of understanding through which sense is made of experience. Similarly with ‘problem-solving’. To treat this as a skill as though there are not many logically different kinds of problem, each requiring different understandings and different modes of enquiry, is simply to misuse language in a practically misleading way, for it encourages the view that the ‘vocational skill’ of problem-solving can be clearly defined and then trained in, without the necessity of the long and arduous apprenticeship in the ideas and modes of enquiry through which different kinds of problem are identified and explored. The vocationalising of liberal education has, as I have explained, arisen from the criticisms emerging from quite different quarters—the exclusion of so many from the liberal ideal, the disconnection of education from the practical world of business, the failure to incorporate the moral and social formation of the next generation, the lack of public accountability in a publicly funded service. But the ‘vocationalising’ of education in response to those criticisms may be most significant not in the curriculum proposals so much as in the language through which that transaction between teacher and pupil is described and evaluated. Education is now spoken about in a language that would not have been recognised a decade ago. To what extent are we entering a world of ideas in which ‘liberal education’, as previously conceived—rooted in the different disciplined forms of enquiry and guarded by authorities within those forms of enquiry—is no longer recognised or valued? A 1991 report by HMI says, As public interest in managerial efficiency and institutional effectiveness has increased, there has been a general acknowledgement of the need to use performance indicators to monitor the higher education system…some 64

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concrete information on the extent to which the benefits expected from educational expenditure are actually secured…. (An) approach finding most favour in 1989 and 1990 is the classification of performance indicators within an input, output, process model. (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, 1991) In searching for indicators ‘which allow institutions to assess their own fitness for purpose’, the report suggests a range of reference points which enable an assessment of achievement against a defined objective—‘cost effective indicators’, ‘academic operations indicators’ such as ‘inputs’ (e.g. applications in relation to numbers or ratios per place), ‘process’ (e.g. ‘value added’) and ‘output’ (e.g. employer satisfaction). There will be: enterprise audits which evaluate teacher and learning styles and annual school audits where senior staff spend one day reviewing all aspects of a school’s work. Many institutions are working to sharpen their quality assurance procedures by systematising the use of performance indicators and peer review. (op. cit.) Wherein, then, lies the difference between liberal education and vocational preparation? Liberal education pursues no ends beyond those set by the educational enquiries themselves; vocational preparation, on the other hand, insists those enquiries should be useful. Liberal education eschews clear objectives—no one can say where the conversation will lead; whereas vocationalism requires specific objectives determined by what is useful. The liberal programme is a process, an engagement; the vocational specifies the product (an ‘output’ compared with an ‘input’). The standards evoked by liberal education are implicit within the different forms of enquiry; the standards of vocational education are those of successful performance on the job. The ‘quality assurance’ (itself a recently imported term) within liberal education lies in the judgement of those who are part of the engagement; that of vocational education in the conformity to ‘performance indicators’ established from without. Liberal education introduces the learner to a world of ideas, of understandings, of imagination; vocational preparation leads to skills and competencies. Liberal 65

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education flourishes best in isolation from the distractions of the practical world; vocational preparation is pursued in the economic context in which the skills and competencies apply. Liberal education is an investment in intellectual values, the reward for which (largely an act of faith) is the enhancement of those values; vocational preparation is an investment in accomplishment, the reward for which is economic success. Liberal education promotes those virtues inseparable from the pursuit of knowledge; vocational education those ‘virtues’, such as ‘enterprise’, necessary for economic well-being. In reality, two courses of action are available in the reconstitution of the educational system. The first is to recognise the differences and to make available two distinct routes, the educational and the vocational. The second course of action is to re-examine the liberal ideal, and to see how far it can be made vocationally relevant without the educational ideal being jeopardised.

RECONCILING THE DIFFERENCES: THE PHILOSOPHICAL AGENDA I have drawn a sharp contrast between the idea of liberal education and the idea of vocational preparation as they vie with each other for dominion over the curriculum of school and higher education. Perhaps the contrast is too sharp; in reality there are reconciliations and compromises. But these compromises are not easy. The ‘vocationalising’ and the ‘economising’ of the language through which education is described and evaluated (with its audits, performance indicators, costeffectiveness of curriculum delivery, quality assurance, competencybased objectives, value added, inputs and outputs, usefulness) transforms our understanding of educational activities and of the values attributed to them. And the problems of compromise have resulted in the determination to create different routes—the traditional educational one for some and the vocational one for the many. There is a need to re-assess the idea of liberal education in the light of this vocational challenge. To what extent are the criticisms valid? And how far does meeting the criticisms require a reexamination of those features of the liberal concept which seem most at odds with the idea of vocational preparation—namely, (a) the aims and values to be pursued, (b) the structure and content 66

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of the knowledge to be acquired, (c) the respective virtues and dispositions to be fostered, and (d) the authorities to be obeyed. This concluding section is called a ‘philosophical agenda’ because there is not the scope in one chapter for the more detailed philosophical job to be done. I can but indicate where further work is needed. Aims and values It is easy to make a sharp distinction between those activities pursued for their own sake and those which are simply the means to some further, quite disconnected end—the difference between travelling on a train simply for the fun of it and travelling on the train because it is one means amongst many for reaching a destination. The fun is not external to the travelling; the description of it would require reference to the sensations, the experience of being on the train. To press the question ‘Why did you travel?’ would soon appear pointless; one travelled because one found pleasure (a certain sort of value) in the travelling. Similarly it is argued that a distinction can be made between the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the pursuit of knowledge because it is useful for some further purpose—for the building of bridges, say. In this latter case, the knowledge remains valuable only so long as it serves that purpose. In the case of liberal education, on the other hand, an answer to the question ‘Why study the classics, or literature or science?’ would not depend upon their utility. Those studies are part of that distinctively human activity which we engage in, not because it is fun (although it may, as a matter of fact and on some occasions, be fun), but simply because it is part of that conscious effort to make the world and ourselves more intelligible. Such an activity is not engaged in only by the privileged few; it is, to a greater or lesser degree, participated in by all who ask questions, show curiosity, are puzzled, seek solutions or try to explain. Some, however, will pursue those questions and curiosity further than others. They will be more serious in seeking answers. They will engage more completely with the thoughts and the answers of others, both alive and dead, who have pursued these questions. They will in other words engage in a conversation that has gone on between the generations and will continue to do so. How clear however is the distinction in practice? Certainly, those who feel most at home in the pursuit of knowledge for its 67

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own sake also see its utility in obtaining the better paid jobs. And often this is justified vocationally by reference to ‘the trained mind’ and the personal and social qualities that a liberal education endows. To the person being educated there may be an external and vocational purpose, although to someone else the educational experience can be seen to be of value for its own intrinsic merits. But much more significantly, the attempt to make the world intelligible (the object of liberal education) includes the world of economic activity within which each one has to find and understand one’s own place. The sense of one’s own destiny (tied so closely to the occupation one chooses and then trains for), the interests one develops which help to determine that choice, and the economic values or style of life one adopts are themselves partly the products of that engagement with the thoughts, the arguments, the values, the appreciations one is introduced to through a ‘liberal’ curriculum which on the surface appears not to be vocational. Therefore the intrinsically motivated exploration of that economic world, and the effort to make intelligible one’s own possible place within it, are in a real sense vocational. There is a danger, of course, of so blurring a distinction that it no longer has any analytic value. There is a distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘vocational’. But the same activity can be both one and the other depending on the point of view from which the activity is being examined. A learning experience might be educational but have little vocational significance—it does little to equip with skills and knowledge relevant to the world of work into which the learner will enter. Similarly a learning experience might be vocational with little educational merit—indeed, the vocational skill is so acquired as to deaden the mind and preclude further explorations. But truly vocational learning—the acquisition of carpentry skills, say, or the mastery of medical knowledge— can also be an entry into aesthetic appreciation or scientific understanding. The issue is not so much what is taught but the way in which the learning, leading to useful knowledge or skills, opens the mind to further explorations, experiences and appreciations. Is it not a matter of liberalising vocational training and, at the same time, ensuring the vocational relevance of that which is engaged in for its own sake? In ‘Vocational aspects of education’, Dewey refers to ‘vocation’ as nothing but such a direction of life activities 68

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as renders them perceptibly significant to a person, because of the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates. The opposite of a career is…aimlessness, capriciousness, the absence of cumulative achievement in experience, on the personal side, and idle display, parasitic dependence upon others, on the social side. Occupation is a concrete term for continuity. It includes the development of artistic capacity of any kind, of special scientific ability, of effective citizenship, as well as professional and business occupations… (Dewey, 1916) To unpack this passage from Dewey is not easy, but it puts the idea of the ‘vocational’ into the much wider context of seeing (a) one’s life as a whole (thinking through both the kind of life that one wants to lead and the qualities, talents and skills required to lead that life), (b) the central place of career or occupation in that ‘life as a whole’, (c) the integrating role that occupation plays in the many different strands of learning, and (d) the connection between one’s occupational concerns on the one hand and wider social understandings and values on the other. The separation of vocational, in this wider meaning, from liberal education did not make sense to Dewey. Education refers to that range of activities through which people seek sense in what surrounds them, explore old truths and test out new meanings. At the centre of those explorations must be the self—one’s puzzles, understandings, doubts, desires—and thus those questions about how one is to live one’s life. And those questions in turn cannot be pursued without some examination of the occupation to be followed and the skills and qualities necessary for the following of it. In this respect, Dewey (1916) distinguished between vocational education on the one hand and preparation for a trade on the other: ‘there is a danger that vocational education will be interpreted in theory and practice as trade education: as a means of securing technical efficiency in specialised future pursuits’. Rather is it necessary to recognise and to teach the ‘full historical and social meanings’ of the trade. Only then will the training in the trade be at the same time a vocational education. To recognise this is to respect many more voices in the conversation of mankind—including both the voices of the 69

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learners themselves, as they try to articulate their experiences of the past and their anxieties for the future, and the voices of employers, as they explain the needs and the realities of the world into which the students are proceeding. It is also to recognise a greater sense of direction in the conversation—a direction towards answering the more personal questions of the learner and a direction towards the social and economic significance attributable to the personal choices made. Structure and content of knowledge The contrast is frequently drawn between theory on the one hand and practice on the other, between knowledge and skills, between thinking and doing or making. Obviously, only in the most extreme cases can such distinctions be maintained; the academic scientist must know how to use equipment and the academic geographer will have acquired a range of field work skills. Nonetheless, there are grounds for the distinctions and liberal education has often been associated with the theoretical and propositional knowledge, and thus with the pursuit of the truth in its different forms, rather than with the skilled performance, and thus with the pursuit of usefulness. The perfection of the intellect, rather than the achievement of goodness or the production of something useful, has been seen to be the mark of the ‘gentleman’ or the educated person. Certain kinds of knowledge (practical knowledge) are thus downgraded. There is the assumption, too, that the person of academic distinction will be able to apply that learning to practical situations, as though the application itself were not a distinct kind of knowledge. Hence the criticisms of those who signed the Education for Capability charter—the educational system was, so it was argued, preparing people to think, to reflect and to theorise, but not to work intelligently in the practical world (Royal Society of the Arts, 1980). The vocational alternative is in danger, as we have seen, of remedying this problem through the neglect of theoretical understanding. A certain contempt is frequently shown of ‘theory’ and of the pursuit of knowledge away from the busy world of practice. Indeed, the training of teachers has been criticised for too much theory and for its disconnection from the practical world of the teacher. Teacher training should take place in schools, uncontaminated by the thoughts of educational theorists. And 70

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training here and elsewhere should concentrate on the acquisition of appropriate skills. There are two related points that need to be made about this apparent contrast between theory and practice which too often lies at the base of the liberal/vocational divide. The first is that practical activities are themselves permeated by understandings that can be more or less intelligently held. In preparing the potato patch, one’s efforts can range from the ill-thought-out, almost mechanical, digging to the careful choosing of the site in the light of what one knows about the soil and about the previous season’s use of the land. There is embryonic theory contained within intelligent practice. It becomes theoretical, and thus open to examination, reflection and criticism, once the understandings embedded within the practice are made explicit and systematically formulated. Second, the way into theory is often best reached through this intelligent reflection upon a practice that might otherwise have been pursued mechanically. Is not systematic theology (a theoretical pursuit if ever there was one, since it deals with realities not open to empirical investigation) the attempt to make sense of or to theorise about (amongst other things) the intimations of immortality? Theory, and the propositional knowledge which constitutes the theoretical position, are a provisional formulation of a set of ideas through which we make sense of reality, including the practical reality of worship, of work, or of moral struggle. Therefore, the emphasis upon the ‘vocational’ has been not so much a focus upon job-specific skills as upon more practical modes of learning which, engaged in reflectively, can be intellectually demanding and can lead (logically) to the explicit formulation of the implicit theoretical position. The intelligent ‘doing’ (intelligent because it demonstrates insight, adaptability to circumstances, openness to criticism) is in that sense to be seen as both vocationally significant (not just bookworms or articulate talkers, but ‘doers’) and academically respectable (not just ‘doers’, but systematic thinkers about ‘doing’). There are important truths in this—namely, that the logical connection between thinking and doing and between theory and practice are too often neglected in education, to the detriment of the intelligent practice essential to moral and working life. But there is a danger of failing to see the nature of that reflective exercise through which ‘action’ becomes an intelligent activity and 71

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practice becomes theoretically sound. For the reflection itself requires not simply rendering explicit the ideas embedded within the practice (the way in which the experience is shaped and understood, the beliefs that guide howsoever unconsciously the practice), but the criticism of those ideas; and that criticism must itself be rooted in the objective world of critical enquiry developed through the various intellectual disciplines, the academic studies, the different forms of enquiry. To make explicit the quaint ideas of healthy living implicit in one’s daily eating habits and not to subject them to some form of science-based criticism is to be living unintelligently. And yet to have that critical perspective requires some mastery of basic and relevant concepts in science. Many of the vocationally oriented curriculum developments such as TVEI have stressed the need for reflection and have encouraged independent ‘doing’ and ‘making’, often with the argument that ‘it is the process rather than the product which counts’. But this itself (a popular cliché in the justification of TVEI) is but one of the false dichotomies arising from the failure to see that the ‘process’ embodies ideas (bad as well as good) and beliefs (false as well as true) which can be rectified only through engagement with that critical conversation which is the product of other people’s enquiries. The academic disciplines are the resources upon which the teacher must draw in helping the ‘doer’ to be more intelligent in the doing. However, the organisation of the learning (the acquisition of knowledge and understanding) might not follow the logical organisation of knowledge. For example, ‘atom’ may be a basic concept in science but it does not follow that science should begin with an introduction to the concept of the atom. The psychological process is not determined by the logical structure. The vocational and the practical interests of the learner can themselves be organising elements. For example, access to biology might be through moral concern over environmental pollution; access to physics might be through an industrial topic. But the criteria of valid fulfilment of those interests or of the correct grasp of the relevant biological or scientific points are themselves established, not by the vocational interests themselves, but by the tests of validity and correctness within the respective bodies of knowledge. There is no necessary separation of academic knowledge from vocational preparation. Both develop in response to quite different demands. They suggest different ways in which the 72

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process of learning might be organised. But access to the academic world of ideas can be through vocational interests. Indeed, such a mode of entry might challenge the gap between theory and practice which permeates the liberal ideal. And the pursuit of vocational interests can at the same time be subjected to critical academic scrutiny. Virtues and dispositions to be promoted Liberal education, at least for Newman, aimed not at the promotion of virtue but at the perfection of the intellect. Nonetheless, the perfection of the intellect necessarily entails certain intellectual if not moral virtues—not kindness or magnanimity or humility, but truthfulness, elegance of style, openness to criticism. These are dispositions without which one is unlikely to achieve intellectual excellence because such excellence is essentially concerned with getting at the truth and taking the arduous but necessary steps for getting there. One could enlarge on this—impartiality in attending to arguments, objectivity in the sifting of evidence. And such a list might indeed be very different from that of the qualities required of the successful business person. The qualities required of the person curious about, and discovering, the world may be very different from those required of the person seeking to remake it. Liberal education, as it is manifested in our schools and universities, has been criticised for missing out on one particular ‘virtue’ in its pursuit of excellence, namely, that of enterprise. Indeed, so important has been this criticism that, as has been mentioned earlier, a major project at reforming higher education has been called ‘Enterprise in Higher Education’, funded not by the Secretary of State for Education but by the self-styled Department of Enterprise. It is difficult to say precisely what ‘enterprise’ is. People who are enterprising are presumably those who can think up new ideas and see ways of overcoming difficulty; who are fairly extrovert in tendency, and outgoing. They are not easily put off by failure. But in the present context it seems to be associated with the successful business person, even though there are many academics who have been called enterprising (they devised schemes for persuading unwanted colleagues to take early retirement). Certainly in practice 73

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it has been linked to a range of personal traits (outgoingness), thinking strategies (lateral thinking), acquired skills (technological), and attitudes (particularly towards industry). These latter associations seem quite arbitrary. The result is that the particular ‘virtue’ of enterprise has little analytic, only emotive, value. Much more valuable is the reference to attitudes and values as these are fostered or disdained by liberal education and vocational training. It is argued by Wiener and many others that the pursuit of intellectual excellence has been linked with certain kinds of knowledge, which knowledge is most removed from the practical world of industry and commerce. This in turn generates disdain for the industrial and commercial world and for the interests which motivate people to succeed within it. Such a separation of attitudes and interests seems much more a cultural phenomenon, and certainly the shift in funding of schools and universities has required, too, a shift in respect for different sets of virtues. A more businesslike approach is essential for the survival of the liberal ideal, and thriving institutions of the contemplative life have to fight competitively for novices. But it could be argued that it is not just a culturally based phenomenon and that there are differences between the sorts of activity engaged in for the pursuit of profit, on the one hand, and those engaged in for the pursuit of truth, on the other, which require different social conditions—these, in turn, depending upon different values. The values of competition within the market place, of standards determined by consumer choice, of profitability in terms of material gain—the values so closely tied to the ‘enterprise culture’ that is increasingly encouraged within the more vocationalised educational system—may be incompatible with the values of co-operation between research communities, of standards determined by the critical conversation of scholars, and of profitability in terms of the generation of new ideas. There is much more to the attempt to bridge the gap between the academic and the vocational, between the liberal ideal and the vocational preparation, than the liberalising of vocational training and the transformation of academic studies into something vocationally relevant. Attitudes and values need to be re-examined, and particularly the language through which these educational aims and values are expressed. 74

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Authorities to be obeyed R.S.Peters distinguished between being ‘in authority’ and being ‘an authority’. Being ‘in authority’ referred to having the right to make people obey backed up by power—it assumed a set of rules that prescribed how people should behave and a structure for creating and for enforcing these rules. Being ‘an authority’, on the other hand, referred to having the right to pronounce on matters of truth or correctness or validity. ‘An authority’ is a recognised expert in a particular area of study; and this authority arises, not from any formal structure of power or judicial legitimacy, but from recognition by other experts. This recognition is deserved because of scholarship, research, the solving of problems. Authority in this latter sense cannot itself arise from the declarations of those ‘in authority’, although there are many instances of this being attempted. Rather does it make sense only within the context of open and critical debate—within the conversation between the generation of mankind—wherein the capacity to argue correctly, to research carefully and effectively, to solve problems, to think speculatively, is recognised by others who have become experts within the same undertaking. Such authority is only provisional and relative: relative, since there are always higher authorities; provisional, since eventually others will come to challenge that authority and to do so by producing counter evidence or better arguments. Nonetheless, authorities there are. There are medical authorities to whom we go for advice on matters of health, and we do so because, as a result of experience and systematic study and proven record, they clearly know more than most about these things. There are legal authorities and scientific authorities for the same reason. But always that authority is provisional and relative—open to challenge. Indeed, it is a sign of achievement in teaching that the authority once held by the teacher is challenged—and then dismissed—by the successful learner. ‘Liberal education’ has therefore respected those authorities who are within the academic conversation, who are recognised by others within the same field of enquiry as the experts. University departments examine and grade their own students, and their judgements are confirmed (or challenged) only by those external examiners they choose as authorities. Judgement by those outside the field of study is unacceptable. 75

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A different picture emerges once the separation of liberal education from vocational preparation is challenged—and reconciliation attempted. The authorities are extended beyond the world of academics. ‘Utility’ is not the special province of Professors of English or Readers in Philosophy; even moral and social questions about the purpose of academic studies are raised by those outside the academic community. To what extent is the study of medieval history conducive to a more enterprising society? Does the study of literature in fact make the students more morally sensitive? And why should society continue to sustain a set of activities from which the majority of its members are excluded? Vocational preparation, where this is seen to be a legitimate goal of an educational system, not simply for those to be trained in craft and technical skills, but also for those who are to develop the qualities and knowledge which fits them for leadership, introduces further criteria of successful achievement and thus a different set of authorities. The question then is: how far can ‘liberal education’ be confined to participating in a highly selective conversation which makes little concession to utility or to social purpose here and now? A more broadly conceived conversation that does reflectively seek wider social, economic and personal purposes to that conversation and that does have a place within it for the more discordant voices, especially of young people, affects the liberal vision, not simply in terms of aims and values, not simply in terms of the recognised content and structure of knowledge, not simply in terms of the virtues and dispositions to be promoted, but also in terms of the authorities to be respected. And these new authorities will include those affected by an educational system which, whatever the insulation from the world of economic affairs or personal interest that it tries to foster, impinges immensely upon those public and private worlds. They will include: the employers who have some authority on the utility of what is learnt; the learners who have some authority on the alternative cultural traditions through which they make sense of experience; and the wider community who will claim some authority on social and moral issues.

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CONCLUSIONS Philosophy requires the constant re-examination of old concepts in the light of new situations, new challenges. Paul Hirst’s essay on liberal education was not (nor was it intended to be) a final word, a conclusive position. Rather was it an important statement within a long tradition of statements about the nature and purpose of education. In making that statement he reasserted old faiths that needed reasserting—in particular, that education was about the development of the mind, and that such development required the initiation into those various forms of knowledge and understanding through which human kind has come to make sense of experience. But education is a social activity—undertaken by society in a systematic way so that the next generation might benefit from the enquiries, the exploration, the reflections, the critical questioning of the previous ones. And, as is the case of any social activity, it will reflect the deepseated concern and structure of the society itself. One such concern of our society is the relevance of that educational system, and of the liberal ideals that underpin it, to the economic well-being of society as a whole and to the personal well-being of all its members. The pursuit of this concern has required a re-appraisal of the idea of liberal education and in particular of its relationship with vocational preparation. Such a re-appraisal must focus upon the four areas I have introduced, each of which poses philosophical questions—the purpose of education and the reconciliation of intrinsic worthwhileness with external utility, the structure and the selection of appropriate knowledge, the qualities and dispositions to be promoted, and the authorities to be allowed in the educational enterprise. Above all, however, there is, reflecting this re-appraisal, a shifting language of education which may or may not be adequate to the task—a matter, surely, in need of urgent examination.

REFERENCES Boys, C.J., Brennan, J., Henkel, M., Kirkland, J., Cogan, M. and Youll, P. (1988). Higher Education and the Preparation for Work. London: Jessica Kingsley.

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DES, White Paper (1987). Higher Education: Meeting the Challenge. London: HMSO. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York: The Macmillan Co. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (1991). Higher Education in the Polytechnics and Colleges. London: HMSO. Hirst, P. (1965). ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’, in Archamult, R.D. (ed.) Philosophical Analysis and Education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1867). ‘Inaugural Address at St Andrews University’, in Cavanagh, F.A. ( 1931 ) James and John Stuart Mill on Education. Cambridge University Press. Newman, J.H. (1852). The Idea of a University. London: Longman, Green & Co. (1919 edition). O’Hear, A. (1987). ‘The Importance of Traditional Learning’, British Journal of Educational Studies. 35. Oakeshott, M. (1972). ‘Education: The Engagement and Its Frustration’, in Dearden, R.F., Hirst, P.H. and Peters, R.S. (eds) Education and the Development of Reason. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Oakeshott, M. (1975). ‘A Place of Learning’, in The Colorado College Studies, 12, and reproduced in Fuller, T. (ed.) (1990) Michael Oakeshott on Education. Yale University Press. Royal Society of the Arts (1980). ‘Education for Capability’, RSA Journal. White, R. (1986). ‘The Anatomy of a Victorian Debate: An Essay in the History of Liberal Education’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 34 (1). Wiener, W. (1981). English Culture: the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. Cambridge University Press.

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4 PAUL HIRST’S STRUCTURE, OR, THE USES AND ABUSES OF AN OVERWORKED CONCEPT1 D.C.Phillips The former enfant terrible of British philosophy, Ernest Gellner, once pointed out that certain ideas and concepts have great sex appeal—they capture attention, they titillate the mind (Gellner, 1979:1). The notion of ‘naturalness’ is one current example; who in his or her right mind would want to be caught doing something ‘unnatural’? We have natural icecream, naturally grown fruit, natural toothpaste, natural spray deodorant, natural birth-control, and natural childbirth. It is clear that the word has become so appealing that its usage has outstripped its meaning, and it serves only as a vague label of commendation. In short, a perfectly good word has gone down the tubes. Even that undiscerning authority, Time Magazine, noticed this phenomenon several years ago and commented upon it in a special feature: ‘The notion of what is natural is getting stretched absurdly out of shape’ (Time, 1982:102). It is not beyond the realm of possibility, therefore, that the mass media eventually will become interested in another coquettish concept, to wit, ‘structure’. This term is also being overworked, and is rapidly becoming problematical. But any suggestion that educationists and fellow-travellers such as cognitive scientists and philosophers ought to let go of it is usually met with incredulity. The following discussion is partly autobiographical, and traces my attempts to escape from the attraction of the notion of structure. So it is appropriate to open by placing the blame squarely where it belongs: in my case, the fascination with matters structural clearly dates from the reading of an essay by Paul Hirst. 79

4 PAUL HIRST’S STRUCTURE, OR, THE USES AND ABUSES OF AN OVERWORKED CONCEPT1 D.C.Phillips The former enfant terrible of British philosophy, Ernest Gellner, once pointed out that certain ideas and concepts have great sex appeal—they capture attention, they titillate the mind (Gellner, 1979:1). The notion of ‘naturalness’ is one current example; who in his or her right mind would want to be caught doing something ‘unnatural’? We have natural icecream, naturally grown fruit, natural toothpaste, natural spray deodorant, natural birth-control, and natural childbirth. It is clear that the word has become so appealing that its usage has outstripped its meaning, and it serves only as a vague label of commendation. In short, a perfectly good word has gone down the tubes. Even that undiscerning authority, Time Magazine, noticed this phenomenon several years ago and commented upon it in a special feature: ‘The notion of what is natural is getting stretched absurdly out of shape’ (Time, 1982:102). It is not beyond the realm of possibility, therefore, that the mass media eventually will become interested in another coquettish concept, to wit, ‘structure’. This term is also being overworked, and is rapidly becoming problematical. But any suggestion that educationists and fellow-travellers such as cognitive scientists and philosophers ought to let go of it is usually met with incredulity. The following discussion is partly autobiographical, and traces my attempts to escape from the attraction of the notion of structure. So it is appropriate to open by placing the blame squarely where it belongs: in my case, the fascination with matters structural clearly dates from the reading of an essay by Paul Hirst. 79

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HIRST ON THE STRUCTURE OF KNOWLEDGE As I was trained as a philosopher of education during the decade of the 1960s, there was no chance that Paul Hirst’s work would not mean a lot to me. And although I ended up being quite critical of some of his ideas (Phillips, 1971, 1974, 1987), I have never denied the interest of his work nor the stimulus that I—along with most of my colleagues in the profession—have received from it. In 1965 Hirst published ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’, an essay that was destined to achieve—in what must be record time—the status of a classic (Hirst, 1965). Although the expression ‘structure of knowledge’ does not feature prominently in the essay (if it appears at all), that is what many of us took to be the nub of his discussion. Certainly the term ‘structure’ appeared frequently. The argument of the essay was complex, and is not easily summarisable in a pithy way, and there is much fascinating material that is necessarily overlooked when a precis is given. But, in essence, Hirst set out to give an account of the nature of liberal education that was based upon an analysis of the nature of knowledge. He concluded that there are seven forms of knowledge—mathematics, physical sciences, human sciences, history, religion, literature and the fine arts, and philosophy (Hirst, 1965: 131); a form being described in one place in the following words: As stated earlier, by a form of knowledge is meant a distinct way in which our experience becomes structured round the use of accepted public symbols. The symbols thus having public meaning, their use is in some way testable against experience and there is the progressive development of series of tested symbolic expressions. In this way experience has been probed further and further by extending and elaborating the use of the symbols and by means of these it has become possible for the personal experience of individuals to become more fully structured, more fully understood. (Hirst, 1965:128) In other words, each form of knowledge is distinguishable because it has a distinctive logical structure, which Hirst proceeded to analyse in terms of four central elements: each form has its own peculiar (i.e. unique) central concepts; these concepts are linked 80

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to form a distinctive network of logical relationships; each form has statements that are testable against experience in some peculiar (i.e. distinctive) ways; and each form has developed ‘particular techniques and skills for exploring experience’ (Hirst, 1965:129). All this aroused my interest, and in 1971 I published my first and shortest critique, in which I argued that these four criteria failed to accomplish what Hirst demanded of them—there were overlaps between the forms with respect to these four, and, furthermore, within some of the forms there was more than one alternative logical structure (psychology, presumably a member of the human sciences, being a good example—it harbours both Freudianism and behaviourism, where it is difficult to sustain the argument that there are similar central concepts, logical relations, tests against experience, and techniques and skills) (Phillips, 1971). This issue aside, it should be evident from the passages already cited from Hirst’s essay that there is a degree of vagueness about how the term ‘structure’ is to be understood. He stated twice, in the long passage above, that experience becomes structured in terms of the concepts located within the forms of knowledge, although once he added the words ‘more fully structured’, which implies that without the forms of knowledge human experience would be less fully structured. Elsewhere in the essay he talked about each form of knowledge having a ‘logical structure’ (Hirst, 1965:129); and he stated that ‘to acquire knowledge is to become aware of experience as structured, organised and made meaningful in some quite specific way’ (Hirst, 1965:124–5) —a passage that suggests, by its grammatical structure (if this expression is meaningful enough to be used), that structure and organisation are not the same thing! The mystery deepens elsewhere, where he replaces ‘structure’ with, presumably, a synonym: ‘to have a mind basically involves coming to have experience articulated by means of various conceptual schema’ (Hirst, 1965:125) —a passage that suggests that experience is structured (articulated) by means of cognitive structures that are already present; and in another place he talks about the need for human experience (‘the life of man in every particular’) to be ‘patterned and ordered’ (Hirst, 1965:124) —no doubt another set of synonyms. After reading Hirst’s essay, and thinking about the notion of structure, one’s eyes become opened, and very similar broad usages of the term are readily located throughout various ‘forms of knowledge’ —psychology and the infant field of cognitive 81

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science being particularly rich sources. Since life—and space in books—are both short, one example will have to suffice. In a recent essay in a volume on intellectual development, the well-known educational psychologist Robbie Case discusses ‘NeoPiagetian Theories of Child Development’ (1991).2 In this essay, the notion of structure features very prominently; indeed, in one brief section of about eleven hundred words, the term ‘structure’ appears ten times (Case, 1991: Section II), and in the following three hundred words the term is used thirteen more times. The reader learns that, according to the neo-Piagetians, children actively assimilate the world to their existing cognitive structures; these structures ‘are not merely the product of their empirical experience’, but are a product of their attempts ‘to organise that experience, in a coherent fashion’; and of course there are levels of cognitive structure (Case, 1991: Section III). Furthermore, it is said that, according to Pascual-Leone’s work, when the developing child is changing stage and is ‘engaged in major structural re-organisation’, then that child ‘must actively inhibit the application of current logical structure’ (Case, 1991: Section III). In other words: children structure the world by using their cognitive structures which not only are produced from their structured experience but which also come from their attempts to structure that structured experience; but when children abandon their present structures and make new structures they must not use their present structures (which, we are told later, are nevertheless incorporated into the new structures)! Development is, indeed, a mysterious process. (It should be stressed that this example is not put forward as a ‘straw man’; on the contrary, Case is a respected colleague whose work is insightful and philosophically sensitive. The point is that none of us are safe from being swept off our feet by ‘structure’; and in some intellectual domains the term seems to be well-nigh indispensable.)

USES AND ABUSES A number of interesting issues come to the surface when Hirst’s usage of the notion of structure is examined in conjunction with examples drawn from other fields such as cognitive and developmental psychology. The following is a brief listing. First, in the fundamental sense in which Hirst and others have used the term, ‘structure’ means (according to Webster) 82

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‘arrangement of parts, elements, or constituents’. Because most things have parts or constituents, most things have a structure, and this is why the term has such a wide usage. (Even atoms, which were once thought to be structureless unitary building blocks of nature, have been found to possess a complex structure.) A clock, an engine, an argument, a sugar molecule, a painting, the human psyche, and human memory, are all supposed to have a structure (for all are supposed to be made up of elements). But, second, it is important to note that a poorly made clock or engine, and a weak argument, also have structure in this sense. A child who knows almost nothing, and a child (perhaps an older one) who knows a great deal, both have ‘cognitive structures’. This point is relevant because some people have drifted into a mode of speaking according to which a poor argument lacks structure, or according to which a young child gradually acquires a cognitive structure. However, if ‘structure’ refers to relationships between units (whatever the units are), a poor argument, a bad painting and an immature child all have structures (for in all these cases relationships between the units or elements are still present). In the poor argument or painting, the problem is that the relationships are not of the ‘proper’ sort; and in the case of the immature child, there are not very many cognitive elements, but there are some—there is paucity of quantity (together, perhaps, with paucity of quality). In short, people sometimes use the term ‘structure’ in a normative fashion, and they withhold the term if whatever structure is present does not come up to certain standards. According to this usage, it is not the possession of a structure, but the type of structure, that is crucial. It follows, third, from the preceding point that when the term ‘structure’ is used, it often as not requires that some theory be available to provide the relevant criteria and norms. Needless to say, this theory is sometimes a poorly formulated one, and frequently it is one that is never made explicit in the discussion. But whether it is good or bad, precise or vague, the theory is vital, for the term is well-nigh meaningless without some anchoring. An example from Case makes this clear; although here, presumably, the school of psychologists who hold the position being explicated do have theories available that could back up the uses of the term ‘structure’: As long as development is seen as taking place in ‘the structure of the whole’, then the expectation is that individual children should be at the same level of 83

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functioning across the entire range of tasks one might care to expose them to. Once one sees structural change as taking place in a more local and focused fashion, however, it becomes possible to understand how a child might be at quite different levels, in different structural domains. (Case, 1991: Section III, B2; my emphasis) Clearly, this passage does not convey much unless there is some way to unpack the italicised notions of ‘structural change’ and ‘structural domains’. Fourth, great problems surface when various types of structure are not kept separate. The plain fact of the matter is that disparate domains become confused or conflated, so that one type of structure is thought of, or discussed, in terms only appropriate to another; modes of measurement that are appropriate for one type of structure are misused in the forlorn attempt to measure other types of structure; and so on. (Elsewhere I have documented in some detail how researchers confuse cognitive with disciplinary structures; see Phillips, 1987.) Consider the ‘Alice Through the Looking-Glass’ situation that arises in the following case: a teacher is presenting a piece of science curriculum to a student, and the whole transaction is being studied by a cognitive psychologist who is preparing a paper for a conference presentation. The lesson has a structure; the science discipline being taught has a structure (à la Bruner and Hirst and Schwab); the physical universe has a structure that the science discipline in some sense is reflecting; the teacher has a cognitive structure (pertaining to what he or she wants the pupil to learn); the pupil has a cognitive structure (pertinent to mastering the discipline); the researcher has a cognitive structure (pertinent to studying this complex situation); and the researcher might use his or her own cognitive structure to construct a mental model which postulates a structure that hypothetically is what is present in the mind of the learner. If all goes well, even the researcher’s conference paper will have a structure (and maybe even some content). Something of the nightmarish quality here is captured in the words of Donald Norman, from a 1983 book on mental models (the only blemish is that he somewhat underestimates the complexities): ‘In the construction of mental models we need really consider four different things: the target system, the conceptual 84

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model of that target system, the user’s mental model of the target system, and the scientist’s conceptualization of that mental model’ (Norman, 1983:7). Fifth, the problem at the centre of present attention is that these various structures tend to get conflated. If the pupil successfully learns the science, the temptation is to suppose that his or her cognitive structure is isomorphic with the structure of the science that was learnt (even non-Piagetians have picked up the Genevan’s unfortunate use of the word ‘isomorphic’). The cognitive scientist sometimes supposes that the mental model that he or she has constructed is isomorphic with what is located in the student’s head. And so on—a veritable Pandora’s box. It should be evident, however, that these structural models are models of quite different domains. Only confusion can arise when terminology appropriate to these various domains is not kept distinct. Thus, when a student of science learns that a proton is part of an atom, he or she has not reduced the distance between the two concepts (this is cognitive model talk), and he or she has not come to appreciate that there is a strong associative bond between ‘atom’ and ‘proton’ (this is psychological process talk). Rather, the student has learnt that there is a conceptual link between the two notions, which are notions drawn from physics (‘a proton is part of an atom’, which is ‘structure of the discipline’ talk). In similar vein, to say that there is isomorphism between the conceptual structure of the discipline of physics and the structure of the real physical world, or between the cognitive structures of a learner and the structure of physics, is to postulate isomorphisms between entities that occupy different ‘universes of discourse’, and it is to strip the term ‘isomorphism’ of most of its useful content! The preceding point was about terminology, but a sixth and parallel point can be made about research methodology. Methods that are appropriate for structures in one universe of discourse should not be allowed to drift over into other universes, at least not without some justificatory argument being supplied. Thus, on the face of it, to ask a pupil some questions about the relationships between concepts in a discipline is, indeed, to do just that—it is to seek to find how well the pupil understands the discipline. It is not a good way to discover the pupil’s cognitive structure. If a pupil was to say that ‘energy in physics is the same as force’, this would show that the pupil did not understand part 85

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of the discipline of physics—he or she has incorrectly linked the two concepts (incorrectly, that is, in terms of the rules of the discipline of physics). And presumably, too, there is something going on in the head of the pupil that caused him or her to make that statement, but whatever the cognitive-psychological story is, it is not identical with, and is not fully describable in terms of, the discipline of physics story. To take another example of misplaced methodology, reactiontime data about how long it takes me to solve some simple problem may reveal a lot about the complexity of my cognitive processes, but it throws little if any light on the nature of the conceptual links that I have made between the elements in the problem I was trying to solve. Seventh and finally, all the models discussed so far purport to be structural models; the diversity of issues that have emerged perhaps serves to indicate that the notion of structure is beginning to raise more problems than it is worth. But there is a further problem, that may be the final nail in the coffin. There are two types of structural models, at least. On one hand, a structural model can attempt to display the relations between ontological elements; on the other hand it can deal with relations between functional units. In other words, the first of these is a model of the relationships between the physical or cognitive or psychological or conceptual elements or building blocks, while the second is a model of the relations between the functioning elements or processes—some cognitive psychologists have been relatively up-front about the fact that by ‘structures’ they mean ‘processes’. Thus ‘structure’ has come to mean almost anything, and thereby it has become a candidate for critical comment by Time.

WHY THE ROMANCE IS DIFFICULT TO END The above was an extremely rough and ready survey of the dark side of models involving the notion of ‘structure’. A sensible person who becomes familiar with all this might reasonably conclude there ought to be a moratorium on the use of the term. After all, it would be an easy matter, in almost any context, to find some less beguiling—and less misleading—synonym to use. For instance, when a researcher was tempted to say that a pupil’s cognitive 86

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structure had now come to include certain ingredients, not much would be lost—and something would be gained—by saying instead that the pupil had learnt something. (Professional opinion, of course, suggests that the clarification runs in the other direction—it is an advance, it is held, to replace ‘learn’ by structural language.) I myself have often come close to advocating such a moratorium on ‘structure’. But—at least up until now—I have never been able to bring myself to take the final plunge. Why not? Why do I want to retain the notion of structure, warts and all? The answer, I believe, has something to do with the suggestive or heuristic power of the notion of structure. In many domains, it can be very fruitful to start out by allowing this term to play a central role in one’s thinking. This can be illustrated by a simple but somewhat lengthy parable. Over the past few years my office on campus has got out of hand—books and journals have been accumulating, as books and journals are wont to do, but because I have been pressed for both time and shelf-space I have just stuck things in here and there, and I have let other things pile up on the floor and desk. I possess a large academic reference collection, and although potentially all of it is usable, I never actually make much use of most of it (largely because I have forgotten the details of all that I own, and I cannot locate particular items readily). Things are in such disarray that sometimes I buy an interesting book, only to discover later that I already had a copy! I have taken a vow to reorganise my collection, along the lines it was in the halcyon days of long ago— there was a logic to the organisation, indeed, even a pristine structure, that allowed me to gain access to material very readily. (I even recognise that I could arrange the collection in more than one way—by topic, or historically, or alphabetically, or by the Dewey decimal system. For my purposes almost any of these would do; the point is that some clearly understood structure would be better than some haphazard order that I could not use to my advantage.) Here I have been using the notion of structure unproblematically in the dictionary sense; what I plan to do is impose certain relationships between the elements (i.e. books and journals) in my collection, and this new structure would replace the haphazardly developed—and practically useless— structure that exists at present. In short, I intend to impose a usable logic or ordering principle on the elements, to replace the present awkward and not-readily-usable logic. 87

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It is worth stressing that at present my professional library does have a structure; it is composed of elements, and there are relationships between these elements—the problem for me is that the relationships are not of a simple and easily-mastered kind (there is not a simple rule, like ‘alphabetical order of author’s familyname’). No doubt there are some readers who find the notion of structure problematical when applied to a collection of professional books; this of course raises the issue of whether there is any context in which the notion would not be problematical! (If collections of clearcut physical elements—in this case, books—do not have a structure, what about ‘structure of knowledge’ or ‘cognitive structure’?) Let us make a little more out of this story. (At this point the parable becomes highly relevant to cognitive psychologists, some of whose experiments run a parallel course.) Because the notion of structure has heuristic value, it is easy to imagine a series of mini research projects along the following lines. It would be possible to study the types of structure present in the professional libraries of a variety of colleagues, to see if there was any relationship between that structure and the degree of their scholarly productivity. It would also be possible for a researcher to stand at their office doors, and ask them a series of questions, the answers to which they have to look up. The attempt could then be made to infer the type of structure in their collections, using as data the time taken to find the answers to various questions. Finally, it could be determined if their performance in answering certain questions improved over time; and then any such improvement could be correlated with the purchase of new books, or with the reorganisation of the existing set. A researcher could even work with them to help reorder their libraries, to make more efficient working collections. In enquiries of these kinds, the term ‘structure’ is a useful one —at least at first. True, even at the outset it could be replaced by a synonym— ‘organisation’, ‘arrangement’, ‘articulation’ are among the candidates that were met earlier. But whatever term is used, the underlying notion is the same; and it is an important one, even when dealing with so mundane a topic as a library collection. For some time I have believed that I would, when the crunch came, be prepared to abandon many of the usages of the term ‘structure’, but I am also sure I would not be prepared to abandon the notion (as opposed to the word) in contexts that come close to 88

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the ones outlined in my parable. But in the course of preparing this essay another possibility surfaced; it came to me when I realized that, in my parable, I could eventually replace ‘structure’ with something more definite, for example, when I decided that my books could be shelved according to the alphabetical order of the authors’ names. Thus, in this parable, the concept of structure played a heuristic (or suggestive or guiding) role—at first it was possibly the best term available. However, as reflection and enquiry proceeded, it became possible to replace the notion with something more specific—hypotheses could be formed, as sketched above, about the types of organisation of library books (whether alphabetical, or topic-centred, and so on), so that eventually the useful but potentially misleading heuristic notion could be dropped. The viability of this last suggestion was brought home to me by reading what the philosopher Daniel Dennett had to say about a similarly useful, but basically problematical, notion in his own area of expertise. Dennett works at the interface of the areas of philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence, and he has been especially concerned with how theories in cognitive science explain or account for the phenomenon we label with the term ‘intelligence’. He writes in an enormously rich passage: Any time a theory builder proposes to call an event, state, structure, etc., in any system (say the brain of an organism) a signal or message or command or otherwise endows it with content, he takes out a loan of intelligence. He implicitly posits along with his signals, messages or commands, something that can serve as a signal-reader, messageunderstander, or commander, else his ‘signals’ will be for naught, will decay unreceived, uncomprehended. This loan must be repaid eventually by finding and analyzing away these readers or comprehenders; for, failing this, the theory will have among its elements unanalyzed mananalogues endowed with enough intelligence to read the signals, etc., and thus the theory will postpone answering the major question: what makes for intelligence? (Dennett, 1978:12: his emphasis) Using Dennett’s terminology, then, my position is as follows: for heuristic purposes we might sometimes want to take out a loan on the notion of structure (and make use of it, for example, the 89

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way I did in the parable); but after it has served its purpose, we have a duty to cash it in, to replace it, to discharge the loan with something more precise. We have this duty, because the bare notion of structure has become a degraded one—it communicates little, and eventually we always have to specify more precisely what we mean when we use the term.

AN EXAMPLE: KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES OF BEGINNING TEACHERS The parable was manufactured, although it is based on fact. A real life example would not be out of place. The analysis just presented helps to throw light on the development of an interesting research project at Stanford, in which I was invited to participate by my colleague Lee Shulman: the ‘Knowledge Growth in Teaching Project’. I cannot testify about what the notion of structure meant to my co-workers; I can only say what the notion meant to me, and what I perceive its role— and its fate—to have been in the project at large. I believe the parallel with the parable is quite direct, and certainly Dennett’s notion of a ‘loan’ has been extremely helpful. My historical analysis is, roughly, that we stumbled, unawares, on the need to ‘cash in’ the heuristic loan we had taken out on the notion of structure. The inspiration for our project—if that is what it was—came from several sources. One important thread was the following: young men and women who graduate with degrees in the sciences or history or maths or English or social science, and who decide to become high school teachers, move from being relative experts in the subject domain, to being relative novice teachers of that domain. What are the changes that take place in their understandings of their subject field? Leaving aside the educational component that is added to their knowledge (and in other strands of our work we were interested in how this new knowledge gets integrated), how is the knowledge of the subject domain, simpliciter, different for these teachers-intraining compared to what it had been before they embarked on pedagogical training? In his Presidential Address at the 1985 convention of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), my co-worker Lee Shulman put it as follows: 90

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Our central question concerns the transition from expert student to novice teacher. How does the successful college student transform his or her expertise in the subject matter into a form that high school students can comprehend? When this novice teacher confronts flawed or muddled textbook chapters or befuddled students, how does he or she employ content expertise to generate new explanations, representations, or clarifications? …In which forms are the domains and categories of knowledge represented in the minds of teachers? (Shulman, 1986:8–9) It is hard to put any more flesh onto the bones of this interest, without using structural language. (Indeed, the passage quoted verges on using it, when the issue is raised of the representation of different types of knowledge in the minds of teachers.) The project staff became familiar with the structural notions of cognitive psychology; and Hirst’s views, together with Schwab’s notions of substantive and syntactical structures of disciplines (Schwab, 1965) became part of our daily vocabulary. We adopted research techniques in a fairly eclectic way—card-sorting tasks, checklists, stimulated recall, simple problem-solving tasks based on material from the home disciplines of our research subjects, and so forth. We drew rather impressive map-like diagrams representing the ‘structure’ of the understanding that our subjects had of their academic disciplines. Then we tried to monitor the changes that took place here as our subjects trained to become teachers of their disciplines. This is the stage we were at during the 1985 AERA convention, and the project’s papers delivered at that time were heavily ‘structural’ in orientation. Later, however, in browsing through the material gathered and written during the following year, I found that the notion of ‘structure’ had well-nigh disappeared without our having been conscious of it at the time. The general structural interest was still present deep within our work, but what had happened was that we had moved on—we had become more precise in our hypotheses, our concerns were clearer, and we adopted a new set of terminology that allowed us to deal better with these concerns. Instead of talking about the cognitive structures of novice teachers, Shulman started talking of the growth in their ‘subject matter knowledge for teaching’ (Shulman, 1987; Phillips, 1988). But at none of our staff meetings 91

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did we consciously decide to abandon the term ‘structure’; in effect, as we got clearer about what we were doing and what we were finding, we discharged our loan on ‘structure’. HIRST REVISITED It has been said that love is like a cigar: both can be rekindled after they have gone out, but neither of them is the same again. I will never again experience the initial excitement I felt upon that first reading of Hirst’s classic essay, but each time I dip into it something is rekindled. Nowadays my attention is drawn to the structural language, and I play with possible paraphrases—or repayments— of Hirst’s loan. He is the one who incurred the debt in the first place, but it would be churlish to let him bear the burden of repayment all by himself. I still feel that he was on to something: human experience, or at least my experience, does seem to be orderly; it is not all ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’. But what is the nature of this order? Will cognitive psychology resolve the mystery? What role is played by social forces of the sort that interested Vygotsky? And what role—if any—do the traditional disciplines play in helping me to order my experience? Are these disciplines themselves organised in some way? These are matters about which I still do not have the answers, and certainly I do not accept the answers that Paul Hirst gave. But they are—and were—questions worth asking. And who can blame Paul Hirst for using an attractive term while grappling with them? But it is time to move on. NOTES 1

2

Portions of this chapter are based on an unpublished paper on ‘structure’ presented at the 1986 AERA Conference, which was prepared with support from the Spencer Foundation as part of the ‘Knowledge Growth in Teaching Project’ at Stanford University. Because the Case essay appears in a volume that was in press at the time of writing this, references are to sections rather than to page numbers which were not yet available.

REFERENCES Case, R. (1991). ‘Neo-Piagetian Theories of Child Development’, in Sternberg, R.J. and Berg, C.A. (eds), Intellectual Development. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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5 THE CURRICULUM: THE TIMELESS AND THE TIME-BOUND Ivan Snook

Since the beginning of their existence, humans have asked questions about their world. They have done this from their desire to explain and control it, render it productive, and live in it with some degree of happiness. As a result of this questioning humans have developed bodies of knowledge (arts, skills, procedures and ways of behaving) which provide relatively stable answers. Once gained, this knowledge can be handed on to the next generation, so that their questioning does not have to start from the beginning. The passing on of this knowledge is what we call education, and the knowledge arranged to be handed on is called the curriculum. There is, therefore, an intimate connection between knowledge and the curriculum. The nature of this connection has, however, been discussed in very different ways and the resulting debate is central to educational theory. There are two extreme views. The first is that bodies of knowledge are ‘absolute’ for they are a reflection of reality. They capture the way things really are and hence constitute the only ways of really educating people. These bodies of knowledge have been discovered not created by human beings and they therefore transcend us. We educate human beings by putting them in touch with the timeless, spaceless, classless knowledge which humans have accumulated. This view is reinforced by—and in its turn further reinforces—the tendency to focus attention on knowledge as consisting of bodies of propositions to which terms like ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘verified’, ‘unverified’, ‘subjective’, ‘objective’ can appropriately be 94

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applied. I suspect that a great deal of curriculum nonsense (and epistemological nonsense too) could be traced to this narrowing of vision. For, whatever might be said about a body of factual knowledge (like science) or a body of formal knowledge (such as mathematics) it is surely absurd either to affirm or deny an ‘absolute’, ‘timeless’, ‘culture-free’, or ‘classless’ method of catching fish, designing shelter, carving a totem or preparing a meal. Only by concentrating on the narrow range of propositional knowledge could one subscribe to this traditional view of the curriculum. Equally, however, once seduced by this notion (which, as has been frequently pointed out, is a notable feature of our Western civilization) it becomes easy (a) to focus on knowledge as timeless and hence to reify existing disciplines and (b) to rule out or downplay practical skills, techniques and crafts. ‘What did you learn in school today?’ is a symbol of our fixation on knowledge as sets of propositions. However, this view of knowledge as ‘absolute’ is misleading even if we are talking purely of propositional knowledge. The other extreme view is that bodies of knowledge are ‘sociohistorical constructs’. This term became fashionable after the work of the sociologists of knowledge in the 1970s. Although it has been strongly criticised, it still influences academic discussion of education. Quite apart from sociology, however, many teachers subscribe to the view that divisions of knowledge are arbitrary ways of organising material to be taught. Thus, there is criticism of the ‘subject fetish’ of university and secondary school teachers and its malign effect on the curriculum of the school, and primary teachers often try to break free of this constrained view, suggesting in the process that the organising of content is a matter for decision by each teacher. On this view, of course, knowledge is viewed broadly as encompassing skills, attitudes, values as well as ‘knowledge about’. ‘We teach children not subjects’ was at one time the slogan representing this view. These, then, are the extreme. On one hand, knowledge is propositional and absolute but also differentiated into timeless subjects. On the other, knowledge is broadly construed and is a seamless cloth which one can cut and package as required. I want to argue that both the ‘extreme’ positions are mistaken: the first treats as timeless what is in fact time-bound, while the second treats as time-bound what is in fact timeless (hence the title of this chapter). It is my conviction that the key to curriculum 95

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design, curriculum change and curriculum reform lies in carefully distinguishing the timeless and the time-bound. To indicate what I mean I intend to discuss, first some epistemological issues, and then a little cultural history. EPISTEMOLOGICAL ISSUES One of the longstanding debates in philosophy has been over whether we create our world or discover it. To the average person, this initially seems a silly discussion for as ordinary people we are sure that the world of mountains, planets, buildings and other people really exists and would continue to exist even if we vanished, and that by our senses we come to grasp that world as it really is. This commonsense view is simplistic as can be shown by questions such as: • • • •

Does the box-camera or the X-ray machine give the correct picture of a human body? How can I see stars which have been ‘dead’ for countless thousands of years? Is the table in front of me solid pine (as my eyes tell me) or masses of atoms (as the physicist tells me)? Does the world look different to us from how it does to sheep, angels, God?

This is not the place to enter fully the debate but I shall assert two points. We do not discover our world in a naïve realist way. That is, what we perceive is not per se the way things are. To us, it looks as if the earth is still and the sun moves and this is how it looked to the Vatican theologians, who took it to be a timeless truth. The scientists tell us we are wrong and we tend to believe them, thus denying naïve realism: things are not always as they seem to our senses. Similarly, we do not discover our world in a naïve empiricist way. There are not facts out there which bombard our senses until truth is seen. For centuries or millennia, objects had fallen to the ground without gravity being ‘discovered’. That required a specific activity of the human mind—we call it theorising—and not simply a passive reception of sense impressions. It follows, then, that it is misleading to think of humans as simply capturing truths out there: we go beyond what we see, correct what we see, and by theorising shape what we see. On the other hand, the suggestion that we create our world cannot be accepted if ‘create’ suggests an analogy with dreams or 96

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artistic production. Our everyday knowledge is not (completely) like our dreams, for in real life (but not in dreams) we test our perceptions to verify or refute them—the real world hits back. Our technological creations are not like artistic creations for they really do have to fly, float or compute. If we are to make progress in understanding and redesigning the curriculum, we have to recognise and reconcile these two facts. There is, first of all, no point in talking about the world as it really is, in abstraction from the human beings who know it. We do not know (but can make guesses about) how the world looks to cows, fleas or pigeons. We do not know (and cannot even imagine) how it might look to God, angels, Martians or the spirit of a departed friend. The world we are talking about is the world as known by humans; knowledge is our knowledge. It depends on our perceptual equipment, and to that extent is dependent on us. The ‘us’ however, is a human ‘us’, not a time-bound, culture-bound or class-bound ‘us’. It is also dependent on our conceptual equipment, which varies from place to place, person to person, age to age. But let us not slide too readily into complete relativism. Individual humans—or groups of humans—have different interests and hence view things differently. The botanist, the businessperson, the ecologist may view a clump of trees differently, but this does not mean that we impose our interests; rather, certain differences in the world (trees as a botanical specimen, as saleable products, or as part of the ecological system) are settled on according to our purposes: It is thus just not a matter of human contrivance and convenience in the division of intellectual labour that there are many…standpoints. Rather, this circumstance reflects a fact about the world itself—as we have come to know it— namely that its things have different sorts of properties. (Reschner, 1979:23) There is, then, a world with differing properties. For various purposes humans connect their interests with these different properties. Our situation as humans in a world is bounded by two ontological facts: we have different kinds of interests; and the world has different kinds of properties. Together these lead to different aspects of human knowledge: descriptive, explanatory, controlling and productive. At the deepest level hunting is as 97

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dependent on seeing animals in a certain way as is biology, while ecological concerns transform both. As Reschner puts it: ‘The fact that things hold multiple citizenship in diverse law frameworks provides the explanatory basis for their falling subject to various different, naturally constituted disciplines’ (1979:24). Disciplines, therefore, depend on regularities in the world and we, as human beings interrogating our world, need to exploit these regularities. Understanding our world, controlling our world, living in and altering our world, depend on regularities not just chunks of information, sets of skills and conglomerates of attitudes. Curriculum, as an attempt to short-circuit experience, is totally reliant on these regularities. The generalisations we make from the regularities are embedded in what are known as disciplines. These are neither timeless categories nor arbitrary groupings. They are, of course, conceptualisations of our world (and hence are not absolute) but they also depend on our world (and hence are not arbitrary). The link between the two is an evolutionary one (or, less controversially, a feature of our ongoing relationship with our world): ‘The serviceable handling of our experience by our cognitive instruments is guaranteed—not by a pre-established harmony but by the processes of evolution’ (Reschner, 1979:109–10). Humans are beings of a certain kind, the products of adaptation. The world with its properties exists independently of us. Knowledge arises from questions raised by humans in their attempts to control, explain and shape ‘the world’. By evolution, a dynamic interaction is set up, which both explains and justifies our views (expressed in disciplines etc.). It follows that we should never underestimate these perennial questions or the ‘warranted assertability’ of the answers. Nor must we forget that answers are (i) in part dependent on our concerns and interests (and, hence, apt to subjective change) and (ii) tentative, fluid, evolving (and, hence, open to objective change). In a deep epistemological sense we have to recognise and, as best we can, reconcile the timeless and the time-bound. THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT It is tempting, especially for those who hold a traditionalist view of knowledge and the curriculum, to believe that ‘school subjects’ 98

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or ‘academic disciplines’ emerge fully grown, are obvious for all to see and form (or should form) the indisputable basis of the school curriculum. But this is far from the truth. Viewed historically: ‘Subjects are not monolithic entities but shifting amalgamations of sub-groups and traditions.’ (Goodson, 1983:3). From the undifferentiated attempts of humans to interrogate their world, there emerged ways of so doing which diverged in their procedures. Thus, carving and hunting evolved different procedures which again differed widely from those used in plotting the movements of planets or tending the flocks. In course of time these various procedures became the concern of different groups of people whose interests became connected with the knowledge and whose power depended on it. Thus, a tension is set up between the epistemological view and the sociological view and at times the two are thoroughly confused. Layton has detailed three stages in the evolution of a secondary school subject or discipline: 1

2

3

The new subject appears as a callow intruder justified by its utility or relevance. At this stage each teacher has to make do for herself for there are no authorities to lean on, no experts to go to, no textbooks to consult, and she herself of course has had no training in the new subject. At the second stage, experts begin to emerge, the subject generates its internal logic and the discipline acquires a degree of respectability because it is so recognised. The discipline acquires a professional body, it is taught in universities and there are specialists who shape the subject matter which is to be taught in schools (Goodson, 1983:10).

From this account, three facts emerge: (a) Although there is a logical and epistemological basis for our knowledge of the world, the number, division, and extent of disciplines is more a matter of power, influence and institutional support than of logic: this, I submit, is what was basically wrong with Hirst’s forms of knowledge. From one point of view Hirst was right: there are distinctive ways of viewing the world. But there is no way of showing that the seven forms cannot be subsumed under, say, three modes of knowledge (e.g. the logical, the empirical and the practical) 99

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or alternatively viewed as shorthand for X number of scientific and other disciplines. It is my belief that no answer has been found to this kind of dilemma because no answer can be found (at least, not in the epistemological world in which it has been sought). (b) The connection between school subjects and academic disciplines is not a tight one. It is often assumed that ‘English’ in the primary school must be identified with ‘English’ in the university and so on but ‘school subjects and academic disciplines are normally temporary coalitions’ (Goodson, 1983:57). (c) Schools themselves and their communities are to some extent the instigators, not simply the purveyors, of disciplines. Goodson concludes his discussion of the relationship by saying: ‘The process of evolution for school subjects can be seen not as a pattern of disciplines “translated” down or of “domination” downwards but very much as a process of aspiration upwards’ (1983:82). And again: ‘The [new] academic discipline is developed because the classroom teachers perceive the need for a new area of knowledge and then set about involving academics in the construction’ (1983:133). By way of example, Goodson cites the ways in which, in Britain, biology and geography both established their claims to being school subjects and evolved (with some difficulty) into rural studies, and, more recently, environmental studies. It is interesting to note that geography itself has only recently come of age. It began in the mid-nineteenth century as an attempt to collect and classify, and to bring data into coherence under some general laws. By the end of the century, this upstart subject had made progress in schools but was ‘only a tentative plan in a few universities’ (Goodson, 1983:61). As late as 1901, Rooper declared that in British schools geography ‘has ever been a dull and uninteresting subject’, ‘a dreary recitation of names and statistics, of no interest to the learner, and of little use except perhaps in the sorting departments of the Post Office’ (T.G.Rooper Geographical Teacher, Vol. 1 (1901) cited in Goodson, 1983:62). The first academic post in geography, a Readership at Oxford University, was established in 1887, and in many countries it faced a long struggle to be accepted as a university subject. It is tempting, of course, to put such problems 100

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down to academic snobbery or simple conservatism. No doubt these are factors, but the deeper point is that until a body of information can rise beyond ‘a dreary recitation of names and statistics…of no interest…and of little use…’ its case for inclusion in the curriculum is weak no matter how relevant in principle it might be. There is always need for a discipline that is: ‘a coherent body of facts and concepts demanding an ordered mind for its appreciation’ (Goodson, 1983: 185). It seems then that we cannot overlook the time-bound, contextbound, socially based, interest-embedded nature of the current parcels of knowledge. Nor dare we forget that such ‘parcels’ are also dependent on the continuity of the tradition which has tried in particular ways to understand the world. To be more concrete: if geography (or sociology, or political science) has made sustained progress over a period of time in universities, it would be imprudent of schools to attempt to devise their own synthesis which might then turn out to be ‘a dreary recitation of names and statistics…’

CURRICULUM IMPLICATIONS But, here we are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the past by focusing on those questions which imply understanding of and control of our world. It is time to remind ourselves of the varied ways of interrogating our world which we looked at at the beginning of this chapter. According to Aristotle, human knowledge can be grouped in three main categories: • • •

Theoretical Productive Practical

These represent three central aspects of human life requiring thought, information, skill, practice and so on. The Theoretical disciplines are those whose principal aim is to grasp the way things are. They include, of course, the natural sciences and history but also modern endeavours such as environmental studies and social sciences. Theoretical disciplines are important but they are by no means the whole of education nor should they dominate schooling. Any special status they have had derives not from the nature of knowledge or from the nature 101

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of schooling (much less from the nature of ‘mind’) but from political views about what schools should do. Such disciplines may be introduced in too pure a form (the ‘new’ mathematics was perhaps an example), or deceptively packaged (as, perhaps, secondary school geography has often been). Similarly they may distort the rest of the curriculum (music, for example, becomes not a performing art but a theoretical subject tested by one’s knowledge of musical notation and music history). I suspect that there is much of this confusion in schools and colleges and that it exerts a bad influence on curriculum design and student evaluation. Productive disciplines, according to Aristotle, are those whose point is to create or make things. Music, art, craft, ceramics, woodwork, metalwork and cooking are obvious modern examples. Music issues in playing an instrument or singing; woodwork and ceramics are to be judged by the bookcase or vase produced; and in cooking, of course, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. This old expression is quite illuminative. The ‘proof’ of a recipe in cooking (a productive discipline) consists not in chemical or mathematical accuracy but in the quality of what is produced. Schools face a constant temptation to reduce productive studies to theoretical ones: music becomes musical appreciation, religion becomes religious knowledge, and gardening turns into horticulture. Productive disciplines cannot, of course, be assessed by essays or written exams; it is tempting to conclude (wrongly) that they cannot be assessed at all. Such disciplines are to be assessed either by the quality of what is produced or by the personal satisfaction in its production. Ideally, these two should be intimately connected. There is, I think, no way (other than personal satisfaction) of reconciling the rival claims of different productive disciplines. There may be some recourse to historical influence (music vs. ceramics) or to theoretical adequacy (art vs. woodwork) but in the last analysis a judgement is required about social goals. Some particular provisions may be sexist (cooking for girls, woodwork for boys), irrelevant (engineering workshops in a computer age), or useless (certain kinds of art lessons). It is nevertheless of great importance to realise that the ability to produce is an essentially human enterprise (Marx made it the defining characteristic of humans, on which our dignity depends), which accords us human fulfilment and productive leisure. It 102

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should not, especially in times of under-employment or unemployment, be downplayed as an aspect of formal education. Practical disciplines are those which help us lead our lives more sensibly, make choices more rationally. In Aristotle’s day ethics (the art of living well) and politics (the art of governing well) were the main examples. Nowadays, lessons in health, careers, and human relations would qualify. Here again we face problems. There are those who rule them out of schooling because they are not factual bodies of knowledge. There is also a tendency to reduce them to the theoretical: health becomes physiology and ‘food science’; careers education simply provides factual information about jobs; human relations become human development or sex information. As a result, these ‘practical’ disciplines fail to provide help to young people in their daily lives and are dismissed accordingly. There will be problems in the years to come about the aim or point of various studies. Computer studies slides back and forth from being a communication skill, a productive science and a view of social life (‘awareness’). Careers education is similarly ambiguous. From all this, two things follow. First, in a culture peculiarly aware of the political, we need to appreciate the ‘timeless’ nature of curricula. There are only a limited number of ways of grasping or influencing our world and to deny this is normally self-refuting and often politically oppressive. (‘Do it my way for you cannot show your way to be better.’) Second, we must also be aware of the ‘time-bound’ nature of the curricula. Aware that ethical and social concerns predominate over epistemological ones, we need to be sceptical about fads, yet responsive to legitimate innovations. The difference between them is itself a focus of debate—but the debate itself indicates that all is not lost. A good curriculum, I suggest, is one which: (a) maps onto the maturity level of the pupils, (b is supported by the teachers who are implementing it, (c) is relevant to, though critical of, the social order outside the school, (d) brings young people to ‘knowledge’ (of widely varying kinds) and not just sets of contested beliefs, attitudes or values. Indoctrination is always a danger where there is no clear articulation with rule-governed disciplines. 103

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In this general connection, the role of universities in the curricula of primary and secondary schools is problematic. On the one hand, the university should have its part to play. It is concerned with developing and extending knowledge and this is what schools also are about. On the other hand, many an opportunity has been lost for genuine co-operation in the concerns of schools. Social studies is still a Cinderella subject and the contributing university disciplines display little interest and less imagination. Departments of sociology, history, philosophy, political science and even the newer subjects such as area studies and women’s studies have been unable to adapt their single-minded focus to the concerns of the schools. Where we go from here is partly a political question. It may, however, be worthwhile to think of the school curriculum in terms of three broad bands, corresponding to the three types of questions or disciplines: 1

2

3

There is, or should be, concern about choice questions (‘how to live my life’) from which flow language studies, computer studies, human development and relationships, careers education, religious/moral education and health education. Then, there are questions of understanding and control. Geography, history, science, and some aspects of social studies figure here. Finally, there are questions involving making or producing: music, art, craft, gardening, hobbies.

There is great need for flexible planning (many ‘subjects’ slide back and forth between areas), and individual adaptation (I would prefer a child to spend all her time preoccupied with music than to dissipate it on several areas of knowledge none of which ‘grabs’ her). We must also be less concerned with time allocations and more with ensuring attainments. Finally, there needs to be more critical reflection in schools on what we are doing. The criticism of the educational value of science ‘experiments’ is longstanding and widespread. Perhaps a valuable lesson is being lost in a wave of cynicism. There are disputes over scientific method and the role of crucial experiments. These disputes should be made explicit as part of the educational process. Similarly, in social studies it is unclear whether our knowledge of other people’s activities is akin to our knowledge of planets, rocks 104

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and biological specimens. Disputes such as these should flow over into the study of the topics themselves. There might, moreover, be unifying themes within the various types of discipline: the theoretical disciplines might be unified by the question ‘how do we know?’, which focuses attention on the nature of evidence in the various putative subjects (for example astronomy vs. astrology, history vs. ‘civics’, psychology vs. prejudice). ‘What constitutes a good X?’ might unify the productive discipline. As well as producing music, art objects or useful artefacts, students should be able to evaluate them. ‘What is the Good Life?’ could be the unifying theme of the practical disciplines. Clearly, in our sort of society, there will be no obviously right answer but teachers could take every opportunity to demonstrate that it is a central question for us all. To be educated is to accept and apply consistent standards—of evidence in the theoretical subjects, of value in the productive, of responsibility in the practical. To conclude: (a) I believe that there are reasonably firm epistemological foundations to academic disciplines and these yield varying kinds of curriculum focus. The nature of knowledge must not be ignored in the design of curricula. There are timeless questions to keep us on track. (b) On the other hand, the answers to such questions arise in a particular context in which there is interplay between ongoing traditions and time-bound interests. At any particular time, therefore, there is no objectively right answer to most curriculum questions though there are restraints on the kind of answer allowable. History opens the past to us but whether British, Asian or Polynesian history should be studied in New Zealand schools is a political question, not an epistemological one. Music is a productive art, but whether school children should produce music rather than metal or pottery artefacts cannot be answered by reference to objective norms of knowledge. If music is decided on, the type to be taught is a matter for further decision. On the other hand, answers to such questions are not arbitrary or subjective either: we are essentially human and are involved in the education of human beings. Bounds are set by the nature of 105

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the world and by the nature of us as beings-in-the-world. These provide the boundaries of curriculum and the touchstones of its adequacy. The rest is up to us in the light of political, social, ethical and personal aspirations. It will, I suppose, come as no surprise when I say that curriculum decisions are matters which go beyond the academic specialist and the practising teacher. Teachers have or ought to have, expertise in the curriculum questions and the historically evolved answers (‘disciplines’); others, however, must help them to decide what aspects of these disciplines are relevant, interesting and useful today. Dialogue with students, parents and community is vital. But, in turn, these restricted views must be located within the broader context of human existence. The ‘trick’ for teachers is to recognise both the perennial and the contextual aspects of curriculum and to preserve and unite them in such a way that, while operating of necessity within a particular social context, they see themselves as engaged in the timeless task of educating human beings.

REFERENCES Goodson, Ivor (1983). School Subjects and Curriculum Change. London: Croom Helm. Reschner, N. (1979). Cognitive Systematisation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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6 CURRICULUM AND THE MIRROR OF NOWLEDGE Jane Roland Martin

Even a cursory glance at contemporary proposals for curriculum reform serves to show that ideas of curriculum integration are immensely popular…. Yet a second glance at these proposals is enough to convince anyone that what distinguishes an ‘integrated’ curriculum from any other form of curriculum is far from clear and that the arguments on its behalf are, to say the least, elusive. (Paul H.Hirst, Knowledge and the Curriculum) When in the 1980s commentators on American society began expressing their fears for the younger generation and for the nation itself, I was reminded of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart. Chronicling the life and death of an intrepid man whose ruling passion is to become one of the lords of his fatherland, Achebe portrayed a clan and culture at the brink of destruction. ‘Does the white man understand our custom about land?’ Okonkwo asks upon his return from a seven-year exile in his motherland. A kinsman replies: How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart. (Achebe 1959:162) 107

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At the feast Okonkwo provided during his last days in exile, one of the oldest inhabitants of the motherland rises to thank him for calling the clan together. I fear for the younger generation, for you people,’ he said. ‘As for me, I have only a short while to live, and so have Uchendu and Unachukwu and Emefo. But I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice…I fear for you; I fear for the clan. (Achebe 1959:155–6) Although the elders in our twentieth-century white man’s culture did not speak of kinship bonds, their rhetoric resembled the Ibo’s. Just as the Ibo elders of Achebe’s narrative repeatedly invoke images of breaking up and falling apart, our own invoked the image of fragmentation. Nowhere was this so evident as in discussions of American education. Imbuing the curriculum of their childhood with cohesiveness and unity, William Bennett, Allan Bloom, E.D.Hirsch, Jr., and the others characterised the current course of study as fragmented and incomplete. It is a sign of America’s fundamental optimism that even as we mourn things lost, we propose strategies for regaining them: core curricula, great books, fundamental questions, lists for cultural literacy. But if behind the rhetoric of fragmentation there lies the belief that all things shattered can be restored, the image nevertheless demands attention. The implicit claim that the curriculum of yore was an integrated, unified whole does too. Describing what an integrated curriculum is not, Paul Hirst wrote in Chapter 9 of Knowledge and the Curriculum: ‘Above all it is not a curriculum organised under a number of quite distinct “subjects” such as mathematics, history, geography, English…’ (Hirst 1974: 133). The curriculum that America’s elders represent as possessing the coherence and integrity which today’s course of study lacks is that very ‘subject’ curriculum. The fact that those who call the American school and college curriculum fragmented attribute this condition to the fragmentation of knowledge itself is also worth noting. Whereas they look back to a time when knowledge itself was a unified whole, Hirst insisted in that chapter on curriculum integration that existing knowledge ‘cannot readily be regarded as a unity’ (Hirst 1974:137). 108

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BROKEN GLASS Only certain substances fragment. Cloth and paper rip or tear, plaster cracks, wood splinters. Earthenware fragments, however, and so does glass. Do those who use the language of fragmentation imagine the pieces of the school curriculum to be the parts of a broken bowl or pot? Surely not. Do they presuppose a curriculum made of glass: a window on the world, perhaps, or a mirror of reality? A mirror definitely but one turned on knowledge not nature, or they would not be saying that the ‘crisis of liberal education is a reflection of the crisis at the peaks of learning’ (Bloom 1987:346). The picture of a mirror is familiar enough by now although the application of it to curriculum is not. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Richard Rorty traced back through the history of Western philosophy the image of mind as a mirror turned on nature and of knowledge as the representation in that mirror. His primary objective was to discredit the mirror metaphor. Not even the minds of the best and brightest amongst us are ‘glassy essences’, Rorty argued (Rorty, 1979). Knowledge is not and never can be a mirror reflection of reality. But calling into question the imagery of the mind as mirror destroyed the image in the mirror. For Rorty did not simply argue that it is a mistake to view knowledge, on the model of a mirror reflection, as a direct, undistorted representation of nature. Telling us, in effect, that if there were a mirror the knowledge we would see reflected in it would consist of free floating bits and pieces, he also challenged the idea that knowledge constitutes a unified and justified whole. In this Rorty was not alone. When his book was published in 1979 scholars in fields as diverse as history and literature, biology and psychology had already been criticising knowledge for being inaccurate and incomplete—in its representation of blacks, women, the poor, for example. At the same time, by denying the very possibility of the unity of knowledge and of our finding a solid foundation on which to rest even our partial perspectival theories, philosophers, historians of science and literary critics, among others, were posing a much deeper challenge. There appears to have been, then, a double shattering: the image of a unified body of knowledge derived from first principles that our elders have claimed to see in the mirror is illusory, and so is any conception of the mind as a mirror. 109

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After Rorty traced the history of the mirror metaphor of mind in Western philosophy, Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind outlined the history of the knowledge reflected in the mirror. His saga was not merely the tale of the growth of intellectual specialisation, not simply a story of competing and apparently incommensurable theories. It was a narrative of the erosion of faith in a truth that transcends time, place, social circumstance and individual personality and in the very possibility of a unified, justified knowledge. Rorty’s book and Bloom’s might be considered the two sides of a coin were it not for the fact that Rorty considered it salutary that the mirror has at long last broken whereas Bloom’s purpose was unabashedly restorative: what Rorty and others had shattered, Bloom would repair. Unfortunately for Bloom, the intellectual history he wrote in 1987 exemplified the inadequacies of the mirror metaphor he was defending. Although he wanted his readers to believe that knowledge is the outcome of a direct, unmediated meeting between mind and ideas—if not between mind and nature itself, he allowed ‘Nihilism, American Style’, a theoretical construction of his making, to shape his representation of our past. And while he pleaded for not merely the possibility but the primacy of noninterpretive readings, he interposed his own interpretations between our glassy essences and the texts he would have us know directly. Bloom’s highly selective, interpretive reading of the history of ideas contradicts his message that individual minds directly mirror ideas. But if even Bloom’s efforts to restore the mirror tend to confirm its shattering, are not our elders right to fear for our youth? If the double shattering of mind and knowledge has indeed occurred, will not curriculum inevitably be fragmented? Criticising the university for offering ‘a democracy of disciplines’ that is ‘really an anarchy’ (Bloom, 1987:337), Bloom was convinced that the undergraduate arts and sciences curriculum already was fragmented. Implying that the shattering had happened relatively recently, certainly since he himself attended the University of Chicago, he insisted that it reflected ‘an incoherence and incompatibility among the first principles with which we interpret the world’ (Bloom 1987:346). Bloom called the fragmentation of knowledge ‘an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization’ (Bloom, 1987:346) and implied that the fragmented liberal curriculum, in 110

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turn, cannot speak to those who would develop into whole human beings. Connecting a problem of curriculum back to a problem of knowledge and forward to a problem of our young, Bloom constructed a chain of epistemological, educational and personal disintegration. Ignoring the questions about knowledge that intrigued Bloom, and focusing instead on the fragmentation of the American elementary and secondary curriculum, Hirsch added another link to the chain. The most effective recipe one could invent for the fragmentation of culture itself, Hirsch said in his best-selling book Cultural Literacy, is the curricular fragmentation we are now experiencing (Hirsch, 1987:21). Is it any wonder that both his voice and Bloom’s reached vast audiences? In manifesting their concern about the younger generation they at once gave voice to and tapped into the profound and largely unarticulated fear that this white man’s culture is falling apart.

THE MIRROR OF CURRICULUM I have been speaking here as if a double shattering has occurred, yet mind is not actually a hard brittle substance, knowledge not really a reflection in a mirror. Bloom’s interpretations of texts do, however, add confirmation to the already strong case against any theory that views mind as standing in direct unmediated contact with reality. And comments like Cynthia Ozick’s in the New York Times Book Review that both science and the humanities are ‘multiplying, fragmented, in hot pursuit of split ends’ (Ozick, 1987) support Bloom’s diagnosis of knowledge as disconnected and incomplete. The theoretical question of whether the split ends of knowledge can ever be fused, the fragments pieced together into a single whole, is not easily answered. This issue need not be decided for an exploration of the implications of the present reality of a disconnected, unintegrated knowledge to proceed, however. To be sure, Bloom’s remark about the crisis of liberal education suggests that a fragmented curriculum is the inescapable consequence of fragmented knowledge. The implicit assumption that curriculum is a mirror turned on knowledge rests, however, on what I have elsewhere called the epistemological fallacy (Martin, 1981:47). Remarking that if music is not knowledge it does not follow that it should not be taught, some years ago the philosopher 111

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William Frankena pointed out that, in discussions of curriculum, theories of knowledge are relevant but they are never in themselves decisive (Frankena, 1970:20). This point leads to the more general one that it is a fallacy to argue directly from a theory of the structure, nature, extent, or limits of knowledge to conclusions about curriculum. If music is not knowledge, it can still be included in curriculum. If how to pickpocket or swindle constitutes a kind of knowledge, curriculum space is not therefore guaranteed it. And if knowledge itself is fragmented, it does not follow that curriculum must be. Why over the years has Frankena’s warning gone unheeded? The mirror metaphor of curriculum is deeply embedded in curriculum thought. Because a mirror faithfully reflects its object, insofar as curriculum is conceived of as a glass turned on knowledge a correspondence between the structure of knowledge and of curriculum is to be expected. Why does the fragmentation of curriculum seem an inevitable result of the double shattering of the mirror of mind and the representation in it? Because a reflection of a shattered mirror image will of necessity represent that shattering, the picture of curriculum as mirror masks the fact that educators can construct their own integrated wholes. They not only can. They do. In recent years I visited two sites of learning whose curricula, though very different, were both so integrated, so unified as to make attributions of fragmentation quite inappropriate. The curriculum of Shakespeare and Company’s Workshop for Theater Professionals was divided into four subjects—voice, movement, fight and text—but, considering them conceptually interconnected, the faculty had arranged so much practical carry over from one class to the next that, as a student said in my presence, ‘You can’t even tell when one class ends and another begins. One just bleeds into the next.’ In contrast, the curriculum of the Summer Institute on Women in NineteenthCentury American Culture, held at the University of New Hampshire and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), defied description in terms of separate subjects. Drawing its primary content from the fields of history and literature but also incorporating material from art and theatre, sociology and education, its programme represented another kind of unity altogether. Neither programme was designed for school or college students. Moreover, the specialised purposes of each both 112

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distinguish their curricula from the sort being charged with fragmentation and simplify the integrative project. Yet, such examples indicate that, when educators set themselves to construct unified wholes, the actuality of a fragmented knowledge does not have to translate into a fragmented curriculum. Hiding the logical lapses of those who commit the epistemological fallacy, the picture of curriculum as a shattered mirror exonerates those who might otherwise be accused of abdicating responsibility. It also misrepresents the process of curriculum construction. Whether a mirror breaks in two or into a thousand pieces, once the shattering has occurred the fragments are of necessity disconnected. The chances of restoring a shattered mirror are slight but, supposing such action to be possible, there is only one right ordering of the fragments. Their edges are jagged, their shapes assorted: like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle their relationship to one another is both predetermined and unique as, of course, is their place in the mirror, itself a preformed whole. The parts of a curriculum are not like this. Capable of being connected to one another in more than one way, they can also be integrated into more than one whole. Take philosophy and literature. We normally view them as independent subjects yet they can be conceived of as mutually illuminating a common topic, for instance the moral life; the techniques of literary analysis can be seen as applying to philosophical texts; works of literature and philosophy from a given historical period can be viewed jointly as products of their times. Take history and science. Assumed to be even more distinct than philosophy and literature, these subjects can be seen in relation to one another: science, for example, as a formative element of history; scientific theories, in turn, as historical products. Furthermore, they can be made the constituents of quite different unities. Philosophy, literature, science, history, and also mathematics, the social sciences and the arts can be given a place in a curriculum organised around the theme of world peace as they all can in one that takes as its focus the variety of human culture and experience.1 By imposing on curriculum the logic of mirrors, we fail to see that subjects connect to one another in different ways and that a given subject has no fixed essence. Serving in one instance to illuminate issues of justice and the moral life and in another to raise questions about human nature and the relationship between nature and culture, philosophy, for example, will function 113

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differently in different curricular contexts, indeed will be seen differently in them. Perceived for some purposes as a way of thinking, for others it may be understood as a cluster of questions and answers, a body of great works or a route to selfunderstanding. Cries of distortion often greet the claim that even the most prosaic school subject can be seen under different aspects. Students will not really be learning English literature if this autonomous subject is viewed in relation to social justice! If the sciences are brought within the orbit of world peace, students will not learn physics, chemistry, biology as they really are! But how are physics, mathematics, literature and philosophy, really? If from one point of view physics is a methodology or a set of theories, from another it is a social construction and from yet another the source of a technology that imprisons as it tries to liberate. Literature, mathematics, philosophy are also seen differently from different standpoints. Does one point of view have privileged curricular status? Many would say that only when physics is seen through the eyes of the physicist or philosophy through the eyes of the philosopher is the one seen as physics, the other as philosophy. The two-mirror imagery lends support to this claim: since the mirror of mind is turned on nature, the reflection in it will be what scientists see; since the mirror of curriculum is turned on that reflection, it in turn will reflect what is seen through their eyes. Ignoring what is surely true, namely that the practitioners of a given field do not all see in the same way—just think of the different outlooks of a cognitive psychologist and a Freudian or of an analytic philosopher, a phenomenologist, and a neo-Marxist —this presumption in favour of the standpoint of ‘the’ practitioner of a discipline begs the question of why only practitioners manage to see their disciplines as they ‘really’ are. Granted, despite their differences they all view their chosen fields from the ‘inside’. Yet as Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb makes painfully clear, the eyes of even the keenest insider are sometimes myopic. Speaking in November 1945 about the question of why scientists built the bomb the United States had dropped on Japan only three months earlier, Robert Oppenheimer cited the fear that Nazi Germany would build it first, the hope that the war would be shortened, and the motives of curiosity and a sense of adventure. Rhodes reports Oppenheimer as saying: 114

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When you come right down to it, the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are…. (Rhodes, 1988:761) Look at the world through the eyes of a physicist as the mirror metaphor demands, and the effects on it of the enterprise of physics are indiscernible. So are physics’ interconnections with politics and government, its responsiveness to the exigencies of war, its ranking of the value of knowledge above the value of human life, all splendidly documented by Rhodes. Step outside physics and see it through the eyes of a historian, a sociologist or even an interested citizen—as the metaphor of a mirror turned on nature forbids—and these can appear to be just as much a part of the way physics ‘really’ is as any components of the view from within. To assign the practitioner’s standpoint a privileged curricular position is to forget that the purposes of education bear on the issue of how to view the subjects of a curriculum and that those purposes are not everywhere the same. If in the education of specialists it is appropriate to teach a field from the standpoint of those who engage in it—and even here one wishes that some attention might be paid to perspectives that take into account the human, the social and the planetary consequences of ‘advances’ in knowledge—in general and liberal education the issue of how to view the subjects of the curriculum is by no means so clearcut. Because the two-mirror metaphor denies the very possibility of our having knowledge about the disciplines of knowledge, the fact that we face such choices is often overlooked. This imagery, by placing mind outside nature peering in and picturing knowledge as a reflection of nature, conceals the existence of ‘external’ standpoints from which physics, philosophy, economics can themselves become objects of study.

THE INWARD GAZE Even as mirror imagery distorts the curricular enterprise by detaching it from human purposes and making invisible the many points at which choices must be made, it lends credence to a 115

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rhetoric that directs one’s gaze to curriculum’s inner structure. By definition, if there is a fragment there must once have been a whole. Thus, a language of fragmentation boasts a vocabulary of incompleteness. Its terminology is also one of lack of unity since necessarily a fragment was once a part of some whole; of disconnection since if something is a fragment it is a separate, distinct, unattached entity; and of meaninglessness. Instead of a mirror think for a moment about a fragile bowl. Constituting a unified whole that in its own way is both complete and integrated, its decorative as well as its utilitarian elements derive whatever meaning or significance they have from their contribution to that whole. Let the bowl break into pieces and in lieu of unity, and of the integrity, completeness and meaning this implies, there will be disconnection, incompleteness and an absence of meaning. Presupposing a once existing whole into which the various subjects fit and from which they gain their meaning, the rhetoric of curricular fragmentation is at bottom accusatory. Why did our school and college curriculum fall apart? How did it happen? Who is to blame? It is also equivocal. In the language of fragmentation claims of incompleteness, disconnection and meaninglessness pertain to an entity’s inner constitution. The connectedness of the parts of the entity and their place in the whole: such are its concerns. Does the curriculum fit people’s needs? Can it serve students well? Questions focusing on the entity’s relationship to things outside itself cannot even be asked for this is a language of internal relationships. As such, it draws attention to defects of a curriculum’s inner composition. Its external shortcomings are overlooked. In ordinary talk about curriculum, however, the attributions of incompleteness, disconnection, lack of meaning, lack of integration and their polar opposites—completeness, connection, meaning, integration—have both an internal and external sense. Is a curriculum incomplete when it is not a unified whole or when it is not inclusive? Is it disconnected when its various subjects are unrelated to one another or when it does not connect up with student needs and purposes? Does it lack meaning when there is no unifying principle or theme to give the various subjects significance or when the subjects are not meaningful to students? Does it lack integration when the various parts are not tied together or when new knowledge and different perspectives are not incorporated in it? 116

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Our elders’ silences about external completeness, connection, meaning and integration bespeak volumes. These were the primary issues for an earlier generation of educational critics. From the late 1960s through the 1970s the American curriculum was damned for being irrelevant, not for being fragmented. Its connection to students’ lives was doubted, its remoteness from the concerns of society deplored. And when its completeness was questioned, the charge referred to the exclusion of subject matter relating to the background and experiences of students, not to a lack of unity. It is not surprising that what occupied one wave of educational critics is ignored by the next. Yet the inward gaze of the present generation of elders should not go unnoticed for the one kind of curricular completeness, connection and meaning does not ensure the other. Curricula can certainly be constructed so that they are unified wholes whose subject matter fits together in a way that gives meaning to its parts and is also connected to people’s lives and purposes so as to make them meaningful to students. The subject matter of the NEH-sponsored Summer Institute on Women in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, for instance, was not only highly integrated; participants also found it extraordinarily relevant to their past experience and their ongoing lives. Indeed, members of the programme described their experience to me as ‘a homecoming’. It provided ‘the missing link’, they told me. It gave them back their ‘history’, they said. The enthusiasm with which students entered into the classroom exercises and activities of the Shakespeare and Company Workshop and the palpable joy they derived from them in turn testify to the fact that the meaning this curriculum succeeded in having for its participants far exceeded that of simply meeting their professional goals. Taking the fundamental problem of an interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays to be that of understanding his language yet seeing acting as a pursuit that engages the whole person, the staff provided experiences for students that tapped into deep feelings and emotions while also placing each of them in close relation to some text. Despite these happy examples, a curriculum possessing the internal properties of connection and meaning can just as easily be so remote from student experiences and concerns as to be meaningless to them. As long ago as 1983 sociologist Sara 117

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Lawrence Lightfoot reported that at the public high school in Brookline, Massachusetts, a relatively affluent suburb of Boston, 10 per cent of the student body who spoke English as a second language represented fifty-five native languages originating in twenty-five countries. Thirty per cent of this student body was minority, the largest proportion being Asian with that category including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian and Iranian. Twelve per cent of the total was black. In turn, at the John F.Kennedy High School outside New York City, 40 per cent of the student body was Hispanic, 35 per cent black, 2 per cent Asian. Equally significant, 800 students were enrolled in Spanish-speaking sections of its English as a Second Language Program, but the programme also accommodated native speakers of Russian, Albanian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, among other languages (Lightfoot, 1983). In 1987–88, when Samuel Freedman, the author of Small Victories, entered the world of Seward Park High School in New York City, 155 freshmen required bilingual education or courses in English as a second language and nine of ten continuing students lived in non-English-speaking families (Freedman 1990: 26). At approximately the same time in the school in Holyoke, Massachusetts that Tracy Kidder described in Among Schoolchildren, 314 of 620 students were Hispanic. All told, less than 45 per cent of the children were white (Kidder, 1989:65). As I write, California’s population is close to 40 per cent non-white with Hispanics constituting 22 per cent of inhabitants (Mydans, 1990). In Massachusetts, only 23 per cent of the students attending the Boston public schools are white (Ribadeneira and Hernandez, 1990). And a long article on education and the changed American population in The New York Review of Books begins, ‘Each year, this country becomes less white, less “European”, and less tightly bound by a single language’ (Hacker, 1990:19). Saying nothing about the external issues of inclusiveness, relevance and meaningfulness, our elders sing the praises of a curriculum that had no space for portraying blacks as full human beings—in American history they were seen first as slaves and then as the objects of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, elsewhere they were invisible. They extol a course of study in which women were invisible in both the public world and their private homes. They seek to restore an American education that had no room reserved for American Indian cultures and no place 118

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in which the poor, whether male or female, of colour or of no colour, were accurately depicted.

THE RESTORATIVE PRESUMPTION Break a fragile object and what do you do? Piece the fragments together of course, for insofar as this can be accomplished unity is restored and with it integrity, completeness and meaning. To be sure, you may have to sift through remains of other objects to find the fragments. Moreover, they may no longer fit neatly together. Still, if the procedure is not quite as simple as it first appears, it is nevertheless the obvious one to adopt. The obvious one in the case of something you cherish, that is. If, however, that shattered object was not in your opinion well suited to its environment or well fitted to its purpose, you might decide to make or buy a new one rather than restore this old one. There can be no doubt that those who have been decrying the condition of American education cherish the curriculum of their youth. They have told us so repeatedly. They have said how well versed in the classics their generation was, how extensive its knowledge, how disciplined its minds. And they have made it quite clear that they are willing to sift through the new course offerings in order to piece together the fragments belonging to it. Interpreting the multiplication of courses in the last decades as a pandering to the baser instincts and provincial tastes of our youth, they have assured us that those new subjects were designed for lazy students with no ambition. Presenting curricular proliferation in a crass light, they have quite overlooked the fact that some of the new offerings integrate into the school curriculum for the very first time material directly related to the lives and backgrounds of a majority of the student population. It scarcely needs saying that a more inclusive curriculum is not in every case a better one. We have all heard too many stories of subjects so banal, so trivial, so unworthy of study to be this naïve. Yet in a society that is fast changing colour, how rational is it to judge courses in third world philosophy frivolous? In a nation with a history of slavery and a continuing record of racial division and inequality, are the study of Black history and literature, and the inclusion of slave narratives on the reading lists of American history and literature courses, really the irrelevancies they are 119

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described as? In a land in which rape is rampant, the victims of child sexual abuse are most often girls, and women are subjected to sexual harassment at home, at school and at work, is it sensible to say that courses that represent and analyse women’s history, lives, experiences are parochial and take too subjective a point of view? This is not to say that the reports of curricular multiplicity and disconnection should be discounted. At the least they indicate the extent to which educators have abdicated responsibility for shaping the curriculum of our nation’s youth. In so doing they reveal the mirror metaphor of curriculum busily at work, as it were: as knowledge proliferates so do school subjects; as it becomes ever more disconnected, so do studies. Yet if our elders’ objective is curricular unity in the sense of internal integration, why do they not try to pull the split ends together in some brand new creative way? Why do they look back with longing to a curriculum that treated each separate subject as ‘a separate nation with its own governance, psychology, entelechy’ (Ozick, 1987)? And if our elders insist on looking backwards, why do they not try to integrate history, literature, philosophy, physics, biology, mathematics into a coherent whole? Not long ago the condition that our elders have taken as a sign that knowledge is falling apart was looked upon favourably as evidence of a knowledge ‘explosion’. Whether one calls it a fragmenting of existing knowledge or a burgeoning of new knowledge, some of those split ends constitute a problem for our elders: they have taken it upon themselves to criticise the very texts and theories of the curriculum of the past for being inaccurate and incomplete—in their representations of blacks, women, the poor, for example. Some of the new fields of enquiry that have been charged with destroying the unity at the peaks of learning reveal that those products of Western culture around which we proudly constructed the curriculum of school and college are not as universal, as objective, as all-embracing, as we once thought they were. That comprehensive study of the United States’ past, American history, has been shown to misrepresent, when it does not entirely neglect, the lives, works and experiences of women and minority men. Instead of being universal as claimed, psychology’s norms and its narratives of human development turn out to have been derived from studies of boys and men. The evidence for its theories of 120

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intelligence has in turn been manipulated so that white males invariably score the highest. It has also been demonstrated that biology’s accounts of nature have mapped society’s sex stereotypes onto the animal ‘kingdom’, its studies of primates have consistently made the male the main actor of the troop and the linchpin of that small society, its predominant account of human cultural evolution has done likewise although there is no more evidence for the theory named Man-the-Hunter than for the one called Woman-the-Gatherer. This list is far from exhaustive but even the most thoroughgoing survey would not do justice to the situation at the peaks of learning. The new scholarship has not simply revealed biases and gaps in the knowledge accumulated by the different disciplines. It has cast doubt on the very objectivity of the judgements by which some works of art, literature, history, science, philosophy have been included in the cultural canon and others have been put in the scrap heap. It is not just that scholars have recovered long-lost works by women and by men who are not white. It is not even that recent research challenges the portrayals of both groups enshrined in science and history as well as in literature and the arts. Accepted definitions of what constitutes great art and literature and even good science have been called into question. It has been shown that the creation of works in the canon of Western Culture has rested on the exploitation of the very people misrepresented in them. And the idea of canonising any set of works is itself debated. Why do our elders look backwards? At an assembly Okonkwo’s kinsman said: You all know why we are here, when we ought to be building our barns or mending our huts, when we should be putting our compounds in order. My father used to say to me: ‘Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.’ (Achebe, 1959:186) Our elders have seen a toad jumping in broad daylight. Just as the white man put the knife in the things that held the Ibo together, the knowledge our elders would prohibit, if they could, is putting it in the white man’s creation. Revealing the incompleteness of Western Culture’s theories, the partiality of 121

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its claims, the bias of its narratives, its disfiguring portraits, this research cuts through the illusion that ‘the’ classics speak for all of us. Exposing the white man’s arbitrary norms by uncovering alternative ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, acting and being in the world, it excises the myth that the canon of great works itself is eternal and immutable. Were culture transmitted biologically from one generation to the next, our elders would not need to look back. But it is passed down by education, not by our genes. Remember that one major function of education in our society has been to transmit ‘high’ culture or Culture with a capital ‘C’ —history, literature, philosophy, science, and the like—to our young, and our elders’ enthusiasm for the curriculum of yore and disdain for the more inclusive one today are explained. After all is said and done, curriculum is what enables knowledge to survive. It passes along the cultural code from one generation to the next as DNA does the genetic. If the new scholarship that casts doubt on the objectivity and universality of the white man’s heritage is incorporated into the curriculum to be studied by our nation’s young, the fragmentation of the white man’s Culture—a.k.a. Western Culture— will be perpetuated. On the other hand, if the offending knowledge can be kept out of the curriculum of our schools and colleges, the new ideas and directions it contains will have a short life. By piecing together that earlier curriculum, our elders believe they can simultaneously pass along the white man’s Culture to the next generation and erase from our cultural memory the scholarship that threatens its fragmentation. To revert to mirror imagery, one reason they seek to preserve the curriculum of their youth is that they like seeing only themselves in that reflecting surface. Let the mirror of curriculum reflect what now appears on the mirror of mind and not only will our elders see in it free floating bits and pieces of knowledge. They will see other people in that glass they think of as their very own. Pretend that knowledge has not fragmented and the image in the glass has not changed—or else somehow manage to freeze and preserve the reflection of an earlier knowledge on the mirror of mind—and what is seen in the mirror of curriculum will contain no split ends. It will also satisfy our elders’ vanity. Keep the second mirror turned on that earlier representation and, as a bonus, the knowledge that has been shattered may itself be restored. 122

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CURRICULUM WITHOUT MIRRORS In implicitly acknowledging that curriculum has power of life and death over knowledge, our elders reject the very mirror imagery they invoke to explain the multiplicity they deplore. We should not let their inconstancy distract us from the question of whether the perception that past knowledge was integrated is an optical illusion, however. Just as the curriculum of our past treated its component subjects as separate entities, was not knowledge itself composed of a number of distinct forms? This was Hirst’s position and it led him to argue against regarding knowledge as a unity. It cannot be viewed as one, he said, because the concepts and truth criteria of the different forms of knowledge ‘are of fundamentally different kinds and their unification under concepts of one kind is thereby being denied’ (Hirst, 1974:137). It is tempting to remark on the irony of a rhetoric that attributes unity to a curriculum and to a knowledge neither of which was integrated and to leave the matter there, implying that elders like Bloom know not of what they speak. I submit, however, that they are not mistaken. Is Hirst’s claim that ‘the logical structure of existing knowledge is one of distinct, unique, irreducible forms’ untenable, then (Hirst, 1974:137)? One can grant his thesis and still recognise that until very recently both existing knowledge and the curriculum it was thought to reflect were governed by an integrative principle as selective as it was unseen. What unity did knowledge and curriculum each possess? It was not the kind that would be achieved by reducing one subject or form of knowledge to another. Nor was it a function of bringing everything under a relatively small set of concepts. Rather, each school subject, like each form or field of knowledge, partook of the viewpoint of what was then said to be—and by many is still said to be—the sum total of our cultural heritage; or alternatively, that portion of our cultural heritage that should be preserved. The prose and poetry, the narratives and theories, the conceptual structures and methodologies of Western Culture that the curriculum was expected to hand down to future generations were authored by the educated white man, for the educated white man, and about the educated white man and his world or, if about other people and other worlds, from his perspective. Does the point of view on the world which gave the curriculum of yesteryear its unity yield so complete and objective a picture that, 123

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although it originates with one set of people, it serves all of us well? In Henry James’ novel The Bostonians, published in 1886, Basil Ransom tells Verena Tarrant that his interest is in his own sex: The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is—a very queer and partly very base mixture—that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt! (James, 1966:290) In attempting to preserve the primacy of the white man’s point of view it sometimes seems that our elders do not in the least care what happens to either the ladies—over 50 per cent of the school and college population today is female—or the non-white men. No doubt some of those young people who do not find their own lives, histories, experiences, world views in their school curriculum will manage to make the white man’s viewpoint their own. Unable to establish rapport with a curriculum that does not reach out to them, all too many who fail to see themselves in the norm drop out of school figuratively, if not literally, and retreat into their groups and themselves. Lapsing into a kind of cultural solipsism, they feel like—and increasing numbers are acting and living like—outsiders in their own land. The United States does not have to return to the curriculum of yesteryear to see this happen. Although the subjects of the curriculum have multiplied, the lenses with which schools fit our young are, with few exceptions, still ground by the educated white man to his specifications. Patricia, a low-income young woman in a New York City public high school, told sociologist Michelle Fine, ‘I just can’t concentrate in school, thinkin’ about my mother gettin’ beat up last night. He scares me too but I just don’t understand why she stays’ (Fine and Zane, 1989:33). How ill-matched her yearning to understand the world she lives in and her school curriculum! Even the excluded women and men who are not so disaffected as to become school and culture’s dropouts stand to suffer from a curriculum that assimilates all human experience and accomplishments to his. ‘What do you think this is lady, a delivery room?’ said a 1980s Massachusetts court clerk to a pregnant attorney as she entered a 124

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full courtroom. In that same decade a court officer asked a lawyer who had won an acquittal for her client, ‘What are you, sleeping with the judge?’ (Kennedy, 1989:6). A curriculum based on the exclusionary principles one associates with elite clubs is a downright dangerous prescription for a multiracial, ethnically diverse, two-sex society that is struggling to keep things from falling apart at a historical moment when the clouds of nuclear as well as ecological disaster loom large. Treating a problem of inclusion as one of exclusion, our elders worry about the intellectual purity of their subject matter as much as realtors once did about the racial and religious purity of the people to whom they sold property. Displaying the selfsame exclusionary bent in their recommendations, they equate giving curriculum space to research by and about the women and the non-white men who were members of this society from the beginning with a lowering of quality and a diminution of content. Bewailing the lack of integration in today’s curriculum, they endorse restrictive policies regarding the knowledge and perspectives to be included therein. Calling curricular inclusiveness ‘anarchy’, they try to ban the very subject matter that would enable us to acknowledge the differences of sex, race, class, ethnicity, religion without having them make a difference to such questions as who is qualified to govern, be educated, practise the professions. After denying that knowledge is a unity, Hirst made a point of saying, ‘Neither is it a chaos’ (Hirst, 1974:137). Our elders have embraced the false dichotomy he was so careful to avoid. Is the equation of curricular inclusiveness with chaos valid? To make the curriculum of our schools and colleges receptive to voices and perspectives that have been excluded is no more a prescription for disorder than any step toward democracy. The ‘democratisation’ of the curriculum undoubtedly introduces a degree of complexity. But complexity does not entail chaos. Does the opening up of the American curriculum by bringing in new voices and perspectives spell the dilution of quality? No one who has read Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun can possibly think so. As for the complaint that the inclusion of these works would diminish content, the truth lies elsewhere. I, at least, know of no work on our elders’ list of ‘the classics’ that shows the white man putting a knife into clans like Okonkwo’s from the standpoint of the victim, 125

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none that discusses the white man’s past exclusion of the white woman from both his education and his professions, none that represents a black woman’s repudiation of the roles white society has written for her, none that portrays a ghetto family’s agonizing decision to move into a white neighbourhood. Making differences among people disappear by representing the white man’s history, experience and work as every man’s and every woman’s, our elders discount the significance for education of their existence in the nation itself. It might seem that in a democracy theirs is the best approach to diversity. Were ours a society whose history held no traces of race, religious, ethnic and gender discrimination, curricular silence on these matters would be of little consequence. Had the white man’s culture long since incorporated the standpoint of others, our differences from his might require no comment. In our situation, however, denial promotes denigration. Given the extraordinary shifts the United States population has already undergone, the costs of suppressing perspectives other than the white man’s are high. With scholarship now revealing the limitations of his position and also making people aware, often for the first time, of the worlds he could not see, the injustice of suppressing other points of view is magnified. If we were the Ibo, exclusion might be our best alternative. But our nation was founded on diversity and has always thrived on the introduction of new ideas and viewpoints. Things will not fall apart if from an early age children look through lenses of many different hues. Quite the opposite. ‘Though we see the same world, we see it with different eyes’, Virginia Woolf wrote in Three Guineas (Woolf, 1938:18). Educators who are ready to take responsibility for their actions could make this dictum the unifying principle of a curriculum premised on inclusion rather than exclusion. Once mirror imagery is abandoned, other principles will suggest themselves too, many of them far more substantive than this one derived from Woolf. The fact that internal integration is a matter of degree, not an all or nothing affair (cf. Martin, 1977) will also become apparent.

CONCLUSION Rejection of the mirror metaphor of mind does not entail the shattering of the mirror metaphor of curriculum. There can then be 126

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no two-mirror logic, but knowledge can be viewed as a human or social construction rather than a reflection of reality and curriculum still thought of as a glassy essence turned on knowledge. Does a mirrorless concept of curriculum radically sever education from the theory of knowledge? Not at all. A repudiation of the epistemological fallacy leaves open Rorty’s question of the status of epistemology itself. It is also quite compatible with the thesis that there is an intimate relationship between curriculum and knowledge, for it is the assumption of a hierarchy—of a one-way causal influence flowing from knowledge to curriculum —that is rejected when mirror imagery is discarded, not all connections between the two. The presupposition that knowledge has a legitimate claim to all curriculum space is also disclaimed. Will a mirrorless concept of curriculum turn our gaze outward? Not necessarily. But at least it allows us to ask those questions about external meaning, disconnection, incompleteness that our elders have been avoiding. In particular it lets us ask if a nation worried about falling apart does not require a unifying curriculum— one that develops kinship bonds among girls and boys of different races, social classes, ethnicities—far more than a unified one. And it makes it possible for us to acknowledge that even if at some time in American history a curriculum over which the white man’s perspective had a monopolistic hold fitted this bill, it no longer does.2

NOTES 1 2

The analysis of the parts of curriculum presented here is based on the analysis of the parts of a single subject in Martin (1977). I wish to thank Ann Diller, Michael Martin, Beatrice Nelsen, Jennifer Radden and Janet Farrell Smith for their helpful comments on this essay.

REFERENCES Achebe, C. (1959). Things Fall Apart. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett. Bloom, A. (1987). The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. Fine, M. and Zane, N. (1989). ‘Bein’ Wrapped Too Tight: When LowIncome Women Drop Out of High School’, in Weis, L., Farrar, E. and Petrie, H. (eds), Dropouts from School. Albany: SUNY Press.

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Frankena, W. (1970). ‘A Model for Analyzing a Philosophy of Education ’, in J.R.Martin (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Education. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Freedman, S. (1990). Small Victories. New York: Harper & Row. Hacker, A. (1990). ‘Trans-National America ’, The New York Review of Books, 37 (18) : 19–24. Hirsch, E.D. Jr. (1987). Cultural Literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hirst, P.H. (1974). Knowledge and the Curriculum. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. James, H. (1966). The Bostonians. New York: Penguin. Kennedy, J. (1989, June 23). ‘Researchers say Male Lawyers Worst at Offensive Behavior ’, The Boston Globe, p. 6. Kidder T. (1989). Among Schoolchildren. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Lightfoot, S.L. (1983). The Good High School. New York: Basic. Martin, J.R. (1977). ‘ The Anatomy of Subjects ’, Educational Theory, 27 (2): 85–95. Martin, J.R. (1981). ‘ Needed: A Paradigm for Liberal Education ’, in J.F. Soltis (ed.) Philosophy and Education. Chicago: The National Society for the Study of Education. Mydens, S. (1990, June 10). ‘A Shot at the Action for Hispanic Citizens’, New York Times. Rhodes, R. (1988). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ribadeneira, D. and Hernandez, P. (1990, June 10). ‘ Boston Schools Steer Hispanics Down a Path to Failure ’, The Boston Globe. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Woolf, V. (1938). Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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7 MORAL AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION: HIRST’S PERCEPTION OF THEIR SCOPE AND RELATIONSHIP Brian Crittenden INTRODUCTION Writing early in this century, Emile Durkheim claimed that industrial societies were facing a fundamental moral crisis. An adequate range of common beliefs and values, on which any society’s coherence depends, was being corroded by the proliferation of sub-groups, each with its own distinctive set of values. He labelled the condition ‘anomie’. While his general theory did not allow for much in the way of remedial action, he believed that schools could play a crucial role through moral education. However, if they were to be successful, it was essential for them to give up the mistaken notion that secular morality equalled religious morality minus its religious aspects. They could only succeed if the details of moral belief and practice were thoroughly grounded on a secular, rational justification. In several writings over ten or so years from the mid-1960s, Paul Hirst was, in effect, addressing a number of the concerns that are central to Durkheim’s diagnosis. These are still crucial, whatever we may think of Durkheim’s sociological (and philosophical) theories about the nature of social structure and change, or his account of moral education. What Hirst discusses in these writings is the place of morality and religion in the practice of formal education, with particular reference to common (or government) schools in societies that reflect principles of liberal democracy (including respect for cultural pluralism). In the treatment of this complex topic, Hirst examines the relationship between morality and religion, and defends a purely 129

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secular, rational justification of the former. He also relates both morality and religion to his general theory about forms of knowledge, and to his interpretation of the basic normative criteria of what distinguishes the practice of education. Against this background he draws conclusions on what would characterise moral and religious education. While he emphasises the limits on strictly philosophical enquiry in reaching conclusions about the curriculum, his discussion goes beyond a mainly epistemological argument and includes some aspects of social or political philosophy. Cultural pluralism as it affects both moral and religious beliefs has to be taken into account, especially when the question is how these areas should be treated in the curriculum of a common school. In this context, Hirst applies the distinction between the public and private domains. While it affects morality as well as religion and has consequences for both in education, in Hirst’s account religion seems to be consigned wholly to the private domain. All these matters have clear bearing on the crisis of modern societies as identified by Durkheim. It would be interesting to pursue them all and relate them in detail to concerns about social fragmentation and the part that schools can and should play. Within a single chapter, one must be less ambitious. I shall restrict myself to highlighting various features of the topics outlined, indicating points at which I agree or disagree with Hirst’s position, and, where I disagree, suggesting what I regard as a preferable alternative.

MORALITY AND RELIGION AS FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE In his account of the forms of knowledge, Hirst identifies various bodies of belief that employ distinctive concepts and that can be tested, defended or refined as true, on the basis of appropriate methods of enquiry and ways of assessing their epistemological status. He claims that the tradition we call liberal education has throughout its history been preoccupied with rational intellectual development. Hence a genuine liberal education must, in some manner, be an induction into each of the forms of knowledge and be limited to this process. Whether or not one agrees that Hirst has accurately interpreted the tradition of liberal education, it should be noted that he clearly does not regard liberal education 130

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as exhausting the legitimate and desirable role of schools in the practice of formal education. Both morality and religion are given a place among the distinctive forms of knowledge that Hirst believes can be distinguished at the present time. In the first main account (1965a) examples are drawn from morality and religion to illustrate the key dimensions that identify forms of knowledge.1 Religion is included in the basic category of ‘distinct disciplines’, although it is not clear whether Hirst is referring to theology or the broad cultural practice of religion. (There is a similar uncertainty over his inclusion of literature and fine arts rather than the systematic study of these cultural artefacts.) While ‘moral knowledge’ is not regarded as strictly one of the distinct disciplines, Hirst does add it to that group as a ‘unique way of understanding’. In his reflections on the forms of knowledge eight years later, Hirst’s convictions about morality as a domain of rational knowledge have strengthened while he has become somewhat hesitant about religion (Hirst, 1974a). He rejects the suggestion that religion is a unique area of beliefs of a kind in which none of them can be known to be true. His argument rests on the link between meaning and truth criteria. Given that we can identify uniquely religious beliefs, there must be at least some religious claims that can be judged to be true. (It is not obvious why we must reject the possibility that a set of beliefs may have meaning, yet not be able to be confirmed or disconfirmed; or while believed to be true by their adherents, can all be shown to be false.) Hirst’s view on religion is ‘that in the present state of affairs we must at least take the claim to knowledge seriously’ (1974a:88). Although his further comments are somewhat vague, he seems to regard religion as being, at least in part, a unique form of knowledge. Despite the qualifications Hirst makes in revisiting the forms of knowledge, he clearly holds that, insofar as schools are engaged in the balanced development of rational minds, both morality and religion are basic ingredients of the curriculum. Each constitutes an area of rational enquiry in which there are distinctive concepts for expressing truth claims and distinctive criteria for identifying the true claims from the false. Provided they are interpreted in this way, their independent place in liberal education is fully justified. As I have noted, the only shadow cast on this otherwise clear picture of morality and religion in education is some hesitation 131

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over the epistemic status of religion. When Hirst treats their relationship and place in education more directly, the picture becomes somewhat blurred, or at least more complicated. In discussing his detailed comments on these topics, I think it is useful and interesting to see them in chronological order. However, I shall not attempt to cover every relevant item.

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION During the same year in which his influential article on liberal education and forms of knowledge appeared (1965), Hirst wrote an article entitled ‘Morals, Religion and the Maintained School’ (1964b). It is reproduced in Knowledge and the Curriculum (1974), along with a short additional note. On the question of whether moral understanding necessarily depends on religious knowledge or belief, Hirst succinctly presents several strong arguments in support of a negative response. He stresses that while they support the independence of the moral domain from the religious, they do not deny legitimacy to the latter. In fact, if morality could not be sustained without religious assumptions, basic religious beliefs would be rendered vacuous. To speak with any sense of God’s supreme moral goodness presupposes that we have a notion of what is morally good in human life that we apply, by analogy, to a Being believed to be the ultimate source of all finite things. Hirst perhaps oversimplifies the relationship between Divine commands and how moral obligations and the content of moral practices are justified. Plato (1953:318) examined this issue in relation to a version of the question whether things are good because God commands them or whether God commands them because they are good. It is a question that has been much debated throughout the history of Western thought. For Kant, our moral consciousness is the basis of our belief in God and our concept of God derives, above all, from the idea we have of moral perfection. ‘We cannot intuit God’s perfection and can only derive it from our own concepts, among which that of morality is most eminent’ (1964:110). Among the theologians, Aquinas would probably find Kant’s claim more satisfactory than would Augustine. But within the theological tradition of the West there would be general agreement with the philosophers that God commands what is morally good, not that the morally good is simply what 132

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God commands. It does not follow, however, that they would accept—as Hirst seems to assume—something like Durkheim’s formula in reverse: that religious morality equals secular morality plus religion. I shall return to the question of religious morality and its relationship to education after completing the journey through Hirst’s several relevant writings. It should be noticed that in the article to which I have been referring he does not regard religion as an area in which there are any agreed public tests of true or false claims (or even meaning). As a consequence, it belongs in the private sphere of beliefs or ways of life; unlike morality, it cannot be taught in the common schools as one of the dimensions of public knowledge. Hirst expresses some optimism about the emergence of public tests of religious truth claims, but in the meantime the common schools must restrict their role to teaching about religion. This, he emphasises, involves not simply an external examination of religion from such perspectives as psychology and sociology, but also an attempt to understand religious beliefs and their justification by those who profess a religious way of life. Given Hirst’s reservations about religious beliefs as knowledge, his conclusions for education clearly follow. However, it is then not clear why he included (and continued to include) religion in his canon of fields of knowledge. In his references to religious education, Hirst relies on what seems to be a too sharply drawn distinction between the public and private in human life. As we shall see, this distinction recurs in other writing. There are many disputed religious and secular beliefs that have clear consequences for the public domain (e.g. the use of public funds for abortion or euthanasia, questions of war and peace, the government’s regulatory role in the economy). To quarantine such beliefs within the private domain would seem to undermine the point of respecting pluralism in a democratic society. Several of the themes to which I have referred are taken up again in ‘Public and Private Values and Religious Educational Content’ (1967). Here, he applies the distinction between public and private to morality as well as religion. In regard to morality, there is a core of rationally defensible values whose rational grounds are acknowledged. There are also commonly accepted moral values which are held on diverse and disputed grounds. As ‘the objective canons of the public world of reason’ must be 133

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the guides for teachers in the common schools, the first group of moral values and their justification are proper objects of moral education. The common schools may also teach (and reflect) the second group of moral values but not take any stand on how they are to be justified. Private moral values and diverse justifications of morality, whether the latter are private or public, are legitimate objects of study in the common school as long as they are acknowledged for what they are. On religion, Hirst appeals to what he claims is public agreement to the effect that religious beliefs are wholly within the private sphere. Hence, the only legitimate role for common schools is to teach about religion—in a way that encourages appreciation without attempting to promote commitment. He acknowledges that the balance can be difficult to achieve in practice. It should be noted that in this paper the case for teaching about religion (rather than to be religious) appeals directly to a claimed consensus about where religious beliefs are located in the division between what is public and private rather than to their epistemological status. The article ‘Morals, Religion and the Maintained Schools’ provoked some comments, particularly on the nature of religious beliefs and religious education. D.Z.Phillips, writing in 1970, challenges Hirst’s account of the epistemology of religious beliefs, although his conclusion about religious education is much the same as Hirst’s. He too wants religion to be ‘elucidated’ in the course of schooling, but not ‘advocated’. On the epistemological issues, Phillips claims that while we can ask what is truly religious, it makes no sense to ask whether religion as such is true or false. He goes on to assert that the term ‘true’ as used in religious discourse has a different meaning from ‘true’ as applied to matterof-fact claims. In response, Hirst (1970) rejects Phillips’ assumption that the very notion of truth, and not simply the relevant criteria, varies from one area of belief to another. He reiterates his view that there are no clear criteria that any reasonable person would accept for settling the truth, or even reasonableness, of conflicting claims in religion. Thus it follows that, although religion may be the object of study in school, it cannot be treated as a form of knowledge. (Given the problem with settling truth claims in religion, the continued inclusion of religion in Hirst’s list of forms of knowledge seems unjustified.) Hirst correctly points out that Phillips treats rules for meaningful claims as though they were the same as rules 134

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for truth claims, and confuses ‘orthodox’ with ‘true’ in speaking of religious beliefs. While Hirst agrees that the criteria of truth vary from science to religion to morality and so on, the notion of truth itself is held to be the same for all forms of knowledge. The problem for religion is that it lacks agreed criteria for adjudicating between conflicting claims to truth within this domain. Whether diverse truth criteria can be reconciled with a common meaning for ‘true’ would seem to depend on how distinct each set of criteria is. In reviewing his theory about separate forms of knowledge, Hirst recognises that there are significant overlaps. While he speaks of objectivity being related to ‘different conceptual schemes in different societies’, there are substantial concessions to a realist position. He notes that ‘all intelligibility that we can have is tied to the creation of concepts within a setting that being given, we cannot escape, and which is in large measure not of our creating’ (1974a: 93)’. There are different types of objectivity related to distinct conceptual schemes. But, for Hirst, the differences are not so much a reflection of social and cultural perspectives as of the various ‘givens’ that are common to societies and are not socially constructed. Hirst’s earlier discussion of morality and religion and their place in education is developed in his book Moral Education in a Secular Society (1974b). Although there are some variations and the introduction of additional dimensions, the more detailed treatment of the main themes is thoroughly consistent with the views he had already expressed in more summary form. One basic purpose of this book is to argue that secular morality (that is, morality interpreted independently of religion) can be rationally justified in a way that is compatible with recognised interpretations of a Christian way of life. Again, a key point in Hirst’s argument is that the appeal in the Christian tradition to an omniscient and omnipotent creator who knows what is right and good for human beings needs an independent ground on which to identify moral good and establish that the deity is supremely good. The theistic beliefs are regarded by Hirst as forming a metaphysical framework in which the Christian is not only not hindered from pursuing rational epistemological enquiry about morality but needs to do so. The metaphysical framework supports the assumption that there is an order of nature independent of human knowledge. By the 135

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exercise of their capacity for reason, human beings can reach objectively true conclusions about this order whether in the physical world or that of human conduct. On the common Christian belief that divine assistance (or grace) is required if a person is to act morally well, Hirst again suggests that this should be regarded as a metaphysical position, to be distinguished this time from psychological and sociological knowledge about moral action. He correctly notes that belief in the need for such assistance still requires the distinct nature of moral action to be identified. There are, however, some difficulties with the account that Hirst presents in the early chapters of Moral Education in a Secular Society. First, there is no argument to show that the rational basis for morality which he believes is acceptable to many Christians is satisfactory—either preferable to or at least as sound as any other effort at rational justification. Second, Hirst does not consider the position of Christians who would accept the rational justification outlined to the extent that it refers to morality as the object of purely human reflection, but would argue that there is a rational defence of a religious morality that is associated with what is claimed to be divine revelation. Any adequate treatment of this topic would lead to an examination of how religious faith and reason are thought to be related in the Christian tradition. Whatever we might finally make of the arguments, if we were to take two examples—Aquinas (who works at a generalised and theoretical level) and Newman (who focuses on a person concretely believing and knowing)—it would have to be agreed that the relationship between faith and rational enquiry is regarded as a close and complex one. Third, Hirst claims that the rational defence of secular morality can be fully acceptable to the ‘secular Christian’. Depending on what one means by ‘secular Christian’, this claim is virtually tautologous. Hirst himself gives little attention to making clear what he means by a secular Christian, or to the very complicated background issue (both in theory and practice) of the relationship between the sacred and the secular in the history of Christianity. It would be a serious oversimplification to propose, for example, that the separation of Church and State (a dimension of the above issue) was equivalent in the eyes of Christians to the separation of religion from all aspects of the public life of a society and its culture. 136

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No doubt, Hirst is correct in pointing to the secularisation of contemporary Western societies—the displacement of religious thought by ‘autonomous, secular areas of thought’, and of religious institutions by secular ones. These changes have, perhaps, given rise to a new breed called the secular Christian. People of this persuasion seem to take a very different view of the distinction between the sacred and the secular from such an influential figure in the history of Christianity as Augustine. Although he recognises that there is a distinction to be made, one of the keynotes of his thought is the uncompromising and total subordination of the secular to the service of religion. The presence of God in the world gives to the latter an indirectly sacred character. While Augustine acknowledges the role of reason in morality, the link between God as Absolute Order and order in our world is such that for him morality without religion is essentially immoral. Finally, secularisation is interpreted as though it has occurred mainly by default. It is what we are left with following the decline of religion. But it can also be seen as a positive development reflecting a diverse range of beliefs (from the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement and so on) that challenged the assumptions of supernatural religion. To be a secularist is hardly to be neutral about the claims of religion. Of course, secularisation is itself a generic term for a range of outlooks that differ from one another in fundamental beliefs and values. It applies, for example, to both secular humanists and egoistic hedonists. In Chapter 3 of Moral Education in a Secular Society Hirst critically reviews various efforts at a strictly secular justification of morality. It is not clear that the kind of justification he regards as most defensible does accord with the reasoned account of morality which, he acknowledges, is required even by flexible versions of Christian belief. In rejecting ethical naturalism he says that we must, nevertheless, ‘somehow do justice to the rooting of morality in the human and natural context which gives it its raison d’être’. This seems to provide a bridge to the appeal made by Christians to the order of nature in offering a reasoned justification of morality. However, the position he supports is one that identifies logically necessary principles of moral action, given that we are serious about having adequate reasons for what we do. In commenting on this position, he outlines some of his general epistemological beliefs. He emphasises that conceptual schemes, whether in science or morality, are human constructions that differ 137

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in time and place. This does not mean that truth claims or what may reasonably be believed are simply relative to the conceptual schemes. To varying extents, such schemes are used to make objective claims about human experience, and their objectivity depends on how well they meet the test of this experience. Hirst also seems to hold that the diverse conceptual schemes relating to the main areas of human experience are, in general, evolving in the direction of greater objectivity. He claims that the diversity of such schemes is qualified by the fact that human beings everywhere share common characteristics and live in a common physical world. What is lacking in this account is how claims made within a conceptual construction (whether or not it is bound to a particular time or culture) can be tested for objectivity against an area of experience in a way that does not suppose the construction itself in the interpretation of that experience. As we saw earlier, Hirst applies to religious morality the kind of formula that Durkheim believed distorted secular morality. For Hirst, Christian morality equals secular morality plus religion. What religion adds is an interpretation of a more inclusive way of life, within which morality (in the strict sense) is linked with various other ideals. Within this way of life moral ideals are, it is true, given special significance. To respect or disregard them has consequences for the relationship of human beings to God. It is part of Christian religious belief that these ideals, which must be justified on strictly rational grounds, reflect the divine intention for how human beings should live. Whether or not we regard Hirst’s interpretation of morality as being most defensible—or at least satisfactory, the question remains whether it is the kind of rational justification that would normally be accepted in the Christian tradition. Certainly, there has been widespread support within this tradition for a rational justification of morality that, without invoking beliefs in divine revelation (that is, distinctively religious beliefs), includes what are claimed to be rational arguments about a divine being. Perhaps the best example is the argument developed by Aquinas on natural law (1952).2 His thought was shaped by a long line of Christian and non-Christian thinkers stretching back to Aristotle. Over the centuries following Aquinas’ work, it has exercised a profound influence. The philosophy of which it was an essential part has been described by a writer in the middle of this century as ‘the most authoritative expression of what may well be called 138

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the Catholic view of life’ (d’Entreves, 1951:39; see also Donagan, 1969:325–39). For Aquinas a distinctive function of intellectual knowledge (which supposes and builds up on sense experience) is the ability to grasp the essential qualities (nature) common to a number of individual things. Intimately related to this intellectual activity is the recognition of order running through the whole universe. The universe is intelligible because it is intelligently designed. This intelligent design is its order. When the human mind grasps the essential nature of a particular thing, it grasps at the same time an aspect of this design. It now has a criterion for judging the way in which the thing should act or be used. The particular thing’s existence is a continuous development towards the fullest possible realisation of its essential nature. The claim about an intelligently designed world is central in Aquinas’ justification of natural law or morality. At the beginning of the discussion, he states explicitly his basic assumption: ‘supposing that the world is ruled by divine providence’ (1952).3 His earlier argument for this assumption includes an attempt to offer a rational defence for belief in the existence of an uncreated necessary being on whom all other beings’ existence depends and whose actions as creator are supremely intelligent. The created world is the realisation of a design which embraces the totality and its component parts. It is this realised design of the creator or God which human beings in some way grasp through their intellectual activity. Aquinas’ argument supposes that human beings are capable of grasping the moral law written in the nature of things and of freely assenting. Given the Christian belief in original sin, natural virtues may be difficult to achieve, but they are not impossible. The crucial point to emphasise is that for Aquinas the justification of natural morality includes as an indispensable feature the role of a provident creator. It is also worth noting in relation to Hirst’s position on the distinction between religion and morality two other features of the scheme defended by Aquinas. First, natural religion (acknowledging one’s dependence on God and what is due to God on this account) is regarded as the most important of the natural virtues. Second, the perfection of natural moral virtues is possible only through the supernatural moral virtues and the theological virtues (above all charity) which are integral to the 139

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religious life that is bound up with the Christian belief in the Incarnation. Hence, it is a serious distortion of Christian morality (at least in one of its main interpretations) to regard it as simply secular morality associated with a set of distinctively religious beliefs and practices. The key to Hirst’s account of moral and religious education in Moral Education in a Secular Society is in the claims he makes about the general nature of education. He distinguishes between a ‘primitive’ and a ‘sophisticated’ notion. The former consists merely in handing on to children what we believe to be true so that they too become believers. The latter transmits only those beliefs and values for which there are ‘publicly acknowledged’ rational grounds, and with the intention of securing acceptance only on the basis of those rational grounds. In its sophisticated version, the object of education is the development of individuals who live a rationally autonomous life. However, he wishes to avoid the impression that education, as he interprets it, is preoccupied with producing a kind of rational calculating machine. He insists that it must develop the dispositions, emotions, skills and substantive commitments that go with trying to live a life of reason. According to Hirst, one necessary characteristic of education in this interpretation is that it be secular. If this is so, then by definition it makes no sense to talk of a Christian (or any other religious) approach to education. But he does attempt to go beyond the exclusion of Christian education simply by stipulation. If there is no distinctively Christian version of mathematics, science and the other ingredients of education, there can be no Christian form of education considered as a whole. It is interesting to notice that he extends the same argument to any way of life, even of a secular kind, that contains beliefs and values contested by others. Humanism is mentioned as an example along with Christianity and Buddhism. While the encouragement of rationally-based beliefs, attitudes and so on, accepted because they are seen to be rationally justified, is central to the task of education, there are, I believe, various difficulties with Hirst’s interpretation. First, what counts as a life of reason is itself contested; there are also ways of life that radically challenge the primacy of values that characterise any of the main interpretations of ‘a life of reason’. 140

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Second, throughout Hirst’s discussion there is ambivalence over the role that consensus plays in establishing what counts as a rational method, belief, value, attitude and so on. If consensus is not decisive, it is possible that those who follow a contested way of life may do so on reasonable grounds. If, in the course of transmitting this way of life to children, they seek commitment on the basis of these reasons, their practice would seem to be thoroughly consistent with Hirst’s ‘sophisticated ’ version of education. If consensus is treated as a practical or political requirement rather than an epistemological one, it is obvious that the common schools should not seek rational commitment to any belief or way of life that is seriously disputed in the society. Given respect for pluralism in a liberal democracy, the common schools may encourage commitment, but only to what is generally accepted as rationally justified and, when there is agreement, to the grounds of justification. For the rest, they should present as impartial an account as possible of the state of argument. The same respect for pluralism would seem to require at least the toleration of those who seek to have separate schools that reflect the beliefs and values of a particular way of life. Third, despite Hirst’s rejection of an abstract rational calculator as the model for education, he tends to underestimate those complex elements, beyond what can be established on rigorously rational grounds, that influence both the school as a social institution and what is formally taught and learnt. There is, for example, that large and important dimension of individual and social life that may broadly be labelled ‘custom’. In the strict sense, much of its content is neither rational nor irrational. Most of the particular features of the common language that the members of a society study in their schools provide a significant illustration. But this applies to virtually all the main institutions, the arts and architecture, clothing, cooking, manners and so on—even when they are subject to thorough rational scrutiny and revision. Fourth, what can be said about the epistemological status of mathematics, science and other constituents of a curriculum is only one of the bases (as Hirst himself has emphasised) on which an educational theory and practice are determined. The fact that there is not, for example, a Christian version of mathematics, physics and various other major intellectual disciplines does not prevent the whole practice of schooling from being informed by 141

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distinctive Christian beliefs, values and traditions. Some aspects of such theory can be founded on reasonable, although disputed, grounds; others are in the category of custom, and are neither rational nor irrational. In addition to the general informing theory, there are beliefs in religion, morality, politics and other areas of the curriculum that can be defended as reasonable, even though they are disputed. Unless ‘sophisticated’ educational practice is arbitrarily narrow in its definition, the key condition is that students should learn about the contested nature of such beliefs. I have referred here to the possibility of a Christian theory of formal education. But the principle applies to any of the diverse theories of education, whether religious or secular. Some tend to emphasise a particular ideal of social order, others reflect an interpretation of the individual as a learner, others a particular ordering of moral and social values, and so on. There are various educational theories that can be reasonably defended. Pluralism does not require us to refrain from commitment to a theory, belief or value simply because it is rationally disputed. What can be expected of educators in following a general theory of schooling or in defending particular theories or methods in teaching a subject is that their approach should be founded on sound reasons and that their students, as they become sufficiently mature, should be made aware of other defensible positions. A final point that relates to all the others concerns the tendency to draw too sharp a distinction between rational reflection on a practice such as morality, religion or the political life of one’s society, and induction into the practice itself. In Hirst’s scheme the former belongs to ‘sophisticated’ education and the latter to what he calls the primitive concept. In reality, the two should (and do) interact in complex ways. One significant aspect of the relationship has been emphasised—and perhaps exaggerated—in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics (1962). But the truth is that we are first inducted into many practices before we engage in rational reflection on any of them in their details or as a whole. The learning of one’s first language is a perspicuous example. Formal moral education would be a curious phenomenon if it did not presume that students were already taking part in the practice of morality and had some commitment to it. In the case of religious education, it is obvious that there must be a significant difference for those who study it from the outside (as they might learn about various practices of an alien culture) and those who are engaged in a religious way of life. Members in either category 142

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might, of course, change their attitudes to religion as a consequence of trying to gain a rational understanding of the practice. But a study of religion which does not assume any experience and is obliged not to encourage commitment (conditions that the common schools of a liberal democratic society should observe) is not to be taken as the only justifiable form for an educational practice that respects values of rationality. On the content of moral education, Hirst seems to mix practical issues of consensus with directly epistemological considerations. He identifies principles and rules of morality that have clear rational justification (must this be generally recognised as well?), those not clearly justified but which the members of a society accept as necessary for social life, and those that are neither clearly justifiable nor regarded as necessary. It is consistent with the objective of rational autonomy for moral education to encourage commitment to the first but not to the third. Hirst recognises that the line between the first and second is always difficult to draw in practice. However, he seems to maintain the position he defended in ‘Public and Private Values and Religious Educational Content’: support for commonly accepted beliefs along with acknowledgement of different grounds for their defence (when this is the case). While the emphasis is on the social aspect of morality, he also allows a place in education for principles and issues of personal morality provided they are amenable to rational justification. This goes a little further than in the earlier writing to which I have just referred. His crucial principle is that the ‘life of reason’, which is the defining object of secular education, is to be lived in the private as well as the public sphere. The dimensions of moral education are more complex than he suggested in ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’. In addition to propositional knowledge and intellectual skills directly related to moral beliefs, Hirst includes a broad range of related knowledge and skills along with the development of appropriate dispositions and emotions. Perhaps the only notable omission from the list is ‘moral imagination’. Following Durkheim, Hirst sees the school as occupying an intermediate place between the family and the general society. He notes the importance for moral education of discipline and other aspects of a school’s organisation as a social institution. In relation to formal teaching and learning, he emphasises that, although every area of the curriculum may contribute, there is a 143

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need for teachers with specific competence in the content and methods of moral education. Some part of the curriculum should be given to dealing directly with morality. Although it might fit under various labels, it should not be located within an established curriculum subject such as English—and, as we have seen, it would be particularly misleading in Hirst’s view to link it in any special way with religious studies. The teaching of morality must be thoroughly informed by the relevant criteria of rational enquiry. If the full range of moral development is to be effectively encouraged, teachers need to give special attention to the moral issues that relate to the experience of students themselves. Given Hirst’s claim about the essentially secular nature of education, it necessarily follows that religious education cannot go beyond a rational study of the nature of religious beliefs and practices, which may include an effort to appreciate what religion means for those who live a religious way of life. What must be excluded is any effort to encourage the commitment and dispositions involved in being religious. This cannot, in Hirst’s definition, be an educational activity. Even in a school associated with a religion, learning to be religious should be clearly distinguished from religious education in the proper sense (that is, a rational enquiry into the nature of religion). Hirst’s reasons for assigning commitment to religious beliefs to the private domain of life and excluding it as an object of education (strictly interpreted) are not entirely clear in Moral Education in a Secular Society. There are the practical difficulties which arise from fundamental differences over religion and the historical significance they have had. As noted earlier, common schools in a liberal democratic and pluralist society must, as a practical policy, be as impartial as possible between different religions, and between religious and non-religious ways of life. It is, of course, often claimed that this policy, wittingly or otherwise, is not neutral and, in fact, endorses secularism. I do not think that Hirst gives sufficient attention to this problem. There are also the epistemological concerns which we have seen in his earlier writings about religious belief as knowledge. If true education is focused on the pursuit of rational objectivity, there can be no place for education in religion (by contrast with, for example, mathematics or science) because in this domain ‘there are at present no clearly recognizable objective grounds for judging 144

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claims’ (Hirst, 1974b:81). Hence, it seems that even if everyone in a society were committed to a certain body of religious beliefs as true, education in religion would still be excluded. Here we return to the question raised earlier of how, in Hirst’s scheme, the objectivity of truth claims is settled independently of the level of agreement over such claims. Given the above quotation and his exclusion from educational practice of teaching to be religious, it is curious that he still persists in listing religion among the areas in which ‘serious claims to a distinct type of understanding and thought must be recognized’ (1974b: 84). We return to the earlier conclusion that, on epistemological grounds, either religion should not be in the list or its status in education should be the same as any other form of knowledge.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS I agree with Hirst that morality can be rationally defended without reference to religion, and that, despite the apparent paradox, for those who take a religious perspective such a defence is necessary. I am less confident that the rational defence can be neatly achieved by identifying moral principles logically required by anyone determined to live a life of reason. Apart from the undue weight that may be given to intuition in this approach, it could well end merely in principles of prudence or enlightened self-interest. I believe that the argument requires an involved, less tidy appeal to basic human desires, needs and circumstances in an effort to distil criteria of what is fitting for the conduct of human life. The argument is a qualified form of naturalism. It is not, of course, constructed in a vacuum but in relation to practices that claim to reflect the ideals and dispositions that characterise the moral good for human beings. It will be clear, however, from the earlier discussion that my main demurral is over the kind of connection Hirst sees between religion and morality, and thus religious and moral education. I believe that there is a much more complicated pattern of relationship.4 All our schools—both government and private—must reflect and encourage acceptance of the range of moral practices and values that are indispensable for the human quality of life in our society. These include the core values of social morality (such as 145

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justice, truth-telling, honesty, concern to avoid injury to others, co-operation in attaining basic common goals) and the values on which pluralism itself depends (particularly respect for personal freedom, tolerance of diverse beliefs and practices, commitment to non-violent means of persuasion). Although it may seem to be a paradox, no liberal pluralist society is possible in the absence of certain commonly held moral values. These (and other) moral values can be defended on the basis of religious beliefs. Although the status and interpretation of morality as an ingredient of a religious tradition vary, most religions have in fact given a significant place to moral ideals and practices. This is particularly clear for the religions that have been influential in Western culture. Even for the large number who now reject a religious framework, it is clear that the present situation of morality in our society cannot be adequately understood without appreciating its historical affiliations with religion and exploring the nature of the connection between them. When ethical theory and moral practice are approached in the context of religious studies (whether the objective is simply to learn about religions or develop a more informed commitment), there are, I believe, several conditions that need to be met if such studies are to contribute in a distinctive and effective way to moral education. First, religions should not be treated as though they were virtually nothing more than systems of morality. Their scope includes, for example, the communal celebration of what is thought to be the relationship of human beings with God, a more or less complex pattern of beliefs about the nature of human life and its ultimate purpose that affects a believer’s interpretation of every important aspect of experience, and standards of conduct in addition to those of a strictly moral kind. Second, the study should examine the extent to which a religious view of life makes real differences to the practice of morality. Third, special attention should be given to the role that religious beliefs (in particular, an appeal to the will of God) may play in understanding the nature of moral obligation and in justifying moral practices. The second and third conditions open up a range of complex and controversial questions about compatibility and dependence in the relationship of morality to religion. I shall refer briefly to two key points. 146

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The first point is that, if we focus on the most fundamental characteristic of a religious view of life (namely, belief in a personal transcendent Being on whom all other things depend for existence), I think it can be shown that, in principle, religion is not simply compatible with the basic nature of morality but adds significant dimensions that are not found in secular morality. The second point is that any meaningful talk about the goodness of God depends on our having notions of moral and other kinds of good that are themselves independent of reference to God. But it may still be claimed that a fully satisfactory justification of morality must finally be anchored in the acknowledgement of an all-perfect, all-loving personal Creator. Given that the existence of this Being could be established, I think the claim would be correct. However, if this way of justifying morality is to succeed it must first be able to give an adequate justification of its claim about the existence and nature of God. In religious studies all aspects of this question (e.g. the problem of evil) should be faced honestly and thoroughly. In addition to the question of God’s existence, because religious moralities typically appeal to Divine revelation in justifying the content of morality, it would be necessary to provide adequate evidence for the claim that God has in fact revealed that such and such was a moral obligation (e.g. in relation to divorce or birth control). It seems to me that these are extremely difficult matters to justify in a way that strengthens the efforts to defend morality simply in the light of what we know about human needs and capacities and the conditions of human life. (Moreover, even if one relies on Divine revelation, it is necessary to learn to think at this other level in order to make specific applications of revealed moral principles.) It does not necessarily follow that it is unreasonable to adopt a religious faith (not to be confused with making strict knowledge claims); and for those who do, it gives strong motives for moral action as well as affecting the view of morality in ways earlier suggested. This is where I think one must go beyond what Hirst allows. At the same time, I am claiming that religious faith is not a particularly secure further ground on which to justify the ingredients of morality. While students in any kind of school should gain some understanding of the ways in which moral values and judgements can be defended without appealing to a religious tradition, this is no simple matter. There is not a single, universally accepted 147

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philosophical account (or ethical theory) of morality. But the diversity should not be exaggerated (particularly in relation to the core of social moral values outlined earlier). As I have suggested, moral standards can be rationally assessed by appealing to the common needs and capacities of human beings, to the characteristic conditions on which human flourishing depends, and to human experience viewed on the broadest possible scale. If morality can be independent of religion (as based on belief in a transcendent personal Being), I think there is a more general sense in which it can be claimed that there is a necessary religious aspect to morality. It would be a serious mistake to present morality as though it were simply a matter of accurate knowledge and a clear grasp of the rules of logic. There are elements in morality and related conditions of human life that escape the full grasp of knowledge: for example, the mysterious aspects of good and evil that individuals find within themselves and others, of suffering and death, of the existence of the universe beyond the reach of scientific explanation. There is also something mysterious about being a person that underlies the arguments for respecting all human beings equally as moral agents. In these and other ways, the practice of morality depends on attitudes of awe, wonder, reverence that are akin to those of religion.

NOTES 1 2 3 4

Hirst’s paper was prepared directly for Sizer’s book; most of the other papers in the collection were first presented to a conference at Harvard University in the previous year. Summa Theologiae, I-II, Quaestio 90 seq., II-II, Quaestio 57, Art. 1, Quaestio 58, Art. 5, 6, 7. Summa Theologiae, I-II, 91, 1c. I have attempted to discuss the issues more fully in ‘Moral Education: Somes Aspects of its Relationship to General Values Education and the Study of Religion’, Religious Education in Australian Shools. G. Rossiter (ed.), Canberra: Curriculum Development Centre, 1981, Ch. 6. I have considered moral education more generally in, for example, Form and Content in Moral Education, Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1972; Education for Rational Understanding. Hawthorn, Vic.: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1981, Ch. 8.

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REFERENCES Aquinas, Thomas (1952). Summa Theologiae. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. d’Entreves, A.P. (1951). Natural Law. London: Hutchinson. Donagan, Alan (1969). ‘The Scholastic Theory of Moral Law in the Modern World’, in Kenny, Anthony (ed.), Aquinas. New York: Doubleday & Co. Hirst, Paul H. (1965a). ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’, in Archambault, R.D. (ed.) Philosophical Analysis and Education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reproduced in Hirst, Paul H. (1974). Knowledge and the Curriculum. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ch. 3. Hirst, Paul H. (1965b). ‘Morals, Religion and the Maintained School’. British Journal of Educational Studies, November. Reproduced in Paul H.Hirst, Knowledge and the Curriculum. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ch. 12. Hirst, Paul H. (1967). ‘Public and Private Values and Religious Educational Content’, in Sizer, T.R. (ed.) Religion and Public Education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Ch. 17. Hirst, Paul H. (1970). ‘Philosophy and Religious Education’, British Journal of Educational Studies, XVIII (2): 213–15. Hirst, Paul H. (1974a). ‘The Forms of Knowledge Re-visited’ Knowledge and the Curriculum. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ch. 6. Hirst, Paul H. (1974b). Moral Education in a Secular Society. University of London Press. Kant, I. (1964). Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, tr. H.J.Paton. New York: Harper & Row. Oakeshott, Michael (1962). Rationalism in Politics. London: Methuen & Co. Phillips, D.Z. (1970). ‘Philosophy and Religious Education’. British Journal of Educational Studies, XVIII (1): 5–17. Plato (1953). ‘Euthyphro’, The Dialogues of Plato, tr. B. Jowett, Vol. 1, 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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8 WITTGENSTEIN’S SPECULATIVE AESTHETICS IN ITS ETHICAL CONTEXT R.K.Elliott Wittgenstein says that ethics and aesthetics are one (N77e). This is not an exaggerated statement of his position, but since his ethics is more immediately surveyable and comprehensible than his early views on aesthetics, a sketch of his ethical views is at least a desirable preliminary to a presentation of his early views on aesthetics. In the specifically ethical part of this chapter I am much indebted to Brian McGuiness’ splendid biography: Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig (1889–1921), which provided both inspiration and materials essential to it. Wittgenstein’s early ethics and aesthetics, the chief source for which is the Notebooks 1914–16, are themselves systematic, and form part of a more comprehensive philosophical system. One naturally relates them to the tradition of German Idealism which, following Kant’s example, provided philosophical equivalents, or versions, of Christian ideas and principles. The development of Wittgenstein’s aesthetics was largely accomplished during the period 1916–30. I have assumed that, apart from the changes which I suggest constituted their development, Wittgenstein’s ideas on aesthetics remained essentially the same during this period as they are in the Notebooks. This assumption would be implausible for certain further ideas expressed by Wittgenstein in the 1940s, but I consider these also to belong to the development of the early aesthetics. The Cambridge lectures of 1930–33 and the Lectures on Aesthetics of 1938 expose erroneous preconceptions of the earlier aesthetic, but the new ‘critical’ aesthetic does not simply supersede the old ‘speculative’ one. 150

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ETHICS McGuinness provides an outline of Wittgenstein’s religious development during the decade after he first ‘saw the possibility of religion’, around 1910 (McGuinness, 1988:94). From this beginning his thought was within the Christian tradition, and was greatly influenced by Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, which he discovered in 1914. Engelmann reports that Wittgenstein felt unreserved admiration and respect for Tolstoy (Engelmann, 1967: 79), and The Gospel in Brief seems indispensable for understanding Wittgenstein’s religious and ethical views in the Notebooks. Entries in Wittgenstein’s diaries 1914–16 show how resolutely he tried to live in accordance with his beliefs. In his ‘Summary of the chapters’ Tolstoy maintains that we know the Father only as we recognise him within ourselves (G268). He identifies the God within very directly with Jesus (the Son) and with the Spirit, and describes it as ‘the understanding of life’ (G135–6). The meaning of life is revealed in the life and teachings of Jesus (G252). It can be expressed briefly: The meaning of life is fulfilling the will of the Father’ (G284). The individual is called upon to give up a life in pursuit of his personal desires (the life of the body) and to substitute for it the one true life, common to all believers, which is the life of the spirit (G176, 182). Wittgenstein’s view is very similar. He writes: ‘To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning’ (N74e). ‘The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father’ (N73e). He says that my will comes into the world from outside as into something which is already there, and that there is no logical connection between my will and the world which would guarantee that my wants were fulfilled; I am powerless to bend the happenings of the world to my will. Hence I have the feeling of being dependent on an alien will. This alien will we can call God, who is in this sense merely fate. But I can make myself independent of fate by renouncing all influence on happenings (N73e–4e). ‘I am then, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I appear dependent. That is to say: “I am doing the will of God”’ (N75e). By adopting an attitude of renunciation towards the world I constitute the ‘Independent I’, or rather allow its life to become my life, for this I is the God within, the spirit. ‘There are two godheads: the world and my independent I’ (N74e). 151

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Tolstoy writes: ‘And as I live in the body by the will of the Father, so that which lives in me lives by my will’ (G182). Wittgenstein’s view is similar. Although now I am pursuing my personal wants, I am free to make the fundamental choice to live in agreement with the world. If I do, I no longer feel myself to be dependent on an alien will, since I have made that will my own. Understanding the meaning of life as God, I connect it with the comparison of God to a father, by seeing the world—that which it is the meaning of life to be in agreement with—as the Father. This is the revelation of God. By my choice the world ‘waxes as a whole’ (N73e), like a sound which, acquiring a meaning, becomes a word. My choice changes nothing in the world, but it changes the boundaries of the world: before my choice I was within the limitless world, but in making my choice I take up a stand outside it, and contemplate it as a (limited) whole. I make a kind of double movement: by renouncing the world, I set myself free from it as the determinant of my desires and their frustration, and so in a sense lose it; but then I get it back again—as, so to speak, the paradigm to which my will is freely to conform. Now it is as if there were a logical connection between my will and the world which guaranteed the fulfilment of my wanting (cp. N77e). Angelus Silesius puts it a little differently (Silesius, 1953:23): If but my will be dead, what I will, God must do; And I prescribe for him pattern and goal thereto. I remain free to fall, however, in which case the spirit no longer lives in me, and I pass from a state of grace to a state of perdition. Wittgenstein says ‘I will call “will” first and foremost the bearer of good and evil’ (N76e). The independent I, since it is the spirit, cannot be the bearer of evil; so it seems that Wittgenstein is here thinking of the I which can be called the ‘ethical will’—that by which the independent I lives in me, if it is chosen, and so long as I do not let it go. Basic to The Gospel in Brief, though not much emphasised by Tolstoy, is a reference to God as transcendent, ‘the source of everything in heaven and earth’ (G172), from which the spirit has descended (G176). In the Notebooks Wittgenstein makes no reference to the transcendent. He seems to have identified the Son with the spirit, but unlike Tolstoy (and his gospel sources) he identifies the Father with the world. 152

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Wittgenstein’s thinking is therefore kept entirely within the domain of immanence. In the Notebooks he writes, ‘How things stand, is God/ God is, how things stand’ (N79e). In the Tractatus, however, he says that how the world is is completely indifferent for what is higher (T6.432). These remarks are not in opposition. The facts belong only to the task, and are spiritually indifferent. The task is to be in agreement with the world, no matter what the facts may be. But how things are is also God, who is the task as well as the understanding of the task and the performance of it. Wittgenstein agrees with Dostoevsky that the man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence, and says that the problem of life disappears when one sees that life has no other purpose but to live and be content (N73e). He remarks that the happy life seems to be justified in itself, and that the question why one should live happily seems tautological (N78e). But for Wittgenstein ‘being happy’ means being in agreement with the world (N75e), and the question why one should live in agreement with the world does not seem tautological—unless, like Wittgenstein’s, one’s point of view is that of solipsism. In a note in his diary (8.12.14 McGuinness, 1988:225), Wittgenstein writes of his relation to Nietzsche: To be sure, Christianity is the only sure way to happiness; but what if someone spurned this happiness? Might it not be better to perish unhappily in the hopeless struggle against the external world? But such a life is senseless. But why not lead a senseless life? It is ignoble? —How can it be reconciled with the strict solipsistic position? But what must I do in order that my life shall not be lost to me? I must be conscious of it always. For the strict solipsist, the only life that makes sense is one which brings the two aspects of the encompassing self (the subject and the object) into harmony, and the only way of doing this is for the will to bring itself into agreement with the world. Thus the alienation of object from subject is overcome, and happiness achieved. On the philosophical level the injunction ‘live happily’ is a call for the Absolute to come into harmony with itself. What Hegel saw as the task of philosophy, however, Wittgenstein saw as also, and even more fundamentally, an ethical task. His Idealism permitted him to envisage the fulfilment of the ethical task as virtually a complete identification with the world. He imagines 153

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this by transferring as much as possible from the subjective to the objective pole. He declares the body to be part of the objective world just like any other thing, as is also the soul with all its psychological properties and events. These are all facts, and so belong to the world. He declares the thinking subject to be an illusion, transfers his ‘idea’ (concepts) to the world as objective aspects of it, and construes his ‘spirit’ (character, imagination, style of being) also as a character of his world (= the world); ‘… and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out’ (N85e). But there is still the will. Wittgenstein says that in the same way as he can speak of a spirit that is common to the whole world, so he can think of a will that is common to the whole world. Thus the last vestige of the subject is transferred to the side of the object. This transfer is not only the result of a ‘strict thinking out’, but also the accomplishment of the moral ideal: extinction of the personal will and substitution of the will of God in its place. Since, however, I have chosen to make the world-will unique, it is, ‘in a higher sense my will’ (N85e). Now the two godheads are no longer divided, the independent I having vanished into the world. The identification is not absolutely complete, nevertheless, because from the solipsistic standpoint the existence of the world depends on my consciousness: ‘the subject is not a part of the world but a presupposition of its existence’ (N79e). Annihilated in God, I nevertheless keep God in being. Wittgenstein’s thought echoes that of Angelus Silesius (1953:37): God is my final end; if in me he begin His being comes from me and I do cease in him. Harmony (agreement) seems to be the fundamental idea and imperative of Wittgenstein’s ethical thought. Defining happiness in terms of it is not at odds with Christian teaching, since it amounts to identifying happiness with Christian peace. Wittgenstein had difficulty, however, in reconciling it with the altruistic demands of the Christian life. Wanting good for one’s neighbour, like wanting good for oneself, involves the possibility of disagreement with the world. So ‘in a certain sense it seems that not wanting is the only good’ (N77e). He acknowledges that 154

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it is certainly correct to say that conscience is the voice of God, and that having a bad conscience is not being in agreement with something, but he is not sure whether this something is the world. The adjustment which he is required to make may be some change in his attitude rather than to the world. And his unhappiness at having offended someone, for example, may not be the voice of conscience at all. For these reasons he considers ‘live happily’ to be more suitable as a general maxim than ‘act according to your conscience whatever it may be’ (cp Bhagavad-Gita, Ch. XI). He says that ‘Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy’ (N74e), and that ‘whoever lives in the present lives without fear and hope’ (N76e). Schopenhauer has a phenomenological notion of living in the present, which he conceives not as a good but as the common wretched condition of humanity: in the phenomenal world under the tyranny of the will only the present exists (WWR II, 479). Tolstoy mentions living in the present in two of the chapter headings of The Gospel in Brief; both assert that it is the true life (G212, 222). The sources of the idea are Jesus’ teaching against anxiety over worldly things (Matt. 6:25–33; Luke 12:22–32), and his exhortation to constant watchfulness for the coming of the Kingdom, as expressed, for example, in the parable of the Ten Maidens. Tolstoy expresses both these themes explicitly in connection with living in the present (G220– 21, 285). For Tolstoy, however, living in the present is living without fear and doubt (G237), not without hope. Wittgenstein must have thought that to hope for something would be to want some particular outcome, and so would constitute a temptation to disobedience (disagreement). Besides in this psychological sense, Wittgenstein also understood living in the present in a phenomenological sense. He writes that ‘if by eternity is understood not infinite temporal duration but non-temporality, then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he lives in the present’ (N75e). It is non-temporal in the sense that the person who has chosen agreement makes the world as a whole, including its time, the object of his thought, and so has adopted a standpoint ‘outside the world’ and ‘outside time’. Tolstoy, also, describes living in the present as ‘non-temporal’ (G212, 222). Wittgenstein says that ‘For life in the present there is no death’ (N75e). But within a solipsistic, immanentist framework the notion of the deathlessness of living in the present is obscure, for despite its ‘non-temporal’ character, living in the present is nihilated by 155

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death just as surely as any other form of consciousness. Here Wittgenstein’s account seems to rest on a religious belief which is inconsistent with his solipsism.

AESTHETICS Wittgenstein maintains that Ethics and Aesthetics are one (N77e), and that the connection between art and ethics is that The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis’ (N83e). Seeing ssa is seeing from the perspective of eternity as Wittgenstein has already explained eternity, i.e. from the perspective of one who is living in the present. The good life is the world seen ssa: Jesus’ life, for example, could be briefly described as ‘the world seen ssa’. The work of art is the object seen ssa: Wittgenstein does not say that the work of art is the image, or the representation, but the object seen ssa. He says that the usual way of looking at things sees them ‘as it were from the midst of them’, whereas the view ssa is ‘from outside’, ‘in such a way that they have the whole world as background’. It seems from this that seeing the object ssa is also, in a certain sense, seeing the world ssa. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says that the contemplation of the world ssa is the contemplation of it as a limited whole (T6.45). This is clearly meant to apply not only to ethical ‘seeing’, but also to aesthetic contemplation, in which things are seen together with space and time, instead of in space and time. Since each thing modifies the whole of logical space, seeing it ssa is seeing it together with the whole of logical space, i.e. against the total background of objects and events (N83e). (Here Wittgenstein seems to be recognising that when aesthetically contemplated the object remains ‘historical’ in the sense that we continue to think of it as having a cause, past, future, etc., although these matters are in the background, and does not pass out of all such relations as Schopenhauer maintains (WWR I, 178–9).) Seeing objects from the midst of them, in space and time, I take to be seeing them in the lived context of our ordinary wanting, in which the objects are perceived in their relation to our actual and possible purposes. From this perspective, the world is seen not as a limited whole but as radiating from the subject in all spatial and 156

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both temporal directions, each to an apparently endless extent, its objects related in apparently endless chains of causality. Wittgenstein says that if he has been contemplating a stove and someone tells him that all he now knows as a result is the stove, this result would seem trivial. But this represents the matter as if he had studied the stove ‘as one among the many things in the world’, i.e. as if he had regarded it merely in a spirit of objective curiosity, as he might regard anything else in the room, or outside it. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world, and everything else colourless by contrast with it… For it is equally possible to take the bare present image as the worthless momentary picture in the whole temporal world, and as the true world among shadows. (N83e) In these remarks Wittgenstein signals his rejection of the kind of aesthetics propounded by Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic contemplation is perceptive knowledge of a Platonic Idea (or Ideas) through the particular phenomenon which instantiates it. Of phenomena, Schopenhauer says: ‘…only the real archetypes of those shadowy outlines…can be described as truly existing’ (WWR 1.171). Confronted with Schopenhauer’s Platonism, Wittgenstein asserts the equal validity of phenomenalism. Plato and Schopenhauer think of the ‘bare present image’ as a worthless fleeting picture of the real, one of an infinite procession of such shadows, but we are not compelled to regard it in this way; it is equally possible to see it as the reality, relative to which everything else, whether concepts or phenomena past or future, are as shadows. This is how Wittgenstein sees it. The implication of his remarks, in the context of what was said about the stove, together with his choice in favour of the ‘bare present image’ is that Schopenhauer’s cognitive aesthetics is misconceived. Is knowledge of the Idea of a stove, or of any other Ideas that contemplating a stove may reveal, really less trivial than knowledge of a particular stove? Aren’t both motivated by curiosity, the will for knowledge, and isn’t Schopenhauer mistaken in thinking that aesthetic contemplation, as he conceives it, is will-less? It seems that Wittgenstein chose in favour of the ‘bare present image’ because it is that—the object qua phenomenon—which in his opinion has specifically aesthetic significance. He maintains 157

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that ‘as a thing among things each thing is equally insignificant; as a world each is equally significant’ (N83e); and he says that ‘things acquire “significance” only through their relation to my will’ (N84e). Ordinarily, in what may be called the ‘natural’ attitude, they acquire such significance as they have in relation to what we want them for or what we want from them; but in aesthetic contemplation they acquire their significance relative to the will’s attitude of agreement with the world, i.e. through being seen ssa. I take it that, in Wittgenstein’s view in the Notebooks, experiencing this significance is experiencing the object concerned as beautiful (and that a work of art is beautiful insofar as it communicates the aesthetic significance of the object represented in it). Aesthetic contemplation, in which the object becomes my world, is ‘living in the present’ in the strict phenomenological sense, but unlike living in Schopenhauer’s eternal present, it is also an expression of freedom. It is both a symbol of the good, i.e. of the good life, and an element in that life. Naturally, we are curious to know exactly what aesthetic significance is, but all we learn from the Notebooks—other than that it is not what Schopenhauer took it to be—is that certain objects which presumably have it (namely, works of art) are capable of making people happy. Wittgenstein asks if the essence of the artistic way of looking at things is that it looks at the world with a happy eye (N86e). Assuming that he thought that it was, then since art is a kind of expression, no doubt he also thought, in accordance with the classical theory of expression, that the work created by the artist will communicate this happiness to the spectators, and that if the art is good it will communicate it completely (N83e). That he is indeed thinking along these lines is suggested by his remark that there is certainly something in Schiller’s idea that the end of art is the beautiful, ‘And the beautiful is what makes happy’ (N86e). But all that this tells us is that the work of art communicates the condition for the experience of aesthetic significance, namely happiness (as Wittgenstein understands the word). This will be sufficient for the spectator to experience the aesthetic significance of the object represented; but we are not told what that significance is. Nevertheless, something can be inferred from what Wittgenstein says, about how the artist will represent things in order to express both their aesthetic significance and his own 158

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happiness. The happy eye will not see the object with resentment, envy or hatred, since it will see as one who accepts things as they are, and who will not be deceived by hope or fear into representing them optimistically or pessimistically, but will represent them in some manner truthfully. Progress can be made towards solving the problem of aesthetic significance if we are willing to accept that the ideas expressed in the Lecture on Ethics (1929–1930, published 1965) are still substantially the same as those which Wittgenstein held in 1916, or that they represent a natural development of his earlier thought. The link between the Notebooks and the Lecture is the remark: ‘Aesthetically the miracle is that the world exists. That what exists does exist’ (N86e). In the Lecture, Wittgenstein says that he is going to use the term ‘Ethics’ to mean not simply the general enquiry into what is good, but in a slightly wider sense to include ‘what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics’. Nothing he says fits this description until he comes to discuss three types of experience which he believes to be of absolute value (despite the ‘nonsensical’ character of that idea). Of these, two (feeling absolutely safe, and feeling guilt) are not generally thought to belong to Aesthetics. The third is wonder at the existence of the world. This is ‘absolute’ wonder, i.e. it does not depend on whether or not scientists have succeeded in explaining the existence of the world. Wittgenstein says that one might express it by some exclamation such as ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist!’ and that it is ‘exactly what people were referring to when they said that God had created the world’. In terms of his own immanentist position, these people were expressing themselves is a misleading way. They seemed to be referring to a transcendent creator, whereas in fact they were referring not to a God beyond the world but to the world itself. Expressing wonder at its existence is expressing wonder at God’s existence. This may be thought sufficient reason for understanding aesthetic contemplation, in Wittgenstein’s aesthetic, as resulting in an experience of wonder at the existence of the object; which is also wonder at the existence of the world, since (a) the object is my world; (b) it is seen together with the whole of logical space; and (c) every object is capable of being seen in this way. This wonder belongs to the aesthetic ‘significance’ we have been looking for. 159

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Since aesthetic contemplation involves the contemplation of the world as a limited whole, and ‘the feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling’ (T6.45), aesthetic contemplation involves the mystical both as a feeling of the oneness of the world, and of wonder at its existence. Because, as a world, each thing is equally significant, contemplation of each and every object will have the same experience of wonder as its culmination. In short, every object has aesthetic significance, which at this time Wittgenstein seems to have identified with beauty; but all this beauty is in the eye, or rather will, of the beholder. We know from his diaries that Wittgenstein accepted the requirement never to relax the life of agreement with the will of God, for on one occasion (12.10.14) he regrets that ‘…there are times when I cannot simply live in the present and for the spirit’ (McGuinness, 222). But if he is required continually to see the world ssa, is he not also required to see the objects in the world ssa, including the people or ‘lives’? He seems to have thought he was. In a diary entry (7.10.14) he says that he may die in an hour, or a month, or not for a few years, and there is nothing he can do about it: ‘How then ought I to live in order to hold my own at that moment, to live amid the good and the beautiful until life stops of itself.’ (McGuinness: 222). Clearly he thought that it was within his power to ‘live amid the good and the beautiful’ and that he ought to do so. It is fair to say that this can be accomplished only by ‘living happily’ in Wittgenstein’s sense of the expression, which involves seeing the world and the objects ssa, and doing so constantly. But he may have thought that it involves constantly calling to mind the thought that every person is at least potentially God, and perhaps the Dostoievskian idea that there is good in the depths of even the most depraved (McGuinness 254–5). If so, it would seem that the happy eye is not just an accepting but to some degree a loving eye. Be that as it may, it is obvious that Wittgenstein did not see living ‘amid the good and the beautiful’ just as an inspiring ideal, approximated to by a few people such as St Francis, but as the urgent immediate task which constitutes the meaning of life. Even after the Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein’s account of the aesthetic was still defective in certain important respects. He had said virtually nothing about how the object needs to be represented, or what other qualities the work needs to have, if the aesthetic significance of the object is to be successfully communicated. Nor 160

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had he said whether the look of the object changes in any way when it is aesthetically contemplated. There is no talk of any ‘emergent’ quality. All we are told is that the object becomes my world, and that this rapt contemplation occasions wonder. It seems that the object throughout goes on looking as it always does. This is not in accord with aesthetic experience. Wittgenstein’s main concern in a long note written in 1930 (CV4e) is to describe the function of art, but from what he says in the course of doing this it is possible to glean something further about how the object appears when seen ssa. He asks us to imagine a theatre, on the stage of which a man who thinks he is unobserved is alone in a room, walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, sitting down, etc. He suggests that if we were seeing this from the right perspective, ‘from outside’, it would be ‘uncanny and wonderful at the same time’—more wonderful than anything a playwright could have arranged, ‘like watching a chapter of biography with one’s own eyes’. From this we can gather that when something is seen ssa it appears as something formed and complete in itself, as a unified whole. The action Wittgenstein describes is a mere collection of events—fragments—without any definite overall form, yet when seen ssa it appears as ‘a chapter of biography’, i.e. as a unity. This is not really surprising, since, like the stove, when seen ssa, it would be my world, a limited whole. Engelmann had told Wittgenstein that when he (Engelmann) rummages around in a drawer full of his own manuscripts they strike him as so splendid that he thinks of making them available to other people, but that when he imagines publishing a selection of them the idea loses its charm and becomes impossible. Wittgenstein explains that when Engelmann looks at what he has written and finds it marvellous ‘he is seeing his life as a work of art created by God and, as such, it is certainly worth contemplating, as is every life and everything whatever’. Wittgenstein goes on to say: But only an artist can so represent an individual thing as to make it appear to us like a work of art…. A work of art forces us—as one might say—to see it in the right perspective but, in the absence of art, the object is just a fragment of nature like any other. The artist makes the object appear to us like a work of art, and that forces us to see the object ssa, as a work of art created by 161

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God, i.e. as something the existence of which is (absolutely) wonderful. Seeing ssa is not seeing disinterestedly, in the manner described by Kant, Hume or Bell. Wittgenstein says ‘…it is right that those manuscripts should lose their value when looked at singularly and especially when regarded disinterestedly, i.e. by someone who doesn’t feel enthusiastic about them in advance’. So aesthetic contemplation is not just beholding the object with an eye which lets it be, without wanting it to be different, but with a mind which is to some extent disposed to find it wonderful. The function of the artist is that of ‘capturing the world sub specie aeterni’ (CV5e), by representing the object in such a way that the representation induces in the spectator this disposition to find the existence of the object (absolutely) wonderful. The artist cannot, and ought not to, assume that the spectator has any predisposition in favour of the object. It is to create that disposition in the spectator that he makes the object appear like a work of art. Wittgenstein obviously thinks of a work of art as something which is a whole rather than a fragment or collection of fragments, and we know from another note written in 1930 (CV4e) that he thought that a (successful) work of art would have ‘organic unity’. Being a unified whole is something which a work of art created by a human being has in common with a work of art created by God, i.e. the object seen ssa. And since, in addition, wholeness is pleasing to perceive, it serves to induce in the spectator a favourable disposition towards the object. Aesthetic contemplation of art is not simply a matter of being thrown into ‘the aesthetic attitude’, but, since one is forced to see the object ssa, of being brought into a state of grace. It is not a settled disposition of the will, however, but a temporary condition of it. Nevertheless, in that condition the spectator spontaneously bestows aesthetic significance upon the object. It can therefore be said that aesthetic contemplation gives us a true taste of felicity. No doubt, part of the importance of art is that reflection upon the experience of it can reveal to us what great things we are capable of. (Schiller says, excessively, that each and every being ‘forgets its limitations’ when it is under the spell of beauty (Schiller 27.10, 1967:217).) But felicity itself depends upon the resolute choice of renunciation, which is necessary for the good life. In this respect, as Schiller says, ‘Life is serious, art is gay’ (N86e). In a letter to Engelmann (9.4.17 Engelmann, 1967:7) Wittgenstein describes Uhland’s poem Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn 162

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as ‘really magnificent’. The poem presents what Wittgenstein would call a ‘life’. It is a succinct work of only twenty-eight lines, and has a pleasing unity which one admires. But in reading it the reader’s attention is directed to Eberhard’s life, and it is this towards which wonder is felt. Another example would be Wordsworth’s Lucy poems. Each is well-formed—an ‘organic unity’—and by means of his artistry the poet captures and holds the reader’s interest, but it is Lucy’s ‘life’ that is the primary object of wonder (wonder felt for the poet’s art is irrelevant in this context). From the 1930 note it seems that it is not just for the ‘existence’ of the object that wonder is felt, but for something special about it: Engelmann’s ‘life’ seemed ‘splendid’ to him when he was seeing it as a work of art created by God. But this specialness is not any sort of excellence, since everything whatever possesses it when it is seen ‘from the right perspective’. I take it that what, according to Wittgenstein, is wonderful is the object seen ssa in its ‘uniqueness’, by which is meant not the object in its difference from other things, but the object in its own character, apart from evaluative comparisons with other things. Seen ssa, each object is unique in the way that the world is unique. When the stove becomes ‘my world’, it becomes unique in this sense. But even when contemplated in its uniqueness, what is there about the stove which corresponds with and accounts for the wonder that we feel towards it? It must be something over and above its appearing as a unity. So long as a sufficient account is lacking of how the object comes to look when seen ssa, we shall be left with a response which seems excessive to the object, or— what is the same thing—with a bestowal of significance which is not properly effected because the object does not make it a part of itself. Wittgenstein provides the element missing from his account in a remark written in 1946 (CV56e): The miracles of nature. One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature. (The blossom, just opening out. What is marvellous about it?) We say: ‘Just look at it opening out!’ The remark calls to mind the 1916 remark: ‘Aesthetically, the miracle is that the world exists. That what exists does exist’ (N86e). 163

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In 1944 (CV45e) Wittgenstein describes a miracle, in the same remark, both as ‘as it were, a gesture which God makes’ and as ‘a gesture of nature’, and indicates that the point of such a gesture is to be impressive. He says also that a miracle is a sacred gesture, not something purely corporeal (CV50e). I take him to mean that it must arouse absolute wonder, not merely wonder at an, as yet, unexplained phenomenon. I conclude that what in 1946 Wittgenstein calls ‘miracles of nature’ is the same as what in 1930 he called ‘works of art created by God’, and that they include Lucy and Count Eberhard and anything else whatever, so long as it is seen from the right perspective. Wittgenstein’s italics indicate what the insight is that he wishes to communicate in his 1946 remark; art does not merely induce wonder at the existence of the object, but shows the object as wonderful. The artist so represents the object that, to someone suitably disposed, the representation looks as the object looks when seen ssa, namely wonderful. Getting us to see the object in its wonderfulness is showing us the aesthetic miracle. This wonderfulness, although bestowed upon it by the subject, appears as a state or condition of the object. It would be misleading, however, to say that a change of aspect takes place, since aspect-change normally involves a change in the concept presented, and is therefore describable, whereas this change is not. The object appears filled with significance, but this significance is the difference between the object as it is ordinarily seen and the object seen ssa, appearing as the ‘uncanny’ character of the object; and the sense of it is the sense of the advent of the wonderful. That to which the transition is made—the object as it looks when seen ssa—is such that any description of it which is not fantastical or simply obscure will be indistinguishable from a description of the object as it is ordinarily seen. How it looks when seen ssa is what is wonderful about the object. Objective wonderfulness and subjective wonder are then reciprocally related, waxing and waning together. It is the same with art. Cézanne’s or Delacroix’s stove, or Van Gogh’s bed or chair, or Cézanne’s apples or card players do not appear wonderful at first sight; they become wonderful, and then relapse into the more stilted mode of being in which their wonderfulness is potential only. In the examples given, except perhaps Count Eberhard, it is the wonderfulness of the ordinary which is shown, but ordinary or extraordinary is strictly immaterial; each thing, and 164

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each ‘life’, when seen from the right perspective, is wonderful in its ‘uniqueness’. In his Lecture on Ethics Wittgenstein writes: And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. (1965:11) As our language stands, the exclamation ‘How extraordinary that the world should exist!’ relates only to the world’s existence not yet having been scientifically explained—to the relative, not to the absolute miracle. Some other expression for the absolute miracle is therefore needed. Wittgenstein tries to think of the existence of language as fitting this bill, but decides that it cannot be the right expression. The crucial difference between the banal exclamation and the existence of language is that the exclamation makes a reference to the relative miracle, whereas the existence of language makes no such reference to the absolute miracle. Consequently, no matter how impressive the existence of language may be as a response to the miracle, we cannot do by the existence of language what we cannot do by means of language, namely, express (i.e. communicate) the miracle, unless the existence of language somehow shows the miracle. But if it did, the miracle would never be out of our minds—every thought and utterance would remind us of it. How can that be reconciled with the actual intermittent character of our awareness of the miracle? Wittgenstein concludes that since we cannot express the absolute miracle, talk about it remains nonsensical. It seems that in 1946 Wittgenstein saw that art was ‘the right expression’ for the absolute miracle, able to fill the role for which he had once considered the existence of language a candidate. The 165

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miracle can be expressed by art without our thereby having to be continually aware of it. It must have struck him, also, that art had been fulfilling this role from time immemorial. No doubt that is why he says that art is based on the concept of the miracles of nature. It seems a little puzzling that Wittgenstein should not have achieved the insight that art shows the aesthetic miracle until 1946, when in 1917 he had already said that in Uhland’s poem ‘the unutterable is—unutterably—contained in what is uttered’. In the poem, however, Eberhard’s life is presented enigmatically, by means of the symbol of the hawthorn tree. His life in its uniqueness is ‘contained in what is uttered’ by being suggested rather than shown. In the 1946 remark, Wittgenstein’s example is ‘the blossom, just opening out’—the most immediately impressive of all ordinary miracles. The remark indicates that art can show the aesthetic miracle with comparable directness. The wonderfulness of the stove in Cézanne’s studio does not have to be preserved and protected by being half-hidden by symbolism, but is shown outright in the picture, to those who are able to see it, as is true also of Lucy’s life in Wordsworth’s poems, and of the lives of characters of Dostoevsky and other great contemporary novelists. It is still true, of course, that the unutterable is—unutterably— contained in the works. In summary: Wittgenstein’s earlier aesthetic is a mystical aesthetic of the same general kind as, for example, Thomas Traherne’s. Wittgenstein sees the aesthetic as dependent on a particular condition of the will, and so as an integral part of an ethico-religious way of life. The attempt to describe how things look from the mystical/aesthetic point of view runs up against the limits of language, but it can be communicated through art. In the Cambridge lectures of 1930–33 and, most of all, the Lectures on Aesthetics (1938) we seem to be in a different world from that of the Notebooks. The first 1938 lecture begins with a remark that the subject (Aesthetics) is ‘entirely misunderstood’ (LA1), and the content of all the 1938 lectures is largely polemical, exposing fundamental errors into which traditional and contemporary aesthetics had fallen. Not surprisingly, some of the strongest criticisms are applicable to Wittgenstein’s own earlier aesthetics, which could hardly not have been a target. It looks as if, in his earlier aesthetics, he had followed traditional practice, presupposing that the task of aesthetics was to explain the meaning of ‘This is beautiful’, without any consideration of 166

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the part played by this expression in the language-games in which it is actually used, and that he had taken ‘beautiful’ to have a unitary meaning, as if it were the name of a property possessed in common by all the things to which the adjective was properly applied. Perhaps worse still, he had taken it to be the name of an effect which objects have in certain circumstances upon the mind of the aesthetic spectator. And since he had maintained that every object, aesthetically contemplated, has the same effect, and that having that effect is the purpose of art, it followed that any successful work of art would do as well as any other. All these positions, among others which he had taken over from the tradition, are effectively criticised in the Lectures on Aesthetics. The classical theory of expression is also criticised, at least in one of its versions, both as an absurd idea in itself, and for assuming that the work matters less than the reception it gets from us (CV58e). Finally, the Lectures, since they are chiefly and extensively concerned with the appreciation of art rather than with aesthetic experience of objects other than works of art, can be seen as righting a considerable imbalance in the earlier aesthetics. It would be a mistake to assume that for Wittgenstein the later ‘critical’ aesthetic entirely superseded the earlier ‘speculative’ one. For one thing, in the Lectures ‘the tremendous things in art’ are specifically put outside the scope of the account given there, on the ground that we do not talk of ‘correctness’, and so not of ‘appreciation’, in connection with them. With them ‘The entire game is different’. ‘It is as different as to judge a human being and on the one hand to say “He behaves well” and on the other hand “He made a great impression on me”’ (LA8). Obviously the class of ‘tremendous things’ could be a very large one indeed, especially if we include those works which are tremendous in part. And it is hard to believe that the philosopher whose earlier attitude to art and aesthetics was so strongly ethicoreligious should come to adopt an aestheticist point of view according to which the work of art exists purely for the sake of being appreciated, without there having been a commensurate change in his ethical and religious views also. The remarks in Culture and Value do not indicate that there was any such change. Hence consideration of Wittgenstein’s aesthetics raises, not just the question of the nature of the language game of appreciation, but also the question—of immense importance for education—of the place of the aesthetic and of art in the life of the individual. 167

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ABBREVIATIONS CV G LA N T WWR ssa

Wittgenstein: Culture and Value (1980). Tolstoy: A Confession and The Gospel in Brief (1939). Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, etc. (1970). Wittgenstein: Notebooks 1914–1916 (1961). Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1933). Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation (1969). sub specie aeternitatis

REFERENCES Engelmann, P. (1967). Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir, tr. Furtmüller, L. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. McGuinness, Brian (1988). Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig 1989–1921. London: Penguin Books. Moore, G.E. (1959). ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33’ in Philosophical Papers. London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 252–324. Schiller, Friedrich (1967). On the Aesthetic Education of Man ed. and tr. Wilkinson, Elizabeth M. and Willoughby, L.A. London: OUP Schopenhauer, Arthur (1969). The World as Will and Representation tr. Payne, E.F.J., 2 vols. New York: Dover Publications. Silesius, Angelus (1953). The Cherubinic Wanderer, selections, tr. Trask, Willard R. New York: Pantheon Books. Tolstoy, Leo (1939). A Confession and The Gospel in Brief, tr. Maude, Aylmer. London: OUP. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1933). Tractatus Logico—Philosophicus ed. Russell, Bertrand, tr. Ogden, C.K. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1961). Notebooks 1914–1916 ed. von Wright, G.H., and Anscombe, G.E.M., tr. Anscombe, G.E.M. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1965). ‘Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics’, Philosophical Review, 3–12. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1970). Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Barrett, Cyril. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1979). Lectures, Cambridge 1932–35, ed. Ambrose, Alice. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1980). Culture and Value, ed. von Wright, G.H. in collaboration with Nyman, Heikki, tr. Winch, Peter. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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9 THE ARTS, WELL-BEING AND EDUCATION John White What should be the purposes of education in the arts? This is a big question. Fully to deal with it—and bearing in mind the kinds of art activities most commonly found in educational institutions— would require asking why, if at all, students should make art (write poems, paint pictures, compose music), perform on musical instruments, engage in literary and other forms of art criticism. In this chapter I shall not be exploring these questions, but limiting the investigation to what we might call sensuous engagement with works of art and why it should be held to be educationally desirable. The starting point for this enquiry, as for so many contemporary philosophical enquiries about the content of education, must be Paul Hirst’s article on ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’ (1965). At the time of writing Hirst’s interest, too, lay exclusively in engagement with the arts, ‘literature and the fine arts’ constituting one of the forms of knowledge into which every liberally educated person was to be inducted. The justification of the artistic form of knowledge, like that of the others, lay in its indispensability for personal well-being. For Hirst, as for the Greek philosophers, this resided in the flourishing of the mind, which in turn consisted in being in a state of knowledge rather than mere belief; and since knowledge was not all of a piece but was found in logically discrete forms, individual flourishing depended on induction into all these forms. While I see difficulties both in the view that art is a form of knowledge and in tying personal well-being so closely to the possession of knowledge, I find Hirst’s claim that engagement with the arts is an essential ingredient of personal flourishing intuitively appealing. If true, it may give us a powerful argument 169

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for the place of the arts in education, including their place in the school curriculum. In this chapter I shall begin to put this wider claim of Hirst’s to the test, drawing also on recent philosophical writings about the arts which likewise emphasise the latters’ role in human well-being.

OSBORNE’S ARGUMENT Harold Osborne (1986:298–9) has sought to justify the ‘expansion and enhancement of aesthetic sensibility’ as an educational aim. This goes further than, but includes, a justification of engagement with the arts, since it also covers aesthetic experience of nature and of the human environment. Osborne sees the current transition towards a society in which work loses its old salience as enabling the cultivation of ‘cultural values’ not only in a leisured elite but in the population as a whole. ‘Culture’ consists in the cultivation for their own sake of faculties originally developed for purposes of evolutionary survival, such as intelligence, intellectual curiosity and altruistic fellow-feeling. Another of these originally practical faculties is perception of the environment. In its intrinsic form it has become aesthetic experience: this is virtually definable as perception for its own sake. Aesthetic experience is thus in the same category as the cultivated pursuit of intelligence in mathematics and logic, of intellectual curiosity in science and history, of religious awe and reverence in organised religion. The increasingly leisured individuals of the future will be able to devote themselves to one or more of such cultural activities. Will aesthetic concerns have any privileged place among them? On this Osborne states that ‘aesthetic appreciation is the most important (cultural value) and has an even more general appeal than the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake’ (p. 299). He does not say why it is the most important value. If he had done so, we might—it is not clear— have had a reason for making aesthetic experience an indispensable ingredient in human flourishing as distinct from an option which some might adopt and others ignore. As it stands, Osborne’s position would seem to point to an educational justification of aesthetic engagement which consists in acquainting pupils with cultural pursuits among which they will later choose which they prefer. The arts would presumably 170

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be an important element within the wider field of the aesthetic because of their ‘high cultural value’ (p. 298), in that it is in aesthetic experience of works of art that perception for its own sake is most fully developed. The ‘opening-up-options’ justification of educational, including curriculum, activities is in its general form a familiar, and to my mind sound, argument, given some kind o f b a c k g ro u n d c o m m i t m e n t t o t h e v a l u e o f p e r s o n a l autonomy as an element in personal well-being. It may, inter alia, be relied on to justify engagement with the arts. But it falls short of what is needed to support Hirst’s stronger claim, to which this essay is directed, that such engagement is a necessary part of our flourishing. Can this stronger position be defended? On the way to tackling that question, we need to look more closely at Osborne’s account of aesthetic experience. For him it comes close to the exercise of our perceptual powers for their own sake. This would seem to imply that the aesthetic qualities of a work of art—or natural object—are confined to those which can be perceptually discriminated. But this is a contestable claim about the scope of the aesthetic. Others have held that this also covers other features of a work, its expressive powers, for instance, or its capacity to reveal truths about the world or about human nature. If we accept the narrower account of the aesthetic, it is indeed hard to see engagement with the arts as anything more than an option for those drawn in that direction. It will be a matter of developing ever more skilful powers of discriminating such things as patterns of musical sound and their interrelationships, or connections and contrasts among lines, tones, spatial forms and colours in visual art. Those who do not choose to cultivate such connoisseurship need not feel that they are excluding themselves from something vital to their well-being—any more than they need feel this if they decide not to go in for chess or bacteriology. The conclusion seems to be that if the arts are to have any deeper significance in our lives as objects of aesthetic concern a broader account of the aesthetic must be adopted. Whether this conclusion is true will occupy us through the next section.

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BEYOND OPTIONS: FURTHER CLAIMS FOR THE ARTS It is often claimed that engagement with the arts can contribute to personal and social well-being in ways beyond its value as an option for those attracted by it. It has been variously said to help resolve psychological tensions and foster inner harmony; to help us to understand our own existence; to promote mutual sympathy and understanding; to break down feelings of isolation from the rest of mankind; to reinforce socially accepted values; to promote morality. Some writers see it as performing the redemptive role in society today which religion played in earlier times. If valid, these claims provide educational justifications of some moment. We will be examining them in more detail in the rest of this chapter. Many of those philosophers who make them hold the wider view of the aesthetic just mentioned. But not all do. In addition, some people would argue that the benefits referred to depend on a specifically aesthetic engagement with works of art; while others would agree that reading literature, looking at paintings and so on might have moral or psychological spin-off, but urge that this need have nothing to do with relating to the works as aesthetic objects. We need to separate these different strands. Beardsley’s argument First, let us look at the position of Monroe Beardsley (1958). He writes about the ‘inherent values’ of works of art, that is, their ‘capacity to…produce desirable effects by means of the aesthetic experience they evoke’ (p. 573). He has in mind such effects as the relief of tension, the refinement of perception, the development of the imagination, the fostering of mutual sympathy. Unlike other writers with whom we will be dealing, Beardsley holds the narrower view of the scope of the aesthetic. Like Osborne, he restricts aesthetic qualities of a work to certain perceptual features, in his case broadly classifiable under the headings of unity, complexity and intensity of human regional qualities in the work (p. 462). Although the third of these, which he exemplifies by such things as vitality, forcefulness, tenderness and irony, seems to point beyond perceptual qualities to emotions expressed in the work, he emphatically denies this, attracted by the thought that what we call the sadness or joyfulness of a piece of music is an objective 172

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feature of the work, dependent on perceptual qualities like tempo, rhythm, interval and pitch. Beardsley’s view is, then, that aesthetic experience as so defined can produce the desirable effects he describes. How sound are his arguments? (1) He admits that the claims that aesthetic experience relieves tensions, quiets destructive impulses and helps to create an inner harmony are speculative rather than soundly supported by empirical evidence, although he does mention a remarkable feeling of clarification that we feel when aesthetically absorbed— ‘as though the jumble in our minds were being sorted out’ (p. 574). We will come back to views about tension and harmony when we turn to writers with a wider view of the aesthetic. (2) His next claim is that aesthetic experience refines perception and discrimination. This seems to follow logically from his perception-based conception of the aesthetic. He further contends that ‘if we can be made more sensitive and perceptive by aesthetic experience, then this would have a wide bearing upon all other aspects of our lives—our emotional relations with other people, for example’ (ibid.). For this he produces no evidence and prima facie the claim seems implausible: just as a developed skill in throwing darts can remain a self-contained achievement with no spill-over on to the improvement of one’s personal life or social relationships, should we not say the same of the skills of aesthetic discernment? We must not be misled by language in all this. When Beardsley says that aesthetic experience can make us ‘more sensitive and perceptive’, this is obviously true if we take these terms in a perceptual sense; but whether it makes us more sensitive to others’ needs and more perceptive in our judgements of character is quite another matter. (3) A similar verdict should be passed on the statement that ‘aesthetic experience develops the imagination and with it the ability to put oneself in the place of others’ (ibid.). It is true that in aesthetic experience (in Beardsley’s sense) ‘we must be open to new qualities and new forms’; but the kind of imaginative capacity which this requires has to do solely with aesthetic perception and is not the same as the sympathetic imagination which enables us to put ourselves in others’ shoes. One cannot assume a transfer of learning between one kind of exercise of the imagination and another: to show this, too, empirical evidence would be needed and Beardsley does not provide it. 173

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(4) He then argues that aesthetic experience ‘fosters mutual sympathy and understanding’. We have to be careful here. We will come across similar claims when we turn to authors with a wider conception of the aesthetic. The latter are talking about sympathy and understanding among people generally, or at least among people generally within the same community or culture. But Beardsley’s claim is more limited. He has in mind people listening to the same music or seeing the same paintings and so on. ‘Insofar as they have learnt to make similar responses, they share an experience’ and this tends to bring them together in friendship and mutual respect, to create a bond between them. In adjudicating Beardsley’s argument, we should not think of aesthetic experience in individualistic terms, as a transaction between a solitary person and an aesthetic object. If we did, then it would become an empirical matter, and one where evidence is probably not forthcoming, whether lovers of art tend to develop friendship and respect among themselves. We should rely, rather, on MacIntyre’s concept of a ‘practice’, as a co-operative activity with its own internal goods, included among them the recognition of various personal qualities among participants. If we conceive engagement with works of art as a practice, then it follows logically that those who pursue it are bonded together by ties of co-operative endeavour, respect for each other’s abilities and that broad sense of friendship, transcending intimacy, to which Aristotle has drawn our attention in the Nicomachean Ethics. In sum, we can accept this claim of Beardsley’s as conceptually true —as long as we remember that it has only to do with attitudes and behaviour among the aesthetically initiated and has no bearing on whether aesthetic experience fosters mutual sympathy and understanding outside this circle. (5) Beardsley’s last claim is that aesthetic experience offers an ideal for human life—of an activity ‘in which means and ends are so closely interrelated that we feel no separation between them’ (p. 575). He counterposes this to the gap which often exists between means and ends in other parts of our social life, especially in more boring kinds of work. Aesthetic experience gives a clue as to how this undesirable state of affairs can be transformed. I find this argument attractive, but wonder whether it gives aesthetic experience any privileged place in presenting this ideal over other activities where participants see what they are doing as intrinsically rewarding, such as theoretical enquiry, sports, community service. If it is not so privileged, we come close to 174

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Osborne’s position, described above. We may have a good reason for including engagement with art in the content of education in that it helps to extend the range of life-options; but we are not helped in our search for its further contribution to personal and social well-being which is the topic of this section. Taking all five of Beardsley’s arguments together and assessing the light they shed on this further contribution, we can rule out (5), as we have just seen. (2), (3) and (4) fail to deliver what they seemed to promise: where they are at their most convincing, the sensitivity, perceptiveness, imagination, sympathy and understanding which they mention are not qualities found in ordinary human intercourse, but are confined within the circle of aesthetic experience itself. This leaves (1), the speculative, empirically unsupported argument about the relief of tension and the promotion of inner harmony. All in all, Beardsley has given us next to no reason to think that engagement with the arts has any value for human life outside its own autonomous domain. Other arguments Osborne and Beardsley both adhere to the narrower conception of aesthetic experience which confines it to acquaintance with perceptual features of aesthetic objects, detaching this from everything lying outside the work itself. Not everyone sees the aesthetic as belonging to a world of its own—Anthony Savile (1982:86), for instance, quotes with approval Stuart Hampshire’s remark that empiricist philosophies ‘have detached aesthetics as an autonomous domain, only contingently connected with other interests…. The enjoyment of art, and art itself, is trivialised, as a detached and peculiar pleasure, which leads to nothing else. Its part in the whole experience of man is then left unexplained’ (Hampshire, 1959:246). On a broader conception, the objects of aesthetic experience are not limited to perceptible features, still less to such formal features as Beardsley describes, like the complexity and unity in which sensuous phenomena—tones, colours, sounds, etc. —are bound together. The work of art is not, or is not always, an objective, completed entity, requiring only our trained aesthetic perception to yield its aesthetic fruit. On the contrary, for the latter to be possible we must often make a contribution of our own in the shape of an imaginative involvement with the work which 175

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brings it to completion. On one such conception, that of R.K.Elliott, one role of imagination is to enable us to experience works ‘from within’, as if we were participants in their worlds, or were entering into intimate communion with the characters portrayed in them or with their creators. In these ways we experience works as delivering situations (as in painting) or as expressing emotion (as in music) or both (as in poetry) (Elliott, 1972:157). If one conceives aesthetic experience as not only of perceptual, including formal, features of works themselves, but also, at least in many cases, of imagined human feelings and situations, this helps to provide that non-contingent link between aesthetics and other human interests of which Hampshire wrote. Educationally, it enables us to see cultivating in young people a love of art not only as opening up new options, but also as helping them to live a fuller human life. In what way? In recent writings, both Anthony Savile (1982) and Anthony O’Hear (1988) have discussed the wider value to us of engagement with the arts. I will now examine and assess some of their claims. As we shall see, several of them are superficially reminiscent of those of Beardsley; unlike Beardsley’s, however, they do not shepherd us back inside a narrow perceptual fold. O’Hear writes: Art, on the other hand (i.e. unlike science), is intimately involved in our sense of the value of things. First, by means of its sympathetic re-enactments of anthropomorphic perspectives on the world, it can play a central role both in value enquiry and in coming to an understanding of the nature of one’s own existence and the meanings available in it. And, then, through its ability to resolve, at least for a time, certain fundamental tensions in our existence, it is well fitted to play a role in fostering harmony in one’s own existence. (pp. 162–3) The first of these claims is that art promotes value-enquiry and self-understanding; the second that it resolves certain tensions and fosters harmony. Are they both sound? The first claim might seem to suggest that art is valuable to us for theoretical reasons, i.e. that it helps us to uncover truths with which we were not previously acquainted. It certainly can do this. In the field of value-enquiry, we can come to learn about the ethical 176

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values of other cultures or sub-cultures or other historical periods through their art, especially through their literature. But putting things like this underrates the importance that the arts can play in our ethical life. It appears to make engaging with them instrumental to something else, the pursuit of knowledge; and to suggest that if non-aesthetic evidence about values were superior to that furnished by art, the latter might prove dispensable. In addition, it is not even clear that in order to attain these theoretical benefits, one needs to engage aesthetically with a work, as distinct from mining it, as a scholar, for the light it might shed on other things. But perhaps O’Hear has other things in mind than theoretical enquiry. He also writes of the contribution art can make to selfknowledge, and self-knowledge is perhaps more a form of practical wisdom than a theoretical achievement. As David Hamlyn (1977) has implied, it can scarcely be modelled on forms of understanding, like science or mathematics, where a distinction can be drawn between the knowing subject and an independent known object. Knowing oneself better is to have got one’s priorities more into order, to have come more clearly to see what concerns weigh with one more than others. It involves having dwelt not on one’s scheme of values, or hierarchy of desires, as a whole—for this would take us back to the misconception of self-knowledge as confrontation with some kind of inspectable object; but on particular values and on conflicts between them. One role of art is to enable us to dwell on, or better, perhaps, to dwell in our values or desires and their associated emotions in this more particular and less global way. Since works of art are produced to be enjoyed by a public, the desires, emotions and conflicts between them which they express are typically those which many have experienced; and one mark of the greatness of a work is its ability to strike such chords in all of us. In aesthetic engagement with art we come to a profounder self-awareness, of ourselves as unique individuals and at the same time of ourselves as members of a particular community or culture, and as human beings in general. We come to dwell not only in what we do feel but also in what we would feel if our circumstances were different, or became different. Art both reinforces feelings and priorities we already have and also shakes them up, unsettles established patterns and allows us imaginatively to entertain alternatives—a state, for instance, where grief dominates over everything, or where murder no longer belongs to the unthinkable. 177

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This kind of argument for the ethical import of art may be charged with turning it into a vehicle for moral improvement, and therein treating it just as instrumentally as it is treated in the claim, examined earlier, that art can help in theoretical valueenquiry. We have to tread carefully here. There is no suggestion in this context that through the arts we may come to possess values that we did not possess before, e.g. altruistic values where previously we were egoistical. It may or may not be true that art, or some art, can have this power: to determine this would require empirical investigation. The point to be made is not that engagement with the arts gives us new values—although it might do this, but that we have to bring to it desires, feelings and the values they enshrine, which we already possess. Even so, the claim may still look instrumental—it may seem to be saying that we sometimes have recourse to art so as to dwell on our desires and feelings and the conflicts and priorities among them. Does this not overlook the intrinsic interest in it which we must always have if we are to engage with it aesthetically? It is important to defuse this charge of instrumentalism. Aesthetic engagement with a work is something pursued for its own sake. But on a broader conception of the aesthetic, since part of what we understand by aesthetic engagement is imaginatively dwelling in feelings and desires, the experience of art cannot be divorced from ethical contemplation. We do not choose to read poems as aesthetic objects in order to reflect on the ethical life, where the latter is a further goal to which the former is a means; but in choosing so to read them we may well have such ethical ends in mind, accruing as part of our intrinsic experience of the work. This kind of relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical can be obscured by too narrow a conception of either or both of these terms. Just as objects of aesthetic experience can be confined to perceptual qualities, so the ethical can become restricted to that sense of the moral, recently identified by Bernard Williams (1985), in which duty or obligation becomes the central concept: on a wider view of the ethical, this would cover all aspects of how we are to live our lives, including not only obligations into which we have entered, but also our commitments and enthusiasms for our own projects as well as, what is often inseparable from these, our attachments to persons and communities. If we work with a narrow conception of both terms, the aesthetic and the ethical do indeed constitute seemingly impermeable different worlds: of, on 178

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the one hand, a rarefied kind of perception, and on the other of attention to certain kinds of obligation. It is hard to see how aesthetic perception, pursued for its own sake, could be expected to have anything to do with our adhering to moral principles of, say, fairness or non-maleficence. On a broader view of both, however, they come much closer, so close that the aesthetic comes to presuppose the ethical in the way we have seen above (which is not to say that the ethical presupposes the aesthetic, although it may do). What is significant about the conceptions of both the aesthetic and the ethical in their narrow senses is the negligible place both have for the emotions. Just as aesthetic experience on this view has nothing to do with expression, so in moral experience the emotions are seen not as motivators of moral conduct— for only the sense of duty could fill that role, but as forms of passivity which have the potential to interfere with our acting morally and so must be kept firmly under control. (A modern version of this Kantian theme is found in R.S.Peters’ account of the education of the emotions in Peters (1972).) On a wider view of both areas, the emotions become of central importance: in respect of expression, in the case of the aesthetic, and in the shaping of our fears, hopes, joys and sorrows into settled dispositions of behaviour and response in the case of ethics. It is because we bring to our experience of art concerns that we already possess in life that art can play an often-remarked role in binding us together. Beardsley’s claim in this area is confined to mutual understanding among the aesthetically initiated; but we now see how this circle can be both deepened and widened: deepened, because those who engage with a particular work of art can become conscious not only of a shared exercise of skills of discrimination but also of the shared life-emotions and values they bring to the work; and widened, because the sharing now goes beyond the initiated and includes others in society unacquainted with this work, or perhaps, indeed, with any works of art. The public character of works of art, their role as a focal point for shared experience, is from an ethical perspective an important feature of them. Since the ethical values which individuals possess come to them, often in complex ways (see Taylor 1990), from the cultures and communities in which they live, art can help to bind us not only as fellow human beings, but also as members of more localised groups. As O’Hear puts it: ‘through art, indeed, the individual can come to a powerful realisation of the truth of 179

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Bradley’s claim that a community enters into his essence’ (1988:148). This adds a further dimension to O’Hear’s point about the role of art in fostering self-understanding. This mutual binding is not exclusively a matter of shared awareness; for experience of art, in encouraging us to dwell on the springs of our ethical life, recommits us to what we value, thereby strengthening their role in our life, both individually and communally. Savile (1982:107), drawing on Hume, gives an interesting example: the tapering of pillars upwards from a broader base insensibly reinforces a shared desire for security. In these ways, through their common roots in our desires and emotions, art reflects and fosters our ethical life. It has not been proposed, so far at least, that all art does this. Music, and among it the greatest, can be aesthetically interesting for its patterns and complexities of sound, even when we do not hear it as expression. This said, it may still be the case that the patterns and complexities themselves are ethically relevant, but in a different way. We shall be taking up this point in the next section. O’Hear’s second claim is that art can play a part in resolving certain fundamental tensions in our existence and thereby foster harmony. He has in mind such tensions as those between the self and the objective world, between feeling and reason, between the natural and the conventional, between the individual and the community. He writes of the redemptive powers of art, its ability to save us from ‘gazing into the horrors of the night’ (p. 140). Elsewhere he makes a significantly different claim to do with tensions, that ‘art can help us creatively to express and explore the tensions caused in us by the fundamental dualisms of our nature’ (p. 148). Expressing and exploring tensions is different from resolving them. Can art do either? A claim about resolution we also noted in Beardsley. Quite what resolution means in O’Hear’s context would need further exploration, but, as with Beardsley, the claim in question, whether applicable to a narrower or a broader conception of the aesthetic, would seem to depend on evidence, which O’Hear does not provide. For him art seems to have powers once ascribed to religion—redemptive powers, as he puts it, of transforming our life from a meaningless jumble of conflicting elements into a harmonious unity. This may well bring art too close to religion. It suggests perfectibilism. The ideal of human perfectibility, as Passmore (1970) has reminded us, has deep roots in our history, 180

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not least in the history of our religious and political ideas, from ancient times, but is in his view to be shunned, not welcomed. ‘To achieve perfection in any of its classical senses, as so many perfectibilists have admitted, it would first be necessary to cease to be human, to become godlike, to rise above the human condition’ (p. 326). Quite another outlook on human life sees conflict and tension as ineradicable from it. In contemporary ethics one sees this in writers like Williams (1985) who stress the irreducible diversity of values. From this perspective, O’Hear’s second suggestion, that art helps us to express and explore basic tensions, may be more fruitful: it seems a surer vehicle of self-understanding than when viewed from the perfectibilist standpoint, since there it may lead us into a false conception of what we are. At the same time, in any individual’s life conflicts have to be managed somehow. Balances have to be struck, values weighted, all within some kind of personal system of psychological regulation. On this view of human flourishing, conflicts co-exist within a unitary framework, one which is constantly changing with experience as balances are struck in different places. This has its obvious parallel in the contrasting elements held together within the framework of a work of art. Like a self, a work of art is nothing fixed. Both are endlessly open to being seen from new perspectives, to new features coming to the fore while others recede. Art may speak to us not only in its sensuous delights and its links with our emotional life, but also in its mirroring of our psychic constitution as a whole. If this is on the right lines, then even the least expressive music may still be ethically important to us. Music, indeed, may be a more faithful mirror of ourselves than painting. In the latter, the whole work is laid before us simultaneously for our contemplation. But we never see ourselves at any one time as a complete entity; to think in this way is to resort to that misconceived notion of self-understanding with which we dealt above. Music, flowing through time, never graspable in toto, but only in more local stretches and contrasts, is closer to our self as we know it. Perhaps, after all, O’Hear has something more like this, and not perfectibilism, in mind in writing about art’s contribution to our inner harmony. If so, it would be better not to link this with talk of redemption and salvation. Art may indeed have replaced religion in our age as a central element in our flourishing and in our self181

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understanding; but what it can do for us should not be exaggerated: our lives are not in danger without art, only vastly poorer.

CONCLUSION The purpose of education in the arts cannot be restricted to enlarging options. They can have a more intimate connection with our flourishing—with fostering self-knowledge, reinforcing our ethical values, binding us together as members of communities. For these reasons alone, acquaintance with works of art should have a central place in the school curriculum, although not necessarily to an equal extent for pupils of different ages. This essay agrees with Paul Hirst, but for different reasons, that engagement with the arts is, at least, an important element in personal well-being. Whether it is an indispensable element, as his theory may suggest, is, after all, another question. Given that flourishing is not an all-or-nothing matter and that there can be different degrees of it, it would be hard to show that people could not flourish at all without art. With respect to poetry at least, Kit Wright (1989) is sceptical: When they say That every day Men die miserably without it I doubt it.

REFERENCES Beardsley, M. (1958). Aesthetics. New York: Harcourt Brace and World. Elliott, R.K. (1972). ‘Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art’, in Osborne, H. (ed.), Aesthetics. Oxford University Press. Hamlyn, D.W. (1977). ‘Self Knowledge’, in Mischel, T. (ed.), The Self. Oxford: Blackwell. Hampshire, S. (1959). Thought and Action. London: Chatto and Windus. Hirst, P.H. (1965). ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’, in Archambault, R.D. (ed.), Philosophical Analysis and Education. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. O’Hear, A. (1988). The Element of Fire. London: Routledge.

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Osborne, H. (1986). Review of H.B.Redfern Questions in Aesthetic Education . Journal of Philosophy of Education, 20 (2). Passmore, J. (1970). The Perfectibility of Man. London: Duckworth. Peters, R.S. (1972). ‘The Education of the Emotions’, in Dearden, R.F., Hirst, P.H. and Peters, R.S. (eds), Education and the Development of Reason. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Savile, A. (1982). The Test of Time. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Taylor, C. (1990). The Sources of the Self. Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana. Wright, K. (1989). ‘Poetry’ in his Short Afternoons. London: Hutchinson.

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10 EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICES Paul H.Hirst In the 1960s and 1970s British philosophy of education was born, or re-born, under the spell of the analytical techniques then dominating British philosophy in general. But it was born, too, under the spell of a hard rationalism that profoundly determined its substantive content and the major educational principles for which it argued. Since then both those spells have been broken. New approaches have arisen in philosophy in general and other traditions have firmly reasserted themselves. Quietly the character and scope of philosophy of education have changed significantly, and, though recent work may sometimes seem less exciting, new developments of importance are surely taking place and intellectually, if not institutionally, the prospects for the subject are very promising. In these circumstances it is not surprising if our understanding of the central concept of education has itself begun to change, and in this chapter I wish to argue that, putting it crudely, we must shift from seeing education as primarily concerned with knowledge to seeing it as primarily concerned with social practices. But let me stress right away that I am drawing attention to different primary concerns and am not naively suggesting that even at the start of the analytical movement there was not a sophisticated concern for many other matters including social practices.1

I In giving the acquisition of knowledge and understanding supreme priority within education, philosophers of education in the 1960s were deeply influenced by a number of powerful 184

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philosophical doctrines. First there was a strong view of what it is to be a person. The great diversity of human capacities was for convenience frequently, if implicitly, categorised into three domains. The cognitive were seen as those capacities concerned with, for example, perception, concept formation, judgements of truth and validity, choice, reason, memory and imagination; the affective were those concerned, for example, with experiences of sensation, emotion, liking and desiring; the conative were those concerned with, for example, action, disposition and will. But if analytically distinguishable in this way there was no doubt that affective and conative capacities were of their nature necessarily structured by and limited in their intelligible operation by the concepts, belief and knowledge achieved by the cognitive capacities. The substantive constitution of a person therefore was seen as necessarily grounded in a cognitive repertoire, its noncognitive dimensions being ordered or disordered according to that repertoire. In keeping with this emphasis was the view that the central function of cognitive capacities is the formation of conceptual schemes in which judgements of truth can be made and that thence can be achieved bodies of justifiable or rational beliefs, rational actions, and indeed rational emotions. Grounded in knowledge and understanding, human beings can thus aspire to live in conformity with what is the case, what is objectively and naturally given in human nature and in the environment in which human beings find themselves. Such a form of life was further seen not merely as a logical possibility but as a practical ideal, the good life, to which all should aspire, difficult though it may be to attain for many contingent reasons. The justification for that notion of the good life was taken to lie, first, in certain forms of transcendental argument, which held that there can be no more ultimately justifiable pursuits than the intrinsically worthwhile pursuit of reason in all its forms, and, second, in the successful ordering of all other human concerns in terms made possible by the achievements of reason into a coherent and consistent whole. In this ideal the form of the rational life for each individual may be genuinely open-ended, and, granted the differences between individuals and between their contexts, only each individual can ultimately decide what defensible possibilities there are. Freedom of individual choice is thus of course central to the good life. But that choice has to be exercised according to the dictates of reason, 185

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and the commonalities of human nature and the environment are such that reason dictates a broad common framework for the rational life for all. At least certain general fundamental social principles, in particular those of liberal democracy, can be strongly defended as universally valid if reason is to prevail in both communal and personal living. A further tenet consistent with these doctrines concerned the practical conduct of the good or rational life. This was construed as determined by first rationally formulating and justifying the ends to be achieved in activities and practices using all the knowledge and understanding available. The most justifiable means to these ends could then be decided and those means implemented by the exercise of will using all appropriate skills and aided by habit and disposition. Finally, I should like to draw out the significance in this view of social relations. In the first place the development of reason is seen as a fundamentally social construction. It is only through shared conceptual schemes that objective judgements are possible and it is in the creation of public languages alone that knowledge and understanding can be achieved and secured as a progressively developing public deposit. Language is thus a necessary key to the development of reason and rational living. In this sense, but in this sense alone, rational persons are socially constructed. In the second place society is itself seen as simply a collection of freely associating individuals. By organising themselves in families, groups and communities, individuals can the more readily survive and secure many of their goals. And through language their social arrangements can themselves be rationally constructed. In the good life, then, they are linked together primarily in their individual pursuit of life according to rational principles. It is the good will of each member that holds communities and groups together. Put in these brief terms this philosophical position, which owed so much to the tradition of the liberal enlightenment and incorporated numerous achievements of contemporary logical analysis, was and remains impressive. From an educational point of view its concern for a particular view of the rational, autonomous life provided a clear coherent framework for the formation of educational aims. Planning for educational practice was conceived as a matter for the rational determination of the ends to be pursued, the subsequent determination of the best means possible and finally the implementation of the conclusions 186

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reached. The aims were first and foremost those of developing knowledge and understanding and the further pursuit of those as being both intrinsically worthwhile and vital to the ordering of developments in all other aspects of personal and social living. To this end the forms of knowledge and understanding that have been achieved were logically mapped and the diversity of the cognitive objectives involved was explored for their logical interrelations. A stipulative notion of liberal education, defined in terms of initiation into the forms of knowledge as characterised by their distinctive internal, logical features was set out as the core of a wider education. That wider domain however was clearly seen as secondary. It contained useful knowledge and skills appropriate for practical life according to context but in addition there was to be personal and social education to promote the developments of character necessary to the conduct of rational living both individually and in social contexts. This last was conceived of primarily as a matter of moral education in the light of rationally justified principles both universal and local. It was here that the education of the emotions and of dispositions would combine to provide an appropriate network of virtues for the exercise of rational choice and the practical living of the good life.

II Even while this radically ‘rationalist’ approach to education was being developed there were repeated signs of unease with it, unease arising from longstanding criticisms of certain of its crucial philosophical underpinnings, internal contradictions that appeared in working out the details and recurrent worries about its applicability. In particular there were grave doubts in many quarters about the primacy over all else of reason. It might be accepted that cognitive capacities have the logical significance for other capacities that are attributed to them. But that is not to accept that those capacities can in fact operate in independence of other given human characteristics or that the knowledge and understanding their exercise achieves can then be so directed as to bring about the rational ordering both of individual human lives and of human society. In direct opposition to the tradition that sees reason as capable of disengaged knowledge and understanding, not only of the external environment but of all human characteristics even 187

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including reason itself, there is to be found another tradition of similar philosophical power. In that tradition reason is seen as of its nature directed in its operation by wants and desires that are of course essentially affective and conative in their character. Much of the analytical work beloved of philosophers of education in the 1960s itself powerfully undermined the dissociation of cognitive and other mental capacities that was at times being assumed in the ‘rationalist’ position. What is more, the form of body-mind dualism being espoused was equally forcefully being rejected by many philosophical colleagues. It is not surprising then that alongside the ‘rationalist’ approach previously outlined an alternative account of educational aims developed based on more ‘utilitarian’ presuppositions. In this the capacities of reason were seen as necessarily exercised in the service of substantive naturally given wants and desires, whose satisfaction is in certain cases necessary for human survival and in all cases fundamental to human well-being. From this point of view the conceptual schemes by which we make sense of our environment, ourselves and our actions are primarily concerned with the achievement of satisfactions we seek in response to natural functions and in the exercise of our naturally given capacities. The exercise of reason and the knowledge and understanding it makes possible are primarily practical in their significance. They are concerned with the taking of means to ends which are in the last analysis naturally given. And as we take those means, reason helps us to order our wants, achieve maximum satisfaction and provide priorities when wants conflict. Not that wants must be taken merely as simple givens, for in relation to our environment and in the exercise of our wide-ranging capacities the forms of satisfaction we can devise are richly varied. Our wants thus become differentiated into specific yet interrelated and complex patterns according to the diverse satisfactions we discern and construct. In this picture, reason, knowledge and understanding are not at all seen as themselves capable of determining from a detached point of view the ends that constitute the good life for individuals or society. They have the instrumental functions of helping us to discern, develop, and order coherently those basically given elements of wants and satisfactions from which the good life is to be composed. Nor does such a view see the dynamic of the good life as the exercise of the will enthralled in the service of reason. The dynamic is quite elsewhere, in the power over us of wants 188

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and satisfactions. To these reason and all other capacities need to be properly harnessed. The basic wants of individuals have important common characteristics, as indeed do their capacities. But, manifestly, wants vary in specific detail, and their differentiation in terms of richly alternative satisfactions means that what constitutes the good life for an individual can in detail be determined only by that particular person. At the heart of the good life for each individual there must therefore lie personal choice, but choice which is informed by knowledge and understanding. Self-direction, self-knowledge and a knowledge of possible satisfactions are thus necessary keys to the good life. In that almost all wants and satisfactions are significantly social in their character and purport, the good life necessitates in addition a public ordering of the activities and practices to which they lead. For the individual, then, a way of life needs to be developed that is coherently ordered in private and public terms for the overall satisfaction of our wants. Granted the ultimate location of what is considered good within each individual and the importance of self-direction, the most desirable form of social life to which this view leads is understandably once more that of liberal democracy. But now its social principles are strictly utilitarian in the service of individual wants, rather than principles independently derived from the nature of reason itself and general knowledge of human beings and their environment. Resting on experience and empirical evidence in relation to the satisfaction of wants, the principles can serve directly to promote a framework within which individual good lives can be built. In all this, society is seen once more as but a collection of atomic individuals associating together for their personal satisfactions. And the individualism is now particularly strong in that all judgements of what is good, and the motivation to attain that, rest ultimately in personal subjective states. Language continues to be seen as a social construction necessary for the rational development of each person and of society. But in no other sense are social relations anything other than contingent arrangements that promote personal satisfactions. In keeping with these philosophical doctrines, education remains a practice to be rationalistically planned, its aims once more being externally posited prior to the devising of the best means to achieve these. But now the goals education must serve are ultimately generated individually by rational choice in relation to personal wants and 189

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contextual constraints. The general content of education must therefore provide the tools for the task. It must provide skills and dispositions of manifest immediate utility. But it must develop knowledge and understanding of oneself, of the physical and social environment, of available activities and practices with their related satisfactions, and of co-ordinated ways of life. And it must promote those personal qualities and virtues necessary to achieving what is rationally desired.

III The ‘rationalist’ approach to education was dependent on a high doctrine of the powers of detached reason to both determine and motivate the good life. The second approach however is in danger of going too far in the opposite direction, undervaluing the role of reason in the determination of the good life and denying it any direct function in motivation. What is more, insofar as it finds a secure place for reason it still hangs on to the untenable view of reason as a disengaged, spectatorial capacity whose dissociated achievements are simply available to serve our independently given wants and desires. If the ‘utilitarian’ approach denies reason the transcendental status given to it by ‘rationalists’, it nevertheless sees it still as keeping its activities within a separate discrete domain. But if our naturally given capacities of reason are exercised from the very start in inextricable involvement in our exerting our other given capacities, then the resulting achievements will of their nature be complex in character. Elements in these achievements may be analytically distinguishable as the capacities themselves have in the first instance been distinguished. But we must never confuse such analytically discrete elements for distinct existences. We shall never make sense of ourselves if we cannot overcome those dualisms that separate the activities and achievements of reason from those of other mental capacities, or those of mind from those of body. In seeking an account of reason that does fuller justice to its relations with other given human attributes I suggest that each of the two previous approaches does at least give us one important lead. First, following the ‘rationalists’, though reconstructing their account, we must recognise the motivating force of the exercise of the capacities of reason just as we recognise that force in the exercise of other capacities. The exercise of reason’s capacities is 190

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itself an affective and conative matter. Only if we give recognition to the satisfactions, amongst all others, of pursuing and achieving true beliefs and justifiable actions can we ever give an adequate account of the good life. The ‘utilitarian’ approach I take to be right about the anchorage of values in wants and satisfactions. But the inextricable place of the activities and achievements of reason itself right within and alongside other wants and satisfactions is fundamental to our understanding of ourselves as persons, and to the determination of the good, which is the rational, life for us individually and collectively. But secondly, following the lead of the ‘utilitarian’ approach in seeing the activities and achievements of reason as locked into our pursuit of satisfactions, we must take seriously the idea that reason is therefore always directed by our interests and is of its nature practical. That being so, our conceptual schemes are first concerned with distinctions relating to objects that give pleasure, pain and other primary states of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. They discriminate activities that lead to such states and these activities themselves become objects of satisfaction. The knowledge that is thus developed in practice is however also practical in that it is from the start not simply or even primarily propositional knowledge or ‘know-that’. It is rather a matter of ‘know-how’, of skill and judgement, that is in major respects tacit or implicit rather than consciously recognised. Individual objects, situations or events are conceptually distinguished because of their practical significance for our wants and desires. Propositional knowledge and belief are thus developments within the context of practice and are, I suggest, basically in the form of practical principles. The primary propositions that reason delivers are generalisations concerning successful and unsuccessful practice rather than disinterested truths. It is also the case that all propositional knowledge and belief is abstracted, partial, seeing situations and activities under concepts that can at best capture specific general aspects. Reason can put into propositional form only what is necessarily a limited element in any situation, trading in any given instance in categories that necessarily strip practical realities of all their other aspects, exclude unique particularities, and ignore all tacit considerations. What is more there are no good grounds for believing that any array of such general principles, however extensive, could even in principle capture the full character of practical situations. 191

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On this view practical know-how is developed in practice itself, its prime criterion of validity being success in achieving satisfactions. By conceptualisation and generalisation, however, it is clear that reason enables us in practical experiment progressively to develop ever more diverse forms of satisfaction, generate new purposes and possibilities for personal and social activities, the taking of more effective means, the resolving of conflicts in the ordering of our satisfactions in complex patterns of consciously intended activities. Without explicit conceptualisation the rational development of practice is necessarily insecure and lacking a critical examination of its presuppositions. It is indeed also only by such conceptualisation of practices in shared linguistic terms that the peaceful resolution of social conflicts is possible and rational patterns of social life can be developed. But throughout the rational ordering of these activities the test remains the practical satisfaction of wants. In no way can practical principles be derived which individually or collectively are more than guides to the particularities of practice. Of themselves they are incapable of guaranteeing success in individual circumstances. But what of propositional knowledge that is achieved in the seemingly spectatorial, non-practical exercise of reason in, say, the empirical knowledge of the sciences, in mathematics, or in our knowledge of persons? I suggest first that such knowledge must also be seen as the product of practices that seek a particular form of satisfaction. It is that satisfaction which arises from the successful exercise of our given capacities to share conceptual schemes in which there can be agreement in judgements of truth. Such theoretical practices, as I will call them, result in the achievements of different forms of theoretical knowledge which I long ago sought to distinguish by the logical features that characterise them. Grounded as they are in the exercise of common rational capacities in a given shared environment, these forms of knowledge can all potentially possess what we mean by objectivity, a formal characteristic which is most clearly exemplified in the physical sciences. In these areas our rational capacities achieve their satisfaction in the attaining of propositions that meet the objective criteria those capacities make possible. But a correct grasp of the status and significance of such forms of theoretical knowledge in relation to other human practices, the satisfaction of other wants, and the exercise and achievements of other 192

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capacities is of vital importance. I suggest that the propositional knowledge achieved in particular theoretical practices is doubly abstracted from the know-how of all other practices. Theoretical knowledge in the sciences, for example, consists of propositions formulated in concepts that are not themselves properly the concepts of any practical activity or its practical principles as formulated in, say, engineering or technology. Abstracting from practice into general practical principles is one thing. Devising conceptual schemes that abstract further into practices concerned solely with judgements of propositional truth is to enter a very particular pursuit using concepts which most practical knowledge only implicitly employs. Theoretical knowledge is therefore capable of only indirectly contributing to the development of rational practice in shifting the presuppositions of practical knowhow and know-that. A great mistake of the ‘rationalist’ approach outlined was that it saw theoretical knowledge as the only type of knowledge that is properly significant in determining both the ends and means of rational practice and thus of the good life. It is an error of the ‘utilitarian’ position outlined that, if it rightly sees the ends of the good life to lie in the practical satisfaction of wants, it still sharply dissociates reason from those wants and continues to see theoretical reason as paramount if only in the determination of the means for the good life. If practical reason is given its proper place in determining the ends and the means of the good life, with the achievements of theoretical reason seen as in general ancillary, the notion of rational choice that the conduct of the good life requires can no longer be that of detached, neutral judgement of either ends or means. Rational choice can only be the development of the more adequate coherent satisfaction of important wants overall. It is necessarily a modification of present practices, which, even if aided by practical and implicit theoretical considerations, must necessarily be assessed in practice itself. There can be no detached clean slate position from which all possibilities can be assessed, for the first thing we develop as persons is the structuring of our natural wants into specific forms and patterns in practical know-how and practical know-that. In the development of rational practice there is no escaping, at any stage, given wants, their present structure, and the practical knowledge of available satisfactions that goes with these. To pretend otherwise is simply to be deceived by at least part of the ‘rationalist’ myth. 193

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If both the ‘rationalist’ and ‘utilitarian’ positions are mistaken about the nature and role of reason, they are both also mistaken, as has already been indicated, in the radical individualism with which they are infected. It is of course contingently the case that the satisfaction of certain natural human wants, at least in the early stages of life, depends on social relations. It is also the case that certain natural wants are for social relations of certain kinds, even if the satisfaction of these particular wants may not be imperative. But personal activities or practices in association with others make possible, even if only in imitation, the development and organisation of satisfactions which as individuals we could never hope to discover or construct. What is more, the benefits of such development passed on in a tradition can become cumulative. Add to this the developments made possible by the social creation through language of practical and theoretical reason, and the personal significance of social relations becomes overwhelming. In a fundamental sense persons as we know them are necessarily social constructions. And society itself is thus not a contingent arrangement of individual persons. It is a network of socially constructed individuals who within that network have the capacities for choice for the formation of their own patterns of life and the modification of their social networks. In these terms the good life as the rational life is conceivable only as a life personally and progressively built from possibilities available within the traditions of the social groupings we do and can inhabit. But these possibilities can themselves give us opportunity to contribute individually to the development of new and more rational personal and social activities and relationships. In certain contexts doing that is no doubt part of what a rational life would require. It is however important to recognise that one cannot escape the inevitable personal and social implications of existing relations and traditions. We have in human societies needed specific social practices that are rational in varying ways and to varying degrees. Within these, individual rational lives are possible, again in varying ways and to varying degrees. The good life individually is thus in a very real sense engaging in the socially constructed rational practice of engaging in specific rational practices for the satisfaction of wants. And such a pursuit necessarily includes the promotion of rational practices as social institutions. From this point of view we must first recognise that education can no longer be rationalistically planned. As a social practice itself, 194

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it can only be rationally developed in practice and that in relation to other social practices with which it is tightly interlocked. From what I have argued, all that philosophy can do as a theoretical form of knowledge is necessarily indirect. But by considering the presuppositions behind educational practice, examining its nature and purpose as I am seeking to do in this chapter, philosophy can at least propose ways of reconceiving the enterprise that might enable it the better to satisfy our aspirations. But granted that, if we stick with the notion that education is concerned with developing the good life then it follows from what I have said that we are mistaken if we conceive that purpose as primarily the acquisition of knowledge. What is required rather is the development by individuals of the overall rational practice of specific rational practices. There is, however, no way in which this can be either begun or continued in education except by pursuing the satisfaction of given wants and the exercise of given developing capacities in substantive specific practices available in existing social groups. The content of education must therefore be conceived as primarily initiation into certain substantive social practices. Such practices, as I have used that term, are centrally patterns of activity engaged in individually or collectively which have been socially developed or constructed. They are complex interrelated packages of such elements as actions, knowledge, judgements, criteria of success, values, skills, dispositions, virtues, feelings, indeed elements from across the full range of the achievements that human capacities make possible. Education in these terms will necessarily involve the acquisition of knowledge and the development of a person. But what knowledge is acquired or what development of a person will result is not the first determining consideration. That is rather that the individual be initiated into those practices that will at every stage of their history constitute the good life for that individual. At the start of education what those practices are must be determined by others. They must choose these in relation to both the emerging given capacities of the individual and the physical and social context. In engaging rationally in the practice of education others will thus progressively select the practices they consider most defensible for the individual for present immediate wants and for the future development of the good life. As the individual’s wants, capacities and achievements develop, so the practices education involves must become more and more the 195

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subject of the individual’s own modification and choice in rational terms. This suggests that education will be likely to involve practices in at least three distinguishable domains. First there will be all those very varied basic practices necessary for any individual to be rationally viable in their given everyday physical, personal and social contexts. Second, there will be practices from that much wider range of optional practices available for the construction of each individual rational life. Both these kinds of practices will inevitably figure in education from its beginnings. Progressively, however, if that life is to continue to develop its rational character, there must be developed practices of a third kind. These will be ‘second order’ to the first two categories being constituted of critical reflection on the latter. By these second order practices, already acquired first order practices can be modified in personal rational judgement and new practices can be pursued as judged best in the self-direction of life in detail and overall. Amongst this rich diversity of practices, those concerned with the systematic pursuit of theoretical or academic knowledge I see as falling within the second category, and as likely to figure as major elements in the life of relatively few. They are, however, as I have argued, crucially important for all, as their specialist achievements contribute substantively, if only indirectly, to the rational development of the many practices in all three categories. Theoretical or academic knowledge is important in the social development of the practices of critical reflection that the good life requires. They are however not themselves in general necessary for the individual’s conduct of the good life. Their place in education was thus seriously mistaken in the ‘rationalist’ approach.

IV In the light of these considerations, I now, not surprisingly, consider the notion of Liberal Education for which I argued in the 1960s and 1970s to be misconceived in certain important respects which have little to do with many of the more specific objections that have been voiced against it. I still hold that forms of theoretical knowledge can be distinguished in terms of the logical features and truth criteria of the propositions with which they are primarily concerned. I still consider the propositional elements in moral, 196

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religious and aesthetic understanding to be central to the proper characterisation of these areas, though I now take a different view as to how those elements are best construed. The main error in my position was seeing theoretical knowledge as the logical foundation for the development of sound practical knowledge and rational personal development. Education in theoretical forms of knowledge was seen as ultimately fundamental to everything else in education. For psychological or other contingent reasons education may at many stages turn out to be best approached through practical concerns or work on a topic basis. But beneath these approaches logically coherent mastery of distinct forms of knowledge had to be recognised as the key to all fundamental progress. Of course I now consider practical knowledge to be more fundamental than theoretical knowledge, the former being basic to any clear grasp of the proper significance of the latter. But my argument now is not merely for the priority of practical knowledge in education, but rather for the priority of personal development by initiation into a complex of specific, substantive social practices with all the knowledge, attitudes, feelings, virtues, skills, dispositions and relationships that that involves. It is those practices that can constitute a flourishing life that I now consider fundamental to education. What is more, the idea that a curriculum might be organised in terms of significant practices is thus not merely a contingent matter. Such organisation, rather than attention to the forms of knowledge, becomes a necessary demand, if violence is not to be done to the very nature of the achievements a worthwhile education pursues. But worthwhile education conceived in these terms requires initiation into the practices of critical reflection on the fundamental substantive practices it basically involves, not merely immersion in these basic practices. Such reflection, however, directed at the modification of basic practices both socially and personally, is itself a matter of practical reason, though this requires consideration of presuppositions within practice in the light of abstracted theoretical study. Such education therefore requires the capacity to appreciate the significance of the achievements of theoretical reason for the development of the basic practices in which one participates. Though engaging in theoretical practices can contribute to a grasp of their significance for other basic practices, I suggest it is in general impossible for worthwhile education to engage directly in these theoretical pursuits. I suggest it is rather 197

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part of the social responsibility of theoretical specialists to engage in wide public dialogue about the significance of their work for non-theoretical pursuits, thus providing a context of public critical reflection on social practices on which educators can draw. Sophisticated work in political, social and personal education is nowadays increasingly engaged in the kind of critical reflection on political, social and moral practices that I have in mind. It draws freely on philosophical, psychological and sociological studies without presuming to educate pupils in these theoretical disciplines directly. If I were now to formulate a concept of Liberal Education, I should be inclined to do this in terms of developing capacities for critical reflection across the range of basic practices necessary to any flourishing life within a given context. But I am no longer convinced of the need for such a particular distinctive notion. Finally, I wish to draw attention to the implications of the foregoing for moral, religious and aesthetic education. Though willing to accept that the prime concern of all these three areas might well be action or experience rather than knowledge and understanding, I held a theoretical education in each to be fundamental to the achievement of any such wider personal or social goals. But if, instead of being conceived as rationalistically grounded in theoretical understanding, each is taken to be an area of social practices developed sui generis, its educational rationale is manifestly transformed. What then becomes crucial is directly intro ducing pupils to the kinds of practices each area involves and to critical reflection on these. It is the progressive development of the complex desires and satisfactions the practices encompass as elements within a coherent form of flourishing life that matters. The formal, theoretical, rather than practical, consideration of moral principles, religious doctrines and artistic canons becomes secondary and specialist rather than primary and general. Perhaps the distortion to the educational significance of these areas in my earlier approach was more severe than that done to the domains of the natural and social sciences, mathematics and philosophy. At least the latter can indeed with some confidence be said to be primarily areas of theoretical knowledge and understanding. But that is little consolation if even their educational purport was as misconceived as I am now arguing. If that is indeed the case then what matters next is whether my insistence on the primacy of practices in education is in fact any more defensible.2 198

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NOTES 1

2

This paper was given at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Conference in 1992 and is a revised and extended version of a paper first given in 1991 to the American Philosophy of Education Society under the title ‘Educational Aims: Their Nature and Content’. It will be apparent that the ideas in this chapter owe much to the writings on numerous contemporary philosophers, particularly those concerned with developing a more Aristotelian approach to our understanding of persons, practice, and the good life. In particular I have been influenced by the work of John Kekes (The Examined Life, London: Associated University Presses, 1988), Glen Langford (Education, Persons and Society, London: Macmillan, 1985), Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, London: Duckworth, 1981), Michael Polanyi (with H.Prosch, Meaning, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975), Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and John White (Education and the Good Life, London: Kogan Page, 1990). It will be apparent also that I have made eclectic use of their ideas and have espoused a position that they might well all radically reject. I have therefore deliberately not attributed ideas to particular individuals as I alone must accept responsibility for what is here set out. Nevertheless, to these distinguished authors I am deeply indebted.

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BOOKS 1970 Joint author with R.S.Peters: The Logic of Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). 1972 Joint editor with R.F.Dearden and R.S.Peters, and contributor of two papers: Education and the Development of Reason (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). 1974a Author: Knowledge and the Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). 1974b Author: Moral Education in a Secular Society (London: University of London Press). 1983 Editor and contributor: Educational Theory and its Foundation Disciplines (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). 1988 Joint author with Furlong, V.J., Pocklington, K. and Miles, S.: Initial Teacher Training and the Role of the School (Buckingham: Open University Press) . ND Joint editor with S.A.Ashraf, and contributor: Religion and Education: Islamic and Christian Approaches (forthcoming).

ARTICLES 1963a ‘ Philosophy and Educational Theory ’, British Journal of Educational Studies, November 1963 (reprinted in 3 American collections of papers. Translated into Hungarian and Polish). 1963b ‘ Talking about God ’, Learning for Living (Student Christian Movement), September 1963. 1965a ‘ Christian and Secular Education ’, Hibbert Journal, January 1965. 1965b ‘ Morals, Science and the Two Cultures ’, Education for Teaching, May 1965. 1965c ‘ Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge ’, in Archambault, R.D. (ed.) Philosophical Analysis and Education (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), 1965. (Reprinted in numerous British and American collection of papers).

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1965d ‘ Educational Theory ’, in Tibble, J.W. (ed.) The Study of Education (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), 1965 (reprinted in an American collection of papers). 1965e ‘ Morals, Religion and the Maintained School ’, British Journal of Educational Studies, November 1965 (reprinted in Macy, C. (ed.) Let’s Teach Them Right (Pemberton Books, London), 1969). 1966a ‘ The Logical and Psychological Aspects of Teaching a Subject ’, in Peters, R.S. (ed.) The Concept of Education (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), 1966. 1966b ‘ Language and Thought ’, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, Vol. I, 1966. 1967a ‘ Public and Private Values and Religious Educational Content ’, in Sizer, T.R. (ed.) Religion and Public Education (Houghton Mifflin, Boston), 1967. 1967b ‘ The Curriculum: Educational Implications of Social and Economic Change ’, in Schools Council Working paper No. 12 (HMSO, London), 1967. 1968a ‘ Reply to George S.Maccia ’, Review Article in Studies in Philosophy and Education, Vol. VI, No. 1, 1968. 1968b ‘ The Contribution of Philosophy to the Study of the Curriculum ’, in Kerr, J.F. (ed.) Changing the Curriculum (University of London Press), 1968. 1969a ‘ The Logic of the Curriculum ’, in Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol. I, No. 2, May 1969. 1969b ‘ The Foundations of Morality ’, in Spectrum, Vol. 1, No. 2, January 1969 (reprinted in Macy, C. (ed.) Let’s Teach Them Right, (Pemberton Books, London), 1969). 1970 ‘ Philosophy and Religious Education ’, British Journal of Educational Studies, June 1970. 1971a ‘ What is Teaching? ’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, May 1971. 1971b ‘ Liberal Education ’, in Encyclopaedia of Education (Macmillan, NY), 1971. 1971c ‘ Literature, Criticism and the Forms of Knowledge ’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1, March 1971. 1971d ‘ Christian Education—A Contradiction in Terms ’, in Faith and Thought, Vol. 99, No. 1, October 1971. Also in Learning for Living, March 1972. 1972a ‘ The Nature of Educational Theory: Reply to D.J.O’Connor ’, in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, Vol. VI, No. 1, 1972. 1972b ‘ Reflections on the James Report ’, Froebel Journal, No. 24, Autumn 1972. 1973a ‘ Religion: A Form of Knowledge? A Reply ’, Learning for Living, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1973. 1973b ‘ Forms of Knowledge: A reply to Elizabeth Hindess ’, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society, suppl. volume, Vol. VII, No. 2, 1973.

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1973c ‘ Towards a Logic of Curriculum Development ’, in Taylor, P.H. and Walton, J. The Curriculum: Research, Innovation and Change, Ward Lock Educational, East Grinstead, UK), 1973. 1973d ‘ Literature and the Fine Arts as a Unique Form of Knowledge ’, Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 3, Michaelmas 1973. 1973e ‘ The Nature and Scope of Educational Theory (2) ’, in Langford, G. and O’Connor, D.J. New Essays in the Philosophy of Education (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), 1973. 1974a ‘ Statements, Language and Art: A Comment in Reply to Mr. Peter Scrimshaw ’, in Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 4, No. 1, Lent 1974. 1974b ‘ Professional Preparation: The P.G.C.E. ’, in Times Educational Supplement, 22 March 1974. 1974c ‘ Training Professional Teachers ’, in Times Higher Education Supplement, 26 April 1974. 1974d ‘ The Curriculum ’, chapter from The Logic of Education, in Esner, W.W. and Vallence, E. (eds) Conflicting Conceptions of Curriculum, (McCutchan, Berkeley), 1974. 1975a ‘ Education and Human Being ’, Chairman’s Remarks in S.C.Brown (ed.) Philosophers Discuss Education, (Macmillan), 1975. 1975b ‘ The Curriculum and its Objectives: a Defence of Piecemeal Rational Planning ’, Doris Lee Memorial Lecture, 1975, (University of London Institute of Education, Studies in Education, No. 2). 1975c ‘ The P.G.C.E. Course: Its Objectives and Their Nature ’, in British Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 1975. 1975d (joint author with R.S.Peters) ‘ Reply to Clive Beck ’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, Vol. IX, Nos 1 and 2, Summer 1975. 1976 ‘ Towards a Theology of Education ’, Learning for Living, Vol. 15, No. 4, Summer 1976. 1977a Review of D.I.Lloyd (ed.) Philosophy and the Teacher in Philosophy, July 1977. 1977b ‘ Rational Curriculum Planning: Its Logic and Objectives ’, in Melbourne Studies in Education (Melbourne University Press), 1977. 1979a Review of Brent A. Philosophical Foundations for the Curriculum, in Journal of Further and Higher Education, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1979 (NATFE). 1979b Response to Review of Knowledge and the Curriculum by Jonas F. Soltis Teachers College Record (Columbia University), Vol. 80, No. 4, May 1979. 1979c ‘ Human Movement, Knowledge and Education ’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 13, 1979. 1979d ‘ Professional Studies in Initial Teacher Education: Some Conceptual Issues ’, in Alexander, R. and Wormald, E. (eds) Professional Studies for Teaching (Teacher Education Study Group of Society for Research into Higher Education, Guildford, UK), 1979. 1979e ‘ Faculty Survey: 4 The Study of Education ’, in Cambridge, The Magazine of the Cambridge Society, Number 5, 1979. 1979f ‘ Education, The School and The Church ’, 1978 Wiseman Lecture, The Oscotian, VIth Series 1978–9.

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1980a ‘ The P.G.C.E. Course and the Training of Specialist Teachers for Secondary Schools ’, (for U.C.E.T. Working Party) British Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1980. 1980b ‘ The Logic of Curriculum Development ’, in Galton, M. (ed.) Curriculum Change (Leicester University Press), 1980. 1981a ‘ Education, Catechesis and the Church School ’, (edited version of Wiseman Lecture 1978) in British Journal of Religious Education, Spring 1981. 1981b ‘ Symposium Paper: Philosophy of Education: Review of NSSE 80th Year Book ’, in Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 51, No. 3, 1981. 1982a ‘ Philosophy of Education: The Significance of the Sixties ’, in Barrow, R. (ed.) Educational Analysis, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1982. 1982b ‘ Professional Authority: Its Foundations and Limits ’, in British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, June 1982. 1983 Educational Theory, in Hirst P.H. (ed.) Educational Theory and its Foundation Disciplines (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), 1983. 1984a ‘ Philosophy of Education ’, in Sutcliffe, J.M. (ed.) A Dictionary of Religious Education (SCM Press, London), 1984. 1984b ‘ Education and Diversity of Belief, in Felderhof, M.C. (ed.) Religious Education in a Pluralistic Society (Hodder & Stoughton, London), 1984. 1985a ‘ Richard S.Peters ’, in Dicionario de Ciencias de la Educacion, Historia de la Educacion II (Anaya, Madrid), 1985. 1985b ‘ Educational Studies and the PGCE Course ’, in British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol 33, No. 3, October 1985. 1986 ‘Richard Peters’ Contribution to the Philosophy of Education’, in Cooper, David E. (ed.) Education, Values and Mind (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London), 1986. 1987a ‘ Recent Trends in Philosophy of Education ’, in Evenshang, O., Harbo, T., Stalsett, U.E. (eds) Pedagogikk og Lærerutdanning (Tano, Oslo), 1987. 1987b Foreword, in Haydon, G. (ed.) Education and Values: The Richard Peters Lectures (Institute of Education, University of London), 1987. 1988 Review of Lionel Elvin: Encounters with Education, in Cambridge Review , Vol. 109, No. 2303, December 1988. 1989a ‘ Ethical Consideration of Streaming ’, in Education (University of Malta), Vol. 3, No. 3, 1989. 1989b ‘ The Department of Education: Inside or Outside the Social Science Faculty’, in 25th Anniversary Symposium of the Social Sciences Faculty (University of Oslo), 1989. 1989c ‘ The Concepts of Physical Education and Dance Education ’, in Collected Conference Papers in Dance, Vol 4, NATFHE, 1989. 1989d ‘ Implications of Government Funding Policies for Research in Teaching and Teacher Education: England and Wales ’, in Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 5, No. 4, (Pergamon Press, Oxford), 1989. 1990a ‘ Internship: A View from Outside ’, in Benton, P. (ed.) The Oxford Internship Scheme: Integration and Partnership in Initial Teacher Training (C.Gulbenkian Foundation, London), 1990.

203

WRITINGS BY P.H. HIRST

1990b ‘ The Theory and Practice Relationship in Teacher Training ’, in Wilkin, M., Furlong, V.J., Booth, M. (eds) Partnership in Initial Teacher Training: The Way Forward (Cassell, London), 1990. 1990c ‘ The Logic of Curriculum Organisation ’, in Collected Conference Papers in Dance, Vol. 5, NATFHE, 1990. 1991a ‘ Theory, Practice and Teacher Education ’, in Kansanen, P. (ed.) Discussions on Some Educational Issues III, Research Reprint 94, (Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki), 1991. 1991b ‘ Educational Aims: Their Nature and Content ’, in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society (USA), 1991. 1991c ‘ Professional Preparation and the Study of Educational Situations ’, in Sultana, R.G. (ed.) Themes in Education: A Maltese Reader (Mineva, Malta), 1991. 1991d ‘ Certain Basic Issues in Curriculum Development ’, in Firsov, V. (ed.) British and Soviet Perspectives in the Curriculum (Perspectiva, Moscow), 1991. 1992a ‘ Aesthetic Education ’, in Cooper, D.E. (ed.) A Companion to Aesthetics (Blackwell, Oxford), 1992. 1992b ‘ Education and Training ’, in Toward a National Dance Culture: Collected Conference Papers in Dance, Vol. 6, NATFHE, 1992. 1993a ‘ The Foundations of the National Curriculum: Why Subjects? ’ in O’ Hear, P. and White, J. (eds) Assessing the National Curriculum (Paul Chapman Publishing, London), 1993. 1993b ‘ Education, Knowledge and Practices ’ in Barrow, R. and White, P. (eds), Beyond Liberal Education: Essays in Honour of Paul Hirst (Routledge, London), 1993.

204

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS MAKING CRITICAL REFERENCE TO THE WORK OF P.H. HIRST (Note: This bibliography is a far from complete attempt to tabulate all such writings.) Alexander, H.A. ‘Liberal Education and the Open Society: Absolutism and Relativism in Curriculum Theory’, Curriculum Inquiry, 19 (1), (1989), 11–32. Allen, R.T. ‘Metaphysics in Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 23, (1989), 159–69. Apple, M.W. ‘Review of Educational Theory and Its Foundation Disciplines, (ed.) P.H.Hirst ’, Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 14 (2), (1985), 206–7. Arnold, P.J. ‘Education, Movement, and the Rationality of Practical Knowledge’, Quest, 40 (2), (1988), 115–25. Arnold, P.J. ‘On the Relationship Between Education, Work and Leisure: Past, Present and Future’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 37 (2), (1989), 136–46. Arnold, P.J. ‘The Preeminence of Skill as an Educational Value in the Movement Curriculum’, Quest, 43 (1), (1991), 66–77. A.T.C.D.E. Philosophy Section, Report of Conference on ‘Philosophy and the Teaching of the Arts’, at Madeley College of Education, July, 1973. Bailey, C. Beyond the Present and the Particular: A Theory of Liberal Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1984. Barnett, R.A. ‘Teacher Education: A Changing Model of Professional Preparation’, Educational Studies, 13 (1), (1987), 57–74. Barrett, Richard ‘Recent Philosophical Books on the Curriculum’, Journal of Educational Thought, 13 (1), (1979), 78–86. Barrow, R. Common Sense and the Curriculum (London: Allen & Unwin) 1976. Barrow, R. The Philosophy of Schooling (Brighton: Wheatsheaf) 1986. Barrow, R. and Woods, R.G. An Introduction to Philosophy of Education, 3rd edition (London: Routledge) 1988. Best, D. ‘Primary and Secondary Qualities: Waiting for an Educational Godot’, Oxford Review of Education, 11 (1), (1985), 73–84. Birch, W. ‘Towards A Model of Problem-Based Learning’, Studies in Higher Education, 11 (1), (1986), 73–82.

205

WRITINGS REFERRING TO P.H. HIRST

Brennan, A. ‘Primary Education in the Eighties’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 33 (3), (1985), 278–98. Brennan, A. ‘Analysis, Development and Education’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 34 (3), (1986), 249–67. Brennan, Andrew and Dumbleton, Paul, ‘Learning Difficulties and the Concept of a Person’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 37 (2), (1989), 147–68. Brent, Allen. Philosophical Foundations of the Curriculum (London: Allen & Unwin) 1978. Brent, Allen. ‘Transcendental Arguments for the Forms of Knowledge’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 16 (2), (1982), 265–74. Brown, C. ‘Curriculum Responses to Ethnic-Minority Groups: A Framework For Analysis’, Educational Review, 40 (1), (1988), 51–68. Brown, L.M. ‘Metaphors, Concepts and a Liberal Education’, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australia, 1, (1972), 24–42. Burton, R. ‘A Critical Comparison of P.H.Hirst’s Theory of Moral Education with that of J.Wilson’, M. Ed. Thesis, Liverpool, 1981. Callan, Eamon ‘Liberal Education and the Curriculum’, Educational Studies, 10 (1), (1984), 65–76. Carr, W. ‘Review of Educational Theory and Its Foundation Disciplines (ed.) P.H.Hirst ’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 17 (1), (1985), 116–18. Cato, Dennis. ‘The Philosophic Pretence of Linguistic Analysis: A Polanyian Perspective on Joe Green’s Drawing Out Paul Hirst’s Concept of Reason’, Journal of Educational Thought, 20 (3), (1986), 134–42. Clark, C. ‘The Necessity of Curricular Objectives’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 20 (4), (1988), 339–49. Cohen, B. Means and Ends in Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1980. Cooper, D.E. Illusions of Equality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1980. Corson, D. ‘Social Dialect, The Semantic Barrier, and Access to Curricular Knowledge’, Language in Society, 12 (2), (1983), 213–22. Cowell, B. ‘The Role of Christians in Religious and Moral Education’, Journal of Moral Education, 12 (3), (1983), 161–5. Dearden, R.F. The Philosophy of Primary Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1968. Dearden, R.F. Theory and Practice in Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1984. Degenhardt, M.A.B. Education and the Value of Knowledge (London: Allen & Unwin) 1982. Degenhardt, M.A.B. ‘Educational Research as a Source of Educational Harm’, Universities Quarterly: Culture, Education and Society, 38 (3), (1984), 232–52. De Gonzalez De Leon, Corrine ‘Classificatory Schemes and the Justification of Educational Content: A Re-Interpretation of the Hirstian Approach’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 21, (1987), 103–12. Diorio, Joseph A. ‘Knowledge, Truth and Power in the Curriculum’, Educational Theory, 27, (1977), 103–10. Donald, J.G. ‘Knowledge and the University Curriculum’, Higher Education, 15 (3–4), (1986), 95–106.

206

WRITINGS REFERRING TO P.H. HIRST

Downey, M. and Kelly, A.V. Moral Education: Theory and Practice (London: Harper & Row) 1978. Dunlop, F. The Education of Feeling and Emotion (London: Allen & Unwin) 1984. Egan, K. ‘Children’s Path to Reality from Fantasy: Contrary Thoughts About Curriculum Foundations’, Oxford Review of Education, 15 (4), (1983), 357– 71. Elliott, J. ‘Educational Theory, Practical Philosophy and Action Research’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 35 (2), (1987), 149–69. Elliot, M. ‘Can Primary Teachers Still Be Subject Generalists?’ Teaching and Teacher Education, 1 (4), (1985), 279–87. Elliott, R.K. ‘Objectivity and Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 16, (1982), 49–62. Enslin, P.A. ‘The Nature of Educational Theory: A Critical Study of the Views of D.J.O’Connor, P.H.Hirst and J.B.Wilson’, M.Litt. Thesis, Cambridge, 1979. Enslin, Penny. ‘Are Hirst and Peters Liberal Philosophers of Education?’ Journal of Philosophy of Education, 19, (1985), 211–22. Evers, C.W. ‘Analytic Philosophy of Education: From a Logical Point of View’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 11, (1979), 1–15. Evers, C.W. ‘Epistemology and the Structure of Educational Theory: Some Reflections on the O’Connor-Hirst Debate’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 21, (1987), 3–13. Evers, C.W. and Walker, J.C. ‘Knowledge, Partitioned Sets and Extensionality: A Refutation of the Forms of Knowledge Thesis’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 17 (2), (1983), 155–70. Evers, C.W. and Walker, J.C. ‘Pyrotechnics Defended: A Reply to Jim Mackenzie’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 21, (1987), 139–42. Flew, A. Sociology, Equality and Education (London: Macmillan) 1976. Floden, R.E., Buchmann, M. and Schwille, J.R. ‘Breaking With Everyday Experience’, Teachers College Record, 88 (4), (1987), 485–506. Forquin, J.C. ‘Sociology of Curriculum in Great Britain’, Revue Française de Sociologie, 25 (2), (1985), 211–32. Francis, Leslie J. ‘The Logic of Education, Theology, and the Church School’, Oxford Review of Education, 9 (2), (1983), 147–62. Francis, L. ‘Theology of Education’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 38 (4), (1990), 349–64. Gingell, J. ‘Art and Knowledge’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 17, (1985), 10–21. Goldstein, Laurence. ‘The Shaping of the Curriculum’, Oxford Review of Education, 14 (2), (1988), 215–25. Goodrich, R.A. ‘A Revival of the Prepositional Theory of Art?’ British Journal of Aesthetics, 24, (1984), 314–24. Green, Joe. ‘The Concept of Reason in Hirst’s Forms of Knowledge’, Journal of Educational Thought, 19 (2), (1985), 109–16. Greene, M. ‘Philosophy, Reason and Literacy’, Review of Educational Research, 554 (5), (1984), 547–59. Greene, M. ‘The Question of Standards’, Teachers College Record, 91 (1), (1989), 9–14. Greer, J.E. ‘Religious and Moral Education: An Exploration of Some Relevant Issues’, Journal of Moral Education, 12 (2), (1983), 92–9.

207

WRITINGS REFERRING TO P.H. HIRST

Gribble, J. Introduction to Philosophy of Education (Boston: Allyn & Bacon) 1969. Gribble, James. ‘The Critical Fallacy in Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 6, (1974), 1–21. Griffiths, Morwenna. ‘Hirst’s Forms of Knowledge and Koerner’s Categorical Frameworks’, Oxford Review of Education, 12 (1), (1986), 17– 30. Halstead, Robert. ‘The Relevance of Psychology to Educational Epistemology’, Philosophy of Education: Proceedings, 35, (1979), 65–76. Hare, W. Open-mindedness and Education (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press) 1979. Harris, J.E. ‘Discussion in Practice: Theorizing Structure and Subjectivity in Teaching and Learning’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 9 (2), (1988), 205–21. Harris, K. Education and Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1979. Hart, W.A. ‘Is Teaching What The Philosopher Understands By It?’ British Journal of Educational Studies, 24 (2), (1976), 155–70. Hendley, Brian P. ‘The Philosophy of Education since Dewey’, Eidos, 3, (1984), 191–215. Heslep, Robert D. ‘The Moral Import of the Concept of Education’, Atlantic Philosophy of Education Society, 32, (1987), 1–22. Hewson, P.W. and Hewson, M.G.A. ‘An Appropriate Conception of Teaching Science: A View from Studies of Science Learning’, Science Education, 72 (5), (1988), 597–614. Hindess, E. ‘Forms of Knowledge’ in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society, Supplementary Vol. 2, 1972. Hobson, B. ‘Paternalism and the Justification of Compulsory Education’, Australian Journal of Education, 27 (2), (1983), 137–50. Howe, A. ‘Education or Training: Is There any Difference?’ Programmed Learning and Educational Technology, 22 (1), (1985), 78–80. Huckle, J. ‘Geography and Values in Higher Education’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2 (10), (1978), 57–67. Huff, Toby E. ‘An Impossible Epistemology’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 7, (1977), 95–102. Hull, John M. ‘Christian Theology and Educational Theory: Can There be Connections?’ British Journal of Educational Studies, 24, (1976), 127–43. Hurst, B.C. ‘Means, Ends, Content and Objectives in Hirst and Sockett’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 18, (1984), 17–30. Hyland, J.T. ‘Instruction, Rationality, and Learning to be Moral’, Journal of Moral Education, 15 (2), (1986), 127–38. K a s p r i s i n , L o r r a i n e . ‘ L i t e r a t u re a s a Wa y o f K n o w i n g : A n Epistemological Justification for Literary Studies’, Proceedings of Philosophy of Education, 41, (1985), 379–89. Kelly, A., and Weinreich-Haste, H. ‘Science is for Girls’, Women Studies International Quarterly, 2 (3), (1977), 127–39. Kilbourn, Brent. ‘Thoughts on Conceptual Analyses of Teaching’, Journal of Educational Thought, 16 (2), (1982), 64–72. Kleinig, J. Philosophical Issues in Education (London: Croom Helm) 1982.

208

WRITINGS REFERRING TO P.H. HIRST

Langford, G. Education, Persons and Society (London: Macmillan) 1985. Lawson, K.H. ‘The Problem of Defining Adult Education as an Area of Research’, Adult Education Quarterly, 36 (1), (1985), 39–43. Lauglo, J. ‘Concepts of General Education and Vocational Education Curricula for Post-Compulsory Schooling in Western Industrialized Countries: When the Twain Shall Meet’, Comparative Education, 19 (13), (1983), 285–304. Lazerson, M., Mclaughlin, J.B. and Mcpherson, B. ‘Learning and Citizenship: Aspirations for American Education’, Daedalus, 113 (4), 59–74. Lloyd, D.I. ‘Theory and Practice’, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, 10, (1976), 98–113. Lloyd, D.I. (ed.) Philosophy and the Teacher (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1976. Lloyd, D.I. ‘Review of Educational Theory and its Foundational Disciplines (ed.) P.H.Hirst’, Educational Research, 27 (2), (1985), 149–50. Lloyd, Ieuan ‘Teaching Religious Understanding’, Religious Studies, 17, (1981), 253–9. Loukes, Harold ‘Knowledge and the Curriculum’, British Journal of Religious Education, 6 (2), (1984), 75–81. McIntyre, D. ‘The Oxford Internship Scheme and the Cambridge Analytical Framework’ in Booth, M., Furlong, J. and Wilkin, M. (eds) Partnership in Initial Teacher Training (London: Cassell) 1990. Mackenzie, Jim ‘Evers and Walker and Forms of Knowledge’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 19, (1985), 199–209. Maddock, T. ‘The Role of Authority and Reason in Education and Educational Administration’, Educational Administration Quarterly, 27 (1), (1991), 90–102. Marshall, J.D. ‘The Nature of Educational Theory’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 7, (1975), 15–26. Marshall, J. and Hoff, A. ‘The Integration Act and Religious Indoctrination’, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 19 (2), (1984), 124–35. Martin, J.R. ‘The Disciplines and the Curriculum’ in Readings in the Philosophy of Education: A Study of Curriculum (Boston: Allyn & Bacon) 1970. Martin, Jane Roland ‘Needed: A Paradigm for Liberal Education,’ in Jonas F.Soltis (ed.), Philosophy and Education—80th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1981, 37–59. Matthews, M.R. The Marxist Theory of Schooling: A Study of Epistemology and Education (Brighton: Harvester) 1980. Maxy, S.J. ‘Happiness in Education Through the Development of a School Philosophy’, Education, 105 (4), (1985), 427–31. McNamara, D ‘Research on Teachers’ Thinking: Its Contribution to Educating Student-Teachers to Think Critically’, Journal of Education for Teaching, 16 (20), (1990), 147–60. McPeck, J. Teaching Critical Thinking (New York: Routledge) 1990.

209

WRITINGS REFERRING TO P.H. HIRST

Meynell, Hugo A ‘On the Aims of Education’, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, 10, (1976), 79–97. Mucklow, Neale H. ‘Grounds for Grouping the Disciplines’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 14, (1980), 225–38. O’Connor, D.J. ‘The Nature of Educational Theory’, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, 6, (1972), 97–109. O’Hear, A. Education, Society and Human Nature: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1981. Okshevsky, W. ‘Epistemological and Hermeneutical Concepts of the Nature of Understanding: the Cases of Paul H.Hirst and Martin Heidegger’ in Educational Theory (Illinois) Winter 1992. Partington, G. ‘How Can Curricula be Analyzed? The Case of History Syllabuses’, Australian Journal of Education, 28 (2), (1984), 202–11. Phillips, D.C. ‘The Distinguishing Features of Forms of Knowledge’ in Educational Philosophy and Theory, 3 (2), (1971), 27–35. Phillips, D.C. ‘On Describing a Student’s Cognitive Structure’, Educational Psychologist, 18 (2), (1983), 59–74. Phillips, D.Z. ‘Philosophy and Religious Education’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 18 (1), (1970), 5–17. Prakash, M.S. and Waks, L.J ‘Four Conceptions of Excellence’, Teachers College Record, 87 (1), (1985), 79–101. Pring, Richard ‘Common Sense and Education’, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, 11, (1977), 57–77. Proctor, N. ‘Towards a Partnership with Schools’, Journal of Education for Teaching, 10 (3), (1984), 219–32. Reeves, F.W. ‘Forms and Fields’, Educational Studies, 2 (3), (1976), 237–49. Reid, L.A. Ways of Understanding and Education (London: Heinemann) 1986. Royce, R.J. ‘R.S. Peters and Moral Education: The Justification of Procedural Principles’, Journal of Moral Education, 12 (3), 174–81. Ruthven, Kenneth ‘The Disciplines Thesis and the Curriculum: A Case Study’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 26 (2), (1978), 163–76. Scarlett, B.F. ‘Formal and Teleological Elements in Hirst’s Argument for a Liberal Curriculum’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 18, (1984), 155– 65. Schilling, Marie ‘Knowledge and Liberal Education: A Critique of Paul Hirst’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 18 (1), (1986), 1–16. Sealy, J. Religious Education: Philosophical Perspectives. (London: Allen & Unwin) 1985. Shaker, P. and Ulrich, W. ‘Reconceptualizing the Debate Over the General Education of Teachers’, Journal of Teacher Education, 38 (1), (1987), 11–15. Shaw, K. ‘Curriculum, Management and the Improvement of Education: Forging a Practical Alliance’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 19 (3), (1987), 203–17. Simons, Martin ‘The Forms of Knowledge Again’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 7, (1975), 39–46. Simpson, K. ‘Wall on Forms and Norms’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 7, (1975), 29–38. Singh, B.R. ‘Neutrality and Commitment in Teaching Moral and Social Issues in a Multicultural Society’, Educational Review, 41 (3), (1989), 7227–42.

210

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Smith, L.M ‘Effective Teaching: A Qualitative Inquiry in Aesthetic Education’, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 8 (2), (1977), 127–39. Smith, R.D. ‘Hirst’s Unruly Theory: Forms of Knowledge, Truth, Meaning’, Educational Studies, 7 (1), (1981), 17–25. Smythe, Ormond ‘On the Theory of the Forms of Knowledge’, Philosophy of Education: Proceedings, 34, (1978), 28–39. Soltis, Jonas F. ‘Philosophy of Education: Retrospect and Prospect’, Philosophy of Education: Proceedings, 31, (1975), 7–24. Soltis, Jonas F. ‘Knowledge and the Curriculum’, Teachers College Record, 80 (4), (1979), 771–8. Steinberg, Ira, S. ‘Wanting Substance, Bad Form’, Philosophy of Education: Proceedings, 34, (1978), 40–3. Stopes-Roe, H. ‘Moral Practice and Ultimate Reality’, Journal of Moral Education, 12 (2), (1983), 81–91. Straughan, R. I Ought to, but: A Philosophical Approach to the Problem of Weakness of Will in Education. (Windsor: NFER) 1982. Thiessen, Elmer John ‘Two Concepts or Two Phases of Liberal Education?’ Journal of Philosophy of Education, 21, (1987), 223–34. Thiessen, E.J. ‘R.S.Peters on Liberal Education: A Reconstruction’, Interchange, 20 (4), 1990, 1–8. Vandenberg, D. ‘Hirst, Hermeneutics and Fundamental Educational Theory’ in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society (1973) 302–16. Warnock, M. Schools of Thought (London: Faber) 1977. White, J.P. Towards a Compulsory Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1973. White, P. ‘Self-Respect, Self-Esteem, and the School: A Democratic Perspective on Authority’, Teachers College Record, 88 (1), (1986), 121–73. White, P. (ed.) Personal and Social Education: Philosophical Perspectives (London: Kogan Page) 1989. Wilson, J. ‘Speech at the North of England Education Conference, Sheffield’, Oxford Review of Education, 10 (2), (1984), 157–8. Wilson, J. ‘Race, Culture and Education: Some Conceptual Problems’, Oxford Review of Education, 12 (1), (1986), 3–15. Wilson, J. What Philosophy Can Do (London: Macmillan) 1986. Woolcock, P.G. ‘Forms of Knowledge, Teacher Education and the Manipulation of Beliefs’ in The Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 14 (1) (1989) 22–9. Woodhead, M. ‘The Needs of Children—Is there Any Value in the Concept?’ Oxford Review of Education, 13 (2), (1987), 129–39. Yates, L. ‘Is Women’s Studies a Legitimate School Subject? An Outline of an Agenda for Discussion’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 18 (1), (1986), 17–30.

211

INDEX

Achebe, C. Things Fall Apart 107–8, 121, 125 aesthetics and ethics, relationship of 150–67 Aquinas, T. 132, 136; natural law 138–40 Aristotle 101, 102, 103, 138 Arnold, M. 50 art and well-being 169–82 Augustine, 132, 137 authority 18–23, 75 Bantock, G.H. 11 Barrow, R. 36 Beardsley, M. 172–5, 176, 179, 180 Bell, C. 162 Bennett, W. 108 Bhagavad-Gita 155 Bloom, A. 108, 109, 110–11, 123 Bradley, F.H. 180 Brandon, E.P. 47 n2 Boys et al. 56, 58 Bruner, J. 84 Case, R. 82, 83–4 Cezanne, P. 164, 166 competition 20 Cooper, D. 11, 12, 13 Crittenden, B. 13 curriculum 94, 103–6; historical development of 98–101; integration of 107–27; knowledge and 96–8

Davidson, D. 41 Dennett, D. 89 Delacroix, E. 164 d’Entreves, A.P. 139 Dewey, J. 42, 47 n2, 68–9 Donagan, A. 139 Dostoevsky, F. 153, 166 Dummett, M. 34, 42 Durkheim, E. 129, 133, 138, 143 Education for Capability 70 Elliott, R.K. 13–14, 47 n10, 176 Engelmann, P. 151, 161 Emerson R.W. 45 Fine, M. 124 forms of knowledge 80, 99 Frankena, W. 112 Freedman, S.Small Victories 118 Frege, G. 47 n6 Galileo 39 Gellner, E. 79 General Teaching Council 28 Goodson, I. 99–101 Graham, D. 26 Habermas, J. 6 Hacker, A. 118 Hamlyn, D. 177 Hampshire, S. 175 Hansberry, L. A Raisin in the Sun 125 Hegel, G.W.F. 153 Heidegger, M. 30, 47 n6 Hernandez, P. 118

212

INDEX

higher education 61–2, 64–5 Hirsch, E.D. Jr. 108; Cultural Literacy 111 oHC Hirst, Paul H. 16, 31, 39–46, 49– 50, 79–81, 82, 84, 91, 92, 107, 108, 123, 129–45, 169, 182; career 2–4; his criticisms of ‘rationalist’ approach to education 187–190; his criticisms of ‘utilitarian’ approach to education 188– 90; Knowledge and the Curriculum 132; Moral Education in a Secular Society 135–140, 144; his notion of education as a social practice 190–6; themes in work of 4–10 Hurston, Z.Neal Their Eyes Were Watching God 125 Hume, D. 162, 180 Huxley, T.H. 50

moral and religious education 132–145 morality and religion 130 Mulhall, S. 47 n11 Mydans, S. 118 National Curriculum 17 National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) 63 Newman, J.H. 50, 51, 53, 60, 73, 136 Nietzsche, F. 153 Norman, D. 84–5 Oakeshott, M. 46, 51–5, 60, Rationalism in Politics 142 O’Hear, A. 47 n8, 54, 176, 177, 179–82 Oppenheimer, R. 114 Osborne, H. 170–1, 175 Ozick, C. 111 Passmore, J. 180 Peters, R.S. 36, 75, 179 Phillips, D. 12, 13, 91 Phillips, D.Z. 134 Plato, 32, 35–9 132; The Republic 36–9; The Symposium 37 Polanyi, M. 199 n2 Pring, R. 11, 13

James, H. The Bostonians 124 Kant, I. 132, 150, 162 Kekes, J. 6, 199 n2 Kennedy, J. 125 Kidder, T. Among Schoolchildren 118 Kierkegaard, S. 46 Langford, G. 199 n2 liberal education 31–48, 49–57, 80–1, 130, 169; conception of truth underlying 39–43; criticisms of 57–60, 81 Lightfoot, S.Lawrence 117–18 Lincoln, A. 118

religious education 132–45 Reschner, N. 97–8 Rhodes, R. The Making of the Atomic Bomb 114–15 Ribadeneira, D. 118 Rooper, T.G. 100 Rorty, R. 13, 109–10, 127 Rutter, M. 24

McGuiness, B.Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig (1889– 1921) 150, 151, 153, 160 MacIntyre, A. 6, 54, 199 n2 Martin, J.Roland 11, 12, 13, 111, 126 Marx, K. 44, 102 Mill, J.S. 50, 59, 60 Moore, G.E. 40 moral knowledge 131 moral teaching 22–3,

Savile, A. 175, 176, 180 Schiller, F. 158, 162 Schopenhauer, A. 155, 156–8 Schwab, J.J. 84, 91 Shakespeare 117 Shulman, L. 90–1 oHC Sidgwick, H. 50 Silesius, A. 152, 154

213

INDEX

Van Gogh, V. 164 virtues 73–4 vocational preparation 50, 60–6 Vygotsky, 92

Snook, I. 12, 13, structure, concept of 79–92 Tarski, A. 33 Taylor, C. 6, 54, 179, 199 n2 teacher education 6–7, 26–8, 90–2 teachers: authority of 18–23 teaching: institutional commitment to 24–6 testing 19 theory and practice relationship 5–6 Thoreau H.D. 45 Traherne, T. 166 transcendental argument 43–4 truth 30–48; conceptions of 32–5 Tolstoy, L. The Gospel in Brief 151–3, 155 TVEI 72

Warnock, M. 10 Wiener, W. 58 White, J. 14, 199 n2 White, R. 50 Williams, B. 6, 54, 178, 181 Wittgenstein, L. 42, 46, 47 n11; aesthetics 156–67; early ethics 151–6; religious development 151–6; Woolf, V. Three Guineas 125, 126 Wordsworth, W. 163, 166 Wright, K. 182 Zane, N. 124 Zen 44

Uhland, L. 163

214