Richard Smith

ABSTRACT Paul Hirst’s work on the nature of knowledge and its significance for education is still important, in at least two respects. One is the defence he offers of a distinctively liberal education: this is widely acknowledged, but its importance in our own time deserves greater recognition. The other, which is less often noticed, is Hirst’s avoidance of the widespread tendency to think of science as the model that all knowledge should attempt to emulate. This tendency, which in its extreme form is called scientism, represents less respect for science—which of course science deserves—than veneration of it. Wider discussion here of the part that the idea of knowledge plays in educational thinking today touches on recent work on virtue epistemology, the importance but complexity of the ideas of truth and reason, the curious rise of ‘powerful knowledge’, and recent work on the importance of philosophy in its ancient role of orienting us to reality as the home of thinking: a theme anticipated in some of the late work of Paul Hirst.

Character education in schools in England is flourishing. I give many examples of the enthusiasm for it as well as drawing attention to the UK government's new ambivalence towards it. Character education seems largely impervious to the many criticisms to which it has been subjected. I touch on these only briefly as my focus is on a criticism that has received little coverage. This is because the virtues on offer are unstable. They are best understood as sites on which we contest our understanding of what it is to be a good person rather than reach conclusive answers. There is support for this argument in Aristotle, notwithstanding its many oddities and those of some modern uses of his conception of the virtues. The proliferation of the virtues in the practice and theory of education today is, I suggest, a sign of weakness and not of strength, while the very instability of the virtues demands that they be continually discussed and debated. This places them at the heart of any vision of education worth having.

The main purpose of this article is to question and finally reject the tendency to see philosophy and literature (especially poetry) as essentially distinct forms of language, a tendency which sometimes extends to regarding them as mutually exclusive and to be understood as in some way in opposition to each other. The idea of that opposition is generally supposed to go back as far as Plato, at least, and much of what I write here will concern just how we are to read what we find on the matter in Plato's Republic, how we are to read Plato's dialogues in general and, even more broadly, how we are to read what comes to us under the title of philosophy. It is Plato, I suggest, who supplies us with a powerful way of understanding the instability of the literature/philosophy binary, and who, at the end of Republic, invites us to witness its collapse.

Talk of educational reform and of the importance of ‘the management of change’ in education and elsewhere is still in vogue. However it often seems concerned to persuade us that if we engage fully with change rather than resisting it we will find our lives more meaningful, thus omitting the important matter of the goal of the change in question. Change here is in any case invariably a euphemism for the impoverishment of education and the annihilation of its ideals, together with the deprofessionalisation of teachers and other educators. Recent writers about educational change tend to be less concerned with an ever-changing, labile world than with how to make the transition—and make others make the transition—from one stable condition of things to another. Different ways of thinking about change, drawing on different literature, might help us see beyond the ways in which we are currently being asked to respond to educational change and reform.

This book evaluates the increasingly wide variety of intellectual resources for research methods and methodologies and investigates what constitutes good educational research. Written by a distinguished international group of philosophers of education Questions what sorts of research can usefully inform policy and practice, and what inferences can be drawn from different kinds of research Demonstrates the critical engagement of philosophers of education with the wider educational research community and illustrates the benefits that can accrue from such engagement.

In his writings Jim Marshall has helpfully emphasized such Wittgensteinian themes as the multiplicity of language games, the deconstruction of ‘certainty,’ and the contexts of power that underlie discursive systems. Here we focus on another important legacy of Wittgenstein's thinking: his insistence that human activity is rule‐governed. This idea foregrounds looking carefully at the world of education and learning, as against the empirical search for new psychological or other facts. It reminds us that we need to consider, in Peter Winch's words, ‘what it makes sense to say’ about certain educational phenomena, and how these meanings stand against understanding a wider form of life. This insight has important implications for doing educational research, and we examine some of these.

We here analyse the ethical dimensions of the UK's ‘Research Excellence Framework’, the latest version of an exercise which assesses the quality of university research in the UK every seven or so years. We find many of the common objections to this exercise unfounded, such as that it is excessively expensive by comparison with alternatives such as various metrics, or that it turns on the subjective judgement of the assessors. However there are grounds for concern about the crude language in which for example all relevant scholarship becomes called ‘research’ and publications become ‘outputs’. The focus on the impact of research, which was a new feature of the most recent exercise, is particularly problematic, creating as it does a tendency to what Aristotle called alazony, self-aggrandisement, on the part of academics. We conclude that the REF is a mixed good from an ethical point of view, and that more could be done to mitigate its more unfortunate features.

Traditional epistemology is often said to have reached an impasse, and recent interest in virtue epistemology supposedly marks a turn away from philosophers’ traditional focus on problems of knowledge and truth. Yet that focus re-emerges, especially among ‘reliabilist’ virtue epistemologists. I argue for a more ‘responsibilist’ approach and for the importance of some of the quieter and gentler epistemic virtues, by contrast with the tough-minded ones that are currently popular in education. In particular I make a case for what I here call ‘unknowing’: a positive state that is not the same as ignorance. I acknowledge the mystical connotations of the term, and suggest that there is a strong interest in unknowing in writers such as Plato, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In their style of philosophising they also address the paradox of being knowing about unknowingness itself.

Philosophy as Interplay and Dialogue is an original and stimulating collection of essays. It covers conceptual and critical works relevant to current theoretical developments and debates. An international group of philosophers of education come together each summer on a Greek island. This book is the product of their diligent philosophical analysis and extended dialogues. To deploy their arguments, the authors draw on classical thinkers and contemporary prominent theorists, such as Badiou and Malabou, with fresh and critical perspectives. This book thus makes an original contribution to the field. (Series: Studies on Education, Vol. 5) [Subject: Philosophy of Education]

It is one sign of the lack of understanding of the value of the humanities, to educational research and inquiry as well as to our world more widely, that such justifications of them as are offered frequently take a crudely instrumental form. The humanities are welcomed insofar as they are beneficial to the economy, for example, or play a therapeutic role in people's physical or mental well-being. In higher education in the UK, they are marginalized for similar reasons, on the grounds that they neither appeal to the lucrative overseas student market nor constitute a significant source of grant income from research councils, industry, or other funding sources. While their place in educational research is still defended in many quarters, the increasing demand that research should have “impact” can leave the humanities appearing ineffectual. Furthermore, the very idea of research is widely taken to mandate empiricist and “scientific” approaches. Although there are no easy solutions to this state of things, Richard Smith argues in this essay that those of us who value the humanities in and for themselves might adopt two approaches in particular: to pursue vigilant criticism of the rampant instrumentalism and scientism of our time, and to emphasize the importance of that distinctive feature of humane inquiry: interpretation

It is sometimes said that we are strangers to ourselves, bearers of internal alterity, as well as to each other. The profounder this strangeness then the greater the difficulty of giving any systematic account of it without paradox: of supposing that our obscurity to ourselves can readily be illuminated. To attempt such an account, in defiance of the paradox, is to risk knowingness: a condition which, appearing to challenge our alterity but in fact often confirming it, holds an ambiguous place in the ?ethics of belief? and has largely escaped philosophical attention. Like alterity, knowingness can only be approached indirectly. Charles Dickens, in David Copperfield, is exemplary in the way he handles these themes

In this important survey, an international group of leading philosophers chart the development of philosophy of education in the twentieth century and point to signficant questions for its future. Presents a definitive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education. Contains 20 newly-commissioned articles, all of which are written by internationally distinguished scholars. Each chapter reviews a problem, examines the current state of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discusses possible futures of the field. Provides a solid foundation for further study.

This book addresses concerns about educational and moral standards in a world increasingly characterised by nihilism. On the one hand there is widespread anxiety that standards are falling; on the other, new machinery of accountability and inspection to show that they are not. The authors in this book state that we cannot avoid nihilism if we are simply _laissez-faire_ about values, neither can we reduce them to standards of performance, nor must we return to traditional values. They state that we need to create a new set of values based on a critical assessment of contemporary practice in the light of a number of philosophical texts that address the question of nihilism, including the work of Nietzsche.

Education as a public activity is inescapably political. There are different and competing views about what constitutes the good life, about human nature, about justice and equality, about what is worth learning and why, and about the purposes of education in relation to these. Accordingly it is entirely proper in a democracy that education policy should be created by the people’s elected representatives in parliament, even if the thought that it would be good to keep politics out of education from time to time holds its attractions.

The only certainty about education these days, at all levels, is that good management—or effective management, to put it more properly—is crucial. Educational research, for example, must be effectively managed, if it is to score highly in the Research Assessment Exercise. Subject Review, the assessment of teaching quality in universities, also calls for managerial skills of the highest order, and there are even those who say that success in the exercise depends rather on such skills than on the quality of teaching itself. Some of the results certainly seem to suggest so.

Recent radical changes to university education in England have been discussed largely in terms of the arrangements for transferring funding from the state to the student as consumer, with little discussion of what universities are for. It is important, while challenging the economic rationale for the new system, to resist talking about higher education only in the language of economics. There is a strong principled case for rejecting the extension of neoliberalism to education and university education especially. ‘The market’ claims to be the language of perfect rationality: thus it narrows the range of what can be said and thought, driving out the other forms of rationality to which it is the function of education and culture to introduce successive generations. One distinctive role of the university, in our time as always, is to speak richer and more complex languages, invoking other values and goods than those which currently underpin what passes for policy

This is the second of two Special Issues, the first of which appeared as Volume 40, Issue 2 of this year. In the first Issue, our contributors were particularly inclined to question two assumptions that colour thinking about educational research. The first is that educational research is essentially a ‘scientific’ exercise, reaching its apogee in randomised control trials, as if medical research were the ideal to which all other kinds of research should attempt to measure up, and as if education were a process largely analogous to that of administering drugs in order to enhance performance. The second, related assumption is that educational research is to be understood as, at heart, a matter of discovering ‘what works’. This is the background—also explored in other recent publications such as Smeyers and Depaepe (2006)—against which this second Special Issue should be seen.

Jonathan Dancy’s Ethics Without Principles (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004) presents the fullest account of the moral particularism for which its author is well known. Moral particularism, for Dancy, is the view that there is little if any place in the moral life for moral principles, that moral judgement does not need to appeal to them, and that ‘there is no essential link between being a full moral agent and having principles’ (p. 1). We need an account of moral thinking which allows for moral conflict: the idea that moral thinking consists essentially in subsuming particular cases under a universal principle implies that the agent who thinks she is confronted by conflicting reasons is simply in error, since she has not found the relevant universal principle. And this seems wrong. Roughly similar considerations apply to the idea of regret. When I face a dilemma such that the consequences of whichever path I do not take seem bound to haunt me, the ‘subsumption’ view of principles entails that ‘there was no reason to do the other thing at all, since only one principle applied to the case, and it was decisive, and the only reasons around were those which depend for their existence on that principle’ (p. 4). Thus Dancy seeks, in Aristotelian fashion, to save the phenomena: conflict and regret just are part of our moral lives. Principles do not work in our moral deliberation in the way that their supporters think they do; and they may often cause us to fail to attend to the particularity of moral phenomena.

It is remarkable just how often philosophy of education assumes the school or, occasionally, the university as its context. There is very little philosophical work on vocational training or workplace learning; perhaps this is the legacy of an older generation of theorists who assumed that training was somehow inferior to education, and thus automatically beneath notice. Life, Work and Learning: practice in postmodernity, by David Beckett and Paul Hager (Routledge, 2002), is therefore to be welcomed as one of the few texts now offering philosophical discussion of this important area. Beckett and Hager describe themselves as ‘strategic postmodernists’, by which they mean that they do not want to jettison the insights into workplace learning offered by modernist writers, while at the same time they believe modernism itself needs to be held up for scrutiny.

Much current educational research shows the influence of two powerful but potentially pernicious lines of thought. The first, which can be traced at least as far back as Francis Bacon, is the ambition to formulate precise techniques of research, or ‘research methods’, which can be applied reliably irrespective of the talent of the researcher. The second is the recognition that in the social sciences we—humankind—are ourselves the objects of our study. The first line of thought threatens to cut educational research free of the wider range of ideas and theories that should govern or at least inform it. The second tends to turn it into an absorption with self, particularly when allied to what its practitioners like to think of as the postmodern turn.

A new title from Routledge's Major Works series, Major Themes in Education, Philosophy of Education II is a five-volume 'mini library' of the very best scholarship. It is an essential successor collection to Philosophy of Education (1998) (978-0-415-12944-2), edited by Paul Hurst and Patricia White, and described by the Bulletin of the UK-Japan Education Forum as 'indispensable for libraries'. Philosophy of Education (1998) was the first comprehensive collection of the field's canonical and cutting-edge research, and this new collection now takes full account of the numerous important developments that have taken place since its appearance. Moreover, Philosophy of Education II also includes coverage of many new areas and topics without the scope of the first collection. With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the learned editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Philosophy of Education II is a crucial work of reference. It is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital resource.