Kelvin Beckett

In this essay Kelvin Beckett argues that Richard Peters's major work on education, Ethics and Education, belongs on a short list of important texts we can all share. He argues this not because of the place it has in the history of philosophy of education, as important as that is, but because of the contribution it can still make to the future of the discipline. The limitations of Peters's analysis of the concept of education in his chapter on “Criteria of Education” are well known. In the chapter on “Education as Initiation,” however, Peters offered a synthetic sketch of education that, Beckett argues, points us toward a more comprehensive definition of education, one which, he maintains, can be accepted by all philosophers, regardless of the tradition they work in

In this article, I argue that Paulo Freire’s liberatory conception of education is interesting, challenging, even transforming because central to it are important aspects of education which other philosophers marginalise. I also argue that Freire’s critics are right when they claim that he paid insufficient attention to another important aspect of education. Finally, I argue for a conception of education which takes account of the strengths and at the same time overcomes the limitations of Freire’s liberatory conception.

John Dewey adopted a child-centered point of view to illuminate aspects of education he believed teacher-centered educators were neglecting, but he did so self-consciously and self-critically, because he also believed that ‘a new order of conceptions leading to new modes of practice’ was needed. Dewey introduced his new conceptions in The Child and the Curriculum and later and more fully in Democracy and Education. Teachers at his Laboratory School in Chicago developed the new modes of practice. In this article, I explore Dewey’s new conception of education and compare it with the apparently opposed views of R. S. Peters and Paulo Freire. In doing so, I show that, despite their criticisms of Dewey, whether explicit or implicit, these influential philosophers, representing quite different traditions in philosophy of education were in substantial agreement with him. I also show that, despite our own differences, as important as they are, seeing teachers and learners at work in a rapidly changing society, now on a global scale, in classrooms which are also changing, driven largely by new technologies, the conception of education Dewey, Peters, and Freire developed can provide us with the foundation we need to understand the changing teacher–learner relationship and the purposes their shared activities serve.