Two Texts in Philosophy of Education

Steve Tozer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The purpose of my remarks is to interpret each of two important new books in philosophy of education in terms of their distinctive features and uses, and then to examine what that interpretation suggests about the various activities we call philosophy of education.

Before turning to what makes these volumes so different from one another, a word about what they have in common. Both are ambitious, wide-ranging representations of the field of philosophy of education. Both are intended to edify, to leave the reader more informed about that field. At the general level, these volumes are comparable because they treat the same subject matter and share a similar purpose. In addition, each was written or edited by a respected leader in our field, and each book should only enhance the reputation of its author or editor. I should say, incidentally, that I have read no reviews of either volume, so I am coming at this task innocent of how each has been received in the field more generally.

Any fair reading of these volumes, or any fair comparison between them, should recognize how very different they are in their purposes. Their different contexts of use give these volumes their separate meanings. That they share the same title, Philosophy of Education, should not lead us to assume too much about their similarities.

Nel Noddings's Philosophy of Education is in its fundamental character a pedagogical text. Several of its important qualities support this portrayal. First, as Nel makes clear in her references to "students" in the introduction and throughout the text, she has in mind the classroom as a primary context of use for the volume, though the publisher informs us that the volume is also useful for the general reader. Second, the book is developmental in its discourse and in the demands it makes of students. That is, the volume begins with the most elementary of claims and descriptions, assuming very little or no prior knowledge of philosophy of education on the reader's part, then builds toward later chapters that depend on a reader's cumulative acquaintanceship with a great many philosophy of education concepts, thinkers, and relationships among them. (I would say, in fact, that for novices who will comprise most of the book's readership, the volume depends for its success on a pedagogical context for that developmental approach to succeed. Consider that each of the ten chapters deals with major philosophical and educational themes and thinkers, and that each chapter is less than twenty pages in length. To do justice to the complex topics concisely, many passages in the volume are conceptually dense, requiring opportunities for reflection and discussion such as are typically available only in group instructional contexts.)

A third clearly pedagogical feature of the book is that its developmental approach is designed to induct novices into the activities and dispositions of philosophy of education by engaging the reader in thinking through interesting dilemmas within the text of each chapter, and by posing a series of philosophical questions about education at the end of each chapter. Each chapter is an occasion for the student to experience doing philosophy of education in a particular way, not simply to read about this approach or that. Fourth, the volume sets up a distinctly pedagogical relationship between the author and the reader by having the author speak with a personal voice. This voice at various times encourages students by expressing confidence in the students' familiarity with, or ability to understand, a difficult concept; or it acknowledges the difficulty of an idea and offers an example with which students might be familiar; or it weighs in with its own ways of resolving a difficult dilemma, leading by personal example through a conceptual thicket. In doing so, the author turns from representing the views of others to representing her own take on things, and she is clear about it when she does so. One good case of this, as you might expect, is the final chapter on Feminism, Philosophy, and Education, though there are many other examples - such as when she wrestles with the ambiguities of Dewey's conception of growth as an ideal and offers her own take on how to make sense of that notion.

These, then, are some of the distinctly pedagogical features of Nodding's Philosophy of Education. Before turning to how these differ from the characteristics of the Encyclopedia, two more observations seem warranted. First, in contrast to what the publisher claims twice in "About the Book and the Author," this is not really a "survey" of the field at all. I do not think it is intended to be. A survey attempts a more or less comprehensive, systematic mapping out of a given terrain in terms of its major features. If I can be forgiven for using a relatively overused metaphor, and forgiven further for using one that purposely contrasts one gendered activity to another, this volume much more resembles a tapestry than a survey. The chapters, like the warp and woof, represent not just different threads but different kinds of threads. The first two are on historically significant philosophers, focusing on the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Dewey, and others. The next two chapters treat methodological schools of philosophy and philosophy of education-Analytic method, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Critical Theory. In chapters 6, 8, and 9, whole branches of philosophy, not philosophers or schools, become the focus in such chapters as Epistemology and Education or Social and Political Philosophy. What interweaves these various categories is the constant cross-referencing of ideas and individuals. Once introduced, most major terms or thinkers reappear again and again in different contexts, so students can see the connectedness of these various ideas to one another.

This is pedagogically important and pedagogically demanding, I think, for the student and the teacher. By the latter half of the volume, it is not at all unusual for students to have to understand allusions to a half dozen different thinkers and specialized concepts in a single page, and these might be brought together in a way that another author might not think to bring them together at all. (An illustrative exercise would be for several scholars each to write one page of text using the following names and terms, as Noddings does on page 132: Kohlberg, Lakatos, progressive and degenerating paradigms, formal logic, critical thinking, Dewey, epistemology, constructivism (Piagetian biological/individual, social, and radical), Ernst von Glaserfeld, Wallis Suchting, and cooperative learning. If these scholars were to compare their pages to see what sense each had made of the relations among these terms and names, we would expect to find that they had written very different things.) If the fabric has been woven well, all of this holds together; but it is still demanding for students to move through the relationships among these concepts adroitly.

This weaving approach is different from a survey approach, in part in the way it chooses to focus on specific connections among selected ideas rather than to provide a comprehensive map of the terrain. This is in large part why, for example, Noddings's chapter on John Dewey differs so much in character from the treatment of Dewey in the Encyclopedia, as does her treatment of "Feminism, Philosophy of Education." While her chapters on these two topics are significantly longer than the corresponding entries in the encyclopedia, her treatment is less comprehensive with respect to the full terrain of discourse usually associated with each topic. She selects specific points of focus, then spends time weaving in a variety of other issues that connect each chapter with the rest of the volume.

This book is a pedagogical act in another sense. Like teaching, it is temporal. Nel may wish to comment on this, but I am guessing that this book, like an act of teaching, is not written "for the ages" except to the degree that it will have long term impact on its readers. Some may be familiar with Native American sand painters who construct intricate designs with colored sand and then make no effort to preserve them as permanent artifacts. One Native American artist recently interviewed on public television compared such art to a song that one sings in the moment - and then the song is gone. Most teaching is like that. We do not try to preserve an act of teaching for the ages, except when someone boldly puts her teaching into a book for all to see, as Noddings has done. We can see her pedagogy exposed, treating many issues in which no one author is as expert as are her colleagues, taken collectively. Few of us have the range to teach as deeply and widely across such a vast expanse of philosophical/educational literatures. The text deserves to be widely used, and I would expect it will be. It does not try to make the enduring statement, however, that the Encyclopedia seeks to make. Rather, it speaks from the particularity of an insightful scholar making sense of her field in a way that invites others to join in.

The Chambliss volume, in contrast, is a comprehensive survey, one that does seem to be written for the ages. That is, like other encyclopedias, it invites maintaining for many years to come, as long as there is a field of philosophy of education. The order of the title seems apt to me: Philosophy of Education-An Encyclopedia, emphasizing its association with a disciplinary field first and with a genre of texts second. The book is a survey in that it does attempt to map out the terrain of our field. While it makes no claims to definitiveness, it clearly seeks comprehensiveness, both in its selection of 228 articles and in the tendency of each article to treat the major features of the literature on that topic. This volume, at over half a million words, is some six times the length of the Noddings book. Its comprehensiveness and quality together mark this as a volume of enduring significance: it fills a need in the field for such a comprehensive collection, and it does it so well, with such well selected authorships, that it would seem very strange for someone else to mount a similar effort. With this volume, most of the work that needs doing has now been done.

The Encyclopedia, like Noddings's text, is meant to be edifying, but it is not structured as an instrument for developing a learner's capacities in a cumulative way. Its character is that of a reference book, to be reached for again and again in a variety of different contexts over a long expanse of time - a career, even. Its primary context of use is not to be read together as a whole by groups of novices, but in fragments, as particular entries are needed by teachers preparing lessons for college students, by students writing papers, by researchers, by participants in educational policy making who need to clarify a term or concept - and so on. It is written for more independent study than is Nel's book - that is, each selection assumes enough prior knowledge on the part of the reader that each passage can be understood independently from the rest of the book, and independently from a classroom process of dialogue and support.

The fragmented nature of such a volume, organized by alphabet, rather than by how any topic might inform the next, is part of its appeal as a book to browse, incidentally. I find myself choosing to read some topics because I am familiar with them and wish to check my understanding against the author's; some topics because they are so unfamiliar that I am curious about what they are about. I choose some selections because I recognize and am interested in the author, though the topic might not have drawn me itself; other topics regardless of author, and still other selections because of an inviting interface between the author and the topic. I might not have read the Comenius selection, but was curious about how a scholar from Prague would interpret the great Czech educator.

This volume, like Noddings's, cross-references other entries within the treatment of each topic, and a select few of those are listed at the end of each entry, encyclopedia-fashion, to help us track the subject into related areas. Such browsing is particularly rewarding because none of us has command of all, or even a high percentage, of these topics. Part of the appeal of this volume is that it could only have been assembled through the collective expertise of many, many people (over 180 authors), and we are given a single, readable location through which to become acquainted with knowledge and ways of knowing outside our own. Thus, while its central character is that of a reference book rather than an instructional text, it offers an opportunity for learning that will probably be embraced not by novices, but by people who have already developed at least an interest and probably some expertise in philosophy of education. The most knowledgeable among us will find something here to pursue.

The volume instructs in another sense, as well. It teaches any reader something significant about how the vocabulary of the field of philosophy of education might be constructed. The volume tells us what topics the editor and an eminent editorial advisory board, who know the field well, count as contributive to the "core" and the "scope" of the field (p. vii). In so doing, they cause us to think about the core and scope of the field - what has been included and what left out. While I am grateful for the entry on Social Reconstructionism, for example, I would have liked to see an entry on the social foundations of education, or at least the philosophical foundations of education, to address a distinctively important pedagogical project in the history of a field that has contributed much to the education of educators.

One illustration of the Encyclopedia's approach to instructing us about the nature and scope of the field is in its longest single entry, the plus-8,000-word treatment of "Philosophy of Education, History of." Interestingly, it contains one brief sentence on Dewey. Yet, the index lists over sixty other references to Dewey made in other treatments throughout the book.

Because of the different contexts of use for these two volumes, one text's treatment of a given topic cannot be substituted satisfactorily for the other's treatment of that same or a similar topic. I mentioned earlier the topic of feminism, for example, which Noddings embeds in a chapter titled "Feminism, Philosophy and Education." She announces her purposes for the chapter as to (1) review and revisit problems raised in earlier chapters, (2) elaborate some feminist themes only hinted at earlier in the book, and (3) extend a particular feminist view, the ethic of care, using it to examine some basic ideas in education. The author is teaching, here, something of what she thinks students need to understand in the context of this particular text. It is in only a most limited and selective sense an effort to survey the terrain of feminist thought. Instead, it is more clearly an effort to help students understand what feminist perspective brings to enduring issues in philosophy of education as they have been presented earlier in the book. "Now that you understand something about philosophy of social science, or epistemology," she seems to be saying, "look what feminist philosophy does to these ideas." In particular, through her discussion of the ethic of caring, Noddings illustrates here a Deweyan point she later raises in the epilogue: that philosophy of education, more necessarily than philosophy generally, focuses on "philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice."^[1] One inference that might be drawn from Noddings's treatment is this: that the concern for making a difference in practice is characteristic of philosophy of education, of feminist philosophy of education in particular, and still more for the ethic of caring.

Barbara Houston's entry on Feminism in the Encyclopedia shares with Noddings's treatment a concern for the relationship between philosophizing and practice. It is framed, however, not as a pedagogical essay for students, but as a condensed, comprehensive survey. It begins with a provisional conceptual introduction, moves into a four column treatment of the history of feminism, turns to a discussion of theory and postmodernism, next addresses feminist activism at some length, and finally concludes with a brief consideration of feminist perspectives on education. In this treatment, she reminds us specifically that the work of Jane Roland Martin and Nel Noddings have made fundamental contributions to the literature - so much so that "these and other publications have changed the face of philosophy of education."^[2]

One passage from Houston's treatment of feminist theory suggests a telling comparison with the field of philosophy of education. The passage concerns both the fragmentation of feminist theory and the construal of theory as political activity, both of which, Houston suggests, may have the potential for weakening feminist influence on serving the interests of women collectively.

The test for a feminist theory used to be: Does this help in the liberation of women. Now it seems to be: Does this reflect female experience? When one combines the second criterion with postmodernists' emphasis upon differences, it is easy to understand Virginia Held's concern that postmodern feminism is in danger of being caught in a "fragmentation that may dissipate the concentrated effort needed to strive for liberation." Furthermore, when postmodernists emphasize the belief that theorizing is political activity, many feminist activists become wary. They worry that the idea of theory as politics might replace other kinds of activism. Feminist activists point out that redescribing and creating new meaning in theory is not enough to stop battering, promote reproductive freedom, or end child abuse.^[3]

Houston's cautious framing of this thought suggests an equally cautious analogy to the field of philosophy of education: that philosophy of education may be in danger of too much fragmentation and the substitution of theory for the kind of philosophizing that, in Dewey's words, "makes a difference in practice." If offered as a familiar caution, not as an attack on the field, the analogy offers an occasion to reflect on what our field is accomplishing. Just as the feminist criterion "liberation of women" is grounded in a commitment to the development of human capacities, so does the modifier "of education," when applied to "philosophy," signal a similar concern for human growth. On the one hand, it seems clear to many of us in the field today that the diverse discourses that now characterize philosophy of education are intellectually enriching to the field. In the Encyclopedia, J.J. Chambliss says it differently:

In the last decade of the twentieth century, philosophy of education scarcely resembles a discipline with a distinct purpose and a clearly established agenda....From an interest in analysis of concepts to the various concerns for human social problems, we can see a wide and colorful array of projects addressed by philosophers of education. At the same time, the variety of projects is evidence for an individuality of effort that exists in the absence of a community of philosophers who search for the nature of arete. Missing in the present world of diversity of interests is the classic sense of a quest for philosophic unity (p. 472).

To postmodernists who eschew unity as a self-evidently positive aim, it is not clear that J.J. Chambliss's description is necessarily an indictment of the field. Feminism, too, is enriched by its diversity of theoretical enterprises. However, it is interesting to test our field against the concern expressed by Dewey, by Noddings and again by Houston, for making a difference in practice. In her treatment of feminism, Houston was able to illustrate in considerable detail that "women worldwide have found through feminism a language for redefining the scope of politics." Houston describes the world-changing impact that feminism has had in the United States and abroad in all areas of social, economic, and political life. These are clearly instances of a body of ideas making a difference in practice, and being shaped in turn by that practice. If we look for ways in which philosophy of education has had similar impact in how people conduct their lives, or how institutions operate, the evidence is much more sparse. This may not be a function of the "fragmentation" or the "diversity" of the field, but it may well signal a need for discourse within the community of philosophers of education about what "making a difference" and arete mean.

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[1] From John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: MacMillan, 1916), 328, quoted in Noddings, Philosophy of Education, 200.

[2] Barbara Houston, "Feminism," in Chambliss, Philosophy of Education, 219.

[3] Ibid., 218.