nature of education essay

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What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

Philosophy of Education

All human societies, past and present, have had a vested interest in education; and some wits have claimed that teaching (at its best an educational activity) is the second oldest profession. While not all societies channel sufficient resources into support for educational activities and institutions, all at the very least acknowledge their centrality—and for good reasons. For one thing, it is obvious that children are born illiterate and innumerate, and ignorant of the norms and cultural achievements of the community or society into which they have been thrust; but with the help of professional teachers and the dedicated amateurs in their families and immediate environs (and with the aid, too, of educational resources made available through the media and nowadays the internet), within a few years they can read, write, calculate, and act (at least often) in culturally-appropriate ways. Some learn these skills with more facility than others, and so education also serves as a social-sorting mechanism and undoubtedly has enormous impact on the economic fate of the individual. Put more abstractly, at its best education equips individuals with the skills and substantive knowledge that allows them to define and to pursue their own goals, and also allows them to participate in the life of their community as full-fledged, autonomous citizens.

But this is to cast matters in very individualistic terms, and it is fruitful also to take a societal perspective, where the picture changes somewhat. It emerges that in pluralistic societies such as the Western democracies there are some groups that do not wholeheartedly support the development of autonomous individuals, for such folk can weaken a group from within by thinking for themselves and challenging communal norms and beliefs; from the point of view of groups whose survival is thus threatened, formal, state-provided education is not necessarily a good thing. But in other ways even these groups depend for their continuing survival on educational processes, as do the larger societies and nation-states of which they are part; for as John Dewey put it in the opening chapter of his classic work Democracy and Education (1916), in its broadest sense education is the means of the “social continuity of life” (Dewey, 1916, 3). Dewey pointed out that the “primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group” make education a necessity, for despite this biological inevitability “the life of the group goes on” (Dewey, 3). The great social importance of education is underscored, too, by the fact that when a society is shaken by a crisis, this often is taken as a sign of educational breakdown; education, and educators, become scapegoats.

It is not surprising that such an important social domain has attracted the attention of philosophers for thousands of years, especially as there are complex issues aplenty that have great philosophical interest. Even a cursory reading of these opening paragraphs reveals that they touch on, in nascent form, some but by no means all of the issues that have spawned vigorous debate down the ages; restated more explicitly in terms familiar to philosophers of education, the issues the discussion above flitted over were: education as transmission of knowledge versus education as the fostering of inquiry and reasoning skills that are conducive to the development of autonomy (which, roughly, is the tension between education as conservative and education as progressive, and also is closely related to differing views about human “perfectibility”—issues that historically have been raised in the debate over the aims of education); the question of what this knowledge, and what these skills, ought to be—part of the domain of philosophy of the curriculum; the questions of how learning is possible, and what is it to have learned something—two sets of issues that relate to the question of the capacities and potentialities that are present at birth, and also to the process (and stages) of human development and to what degree this process is flexible and hence can be influenced or manipulated; the tension between liberal education and vocational education, and the overlapping issue of which should be given priority—education for personal development or education for citizenship (and the issue of whether or not this is a false dichotomy); the differences (if any) between education and enculturation; the distinction between educating versus teaching versus training versus indoctrination; the relation between education and maintenance of the class structure of society, and the issue of whether different classes or cultural groups can—justly—be given educational programs that differ in content or in aims; the issue of whether the rights of children, parents, and socio-cultural or ethnic groups, conflict—and if they do, the question of whose rights should be dominant; the question as to whether or not all children have a right to state-provided education, and if so, should this education respect the beliefs and customs of all groups and how on earth would this be accomplished; and a set of complex issues about the relation between education and social reform, centering upon whether education is essentially conservative, or whether it can be an (or, the ) agent of social change.

It is impressive that most of the philosophically-interesting issues touched upon above, plus additional ones not alluded to here, were addressed in one of the early masterpieces of the Western intellectual tradition—Plato's Republic . A.N. Whitehead somewhere remarked that the history of Western philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato, and if the Meno and the Laws are added to the Republic , the same is true of the history of educational thought and of philosophy of education in particular. At various points throughout this essay the discussion shall return to Plato, and at the end there shall be a brief discussion of the two other great figures in the field—Rousseau and Dewey. But the account of the field needs to start with some features of it that are apt to cause puzzlement, or that make describing its topography difficult. These include, but are not limited to, the interactions between philosophy of education and its parent discipline.

1.1 The open nature of philosophy and philosophy of education

1.2 the different bodies of work traditionally included in the field, 1.3 paradigm wars the diversity of, and clashes between, philosophical approaches, 2.1 the early work: c.d. hardie, 2.2 the dominant years: language, and clarification of key concepts, 2.3 countervailing forces, 2.4 a new guise contemporary social, political and moral philosophy, 3.1 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 3.2 the content of the curriculum, and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.3 rousseau, dewey, and the progressive movement, 4. concluding remarks, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries, 1. problems in delineating the field.

There is a large—and ever expanding—number of works designed to give guidance to the novice setting out to explore the domain of philosophy of education; most if not all of the academic publishing houses have at least one representative of this genre on their list, and the titles are mostly variants of the following archetypes: The History and Philosophy of Education , The Philosophical Foundations of Education , Philosophers on Education , Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom , A Guide to the Philosophy of Education , and Readings in Philosophy of Education . The overall picture that emerges from even a sampling of this collective is not pretty; the field lacks intellectual cohesion, and (from the perspective taken in this essay) there is a widespread problem concerning the rigor of the work and the depth of scholarship—although undoubtedly there are islands, but not continents, of competent philosophical discussion of difficult and socially-important issues of the kind listed earlier. On the positive side—the obverse of the lack of cohesion—there is, in the field as a whole, a degree of adventurousness in the form of openness to ideas and radical approaches, a trait that is sometimes lacking in other academic fields. This is not to claim, of course, that taken individually philosophers of education are more open-minded than their philosophical cousins!

Part of the explanation for this diffuse state-of-affairs is that, quite reasonably, most philosophers of education have the goal (reinforced by their institutional affiliation with Schools of Education and their involvement in the initial training of teachers) of contributing not to philosophy but to educational policy and practice. This shapes not only their selection of topics, but also the manner in which the discussion is pursued; and this orientation also explains why philosophers of education—to a far greater degree, it is to be suspected, than their “pure” cousins—publish not in philosophy journals but in a wide range of professionally-oriented journals (such as Educational Researcher , Harvard Educational Review , Teachers College Record , Cambridge Journal of Education, Journal of Curriculum Studies , and the like). Some individuals work directly on issues of classroom practice, others identify as much with fields such as educational policy analysis, curriculum theory, teacher education, or some particular subject-matter domain such as math or science education, as they do with philosophy of education. It is still fashionable in some quarters to decry having one's intellectual agenda shaped so strongly as this by concerns emanating from a field of practice; but as Stokes (1997) has made clear, many of the great, theoretically-fruitful research programs in natural science had their beginnings in such practical concerns—as Pasteur's grounbreaking work illustrates. It is dangerous to take the theory versus practice dichotomy too seriously.

However, there is another consequence of this institutional housing of the vast majority of philosphers of education that is worth noting—one that is not found in a comparable way in philosophers of science, for example, who almost always are located in departments of philosophy—namely, that experience as a teacher, or in some other education-related role, is a qualification to become a philosopher of education that in many cases is valued at least as much as depth of philosophical training. (The issue is not that educational experience is irrelevant—clearly it can be highly pertinent—but it is that in the tradeoff with philosophical training, philosophy often loses.) But there are still other factors at work that contribute to the field's diffuseness, that all relate in some way to the nature of the discipline of philosophy itself.

In describing the field of philosophy, and in particular the sub-field that has come to be identified as philosophy of education, one quickly runs into a difficulty not found to anything like the same degree in other disciplines. For example, although there are some internal differences in opinion, nevertheless there seems to be quite a high degree of consensus within the domain of quantum physics about which researchers are competent members of the field and which ones are not, and what work is a strong contribution (or potential contribution). The very nature of philosophy, on the other hand, is “essentially contested”; what counts as a sound philosophical work within one school of thought, or socio-cultural or academic setting, may not be so-regarded (and may even be the focus of derision) in a different one. Coupled with this is the fact that the borders of the field are not policed, so that the philosophically-untrained can cross into it freely—indeed, over the past century or more a great many individuals from across the spectrum of real and pseudo disciplines have for whatever reason exercised their right to self-identify as members of this broad and loosely defined category of “philosophers” (as a few minutes spent browsing in the relevant section of a bookstore will verify).

In essence, then, there are two senses of the term “philosopher” and its cognates: a loose but common sense in which any individual who cogitates in any manner about such issues as the meaning of life, the nature of social justice, the essence of sportsmanship, the aims of education, the foundations of the school curriculum, or relationship with the Divine, is thereby a philosopher; and there is a more technical sense referring to those who have been formally trained or have acquired competence in one or more areas such as epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, and the like. If this bifurcation presents a problem for adequately delineating the field of philosophy, the difficulties grow tenfold or more with respect to philosophy of education.

This essay offers a description and assessment of the field as seen by a scholar rooted firmly in the formal branch of “philosophy of education”, and moreover this branch as it has developed in the English-speaking world (some of which, of course, has been inspired by Continental philosophy); but first it is necessary to say a little more about the difficulties that confront the individual who sets out, without presuppositions, to understand the topography of “philosophy of education”.

It will not take long for a person who consults several of the introductory texts alluded to earlier to encounter a number of different bodies of work (loosely bounded to be sure) that have by one source or another been regarded as part of the domain of philosophy of education; the inclusion of some of these as part of the field is largely responsible for the diffuse topography described earlier. What follows is an informal and incomplete accounting.

First, there are works of advocacy produced by those non-technical, self-identified “philosophers” described above, who often have an axe to grind; they may wish to destroy (or to save) common schooling, support or attack some innovation or reform, shore-up or destroy the capitalist mode of production, see their own religion (or none at all) gain a foothold in the public schools, strengthen the place of “the basics” in the school curriculum, and so forth. While these topics certainly can be, and have been, discussed with due care, often they have been pursued in loose but impressive language where exhortation substitutes for argumentation—and hence sometimes they are mistaken for works of philosophy of education! In the following discussion this genre shall be passed over in silence.

Second, there is a corpus of work somewhat resembling the first, but where the arguments are tighter, and where the authors usually are individuals of some distinction whose insights are thought-provoking—possibly because they have a degree of familiarity with some branch of educational activity, having been teachers (or former teachers), school principals, religious leaders, politicians, journalists, and the like. While these works frequently touch on philosophical issues, they are not pursued to any philosophical depth and can hardly be considered as contributions to the scholarship of the discipline. However, some works in this genre are among the classics of “educational thought”—a more felicitous label than “philosophy of education”; cases in point would be the essays, pamphlets and letters of Thomas Arnold (headmaster of Rugby school), John Wesley (the founder of Methodism), J.H. (Cardinal) Newman, T.H. Huxley, and the writings on progressive schooling by A.S. Neill (of Summerhill school). Some textbooks even include extracts from the writings or recorded sayings of such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Jesus of Nazareth (for the latter three, in works spanning more than half a century, see Ulich, 1950, and Murphy, 2006). Books and extracts in this genre—which elsewhere I have called “cultured reflection on education”—are often used in teacher-training courses that march under the banner of “educational foundations”, “introduction to educational thought”, or “introduction to philosophy of education”.

Third, there are a number of educational theorists and researchers, whose field of activity is not philosophy but—for example—might be human development or learning theory, who in their technical work and sometimes in their non-technical books and reflective essays explicitly raise philosophical issues or adopt philosophical modes of argumentation—and do so in ways worthy of careful study. If philosophy (including philosophy of education) is defined so as to include analysis and reflection at an abstract or “meta-level”, which undoubtedly is a domain where many philosophers labor, then these individuals should have a place in the annals of philosophy or philosophy of education; but too often, although not always, accounts of the field ignore them. Their work might be subjected to scrutiny for being educationally important, but their conceptual or philosophical contributions are rarely focused upon. (Philosophers of the physical and biological sciences are far less prone to make this mistake about the meta-level work of reflective scientists in these domains.)

The educational theorists and researchers I have in mind as exemplars here are the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner (who among other things wrote about the fate of the notions of human freedom and dignity in the light of the development of a “science of behavior”, and who developed a model of human action and also of learning that eschewed the influence of mental entities such as motives, interests, and ideas and placed the emphasis instead upon “schedules of reinforcement”); the foundational figure in modern developmental psychology with its near-fixation on stage theories, Jean Piaget (who developed in an abstract and detailed manner a “genetic epistemology” that was related to his developmental research); and the social psychologist Lev Vygotsky (who argued that the development of the human youngster was indelibly shaped by social forces, so much so that approaches which focused on the lone individual and that were biologically-oriented—he had Piaget in mind here—were quite inadequate).

Fourth, and in contrast to the group above, there is a type of work that is traditionally but undeservedly given a prominent place in the annals of philosophy of education, and which thereby generates a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about the field. These are the books and reflective essays on educational topics that were written by mainstream philosophers, a number of whom are counted among the greatest in the history of the discipline. The catch is this: Even great philosophers do not always write philosophy! The reflections being referred-to contain little if any philosophical argumentation, and usually they were not intended to be contributions to the literature on any of the great philosophical questions. Rather, they expressed the author's views (or even prejudices) on educational rather than philosophical problems, and sometimes—as in the case of Bertrand Russell's rollicking pieces defending progressive educational practices—they explicitly were “potboilers” written to make money. (In Russell's case the royalties were used to support a progressive school he was running with his current wife.) Locke, Kant, and Hegel also are among those who produced work of this genre.

John Locke is an interesting case in point. He had been requested by a cousin and her husband—possibly in part because of his medical training—to give advice on the upbringing of their son and heir; the youngster seems to have troubled his parents, most likely because he had learning difficulties. Locke, then in exile in Europe, wrote the parents a series of letters in which alongside sensible advice about such matters as the priorities in the education of a landed gentleman, and about making learning fun for the boy, there were a few strange items such as the advice that the boy should wear leaky shoes in winter so that he would be toughened-up! The letters eventually were printed in book form under the title Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), and seem to have had enormous influence down the ages upon educational practice; after two centuries the book had run through some 35 English editions and well over thirty foreign editions, and it is still in print and is frequently excerpted in books of readings in philosophy of education. In stark contrast, several of Locke's major philosophical writings—the Essay Concerning Human Understanding , and the Letter on Toleration —have been overlooked by most educational theorists over the centuries, even though they have enormous relevance for educational philosophy, theory, policy, and practice. It is especially noteworthy that the former of these books was the foundation for an approach to psychology—associationism—that thrived during the nineteenth century. In addition it stimulated interest in the processes of child development and human learning; Locke's model of the way in which the “blank tablet” of the human mind became “furnished” with simple ideas that were eventually combined or abstracted in various ways to form complex ideas, suggested to some that it might be fruitful to study this process in the course of development of a young child (Cleverley and Phillips, 1986).

Fifth, and finally, there is a large body of work that clearly falls within the more technically-defined domain of philosophy of education. Three historical giants of the field are Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey, and there are a dozen or more who would be in competition for inclusion along with them; the short-list of leading authors from the second-half of the 20 th century would include Richard Peters, Paul Hirst, and Israel Scheffler, with many jostling for the next places—but the choices become cloudy as we approach the present-day, for schisms between philosophical schools have to be negotiated.

It is important to note, too, that there is a sub-category within this domain of literature that is made-up of work by philosophers who are not primarily identified as philosophers of education, and who might or might not have had much to say directly about education, but whose philosophical work has been drawn upon by others and applied very fruitfully to educational issues. (A volume edited by Amelie Rorty contains essays on the education-related thought, or relevance, of many historically-important philosophers; significantly the essays are almost entirely written by philosophers rather than by members of the philosophy of education community. This is both their strength and weakness. See Rorty, 1998.)

The discussion will turn briefly to the difficulty in picturing the topography of the field that is presented by the influence of these philosophers.

As sketched earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, criteria for selecting evidence that has relevance for the problems that they consider central, and the like. No wonder educational discourse has occasionally been likened to Babel, for the differences in backgrounds and assumptions means that there is much mutual incomprehension. In the midst of the melee sit the philosophers of education.

It is no surprise, then, to find that the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content and methods of argument in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg. It is revealing to note some of the names that were heavily-cited in a pair of recent authoritative handbooks in the field (according to the indices of the two volumes, and in alphabetical order): Adorno, Aristotle, Derrida, Descartes, Dewey, Habermas, Hegel, Horkheimer, Kant, Locke, Lyotard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Rawls, Richard Rorty, Rousseau, and Wittgenstein (Curren 2003; Blake, Smeyers, Smith, and Standish 2003). Although this list conveys something of the diversity of the field, it fails to do it complete justice, for the influence of feminist philosophers is not adequately represented.

No one individual can have mastered work done by such a range of figures, representing as they do a number of quite different frameworks or approaches; and relatedly no one person stands as emblematic of the entire field of philosophy of education, and no one type of philosophical writing serves as the norm, either. At professional meetings, peace often reigns because the adherents of the different schools go their separate ways; but occasionally there are (intellectually) violent clashes, rivaling the tumult that greeted Derrida's nomination for an honorary degree at Cambridge in 1992. It is sobering to reflect that only a few decades have passed since practitioners of analytic philosophy of education had to meet in individual hotel rooms, late at night, at annual meetings of the Philosophy of Education Society in the USA, because phenomenologists and others barred their access to the conference programs; their path to liberation was marked by discord until, eventually, the compromise of “live and let live” was worked out (Kaminsky, 1996). Of course, the situation has hardly been better in the home discipline; an essay in Time magazine in 1966 on the state of the discipline of philosophy reported that adherents of the major philosophical schools “don't even understand one another”, and added that as a result “philosophy today is bitterly segregated. Most of the major philosophy departments and scholarly journals are the exclusive property of one sect or another” ( Time , reprinted in Lucas, 1969, 32). Traditionally there has been a time-lag for developments in philosophy to migrate over into philosophy of education, but in this respect at least the two fields have been on a par.

Inevitably, however, traces of discord remain, and some groups still feel disenfranchised, but they are not quite the same groups as a few decades ago—for new intellectual paradigms have come into existence, and their adherents are struggling to have their voices heard; and clearly it is the case that—reflecting the situation in 1966—many analytically-trained philosophers of education find postmodern writings incomprehensible while scholars in the latter tradition are frequently dismissive if not contemptuous of work done by the former group. In effect, then, the passage of time has made the field more—and not less—diffuse. All this is evident in a volume published in 1995 in which the editor attempted to break-down borders by initiating dialogue between scholars with different approaches to philosophy of education; her introductory remarks are revealing:

Philosophers of education reflecting on the parameters of our field are faced not only with such perplexing and disruptive questions as: What counts as Philosophy of Education and why?; but also Who counts as a philosopher of education and why?; and What need is there for Philosophy of Education in a postmodern context? Embedded in these queries we find no less provocative ones: What knowledge, if any, can or should be privileged and why?; and Who is in a position to privilege particular discursive practices over others and why? Although such questions are disruptive, they offer the opportunity to take a fresh look at the nature and purposes of our work and, as we do, to expand the number and kinds of voices participating in the conversation. (Kohli, 1995, xiv).

There is an inward-looking tone to the questions posed here: Philosophy of education should focus upon itself, upon its own contents, methods, and practitioners. And of course there is nothing new about this; for one thing, almost forty years ago a collection of readings—with several score of entries—was published under the title What is Philosophy of Education? (Lucas, 1969). It is worth noting, too, that the same attitude is not unknown in philosophy; Simmel is reputed to have said a century or so ago that philosophy is its own first problem.

Having described the general topography of the field of philosophy of education, the focus can change to pockets of activity where from the perspective of this author interesting philosophical work is being, or has been, done—and sometimes this work has been influential in the worlds of educational policy or practice. It is appropriate to start with a discussion of the rise and partial decline—but lasting influence of—analytic philosophy of education This approach (often called “APE” by both admirers and detractors) dominated the field in the English-speaking world for several decades after the second world war, and its eventual fate throws light on the current intellectual climate.

2. Analytic philosophy of education, and its influence

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—which make up part at least of the philosophical analysis package—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. But traditionally they stood alongside other philosophical activities; in the Republic , for example, Plato was sometimes analytic, at other times normative, and on occasion speculative/metaphysical. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity (for metaphysics was judged to be literally vacuous, and normative philosophy was viewed as being unable to provide compelling warrants for whatever moral and ethical positions were being advocated).

So, although analytic elements in philosophy of education can be located throughout intellectual history back to the ancient world, the pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie, 1962, xix)

The first object of his analytic scrutiny in the book was the view that “a child should be educated according to Nature”; he teased apart and critiqued various things that writers through the ages could possibly have meant by this, and very little remained standing by the end of the chapter. Then some basic ideas of Herbart and Dewey were subjected to similar treatment. Hardie's hard-nosed approach can be illustrated by the following: One thing that educationists mean by “education according to Nature” (later he turns to other things they might mean) is that “the teacher should thus act like a gardener” who fosters natural growth of his plants and avoids doing anything “unnatural”(Hardie, 1962, 3). He continues:

The crucial question for such a view of education is how far does this analogy hold? There is no doubt that there is some analogy between the laws governing the physical development of the child and the laws governing the development of a plant, and hence there is some justification for the view if applied to physical education. But the educationists who hold this view are not generally very much concerned with physical education, and the view is certainly false if applied to mental education. For some of the laws that govern the mental changes which take place in a child are the laws of learning …. [which] have no analogy at all with the laws which govern the interaction between a seed and its environment. (Hardie, 1962, 4)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D.J. O'Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences; Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), that contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and should be seen as truncated arguments); Smith and Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of British writers who were becoming prominent—most notably R.S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the USA), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970), and Peters (1973), of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage”, it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills, and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for—it was argued—getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook, 1972). Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by: the content that had been taught; or by the intention of the instructor; or by the methods of instruction that had been used; or by the outcomes of the instruction; or, of course, by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Two examples will be sufficient to make the point: (i) The first criterion mentioned above—the nature of the content being imparted—was supported by an argument that ran roughly as follows: “If some students have learned, as factual, some material that is patently incorrect (like ‘The capital city of Canada is Washington D.C.’), then they must have been indoctrinated. This conclusion is reinforced by the consideration that we would never say students must have been indoctrinated if they believe an item that is correct!” However, both portions of this argument have been challenged. (ii) The method criterion—how the knowledge was imparted to the students—usually was supported by an argument that, while different, clearly paralleled the previous one in its logic. It ran roughly like this: “We never would say that students had been indoctrinated by their teacher if he or she had fostered open inquiry and discussion, encouraged exploration in the library and on the net, allowed students to work in collaborative groups, and so on. However, if the teacher did not allow independent inquiry, quashed classroom questions, suppressed dissenting opinions, relied heavily on rewards and punishments, used repetition and fostered rote memorization, and so on, then it is likely we would say the students were being indoctrinated”. (The deeper issue in this second example is that the first method of teaching allows room for the operation of the learners' rationality, while the second method does not. Siegel, 1988, stresses this in his discussion of indoctrination.)

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import; I can offer as illustration a presidential address at a US Philosophy of Education Society annual meeting that was an hour-long discourse on the various meanings of the expression “I have a toothache”. (It is worth noting that the 1966 article in Time , cited earlier, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970's radical students in Britain accused the brand of linguistic analysis practiced by R.S. Peters of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education. There even had been a surprising degree of interest in this arcane topic on the part of the general reading public in the UK as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner's Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein's philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner's book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner's side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced examples of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta, 1963)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with. (See Peters, 1973, where to the editor's credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted.)

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault, and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard's foundational work on The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s; the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin's Reclaiming a Conversation . APE was no longer the center of interest.

By the 1980s, the rather simple if not simplistic ordinary language analysis practiced in philosophy of education, was reeling under the attack from the combination of forces sketched above, but the analytic spirit lived on in the form of rigorous work done in other specialist areas of philosophy—work that trickled out and took philosophy of education in rich new directions. Technically-oriented epistemology, philosophy of science, and even metaphysics, flourished; as did the interrelated fields of social, political and moral philosophy. John Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971; a decade later MacIntyre's After Virtue appeared; and in another decade or so there was a flood of work on individualism, communitarianism, democratic citizenship, inclusion, exclusion, rights of children versus rights of parents, rights of groups (such as the Amish) versus rights of the larger polity. From the early 1990s philosophers of education have contributed significantly to the debates on these and related topics—indeed, this corpus of work illustrates that good philosophy of education flows seamlessly into work being done in mainstream areas of philosophy. Illustrative examples are Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Callan (1997); The Demands of Liberal Education , Levinson (1999); Social Justice and School Choice , Brighouse (2000); and Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education , Reich (2002). These works stand shoulder-to-shoulder with semi-classics on the same range of topics by Gutmann, Kymlicka, Macedo, and others. An excerpt from the book by Callan nicely illustrates that the analytic spirit lives on in this body of work; the broader topic being pursued is the status of the aims of education in a pluralistic society where there can be deep fundamental disagreements:

… the distinction must be underlined between the ends that properly inform political education and the extent to which we should tolerate deviations from those ends in a world where reasonable and unreasonable pluralism are entangled and the moral costs of coercion against the unreasonable variety are often prohibitive. Our theoretical as well as our commonsense discourse do not always respect the distinction…. If some of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church conflict with our best theory of the ends of civic education, it does not follow that we have any reason to revise our theory; but neither does it mean we have any reason to impose these ends on Catholic schools and the families that they serve. (Callan, 1997, 44)

Callan and White (2003) have given an analysis of why the topics described above have become such a focus of attention. “What has been happening in philosophy of education in recent years”, they argue, mirrors “a wider self-examination in liberal societies themselves”. World events, from the fall of communism to the spread of ethnic conflicts “have all heightened consciousness of the contingency of liberal politics”. A body of work in philosophy, from the early Rawls on, has systematically examined (and critiqued) the foundations of liberalism, and philosophy of education has been drawn into the debates. Callan and White mention communitarianism as offering perhaps “the most influential challenge” to liberalism, and they write:

The debate between liberals and communitarians is far more than a theoretical diversion for philosophers and political scientists. At stake are rival understandings of what makes human lives and the societies in which they unfold both good and just, and derivatively, competing conceptions of the education needed for individual and social betterment. (Callan and White, 2003, 95-96)

It should be appended here that it is not only “external” world events that have stimulated this body of work; events internal to a number of democratic societies also have been significant. To cite one example that is prominent in the literature in North America at least, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling ( Wisconsin v. Yoder ) in which members of the Amish sect were allowed to withdraw their children from public schools before they had reached the age of sixteen—for, it had been argued, any deeper education would endanger the existence of the group and its culture. In assessing this decision—as of course philosophers have frequently done (see, for example, Kymlicka, 1995)—a balance has to be achieved between (i) the interest of civic society in having an informed, well-educated, participatory citizenry; (ii) the interest of the Amish as a group in preserving their own culture; and (iii) the interests of the Amish children, who have a right to develop into autonomous individuals who can make reflective decisions for themselves about the nature of the life they wish to lead. These are issues that fall squarely in the domain covered by the works mentioned above.

So much work is being produced on the complex and interrelated issues just outlined, that in a different context it seemed fair for me to remark (descriptively, and not judgmentally) that a veritable cottage industry had sprung up in post-Rawlsian philosophy of education. There are, of course, other areas of activity, where interesting contributions are being made, and the discusion will next turn to a sampling of these.

3. Other areas of contemporary activity

As was stressed at the outset, and illustrated with a cursory listing of examples, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume, and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in the recent A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren, 2003), which contained more than six-hundred pages divided into fourty-five chapters each of which surveyed a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge and truth in learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, purposes of universities in a fluid age, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education.

There is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to filling out—and deepening—the topographical account of the field that was presented in the preceding sections. The discussion will open with a topic that was not included in the Companion , despite it being one that is of great concern across the academic educational community, and despite it being one where adherents of some of the rival schools of philosophy (and philosophy of education) have had lively exchanges.

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but particularly since publication of the book by Stokes mentioned earlier, and also in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one.

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is its not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn's ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred-to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemolgical: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they only were used sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe, 2003, and Phillips, 2008.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millenium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decisionmaking.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicans and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has beome common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the U.S. National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC, 2002), that argued this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work.

Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value-neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, they were guilty of advocating “your father's paradigm”(clearly this was not intended as a compliment). One critic with postmodernist leanings asserted that educational research should move “toward a Nietzschean sort of ‘unnatural science’ that leads to greater health by fostering ways of knowing that escape normativity”—a suggestion that evokes the reaction discussed in Section 1.3 above, namely, one of incomprehension on the part of most researchers and those philosophers of education who work within a different tradition where a “way of knowing”, in order to be a “way”, must inevitably be normative.

The final complexity in the debates over the nature of educational research is that there are some respected members of the philosophy of education community who claim, along with Carr, that “the forms of human association characteristic of educational engagement are not really apt for scientific or empirical study at all” (Carr, 2003, 54-5). His reasoning is that educational processes cannot be studied empirically because they are processes of “normative initiation”—a position that as it stands begs the question by not making clear why such processes cannot be studied empirically.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education (as Dewey pointed out), and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches, or the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or in a system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why is evolution included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Why is Driver Education part of the high school curriculum, and methods of birth control usually not—even though sex has an impact on the life of teenagers that at least is comparable to the impact of car-driving? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Does the justification for not including the Holocaust or the phenomenon of wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some countries stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato's brilliant pioneering efforts all draw upon, explicitly or implicitly, the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues. First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same), or alternatively, what constitutes the good life and human flourishing. These two formulations are related, for presumably our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to act rationally and/or autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. How this is to be done, of course, is not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the matter. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing a conception of the good life, and then for pursuing it; and because logical analysis shows—he argued—that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms. Luckily for Hirst, the typical British high school day was made up of seven instructional periods. (Hirst, 1965; for a critique see Phillips, 1987, ch.11.)

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a ruler or ruling class; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as a medium of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect, and serve, the interests of the ruling class. Michael Apple is typical:

… the knowledge that now gets into schools is already a choice from a much larger universe of possible social knowledge and principles. It is a form of cultural capital that comes from somewhere, that often reflects the perspectives and beliefs of powerful segments of our social collectivity. In its very production and dissemination as a public and economic commodity—as books, films, materials, and so forth—it is repeatedly filtered through ideological and economic commitments. Social and economic values, hence, are already embedded in the design of the institutions we work in, in the ‘formal corpus of school knowledge’ we preserve in our curricula….(Apple, 1990, 8-9)

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century (who arguably were following Plato's lead in the Republic ), sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all”.

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all! Medically, this probably is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings, 2007.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato's system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually be able to contemplate the metaphysical realm of the “forms”, thanks to their advanced training in mathematics and philosophy. Having seen the form of the Good, they would be eligible after a period of practical experience to become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

Plato's educational scheme was guided, presumably, by the understanding he thought he had achieved of the transcendental realm of fixed “forms”. John Dewey, ever a strong critic of positions that were not naturalistic, or that incorporated a priori premises, commented as follows:

Plato's starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice…. And only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. (Dewey, 1916, 102-3)

Furthermore, as Dewey again put it, Plato “had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals…. they fall by nature into classes”, which masks the “infinite diversity of active tendencies” which individuals harbor (104). In addition, Plato tended to talk of learning using the passive language of seeing, which has shaped our discourse down to the present (witness “Now I see it!” when a difficult point has become clear).

In contrast, for Dewey each individual was an organism situated in a biological and social environment in which problems were constantly emerging, forcing the individual to reflect and act, and learn. Dewey, following William James, held that knowledge arises from reflection upon our actions; and the worth of a putative item of knowledge is directly correlated with the problem-solving success of the actions performed under its guidance. Thus Dewey, sharply disagreeing with Plato, regarded knowing as an active rather than a passive affair—a strong theme in his writings is his opposition to what is sometimes called “the spectator theory of knowledge”. All this is made clear enough in a passage containing only a thinly-veiled allusion to Plato's famous analogy of the prisoners in the cave whose eyes are turned to the light by education:

In schools, those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect. The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly. Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs of activity. (164)

This passage also illuminates a passage that many have found puzzling: “philosophy is the theory of education” (387). For in the sentences above it is easy to see the tight link between Dewey's epistemology and his views on education—his anti-spectator epistemology morphs directly into advocacy for anti-spectator learning by students in school—students learn by being active inquirers. Over the past few decades this view of learning has inspired a major tradition of research by educational psychologists, and related theory-development (the “situated cognition” framework); and these bodies of work have in turn led to innovative efforts in curriculum development. (For a discussion of these, see Phillips, 2003.)

The final important difference with Plato is that, for Dewey, each student is an individual who blazes his or her unique trail of growth; the teacher has the task of guiding and facilitating this growth, without imposing a fixed end upon the process. Dewey sometimes uses the term “curriculum” to mean “the funded wisdom of the human race”, the point being that over the course of human history an enormous stock of knowledge and skills has accumulated and the teacher has the task of helping the student to make contact with this repertoire—but helping by facilitating rather than by imposing. (All this, of course, has been the subject of intense discussion among philosophers of education: Does growth imply a direction? Is growth always good—can't a plant end up misshapen, and can't a child develop to become bad? Is Dewey some type of perfectionist? Is his philosophy too vague to offer worthwhile educational guidance? Isn't it possible for a “Deweyan” student to end up without enough relevant knowledge and skills to be able to make a living in the modern world?)

Dewey's work was of central importance for the American progressive education movement in its formative years, although there was a fair degree of misunderstanding of his ideas as progressives interpreted his often extremely dense prose to be saying what they personally happened to believe. Nevertheless, Dewey became the “poster child” or the “house philosopher” of progressive education, and if he didn't make it onto many actual posters he certainly made it onto a postage stamp.

His popularity, however, sharply declined after the Soviets launched Sputnik, for Dewey and progressive education were blamed for the USA losing the race into space (illustrating the point about scapegoating made at the start of this essay). But he did not remain in disgrace for long; and for some time has been the focus of renewed interest—although it is still noticeable that commentators interpret Dewey to be holding views that mirror their own positions or interests. And interestingly, there now is slightly more interest in Dewey on the part of philosophers of education in the UK than there was in earlier years, and there is growing interest by philosophers from the Continent (see, for example, Biesta and Burbules, 2003).

To be a poster child for progressivism, however, is not to be the parent. Rather than to Dewey, that honor must go to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and to his educational novel written in soaring prose, Emile (1762). Starting with the premise that “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil” (Rousseau, 1955, 5), Rousseau held that contemporary man has been misshapen by his education; the “crushing force” of social conventions has stifled the “Nature within him”. The remedy adopted in the novel is for the young Emile to be taken to his family estate in the country where, away from the corrupting influence of society, and under the watchful eye of his tutor, “everything should … be brought into harmony with these natural tendencies”. (This idea of education according to nature, it will be recalled, was the object of Hardie's analytic attention almost two centuries later.)

Out in the countryside, rather than having a set curriculum that he is forced to follow, Emile learns when some natural stimulus or innate interest motivates him—and under these conditions learning comes easily. He is allowed to suffer the natural consequences of his actions (if he breaks a window, he gets cold; if he takes the gardener's property, the gardener will no longer do him favors), and experiences such as these lead to the development of his moral system. Although Rousseau never intended these educational details to be taken literally as a blueprint (he saw himself as developing and illustrating the basic principles), over the ages there have been attempts to implement them, one being the famous British “free school”, A.S. Neill's Summerhill. (It is worth noting that Neill claimed not to have read Rousseau; but he was working in a milieu in which Rousseau's ideas were well-known—intellectual influence can follow a less than direct path.) Furthermore, over the ages these principles also have proven to be fertile soil for philosophers of education to till.

Even more fertile ground for comment, in recent years, has been Rousseau's proposal for the education of girls, developed in a section of the novel (Book V) that bears the name of the young woman who is destined to be Emile's soul-mate, Sophy. The puzzle has been why Rousseau—who had been so far-sighted in his discussion of Emile's education—was so hide-bound if not retrograde in his thinking about her education. One short quotation is sufficient to illustrate the problem: “If woman is made to please and to be in subjection to man, she ought to make herself pleasing in his eyes and not provoke him …her strength is in her charms” (324).

The educational principles developed by Rousseau and Dewey, and numerous educational theorists and philosophers in the interregnum, are alive and well in the twenty-first century. Of particular contemporary interest is the evolution that has occurred of the progressive idea that each student is an active learner who is pursuing his or her own individual educational path. By incorporating elements of the classical empiricist epistemology of John Locke, this progressive principle has become transformed into the extremely popular position known as constructivism, according to which each student in a classroom constructs his or her own individual body of understandings even when all in the group are given what appears to be the same stimulus or educational experience. (A consequence of this is that a classroom of thirty students will have thirty individually-constructed, and possibly different, bodies of “knowledge”, in addition to that of the teacher!) There is also a solipsistic element here, for constructivists also believe that none of us—teachers included—can directly access the bodies of understandings of anyone else; each of us is imprisoned in a world of our own making. It is an understatement to say that this poses great difficulties for the teacher. The education journals of the past two decades contain many thousands of references to discussions of this position, which elsewhere I claimed has become a type of educational “secular religion”; for reasons that are hard to discern it is particularly influential in mathematics and science education. (For a discussion of the underlying philosophical ideas in constructivism, and for an account of some of its varieties, see the essays in Phillips, ed., 2000.)

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world—France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, to mention only a few—have their own intellectual traditions, and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education into the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world, there is such a diversity of approaches to the discipline that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her areas of competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last twenty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, commenting on the field as a whole or on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules, 1994; Chambliss, 1996; Phillips, 1985; Siegel, 2007; Smeyers, 1994); two large volumes—a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith and Standish, 2003) and a “Companion” (Curren, 2003)—have been produced by Blackwell in their well-known philosophy series; and the same publisher recently released an anthology, with 60 papers considered to be important in the field, and which also are representative of the range of work that is being done (Curren, 2007). Several encyclopedias of philosophy of education have been published or are in the works (for example, Chambliss, 1996; Siegel, 2008); there is a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch and Gingell, 1999), and a good textbook or two (see Noddings, 2007); in addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift in the present work (for another sampling see A. Rorty, 1998; Smeyers and Marshall, 1995; Stone, 1994); and several international journals appear to be flourishing— Educational Philosophy and Theory , Educational Theory , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Studies in Philosophy and Education , Theory and Research in Education . Thus there is enough material available to keep the interested reader busy, and to provide alternative assessments to the ones presented in this present essay.

• Apple, M., 1990, Ideology and Curriculum , New York: Routledge, 2 nd . Editon.
• Archambault, R., (ed.), 1965, Philosophical Analysis and Education , London: Routledge.
• Biesta, G., and Burbules, N., 2003, Pragmatism and Educational Research , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R., and Standish, P., (eds.), 2003, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Brighouse, H., 2000, Social Justice and School Choice , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Burbules, N., 1994, “Marxism and Educational Thought”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 6), T. Husen and N. Postlethwaite (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, 2 nd . Edition, pp. 3617-22.
• Callan, E., 1997, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• Callan, E., and White, J., 2003, “Liberalism and Communitarianism”, in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education , N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith and P. Standish (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp.95-109.
• Carr, D., 2003, Making Sense of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Theory of Education and Teaching , London: RoutledgeFalmer.
• Chambliss, J., 1996, “History of Philosophy of Education”, in Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia , J. Chambliss (ed.), New York: Garland, pp.461-72.
• Cleverley, J., and Phillips, D.C., 1986, Visions of Childhood , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Curren, R., (ed.), 2003, A Companion to the Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Curren, R., (ed.), 2007, Philosophy of Education: An Anthology , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Dewey, J., 1916, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education , New York: Macmillan.
• Gellner, E., 1959, Words and Things , London: Gollancz.
• Hardie, C., 1962, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory , New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications.
• Hirst, P., 1965, “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge”, in Philosophical Analysis and Education , R. Archambault, (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 113-138.
• Hirst, P., and Peters, R., 1970, The Logic of Education , London: Routledge.
• Howe, K., 2003, Closing Methodological Divides: Toward Democratic Educational Research . Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Kaminsky, J., 1996, “Philosophy of Education: Professional Organizations In”, in Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia , J. Chambliss, (ed.), New York: Garland, pp. 475-79.
• Kohli, W., (ed.), 1995, Critical Conversations in Philosophy of Education , New York: Routledge.
• Kymlicka, W., 1995, Multicultural Citizenship , Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• Levinson, M., 1999, The Demands of Liberal Education , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lucas, C., (ed.), 1969, What is Philosophy of Education? London: Macmillan.
• Martin, J., 1985, Reclaiming a Conversation , New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
• Mehta, V., 1963, Fly and the Fly-Bottle : London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• Murphy, M., (ed.), 2006, The History and Philosophy of Education: Voices of Educational Pioneers , New Jersey: Pearson.
• Noddings, N., 1984, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• –––, 2007, Philosophy of Education , Boulder, CO: Westview, 2 nd . Edition.
• National Research Council (NRC), 2002, Scientific Research in Education , Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
• O'Connor, D., 1957, An Introduction to Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.
• Peters, R., (ed.), 1973, The Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Phillips, D.C., 1985, “Philosophy of Education”, in International Encyclopedia of Education, T. Husen and N. Postletwaite, (eds.), pp.3859-3877.
• –––, 1987, Philosophy, Science, and Social Inquiry , Oxford: Pergamon.
• –––, (ed.), 2000, Constructivism in Education: Opinions and Second Opinions on Controversial Issues , (Series: 99 th . Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2003, “Theories of Teaching and Learning”, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education , R. Curren, (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 232-245.
• –––, 2008, “Empirical Educational Research: Charting Philosophical Disagreements in an Undisciplined Field”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education , H. Siegel (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press.
• Reich, R., 2002, Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Rorty, A., (ed.), 1998, Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives , New York: Routledge.
• Rousseau, J-J., 1955, Emile , B. Foxley, (tr.), London: Dent/Everyman.
• Scheffler, I., 1960, The Language of Education , Illinois: Thomas.
• Siegel, H., 1988, Educating Reason: rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2007, “Philosophy of Education”, in Britannica Online Encyclopedia , [ Available online ].
• –––, (ed.), 2008, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education , Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press.
• Smeyers, P., 1994, “Philosophy of Education: Western European Perspectives”, in The International Encyclopedia of Education , (Volume 8), T. Husen and N. Postlethwaite, (eds.), Oxford: Pergamon, 2 nd . Edition, pp. 4456-61.
• Smeyers, P., and Marshall, J., (eds.), 1995, Philosophy and Education: Accepting Wittgenstein's Challenge , Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Smith, B., and Ennis, R., (eds.), 1961, Language and Concepts in Education , Chicago: Rand McNally.
• Snook, I., 1972, Indoctrination and Education , London: Routledge.
• Stokes, D., 1997, Pasteur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation , Washington, DC: Brookings.
• Stone, L., (ed.), 1994, The Education Feminism Reader , New York: Routledge.
• Ulich, R., 1954, Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Revised Ed.
• Winch, C., and Gingell, J., 1999, Key Concepts in the Philosophy of Education , London: Routledge.
• PES (Philosophy of Education Society, North America)
• PESA (Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia)
• PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain)
• INPE (International Network of Philosophers of Education)
• UNESCO/International Bureau of Education: Thinkers on Education

autonomy: personal | -->Dewey, John --> | feminist (interventions): ethics | feminist (interventions): liberal feminism | feminist (interventions): political philosophy | -->feminist (topics): perspectives on autonomy --> | feminist (topics): perspectives on disability | Foucault, Michel | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | liberalism | Locke, John | -->Lyotard, Jean François --> | -->ordinary language --> | Plato | postmodernism | Rawls, John | rights: of children | -->Rousseau, Jean Jacques -->

Philosophy Of Education

Definition of philosophy of education.

The Philosophy of Education is a big thought bubble about how and why we learn. It’s filled with questions and deep thinking about the essence of education. To make it simpler, imagine two things:

Firstly, it’s about looking at education with a magnifying glass and asking, ‘What’s the point of school?’. Secondly, think of it as a toolbox, where the tools are different ways to understand and improve how people teach and learn.

Philosophy of Education isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to these questions. It’s more like a conversation that helps us explore different angles of education, so we can all come up with our own ways to make it better.

So, this field is really about thinking super smart and being critical about what we want from education. If you’re curious about what makes a good teacher or why certain subjects are taught, you’re already dipping your toes into the world of Philosophy of Education!

Types of Philosophy of Education

There are many viewpoints on what Education should be like. Here are some key ones:

• Perennialism: This is the belief that some ideas are timeless. These educators often focus on teaching concepts and books that have stood the test of time, much like a classic song that never gets old.
• Essentialism: Essentialists are those who think that there are certain basic skills and knowledge everyone must learn. They prioritize particular subjects that they think are vital for students, like a “must-have” tools in a toolbox.
• Progressivism : This philosophy is all about learning by doing. Think of it as learning to swim by actually jumping in the water. These educators focus on hands-on experiences and making lessons relevant to real-life situations.
• Reconstructionism: This type of philosophy looks at education as a way to improve society. It’s about teaching students not just to learn for themselves, but to make the world a better place.
• Existentialism : Existentialist teachers help students explore themselves and their place in the universe. It’s a bit like self-reflection, pondering life’s big questions, and understanding one’s own identity.

Examples of Philosophy of Education

• A teacher who follows Perennialism may assign books by ancient thinkers like Plato because these works contain wisdom that remains relevant across the ages. They are examples of the topic because they emphasize learning from ideas that endure over time.
• An Essentialist classroom will focus on core subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic, as these are viewed as essential building blocks of a person’s education. They serve as examples because they underscore the belief in imparting fundamental skills.
• Schools that value Progressivism might have students working on science experiments or group projects to apply what they’ve learned. This is an example because it demonstrates the importance placed on active learning and real-world application.
• Reconstructionist educators might encourage their students to participate in local cleanups to understand environmental issues, showcasing the philosophy’s focus on using education to drive social change.
• If a teacher believes in Existentialism , they may have deep discussions about life’s purposes, helping students to discover their own beliefs and identity, reflecting the existentialist idea of personal exploration.

Why is Philosophy of Education Important?

Understanding Philosophy of Education is like having a treasure map for learning. It guides us through the jungle of choices in teaching methods, subject matter, and educational goals. It also gives educators a mirror to see their teaching philosophies more clearly, helping them to improve their approach and connect better with their students.

Origin of Philosophy of Education

People have been sharing ideas about teaching and learning since ancient times. Famous thinkers from Greece like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle posed big questions about knowledge and learning that still influence us today. Over centuries, people have continued to add their own thoughts, making the field of Philosophy of Education really rich and varied.

Controversies in Philosophy of Education

Big questions often lead to big debates. In the Philosophy of Education, people argue about whether schools should focus more on practical skills or personal growth. There’s also disagreement about whether tests are the best way to check if students are learning, and how much technology should be used in classrooms.

The Worldwide View of Philosophy of Education

Around the world, education looks very different. Some countries emphasize things like respect for teachers or learning by heart, while others might encourage you to think outside the box. Looking at how various cultures approach schooling can teach us a lot about their values and ideas.

Personal Philosophy of Education

Just like fingerprints, everyone’s Philosophy of Education is unique. It’s based on your personal beliefs and experiences with learning. Teachers and students alike can have their own philosophy that might change over time as they learn and grow.

Putting it All Together

By digging into the Philosophy of Education, we can make smarter choices in how we teach and learn. This field isn’t just about stuffing facts into our heads; it’s about finding the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind education, which helps us see the big picture and mold better futures for ourselves and others.

Related Topics

• Critical Thinking : This is about learning to think clearly and rationally, understanding the connection between ideas. It relates to Philosophy of Education because it’s a skill that’s valued across many educational philosophies.
• Educational Psychology: This field looks at how people learn and retain new information. It’s related because it helps identify effective teaching methods that different educational philosophies might use.
• Sociology of Education: This is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. It’s relevant because it looks at education within society, which is a major concern of some educational philosophies.
• Curriculum Development: This involves planning what students will be taught and how. It ties into Philosophy of Education because the curriculum is often based on a school or teacher’s educational philosophy.

The Philosophy of Education is a deep and fascinating area that gives us the tools to question and make sense of the world of learning. From the different types of philosophies like Perennialism and Existentialism to the personal beliefs of teachers and students, it’s a field that affects everyone in education. Understanding how these ideas fit together helps us all to become more thoughtful learners and educators. By exploring related topics like critical thinking and educational psychology, we can further enrich our understanding and approach to education, making sure it’s not just about knowing stuff, but about understanding it deeply and finding ways to apply it.

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• Introduction

Principal historical figures

• The aims of education
• Clarification of educational concepts
• Rights, power, and authority
• Critical thinking
• Indoctrination
• The individual and society
• Moral education
• Teaching, learning, and curriculum
• Educational research
• Feminist, multiculturalist, and postmodern criticisms

• Why is Jean-Jacques Rousseau famous?
• What are John Locke’s most famous works?
• What contributions did John Locke make to epistemology?
• What contributions did John Locke make to political theory?
• How did John Locke influence the design of U.S. government?

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philosophy of education , philosophical reflection on the nature, aims, and problems of education . The philosophy of education is Janus -faced, looking both inward to the parent discipline of philosophy and outward to educational practice. (In this respect it is like other areas of “applied” philosophy, such as the philosophy of law , the philosophy of science , and the philosophy of medicine, including bioethics .) This dual focus requires it to work on both sides of the traditional divide between theory and practice, taking as its subject matter both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of knowledge) and more specific issues arising from educational practice (e.g., the desirability of standardized testing). These practical issues in turn have implications for a variety of long-standing philosophical problems in epistemology , metaphysics , ethics , and political philosophy . In addressing these many issues and problems, the philosopher of education strives for conceptual clarity, argumentative rigour, and informed valuation.

(Read Arne Duncan’s Britannica essay on “Education: The Great Equalizer.”)

The history of philosophy of education is an important source of concerns and issues—as is the history of education itself—for setting the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers of education. Equally relevant is the range of contemporary approaches to the subject. Although it is not possible here to review systematically either that history or those contemporary approaches, brief sketches of several key figures are offered next.

The Western philosophical tradition began in ancient Greece, and philosophy of education began with it. The major historical figures developed philosophical views of education that were embedded in their broader metaphysical , epistemological, ethical , and political theories. The introduction by Socrates of the “Socratic method” of questioning ( see dialectic ) began a tradition in which reasoning and the search for reasons that might justify beliefs, judgments, and actions was (and remains) fundamental; such questioning in turn eventually gave rise to the view that education should encourage in all students and persons, to the greatest extent possible, the pursuit of the life of reason. This view of the central place of reason in education has been shared by most of the major figures in the history of philosophy of education, despite the otherwise substantial differences in their other philosophical views.

Socrates’ student Plato endorsed that view and held that a fundamental task of education is that of helping students to value reason and to be reasonable, which for him involved valuing wisdom above pleasure, honour, and other less-worthy pursuits. In his dialogue Republic he set out a vision of education in which different groups of students would receive different sorts of education, depending on their abilities, interests, and stations in life. His utopian vision has been seen by many to be a precursor of what has come to be called educational “sorting.” Millennia later, the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) argued that education should be tailored to the individual child, though he rejected Plato’s hierarchical sorting of students into categories.

Plato’s student Aristotle also took the highest aim of education to be the fostering of good judgment or wisdom, but he was more optimistic than Plato about the ability of the typical student to achieve it. He also emphasized the fostering of moral virtue and the development of character; his emphasis on virtue and his insistence that virtues develop in the context of community-guided practice—and that the rights and interests of individual citizens do not always outweigh those of the community—are reflected in contemporary interest in “virtue theory” in ethics and “communitarianism” in political philosophy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) famously insisted that formal education, like society itself, is inevitably corrupting; he argued that education should enable the “natural” and “free” development of children, a view that eventually led to the modern movement known as “open education.” These ideas are in some ways reflected in 20th-century “progressivism,” a movement often (but not always accurately) associated with Dewey. Unlike Plato, Rousseau also prescribed fundamentally distinct educations for boys and girls, and in doing so he raised issues concerning gender and its place in education that are of central concern today. Dewey emphasized the educational centrality of experience and held that experience is genuinely educational only when it leads to “growth.” But the idea that the aim of education is growth has proved to be a problematic and controversial one, and even the meaning of the slogan is unclear. Dewey also emphasized the importance of the student’s own interests in determining appropriate educational activities and ends-in-view; in this respect he is usually seen as a proponent of “child-centred” education, though he also stressed the importance of students’ understanding of traditional subject matter. While these Deweyan themes are strongly reminiscent of Rousseau, Dewey placed them in a far more sophisticated—albeit philosophically contentious—context. He emphasized the central importance of education for the health of democratic social and political institutions, and he developed his educational and political views from a foundation of systematic metaphysics and epistemology.

Of course, the history of philosophy of education includes many more figures than Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Dewey. Other major philosophers, including Thomas Aquinas , Augustine , Thomas Hobbes , René Descartes , John Locke , David Hume , Immanuel Kant , John Stuart Mill , Karl Marx , Bertrand Russell , and, more recently, R.S. Peters in Britain and Israel Scheffler in the United States , have also made substantial contributions to educational thought. It is worth noting again that virtually all these figures, despite their many philosophical differences and with various qualifications and differences of emphasis, take the fundamental aim of education to be the fostering of rationality ( see reason ). No other proposed aim of education has enjoyed the positive endorsement of so many historically important philosophers—although, as will be seen below, this aim has come under increasing scrutiny in recent decades.

What Is “Education”?

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Analytic philosophy of education focuses on clarifying such key terms as: “education”, “aims”, “goals”, “objectives”, “overt curriculum”, “covert curriculum”, “null curriculum”, “pedagogical content knowledge”. The understanding of these and other concepts is critical to enable contemporary education to be regarded as a truly professional domain.

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• Pedagogic content knowledge

The world of education—like law, medicine, business, and other spheres—has its own unique language. A discussion of this language is important for principals and teachers, parents, and students in order to facilitate a clear understanding of what education is. In this chapter, I analyze and clarify some key terms with a view to promoting a coherent and more precise educational practice.

Three Ways to Analyze the Term “Education”

There are three kinds of definitions of “education” (Scheffler 1960 ). The first type is called the descriptive . It is a statement that proposes to denote or explain the nature of the meaning of the word called “education” by using a variety of words to explain either what the phenomenon is or how the term is to be understood. This type of definition claims to describe precisely how the word denoted as “education” is most prominently used.

The second type of definition of “education” is the programmatic , which comes to advocate for or prescribe a belief of what education should be or should do. A programmatic definition is less preoccupied with what the phenomenon or language of education is and more concerned with promulgating a particular practice of education that is regarded as desirable. Sometimes prescriptive definitions are expressed in short, clipped sentences such as Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education” or the title of Jonathan Kozol’s description of education as Death at an Early Age (Kozol 1985 ). Programmatic definitions are ultimately short slogans or deeply felt preaching about the way education should be.

The third type of definition is the stipulative and its purpose is technical and utilitarian. It is basically a linguistic agreement or pact that enables a discussion to proceed smoothly without forcing a person to each time state, “This is what I mean by the term ‘education.’” It is essentially is a linguistic shortcut, in which one person’s explanation of the word “education” is called Version 1; a second person’s explanation is Version 2, and the third interpretation is called Version 3. This is a kind of a shortcut that enables the discussion to precede at a decent pace.

My concern in this chapter is the descriptive mode, namely, the endeavor to arrive at a clear and generally agreed-upon statement of what the word “education” means. My aim is to refer to terms that are generally used in everyday speech and to attempts to search for viable and relevant definitions that reflect as accurately as possible the common language usage of the term. There is a technique that students and some academics use in the attempt to understand the term, namely, to trace it back to its original linguistic roots. There are times when this is helpful, but very often this can be misleading, since the way it once was used does not necessarily help us understand the way it is used today. The contemporary word “education” is sometimes traced to the Latin root educare , which means “to train” or “to mold”. Based on this linguistic root, some people like to argue that training or molding is what education today should be. At the same time, the Latin word educere means “to lead out”, which suggests a totally different understanding of “education” as a process aimed at that freeing the person from the prison of ignorance. Generally, it is my sense that the technique of tracing back to former linguistic roots is more useful for understanding ways in which terms were understood in the past rather than helping us to grasp what they mean today.

Some Contemporary Meanings

Let’s now look at some diverse definitions of “education”. One understanding of the term is the conscious effort to equip the unequipped young with facts, knowledge, and skills that will enable them to function as adults in a specific society. This is often called the socialization model.

A second usage of the word “education” understands it as exposure to, understanding of, and practice in skillsets that a person needs to be able to function in contemporary culture. This notion is sometimes called the acculturation model.

A third notion of education focuses on the development of reflective thinking and feeling abilities so that the young will be able to carve out how they wish to exist. This model is sometimes known as the liberal or person-centered model of education.

A Proposed Definition of “Education”

I have found the discussion of diverse meanings of education to be very fruitful because it helps me see the world through different lenses and, particularly, enables me to think about and consider diverse meanings and practices of the dynamics of education. At the same time, since I believe that education is a practice, and in practice we need some very specific tools and toolkits to help us proceed, I have searched over time for a definition of “education” that I regard as both descriptively and programmatically useful for the educational practitioner. Ultimately, the definition that I regard as the most useful was shaped by Lawrence Cremin, who is regarded as the most distinguished historian of twentieth-century education:

Education is the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, provoke or acquire knowledge, values, attitudes, skills or sensibilities as well as any learning that results from the effort (Cremin, Public Education , p. 27)

This broad-based definition indicates that education is a purposeful activity. The word “education” is reserved for frameworks created with the considered and conscious intent to educate. This definition also understands education as a process and not a place. It is a purposeful activity that can happen within a wide range of frameworks and not only in buildings called schools. Moreover, this intentional activity does not only transmit knowledge, but it also is concerned with values, attitudes, skills, and sensibilities. Education is an activity which takes place in many diverse venues and is intended to develop knowledge, understanding, valuing, growing, caring, and behaving. It can happen “when you sit in your house, and when you go on the way, and when you lie down and when you rise” (Deuteronomy, 6:7). While contemporary societies have denoted schools as the agency responsible for education, in fact, education far transcends the certificates of achievement received from pre-school, elementary, secondary, and collegiate frameworks.

“Aims”, “Goals”, “Objectives”

The concept of education invites the question “Education for what?” What is the purpose of education? While the terms, “aims”, “goals”, and “objectives” of education are sometimes used interchangeably, philosophers of education describe three distinct activities related to “purpose”: Aims, Goals, Objectives = AGO (Noddings 2007 ).

“Aims” refer to the most general ideals, values, or principles, which a person, institution, or society regards as the ultimate desideratum of education. Aims are value statements which designate certain principles or values as the ultimate aspiration. Aims describe both the ideal target of an educational institution as well at its ultimate desired outcomes or achievements. Educational aims ultimately frame the overall direction of an educational system or institution.

“Goals” refer to a second stage, which is derivative from aims and focuses on contents and topics that should be studied so as to enable students to understand and actualize core ideals explicit in aims. Goals translate aims into specific contents or stepping-stones that should be part of the educational process. If one of the aims of twentieth-century American schooling was to teach a set of shared values for its diverse populations in order to socialize them into a core American society, then its goal was to provide them with skillsets such as language, science, and mathematics, which were then regarded as contents critical to enable realization of the larger shared American creed.

The word “objectives” refers to the most practical stage, which is the actual teaching materials—books textbooks, maps, videos, and visual aids—used in the classroom each day, week, and month in a year. These are the infamous “lesson plans” which are an hour by hour mapping out of how teachers will spend every single day in the classroom.

This AGO framework can be a useful structure for analyzing education, from its most abstract goals to its most immediate daily application. Moreover, if implemented properly, it would seem to reflect a useful dynamic from theory to practice. Unfortunately, in reality, what often happens is that aims and goals are skipped over and objectives—daily blueprints, and lesson plans—become the main preoccupation. Because of a multitude of exigencies, the thoughtful paradigm of aims, goals, and objectives is often neglected at the expense of “getting through the day” in practice.

Three Notions of “Curriculum”

An important term in the study of education is “curriculum”, which popularly refers to the overall subjects or contents of schooling. As the field of curriculum studies developed into a rigorous academic area of study in schools of education, broader understandings of the term were to emerge (Pinar et al. 1995 ).

One of the important sophistications in the study of curriculum has been the notion of overt, covert, and null curricula. The “overt curriculum” refers to the clearly stated and enunciated objectives, contents, subjects, topics, books, and resources, which are the official frameworks, and requirements of a school and its teachers. It is the approved and mandated contents that shape a school’s operation.

The “covert” curriculum refers to attitudes, values, and behaviors that characterize the norms of daily life in schools beyond the subjects formally taught in a classroom. The covert curriculum is the unspoken “culture’” shaped by a multitude of forces and factors. What is the décor of the school? What do the halls look like? What type examinations are given? What is the nature of student interaction? The covert curriculum refers to the multiple features of a school culture very much shaped by the lives, habits, and “lingo” of students which have significant impact on the actual rhythm and flow of daily school life.

The “null” curriculum refers to the books, subjects, topics, and artifacts that are consciously and purposefully not part of the school curriculum. This may include partial or no discussion of the history of indigenous populations in the teaching of American history. It includes the list of books, sources, ands ideas that have very consciously not been chosen in the formal curriculum. All education requires selection, and the topics not chosen—and why—are just as important as those that have been chosen. Indeed, there are political, racial, gender, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual issues that significantly shape the overt, covert, and null curriculum of each and every type of schooling.

These three terms alert us to the complicated nature of curriculum development. While there is a popular phrase that refers to an individual “writing a curriculum’”, in fact, curriculum development has become a specialized domain that involves subject matter experts classroom teachers, and educational leadership, and requires extensive deliberation, field testing, revision, and production. It is one of the most exciting and, at the same time most demanding of fields in contemporary education.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK)

An important dimension of education is what is commonly known as “pedagogy”, which is understood as the methodologies or the ways in which teaching should happen. Footnote 1 This is obviously a critical dimension of education because it is about what educators teach and how students learn—which are the ultimate domain of education. Pedagogy (sometimes called the “science of teaching”) is the assumption that there are universal patterns and procedures in teaching which should constitute an important part of academic teacher training. There were, and there still are, some general courses on pedagogy in university departments of education which reflect the assumption that there is a core set of methodologies generally appropriate for all sorts of teaching. Twentieth-century philosophers in multiple fields of study—for example, physics, mathematics, literature, and economics—began to focus on the notions of “realms of meaning” or “spheres of knowledge”, which led to the general consensus that there is a diversity of pedagogic methodologies that derive from the many different spheres of knowledge. This kind of thinking made it clear that because of the significant differences between science, mathematics, history, literature, and philosophy, there could be no one overall pedagogy appropriate for all subjects; consequently, such courses as “principles of pedagogy” were misleading. In the 1980s, through the innovative work of a group of educators of whom Professor Lee Shulman was a central figure, an important concept was to emerge which has had a profound effect on styles of teaching (Shulman 1986 ). This research led to the term “pedagogical content knowledge” (PCK). PCK refers to the fact that diverse spheres of knowledge utilize diverse methodologies of researching and understanding and therefore require diverse practices of teaching. In other words, the way a teacher teaches the subject depends on the nature of the subject and that all subjects are not the same. Just as it is clear that the ways we teach someone to drive a car or to learn how to swim have their own characteristics, so it is clear that the teaching of mathematics must differ from the teaching of literature, which differs from the teaching of civics, which differs from the teaching of languages. This notion indicates that one must be wary of general principles of “how to teach” and that quality teaching begins with and is related to an understanding of the subject matter being taught. To teach chemistry or physics one has to understand the role of experimentation. In teaching literature, one has to understand the importance of simile, metaphor, plot, and theme. PCK was to have a major impact particularly in the experimental subject areas, although there were also important implications for teaching literature and other areas. At the heart of PCK is the notion that methodology or “what to do” flows from the content one teaches, and the content one teaches ultimately flows from the “why” of education. In other words, education is an integrated dynamic in which the “why” affects the “what” and the “what” affects the “how”.

I learned about the importance of PCK during my travels over the years to all sorts of Jewish schools. One of the most prominent subjects (typically in the early years of elementary school) I observed was the teaching of Genesis Chapter 12 which describes a conversation between God and Abraham in which God makes a covenant—a legal agreement—with Abraham, that if he follows God’s ways, Abraham will be given a certain body of land for himself and for his children in perpetuity. How one teaches this section depends upon how one understands the nature of this ancient source. If this text is a verifiable history book (which was the mode that I observed in so many schools), it will be taught in one way; if this text is not a history book but rather a philosophical or theological work with profound religious, moral, and human messages, it will be taught in a totally different way. These two understandings result in dramatically diverse pedagogies and messages, depending on whether the text in Genesis 12 was presented as an authoritative history or a profound philosophy.

The contemporary language of education includes some key concepts—“schooling”, “aims”, “goals”, “curriculum”, and “pedagogy”—whose meanings are very important to the practice of education in schools and beyond. This conclusion suggests that the fields of education and Jewish education in the twenty-first century are sophisticated domains which call for serious deliberation and study by prospective educators. The educators of our young deserve the same level of training, investment, and rigor that we expect from the doctors who treat our bodies or from the engineers who build the bridges on which we travel. Education in the twenty-first century is a critical sphere that calls for deep reflection, training, and passion.

Adult education specialist Malcolm Knowles suggested that the term “pedagogy” be used to refer to the teaching of children and that the term “andragogy” be used to denote adult learning. (Knowles 2020 ).

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Chazan, B. (2022). What Is “Education”?. In: Principles and Pedagogies in Jewish Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83925-3_3

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the encyclopaedia of pedagogy and informal education

What is education? A definition and discussion

Education is the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning and change undertaken in the belief that we all should have the chance to share in life., mark k smith explores the meaning of education and suggests it is a process of being with others and inviting truth and possibility., contents : introduction • education – cultivating hopeful environments and relationships for learning • education, respect and wisdom • education – acting so all may share in life • conclusion – what is education • further reading and references • acknowledgements • how to cite this piece.

picture: Education by Claude Gillot (1673–1722). creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Introduction

When talking about education people often confuse it with schooling. Many think of places like schools or colleges when seeing or hearing the word. They might also look to particular jobs like teacher or tutor. The problem with this is that while looking to help people learn, the way a lot of schools and teachers operate is not necessarily something we can properly call education. They have chosen or fallen or been pushed into ‘schooling’ – trying to drill learning into people according to some plan often drawn up by others. Paulo Freire (1973) famously called this banking – making deposits of knowledge. Such ‘schooling’ too easily descends into treating learners like objects, things to be acted upon rather than people to be related to.

Education, as we understand it here, is a process of inviting truth and possibility, of encouraging and giving time to discovery. It is, as John Dewey (1916) put it, a social process – ‘a process of living and not a preparation for future living’. In this view educators look to learning and being with others rather than acting upon them. Their task is to educe (related to the Greek notion of educere ), to bring out or develop potential both in themselves and others. Such education is:

• Deliberate and hopeful. It is learning we set out to make happen in the belief that we all can ‘be more’;
• Informed, respectful and wise. A process of inviting truth and possibility.
• Grounded in a desire that at all may flourish and share in life . It is a cooperative and inclusive activity that looks to help us to live our lives as well as we can.

In what follows we will try to answer the question ‘what is education?’ by exploring these dimensions and the processes involved.

Education – cultivating hopeful environments and relationships for learning

It is often said that we are learning all the time and that we may not be conscious of it happening. Learning is both a process and an outcome. As a process, it is part of being and living in the world, part of the way our bodies work. As an outcome, it is a new understanding or appreciation of something.

In recent years, developments in neuroscience have shown us how learning takes place both in the body and as a social activity. We are social animals. As a result, educators need to focus on creating environments and relationships for learning rather than trying to drill knowledge into themselves and others.

Teachers are losing the education war because our adolescents are distracted by the social world. Naturally, the students don’t see it that way. It wasn’t their choice to get endless instruction on topics that don’t seem relevant to them. They desperately want to learn, but what they want to learn about is their social world—how it works and how they can secure a place in it that will maximize their social rewards and minimize the social pain they feel. Their brains are built to feel these strong social motivations and to use the mentalizing system to help them along. Evolutionarily, the social interest of adolescents is no distraction. Rather, it is the most important thing they can learn well. (Lieberman 2013: 282)

The cultivation of learning is a cognitive and emotional and social activity (Illeris 2002)

Alison Gopnik (2016) has provided a helpful way of understanding this orientation. It is that educators, pedagogues and practitioners need to be gardeners rather than carpenters. A key theme emerging from her research over the last 30 years or so that runs in parallel with Lieberman, is that children learn by actively engaging their social and physical environments – not by passively absorbing information. They learn from other people, not because they are being taught – but because people are doing and talking about interesting things. The emphasis in a lot of the literature about parenting (and teaching) presents the roles much like that of a carpenter.

You should pay some attention to the kind of material you are working with, and it may have some influence on what you try to do. But essentially your job is to shape that material into a final product that will fit the scheme you had in mind to begin with.

Instead, Gopnik argues, the evidence points to being a gardener.

When we garden, on the other hand, we create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish. It takes hard labor and the sweat of our brows, with a lot of exhausted digging and wallowing in manure. And as any gardener knows, our specific plans are always thwarted. The poppy comes up neon orange instead of pale pink, the rose that was supposed to climb the fence stubbornly remains a foot from the ground, black spot and rust and aphids can never be defeated.

Education is deliberate. We act with a purpose – to build understanding and judgement and enable action. We may do this for ourselves, for example, learning what different road signs mean so that we can get a license to drive; or watching wildlife programmes on television because we are interested in animal behaviour. This process is sometimes called self-education or teaching yourself. We join with the journey that the writer, presenter or expert is making, think about it and develop our understanding. Hopefully, we bring that process and understanding into play when we need to act. We also seek to encourage learning in others (while being open to learning ourselves). Examples here include parents and carers showing their children how to use a knife and fork or ride a bike; schoolteachers introducing students to a foreign language; and animators and pedagogues helping a group to work together.

Sometimes as educators, we have a clear idea of what we’d like to see achieved; at others, we do not and should not. In the case of the former, we might be working to a curriculum, have a session or lesson plan with clear objectives, and have a high degree of control over the learning environment. This is what we often mean by ‘formal education’. In the latter, for example, when working with a community group, the setting is theirs and, as educators, we are present as guests. This is an example of informal education and here two things are happening.

First, the group may well be clear on what it wants to achieve e.g. putting on an event, but unclear about what they need to learn to do it. They know learning is involved – it is something necessary to achieve what they want – but it is not the main focus. Such ‘incidental learning’ is not accidental. People know they need to learn something but cannot necessarily specify it in advance (Brookfield 1984).

Second, this learning activity works largely through conversation – and conversation takes unpredictable turns. It is a dialogical rather than curricula form of education.

In both forms, educators set out to create environments and relationships where people can explore their, and other’s, experiences of situations, ideas and feelings. This exploration lies, as John Dewey argued, at the heart of the ‘business of education’. Educators set out to emancipate and enlarge experience (1933: 340). How closely the subject matter is defined in advance, and by whom, differs from situation to situation. John Ellis (1990) has developed a useful continuum – arguing that most education involves a mix of the informal and formal, of conversation and curriculum (i.e. between points X and Y).

Those that describe themselves as informal educators, social pedagogues or as animators of community learning and development tend to work towards the X; those working as subject teachers or lecturers tend to the Y. Educators when facilitating tutor groups might, overall, work somewhere in the middle.

Acting in hope

Underpinning intention is an attitude or virtue – hopefulness. As educators ‘we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know’ (hooks 2003: xiv) . In other words, we invite people to learn and act in the belief that change for the good is possible. This openness to possibility isn’t blind or over-optimistic. It looks to evidence and experience, and is born of an appreciation of the world’s limitations (Halpin 2003: 19-20).

We can quickly see how such hope is both a part of the fabric of education – and, for many, an aim of education. Mary Warnock (1986:182) puts it this way:

I think that of all the attributes that I would like to see in my children or in my pupils, the attribute of hope would come high, even top, of the list. To lose hope is to lose the capacity to want or desire anything; to lose, in fact, the wish to live. Hope is akin to energy, to curi­osity, to the belief that things are worth doing. An education which leaves a child without hope is an education that has failed.

But hope is not easy to define or describe. It is:

An emotion . Hope, John Macquarrie (1978 11) suggests, ‘consists in an outgoing and trusting mood toward the environment’. We do not know what will happen but take a gamble. ‘It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk’ (Solnit 2016: 21).

A choice or intention to act . Hope ‘promotes affirmative courses of action’ (Macquarrie 1978: 11). Hope alone will not transform the world. Action ‘undertaken in that kind of naïveté’, wrote Paulo Freire (1994: 8), ‘is an excellent route to hopelessness, pessimism, and fatalism’. Hope and action are linked. Rebecca Solnit (2016: 22) put it this way, ‘Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope… To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable’.

An intellectual activity . Hope is not just feeling or striving, according to McQuarrie it has a cognitive or intellectual aspect. ‘[I]t carries in itself a definite way of understanding both ourselves – and the environing processes within which human life has its setting’ ( op. cit. ).

This provides us with a language to help make sense of things and to imagine change for the better – a ‘vocabulary of hope’. It helps us to critique the world as it is and our part in it, and not to just imagine change but also to plan it (Moltman 1967, 1971). It also allows us, and others, to ask questions of our hopes, to request evidence for our claims. (See, what is hope? ).

Education – being respectful, informed and wise

Education is wrapped up with who we are as learners and facilitators of learning – and how we are experienced by learners. In order to think about this, it is helpful to look back at a basic distinction made by Erich Fromm (1979), amongst others, between having and being. Fromm approaches these as fundamental modes of existence. He saw them as two different ways of understanding ourselves and the world in which we live.

Having is concerned with owning, possessing and controlling. In it we want to ‘make everybody and everything’, including ourselves, our property (Fromm 1979: 33). It looks to objects and material possessions.

Being is rooted in love according to Fromm. It is concerned with shared experience and productive activity. Rather than seeking to possess and control, in this mode, we engage with the world. We do not impose ourselves on others nor ‘interfere’ in their lives (see Smith and Smith 2008: 16-17).

These different orientations involve contrasting approaches to learning.

Students in the having mode must have but one aim; to hold onto what they have ‘learned’, either by entrusting it firmly to their memories or by carefully guarding their notes. They do not have to produce or create something new…. The process of learning has an entirely different quality for students in the being mode… Instead of being passive receptacles of words and ideas, they listen, they hear , and most important, they receive and they respond in an active, productive way. (Fromm 1979: 37-38)

In many ways, this difference mirrors that between education and schooling. Schooling entails transmitting knowledge in manageable lumps so it can be stored and then used so that students can pass tests and have qualifications. Education involves engaging with others and the world. It entails being with   others in a particular way. Here I want to explore three aspects – being respectful, informed and wise.

Being respectful

The process of education flows from a basic orientation of respect – respect for truth, others and themselves, and the world. It is an attitude or feeling which is carried through into concrete action, into the way we treat people, for example. Respect, as R. S. Dillon (2014) has reminded us, is derived from the Latin respicere , meaning ‘to look back at’ or ‘to look again’ at something. In other words, when we respect something we value it enough to make it our focus and to try to see it for what it is, rather than what we might want it to be. It is so important that it calls for our recognition and our regard – and we choose to respond.

We can see this at work in our everyday relationships. When we think highly of someone we may well talk about respecting them – and listen carefully to what they say or value the example they give. Here, though, we are also concerned with a more abstract idea – that of moral worth or value. Rather than looking at why we respect this person or that, the interest is in why we should respect people in general (or truth, or creation, or ourselves).

First, we expect educators to hold truth dearly . We expect that they will look beneath the surface, try to challenge misrepresentation and lies, and be open to alternatives. They should display the ‘two basic virtues of truth’: sincerity and accuracy (Williams 2002: 11). There are strong religious reasons for this. Bearing false witness, within Christian traditions, can be seen as challenging the foundations of God’s covenant. There are also strongly practical reasons for truthfulness. Without it, the development of knowledge would not be possible – we could not evaluate one claim against another. Nor could we conduct much of life. For example, as Paul Seabright (2010) has argued, truthfulness allows us to trust strangers. In the process, we can build complex societies, trade and cooperate.

Educators, as with other respecters of truth, should do their best to acquire ‘true beliefs’ and to ensure what they say actually reveals what they believe (Williams 2002: 11). Their authority, ‘must be rooted in their truthfulness in both these respects: they take care, and they do not lie’ op. cit.).

Second, educators should display fundamental respect for others (and themselves) . There is a straightforward theological argument for this. There is also a fundamental philosophical argument for ‘respect for persons’. Irrespective of what they have done, the people they are or their social position, it is argued, people are deserving of some essential level of regard. The philosopher most closely associated with this idea is Immanuel Kant – and his thinking has become a central pillar of humanism. Kant’s position was that people were deserving of respect because they are people – free, rational beings. They are ends in themselves with an absolute dignity

Alongside respect for others comes respect for self. Without it, it is difficult to see how we can flourish – and whether we can be educators. Self-respect is not to be confused with qualities like self-esteem or self-confidence; rather it is to do with our intrinsic worth as a person and a sense of ourselves as mattering. It involves a ‘secure conviction that [our] conception of the good, [our] plan of life, is worth carrying out’ (Rawls 1972: 440). For some, respect for ourselves is simply the other side of the coin from respect for others. It flows from respect for persons. For others, like John Rawls, it is vital for happiness and must be supported as a matter of justice.

Third, educators should respect the Earth . This is sometimes talked about as respect for nature, or respect for all things or care for creation. Again there is a strong theological argument here – in much religious thinking humans are understood as stewards of the earth. Our task is to cultivate and care for it (see, for example, Genesis 2:15). However, there is also a strong case grounded in human experience. For example, Miller (2000) argues that ‘each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to spiritual values such as compassion and peace’. Respect for the world is central to the thinking of those arguing for a more holistic vision of education and to the thinking of educationalists such as Montessori . Her vision of ‘cosmic education’ puts appreciating the wholeness of life at the core.

Since it has been seen to be necessary to give so much to the child, let us give him a vision of the whole universe. The universe is an imposing reality, and an answer to all questions. We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity. This idea helps the mind of the child to become fixed, to stop wandering in an aimless quest for knowledge. He is satisfied, having found the universal centre of himself with all things’. (Montessori 2000)

Last, and certainly not least, there is a basic practical concern. We face an environmental crisis of catastrophic proportions. As Emmett (among many others) has pointed out, it is likely that we are looking at a global average rise of over four degrees Centigrade. This ‘will lead to runaway climate change, capable of tipping the planet into an entirely different state, rapidly. Earth would become a hell hole’ (2013: 143).

Being informed

To facilitate learning we must have some understanding of the subject matter being explored, and the impact study could have on those involved. In other words, facilitation is intelligent.

We expect, quite reasonably, that when people describe themselves as teachers or educators, they know something about the subjects they are talking about. In this respect, our ‘subject area’ as educators is wide. It can involve particular aspects of knowledge and activity such as those associated with maths or history. However, it is also concerned with happiness and relationships, the issues and problems of everyday life in communities, and questions around how people are best to live their lives. In some respects, it is wisdom that is required – not so much in the sense that we know a lot or are learned – but rather we are able to help people make good judgements about problems and situations.

We also assume that teachers and educators know how to help people learn. The forms of education we are exploring here are sophisticated. They can embrace the techniques of classroom management and of teaching to a curriculum that has been the mainstay of schooling. However, they move well beyond this into experiential learning, working with groups, and forms of working with individuals that draw upon insights from counselling and therapy.

In short, we look to teachers and educators as experts, We expect them to apply their expertise to help people learn. However, things don’t stop there. Many look for something more – wisdom.

Wisdom is not something that we can generally claim for ourselves – but a quality recognized by others. Sometimes when people are described as wise what is meant is that they are scholarly or learned. More often, I suspect, when others are described as ‘being wise’ it that people have experienced their questions or judgement helpful and sound when exploring a problem or difficult situation (see Smith and Smith 2008: 57-69). This entails:

• appreciating what can make people flourish
• being open to truth in its various guises and allowing subjects to speak to us
• developing the capacity to reflect
• 
  being knowledgeable, especially about ourselves, around ‘what makes people tick’ and the systems of which we are a part
• being discerning – able to evaluate and judge situations. ( op. cit. : 68)

This combination of qualities, when put alongside being respectful and informed, comes close to what Martin Buber talked about as the ‘real teacher’. The real teacher, he believed:

… teaches most successfully when he is not consciously trying to teach at all, but when he acts spontaneously out of his own life. Then he can gain the pupil’s confidence; he can convince the adolescent that there is human truth, that existence has a meaning. And when the pupil’s confidence has been won, ‘his resistance against being educated gives way to a singular happening: he accepts the educator as a person. He feels he may trust this man, that this man is taking part in his life, accepting him before desiring to influence him. And so he learns to ask…. (Hodes 1972: 136)

Education – acting so that all may share in life

Thus far in answering the question ‘what is education?’ we have seen how it can be thought of as the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning. Here we will explore the claim that education should be undertaken in the belief that all should have the chance to share in life. This commitment to the good of all and of each individual is central to the vision of education explored here, but it could be argued that it is possible to be involved in education without this. We could take out concern for others. We could just focus on process – the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning – and not state to whom this applies and the direction it takes.

Looking beyond process

First, we need to answer the question ‘if we act wisely, hopefully, and respectfully as educators do we need to have a further purpose?’ Our guide here will again be John Dewey. He approached the question a century ago by arguing that ‘the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth’ (Dewey 1916: 100). Education, for him, entailed the continuous ‘reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases the ability to direct the course of subsequent experience. (Dewey 1916: 76). His next step was to consider the social relationships in which this can take place and the degree of control that learners and educators have over the process. Just as Freire (1972) argued later, relationships for learning need to be mutual, and individual and social change possible.

In our search for aims in education, we are not concerned… with finding an end outside of the educative process to which education is subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are rather concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which they operate and when they are set up from without. And the latter state of affairs must obtain when social relationships are not equitably balanced. For in that case, some portions of the whole social group will find their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will not arise from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly their own. (Dewey 1916: 100-101)

In other words, where there are equitable relationships, control over the learning process, and the possibilities of fundamental change we needn’t look beyond the process. However, we have to work for much of the time in situations and societies where this level of democracy and social justice does not exist. Hence the need to make clear a wider purpose. Dewey (1916: 7) argued, thus, that our ‘chief business’ as educators is to enable people ‘to share in a common life’. I want to widen this and to argue that all should have a chance to share in life.

Having the chance to share in life

We will explore, briefly, three overlapping approaches to making the case – via religious belief, human rights and scientific exploration.

Religious belief. Historically it has been a religious rationale that has underpinned much thinking about this question. If we were to look at Catholic social teaching, for example, we find that at its heart lays a concern for human dignity . This starts from the position that, ‘human beings, created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27), have by their very existence an inherent value, worth, and distinction’ (Groody 2007). Each life is considered sacred and cannot be ignored or excluded. As we saw earlier, Kant argued something similar with regard to ‘respect for persons’. All are worthy of respect and the chance to flourish.

To human dignity a concern for solidarity is often added (especially within contemporary Catholic social teaching). Solidarity:

… is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all. On Social Concern ( Sollicitudo rei Socialis . . . ), #38

Another element, fundamental to the formation of the groups, networks and associations necessary for the ‘common life’ that Dewey describes, is subsidiarity . This principle, which first found its institutional voice in a papal encyclical in 1881, holds that human affairs are best handled at the ‘lowest’ possible level, closest to those affected (Kaylor 2015). It is a principle that can both strengthen civil society and the possibility of more mutual relationships for learning.

Together, these can provide a powerful and inclusive rationale for looking beyond particular individuals or groups when thinking about educational activity.

Human rights. Beside religious arguments lie others that are born of agreed principle or norm rather than faith. Perhaps the best known of these relate to what have become known as human rights. The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts it this way:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 26 further states:

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms….

These fundamental and inalienable rights are the entitlement of all human beings regardless of their nation, location, language, religion, ethnic origin or any other status (Article 2).

Scientific exploration. Lastly, I want to look at the results of scientific investigation into our nature as humans. More specifically we need to reflect on what it means when humans are described as social animals.

As we have already seen there is a significant amount of research showing just how dependent we are in everyday life on having trusting relationships in a society. Without them even the most basic exchanges cannot take place. We also know that in those societies where there is stronger concern for others and relatively narrow gaps between rich and poor people are generally happier (see, for example, Halpern 2010). On the basis of this material we could make a case for educators to look to the needs and experiences of all. Political, social and economic institutions depend on mass participation or at least benign consent – and the detail of this has to be learnt. However, with our growing appreciation of how our brains work and with the development of, for example, social cognitive neuroscience, we have a different avenue for exploration. We look to the needs and experience of others because we are hard-wired to do so. As Matthew D. Lieberman (2013) has put it:

Our basic urges include the need to belong, right along with the need for food and water. Our pain and pleasure systems do not merely respond to sensory inputs that can produce physical harm and reward. They are also exquisitely tuned to the sweet and bitter tastes delivered from the social world—a world of connection and threat to connection. (Lieberman 2013: 299)

Our survival as a species is dependent upon on looking to the needs and experiences of others. We dependent upon:

  Connecting: We have ‘evolved the capacity to feel social pains and pleasures, forever linking our well-being to our social connectedness. Infants embody this deep need to stay connected, but it is present through our entire lives’ ( op. cit. : 10) Mindreading: Primates have developed an unparalleled ability to understand the actions and thoughts of those around them, enhancing their ability to stay connected and interact strategically… This capacity allows humans to create groups that can implement nearly any idea and to anticipate the needs and wants of those around us, keeping our groups moving smoothly ( op. cit. : 10) Harmonizing: Although the self may appear to be a mechanism for distinguishing us from others and perhaps accentuating our selfishness, the self actually operates as a powerful force for social cohesiveness. Whereas   connection   is about our desire to be social, harmonizing   refers to the neural adaptations that allow group beliefs and values to influence our own. ( op. cit. : 11)

One of the key issues around these processes is the extent to which they can act to become exclusionary i.e. people can become closely attached to one particular group, community or nation and begin to treat others as somehow lesser or alien. In so doing relationships that are necessary to our survival – and that of the planet – become compromised. We need to develop relationships that are both bonding and bridging (see social capital ) – and this involves being and interacting with others who may not share our interests and concerns.

Education is more than fostering understanding and an appreciation of emotions and feelings. It is also concerned with change – ‘with how people can act with understanding and sensitivity to improve their lives and those of others’ (Smith and Smith 2008: 104). As Karl Marx (1977: 157-8) famously put it ‘all social life is practical…. philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; ‘the point is to change it’. Developing an understanding of an experience or a situation is one thing, working out what is good and wanting to do something about it is quite another. ‘For appropriate action to occur there needs to be commitment’ (Smith and Smith 2008: 105).

This combination of reflection; looking to what might be good and making it our own; and seeking to change ourselves and the world we live in is what Freire (1973) talked about as  praxis. It involves us, as educators, working with people to create and sustain environments and relationships where it is possible to:

• Go back to experiences . Learning doesn’t take place in a vacuum. We have to look to the past as well as the present and the future. It is necessary to put things in their place by returning to, or recalling, events and happenings that seem relevant.
• Attend and connect to feelings . Our ability to think and act is wrapped up with our feelings. Appreciating what might be going on for us (and for others) at a particular moment; thinking about the ways our emotions may be affecting things; and being open to what our instincts or intuitions are telling us are important elements of such reflection. (See Boud et. al. 1985).
• Develop understandings . Alongside attending to feelings and experiences, we need to examine the theories and understandings we are using. We also need to build new interpretations where needed. We should be looking to integrating new knowledge into our conceptual framework.
• Commit . Education is something ‘higher’ according to John Henry Newman. It is concerned not just with what we know and can do, but also with who we are, what we value, and our capacity to live life as well as we can . We need space to engage with these questions and help to appreciate the things we value. As we learn to frame our beliefs we can better appreciate how they breathe life into our relationships and encounters, become our own, and move us to act.
• Act . Education is forward-looking and hopeful. It looks to change for the better. In the end our efforts at facilitating learning have to be judged by the extent to which they further the capacity to flourish and to share in life. For this reason we need also to attend to the concrete, the actual steps that can be taken to improve things.

As such education is a deeply practical activity – something that we can do for ourselves (what we could call self-education), and with others.

Conclusion – so what is education?

It is in this way that we end up with a definition of education as ‘the wise, hopeful and respectful cultivation of learning undertaken in the belief that all should have the chance to share in life’. What does education involve?

We can begin with what Aristotle discusses as hexis – a readiness to sense and know. This is a state – or what Joe Sachs (2001) talks about as an ‘active condition’. It allows us to take a step forward – both in terms of the processes discussed above, and in what we might seek to do when working with learners and participants. Such qualities can be seen as being at the core of the haltung and processes of pedagogues and educators (see below). There is a strong emphasis upon being in touch with feelings, attending to intuitions and seeking evidence to confirm or question what we might be sensing. A further element is also present – a concern not to take things for granted or at their face value (See, also, Pierre Bourdieu on education , Bourdieu 1972|1977: 214 n1).

Beyond that, we can see a guiding eidos or leading idea. This is the belief that all share in life and a picture of what might allow people to be happy and flourish. Alongside is a disposition or haltung   (a concern to act respectfully, knowledgeably and wisely) and interaction (joining with others to build relationships and environments for learning). Finally, there is praxis – informed, committed action (Carr and Kemmis 1986; Grundy 1987).

The process of education

At first glance, this way of answering the question ‘what is education?’ – with its roots in the thinking of  Aristotle , Rousseau , Pestalozzi and Dewey (to name a few) – is part of the progressive tradition of educational practice. It seems very different from ‘formal tradition’ or ‘traditional education’.

If there is a core theme to the formal position it is that education is about passing on information; for formalists, culture and civilization represent a store of ideas and wisdom which have to be handed on to new generations. Teaching is at the heart of this transmission; and the process of transmission is education…

While progressive educators stress the child’s development from within, formalists put the emphasis, by contrast, on formation from without— formation that comes from immersion in the knowledge, ideas, beliefs, concepts, and visions of society, culture, civilization. There are, one might say, conservative and liberal interpretations of this world view— the conservative putting the emphasis on transmission itself, on telling, and the liberal putting the emphasis more on induction, on initiation by involvement with culture’s established ideas.(Thomas 2013: 25-26).

As both Thomas and Dewey (1938: 17-23) have argued, these distinctions are problematic. A lot of the debate is either really about education being turned, or slipping, into something else, or reflecting a lack of balance between the informal and formal.

In the ‘formal tradition’ problems often occur where people are treated as objects to be worked on or ‘moulded’ rather than as participants and creators i.e. where education slips into ‘schooling’.

In the ‘progressive tradition’ issues frequently arise where the nature of experience is neglected or handled incompetently. Some experiences are damaging and ‘mis-educative’. They can arrest or distort ‘the growth of further experience’ (Dewey 1938: 25). The problem often comes when education drifts or moves into entertainment or containment. Involvement in the immediate activity is the central concern and little attention is given to expanding horizons, nor to reflection, commitment and creating change.

The answer to the question ‘what is education?’ given here can apply to both those ‘informal’ forms that are driven and rooted in conversation – and to more formal approaches involving a curriculum. The choice is not between what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ – but rather what is appropriate for people in this situation or that. There are times to use transmission and direct teaching as methods, and moments for exploration, experience and action. It is all about getting the mix right and framing it within the guiding eidos and disposition of education.

Further reading and references

Recommended introductions.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. New York: Collier Books. (Collier edition first published 1963). In this book, Dewey seeks to move beyond dualities such as progressive/traditional – and to outline a philosophy of experience and its relation to education.

Thomas, G. (2013). Education: A very short introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simply the best contemporary introduction to thinking about schooling and education.

Boud, D., Keogh, R. and Walker, D. (eds.) (1985). Reflection. Turning experience into learning . London: Kogan Page.

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1972|1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published in French as Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle, (1972).

Brookfield, S. (1984). Adult learners, adult education and the community . Milton Keynes, PA: Open University Press.

Buber, Martin (1947). Between Man and Man. Transl. R. G. Smith. London: Kegan Paul .

Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming Critical. Education, knowledge and action research. Lewes: Falmer.

Dewey, J. (1916), Democracy and Education. An introduction to the philosophy of education (1966 edn.). New York: Free Press.

Dewey, J. (1933). How We Think. A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. (Revised edn.), Boston: D. C. Heath.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. New York: Collier Books. (Collier edition first published 1963).

Dillon, R. S. (2014). Respect. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). [ http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/respect/ . Retrieved: February 10, 2015].

Ellis, J. W. (1990). Informal education – a Christian perspective.   Tony Jeffs and Mark Smith (eds.)   Using Informal Education. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Emmott, S. (2013). 10 Billion . London: Penguin. [Kindle edition].

Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Freire, P. (1994) Pedagogy of Hope. Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed . With notes by Ana Maria Araujo Freire. Translated by Robert R. Barr. New York: Continuum.

Fromm, E. (1979). To Have or To Be . London: Abacus. (First published 1976).

Fromm, E. (1995). The Art of Loving . London: Thorsons. (First published 1957).

Gallagher, M. W. and Lopez, S. J. (eds.) (2018). The Oxford Handbook of Hope . New York: Oxford University Press.

Gopnik, A. (2016). The Gardener and the Carpenter. What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children . London: Random House.

Groody, D. (2007). Globalization, Spirituality and Justice . New York: Orbis Books.

Grundy, S. (1987). Curriculum. Product or praxis . Lewes: Falmer.

Halpern, D. (2010). The hidden wealth of nations . Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Halpin, D. (2003). Hope and Education. The role of the utopian imagination . London: RoutledgeFalmer.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress. Education as the practice of freedom , London: Routledge.

hooks, b. (2003). Teaching Community. A pedagogy of hope. New York: Routledge.

Hodes, A. (1972). Encounter with Martin Buber. London:   Allen Lane/Penguin.

Illeris, K. (2002). The Three Dimensions of Learning. Contemporary learning theory in the tension field between the cognitive, the emotional and the social. Frederiksberg: Roskilde University Press.

Kant, I. (1949). Fundamental principles of the metaphysic of morals (trans.  T. K. Abbott). New York: Liberal Arts Press.

Kaylor, C. (2015). Seven Principles of Catholic Social Teaching. CatholicCulture.org. [ http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=7538#PartV . Retrieved March 21, 2015].

Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything. Capitalism vs. the climate . London: Penguin. [Kindle edition].

Liston, D. P. (1980). Love and despair in teaching. Educational Theory . 50(1): 81-102.

MacQuarrie, J. (1978). Christian Hope . Oxford: Mowbray.

Marx, K. (1977). ‘These on Feurrbach’ in D. McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx. Selected writings . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moltmann, J. (1967). Theology of hope: On the ground and the implications of a Christian eschatology . New York: Harper & Row. Available on-line: http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?PID=1036

Moltmann, J. (1971). Hope and planning . New York: Harper & Row.

Montessori, M. (2000). To educate the human potential . Oxford: Clio Press.

Rawls, J. (1972). A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rorty, R. (1999). Philosophy and Social Hope . London: Penguin.

Sciolli, A. and Biller, H. B. (2009). Hope in the Age of Anxiety. A guide to understanding and strengthening our most important virtue. New York: Oxford University Press.

Seabright, P. (2010). The Company of Strangers. A natural history of economic life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Smith, H. and Smith, M. K. (2008). The Art of Helping Others . Being Around, Being There, Being Wise . London: Jessica Kingsley.

Smith, M. K. (2019). Haltung, pedagogy and informal education, The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education . [ https://infed.org/mobi/haltung-pedagogy-and-informal-education/ . Retrieved: August 28, 2019].

Smith, M. K. (2012, 2021). ‘What is pedagogy?’, The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education . [ https://infed.org/mobi/what-is-pedagogy/ . Retrieved February 16, 2021)

Thomas, G. (2013). Education: A very short introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Kindle Edition].

United Nations General Assembly (1948). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights . New York: United Nations. [ http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ . A ccessed March 14, 2015].

Warnock, M. (1986). The Education of the Emotions. In D. Cooper (ed.) Education, values and the mind. Essays for R. S. Peters . London: Routledge and Keegan Paul.

Williams, B. (2002). Truth & truthfulness: An essay in genealogy . Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Acknowledgements : Picture: Dessiner le futur adulte by Alain Bachellier. Sourced from Flickr and reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/alainbachellier/537180464/

The informal-formal education curriculum diagram is reproduced with permission from Ellis, J. W. (1990). Informal education – a Christian perspective. Tony Jeffs and Mark Smith (eds.) Using Informal Education . Buckingham: Open University Press. You can read the full chapter in the informal education archives: http://infed.org/archives/usinginformaleducation/ellis.htm

The process of education diagram was developed by Mark K Smith and was inspired by Grundy 1987. It can be reproduced without asking for specific permission but should be credited using the information in ‘how to cite this piece’ below.

This piece uses some material from Smith (2019) Haltung, pedagogy and informal education and (2021) What is pedagogy? (see the references above).

How to cite this piece : Smith, M. K. (2015, 2021). What is education? A definition and discussion. The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education . [ https://infed.org/mobi/what-is-education-a-definition-and-discussion/ . Retrieved: insert date ].

© Mark K Smith 2015, 2021

7 minute read

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)

The nature of education, educational development and the rhythm of growth, universities and professional training.

One of the twentieth century's most original metaphysicians and a major figure in mathematical logic, Alfred North Whitehead was also an important social and educational philosopher. Born in England, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also taught mathematics from 1884 until 1910. He then moved to London, where he was professor of applied mathematics at the University of London until 1924. Receiving an invitation to join the philosophy department at Harvard University, Whitehead came to the United States and taught at Harvard until 1937. He remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the rest of his life.

While Whitehead's metaphysical and logical writings merit his inclusion in any pantheon of twentieth-century philosophers, his work in social and educational philosophy is marked by singular qualities of imagination, profound analysis, and personal commitment. His thought resembles much in the philosophy of John Dewey (1859–1952). In the philosophy of higher education, where Dewey wrote very little, Whitehead is probably the most important figure since John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801–1890).

The Nature of Education

"Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge." This simple sentence from Whitehead's introductory essay in his Aims of Education (1929, p. 4), epitomizes one of his central themes: Education cannot be dissected from practice. Whitehead's synthesis of knowledge and application contrasts sharply with educational theories that recommend mental training exclusively. His general philosophical position, which he called "the philosophy of organism," insists upon the ultimate reality of things in relation, changing in time, and arranged in terms of systems of varying complexity, especially living things, including living minds. Whitehead rejected the theory of mind that maintains it is a kind of tool, or dead instrument, needing honing and sharpening. Nor is it a kind of repository for "inert" ideas, stored up in neatly categorized bundles. It is an organic element of an indissoluble mind/body unit, in continuous relationship with the living environment, both social and natural. White-head's philosophy of organism, sometimes called "process philosophy," stands in continuity with his educational thought, both as a general theoretical backdrop for this educational position and as the primary application of his fundamental educational themes.

Educational Development and the Rhythm of Growth

Whitehead's general concept of the nature and aims of education has as its psychological corollary a conception of the rhythm of education that connects him with developmental educators such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). For Whitehead, education is a temporal, growth-oriented process, in which both student and subject matter move progressively. The concept of rhythm suggests an aesthetic dimension to the process, one analogous to music. Growth then is a part of physical and mental development, with a strong element of style understood as a central driving motif. There are three fundamental stages in this process, which Whitehead called the stage of romance, the stage of precision, and the stage of generalization.

Romance is the first moment in the educational experience. All rich educational experiences begin with an immediate emotional involvement on the part of the learner. The primary acquisition of knowledge involves freshness, enthusiasm, and enjoyment of learning. The natural ferment of the living mind leads it to fix on those objects that strike it pre-reflectively as important for the fulfilling of some felt need on the part of the learner. All early learning experiences are of this kind and a curriculum ought to include appeals to the spirit of inquiry with which all children are natively endowed. The stage of precision concerns "exactness of formulation" (Whitehead 1929, p. 18), rather than the immediacy and breadth of relations involved in the romantic phase. Precision is discipline in the various languages and grammars of discrete subject matters, particularly science and technical subjects, including logic and spoken languages. It is the scholastic phase with which most students and teachers are familiar in organized schools and curricula. In isolation from the romantic impetus of education, precision can be barren, cold, and unfulfilling, and useless in the personal development of children. An educational system excessively dominated by the ideal of precision reverses the myth of Genesis: "In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them" (Whitehead 1925, p. 285). But precision is nevertheless a necessary element in a rich learning experience, and can neither substitute for romance, nor yield its place to romance. Generalization, the last rhythmic element of the learning process, is the incorporation of romance and precision into some general context of serviceable ideas and classifications. It is the moment of educational completeness and fruition, in which general ideas or, one may say, a philosophical outlook, both integrate the feelings and thoughts of the earlier moments of growth, and prepare the way for fresh experiences of excitement and romance, signaling a new beginning to the educational process.

It is important to realize that these three rhythmic moments of the educational process characterize all stages of development, although each is typically associated with one period of growth. So, romance, precision, and generalization characterize the rich educational experience of a young child, the adolescent, and the adult, although the romantic period is more closely associated with infancy and young childhood, the stage of precision with adolescence, and generalization with young and mature adulthood. Education is not uniquely oriented to some future moment, but holds the present in an attitude of almost religious awe. It is "holy ground" (Whitehead 1929, p. 3), and each moment in a person's education ought to include all three rhythmical elements. Similarly, the subjects contained in a comprehensive curriculum need to comprise all three stages, at whatever point they are introduced to the student. Thus the young child can be introduced to language acquisition by a deft combination of appeal to the child's emotional involvement, its need for exactitude in detail, and the philosophical consideration of broad generalizations.

Universities and Professional Training

The pragmatic and progressive aims of education, accompanied by Whitehead's rhythmic developmentalism, have ramifying effects throughout the lifelong educational process, but nowhere more tellingly than in their application to university teaching and research. Whitehead was a university professor throughout his life, and for a time, dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London. Personal experience makes his analysis of higher studies pointed and relevant. Strikingly, Whitehead chose the modern business school as representative of modern directions in university theory and practice. As a Harvard philosopher, he was in an excellent position to comment on this particular innovation in higher education, since Harvard University was the first school in the United States to have a graduate program in business administration. The novelty of the business school should not be overestimated, since the wedding of theory and practice has been an unspoken motif of higher education since the foundation of the university in the Middle Ages. What has happened is that business has joined the ranks of the learned professions, no longer exclusively comprising theology, law, and medicine. The business school shows that universities are not merely devoted to postsecondary instruction, nor are they merely research institutions. They are both, and the active presence of young learners and mature scholars is necessary to their organic health. "The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning" (Whitehead 1929, p. 93). This community of young and old is a further extension of the organic nature of learning. It makes the university analogous to other living associations, such as the family. The place of imagination in university life illustrates Whitehead's insistence on the aesthetic element in education. Universities are not merely institutions of analytic and intellectual skills, but of their imaginative integration into life. There is a creative element to all university activity (and not merely to the fine arts), a creativity necessary to the survival of life in a world of adventurous change. "Knowledge does not keep any better than fish" (Whitehead 1929, p. 98) and, while universities have a calling to preserve the great cultural achievements of the past, this conservatism must not be allowed to degenerate into a passive and unreflective commitment to inert ideas. "The task of a University is the creation of the future" (Whitehead 1938, p. 233). Ironically perhaps, the modern university, even one containing a business school, should not be managed like a business organization. The necessary freedom and risk, so important to the inventive scholar, requires a polity "beyond all regulation" (Whitehead 1929, p. 99).

Civilization, as Whitehead expresses it in his 1933 book, Adventures of Ideas (pp. 309–381), is constituted by five fundamental ideals, namely, beauty, truth, art, adventure, and peace. These five capture the aims, the rhythm, and the living, zestful and ordered progress of education and its institutional forms. They constitute a rich meaning of the term creativity, the ultimate driving source and goal of Whitehead's educational theory and program.

See also: P HILOSOPHY OF E DUCATION .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B RUMBAUGH , R OBERT S. 1982. Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Education. Albany: State University of New York Press.

D UNKEL , H AROLD B. 1965. Whitehead on Education. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

J OHNSON , A LLISON H. 1958. Whitehead's Philosophy of Civilization. Boston: Beacon.

L EVI , A LBERT W. 1937. "The Problem of Higher Education: Whitehead and Hutchins." Harvard Educational Review 7:451–465.

W HITEHEAD , A LFRED N ORTH . 1925. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan.

W HITEHEAD , A LFRED N ORTH . 1929. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan.

W HITEHEAD , A LFRED N ORTH . 1933. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Macmillan.

W HITEHEAD , A LFRED N ORTH . 1938. Modes of Thought. New York: Macmillan.

R OBERT J. M ULVANEY

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Personal Philosophy of Education

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The purpose of education, the role of the educator, individualized learning, inclusivity and diversity, lifelong learning, conclusion: nurturing minds, fostering growth.

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Why Is Education Important? The Power Of An Educated Society

Looking for an answer to the question of why is education important? We address this query with a focus on how education can transform society through the way we interact with our environment. 

Whether you are a student, a parent, or someone who values educational attainment, you may be wondering how education can provide quality life to a society beyond the obvious answer of acquiring knowledge and economic growth. Continue reading as we discuss the importance of education not just for individuals but for society as a whole. 

Harness the power of education to build a more sustainable modern society with a degree from  Unity Environmental University .

How Education Is Power: The Importance Of Education In Society

Why is education so important? Nelson Mandela famously said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” An educated society is better equipped to tackle the challenges that face modern America, including:

• Climate change
• Social justice
• Economic inequality

Education is not just about learning to read and do math operations. Of course, gaining knowledge and practical skills is part of it, but education is also about values and critical thinking. It’s about finding our place in society in a meaningful way. 

Environmental Stewardship

A  study from 2022 found that people who belong to an environmental stewardship organization, such as the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics, are likely to have a higher education level than those who do not. This suggests that quality education can foster a sense of responsibility towards the environment.

With the effects of climate change becoming increasingly alarming, this particular importance of education is vital to the health, safety, and longevity of our society. Higher learning institutions can further encourage environmental stewardship by adopting a  framework of sustainability science .

The Economic Benefits Of Education

Higher education can lead to better job opportunities and higher income. On average, a  person with a bachelor’s degree will make $765,000 more  in their lifetime than someone with no degree. Even with the rising costs of tuition, investment in higher education pays off in the long run. In 2020, the return on investment (ROI) for a college degree was estimated to be  13.5% to 35.9% . 

Green jobs  like environmental science technicians and solar panel installers  have high demand projections for the next decade. Therefore, degrees that will prepare you for one of these careers will likely yield a high ROI. And, many of these jobs only require an  associate’s degree or certificate , which means lower overall education costs. 

Unity  helps students maximize their ROI with real-world experience in the field as an integral part of every degree program. 

10 Reasons Why School Is Important

Education is not just an individual pursuit but also a societal one.  In compiling these reasons, we focused on the question, “How does education benefit society?” Overall, higher education has the power to transform:

• Individuals’ sense of self
• Interpersonal relationships
• Social communities
• Professional communities

Cognitive Development

Neuroscience research  has proven that the brain is a muscle that can retain its neuroplasticity throughout life. However, like other muscles, it must receive continual exercise to remain strong. Higher education allows people of any age to improve their higher-level cognitive abilities like problem-solving and decision-making. This can make many parts of life feel more manageable and help society run smoothly. 

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is key to workplace success.  Studies  show that people with emotional intelligence exhibit more:

• Self-awareness
• Willingness to try new things
• Innovative thinking
• Active listening
• Collaboration skills
• Problem-solving abilities

By attending higher education institutions that value these soft skills, students can improve their emotional intelligence as part of their career development in college.

Technological Literacy

Many careers in today’s job market use advanced technology. To prepare for these jobs, young people likely won’t have access to these technologies to practice on their own. That’s part of why so many STEM career paths require degrees. It’s essential to gain technical knowledge and skills through a certified program to safely use certain technologies. And, educated scientists are  more likely to make new technological discoveries .

Cultural Awareness

Education exposes individuals to different cultures and perspectives. Being around people who are different has the powerful ability to foster acceptance. Acceptance benefits society as a whole. It increases innovation and empathy. 

College also gives students an opportunity to practice feeling comfortable in situations where there are people of different races, genders, sexualities, and abilities. Students can gain an understanding of how to act respectfully among different types of people, which is an important skill for the workplace. This will only become more vital as our world continues to become more globalized.

Ethical and Moral Development

Another reason why school is important is that it promotes ethical and moral development. Many schools require students to take an ethics course in their general education curriculum. However, schools can also encourage character development throughout their programs by using effective pedagogical strategies including:

• Class debates and discussions
• Historical case studies
• Group projects

Unity’s distance learning programs  include an ethical decision-making class in our core curriculum. 

Ready To Learn More About Unity Environmental University?

Communication Skills

Effective written and verbal communication skills are key for personal and professional success. Higher education programs usually include at least one communication course in their general education requirements. Often the focus in these classes is on writing skills, but students can also use college as an opportunity to hone their presentation and public speaking skills. Courses such as  Multimedia Communication for Environmental Professionals  provide many opportunities for this. 

Civic Engagement

According to a  Gallup survey , people with higher education degrees are:

• More likely to participate in civic activities such as voting and volunteering
• Less likely to commit crimes
• More likely to get involved in their local communities

All these individual acts add up to make a big difference in society. An educated electorate is less likely to be swayed by unethical politicians and, instead, make choices that benefit themselves and their community. Because they are more involved, they are also more likely to hold elected officials accountable.

Financial Stability

The right degree can significantly expand your career opportunities and improve your long-term earning potential. Not all degrees provide the same level of financial stability, so it’s important to research expected salary offers after graduation and job demand outlook predictions for your desired field. Consider the return on investment for a degree from an affordable private school such as  Unity Environmental University .

Environmental Awareness

We have already discussed why education is important for environmental stewardship. Education can also lead to better environmental practices in the business world. By building empathy through character education and ethics courses, institutions can train future business leaders to emphasize human rights and sustainability over profits. All types and sizes of businesses can incorporate sustainable practices, but awareness of the issues and solutions is the first step.

Lifelong Learning

The reasons why education is important discussed so far focus on institutional education. However, education can happen anywhere. Attending a university that values all kinds of learning will set students up with the foundation to become lifelong learners.  Research  demonstrates that lifelong learners tend to be healthier and more fulfilled throughout their lives. When societies emphasize the importance of education, they can boost their overall prosperity.

The Role Of Unity Environmental University In Society

Environmentally conscious education is extremely valuable and should be accessible to all.   Unity Environmental University  offers tuition prices that are comparable to public universities, and financial aid is available to those who qualify. Courses last five weeks so that students can focus on only one class at a time. This ensures all learners are set up for academic success. 

Unity believes in supporting students holistically to maximize the power of education. This includes mental health services,  experiential learning opportunities , and  job placement assistance . Students in our  hybrid programs  can take classes at several field stations throughout Maine and enjoy the beautiful nature surrounding the campus for outdoor recreation.

Sustainable Initiatives

Some highlights from Unity Environmental University’s many sustainable initiatives:

• All programs include at least one sustainability learning outcome
• All research courses are focused on sustainability research
• Reduced building energy use by 25% across campus
• 100% of food waste is recycled into energy 
• Campus features a  net-zero LEED Platinum-certified classroom/office building

While many schools value sustainability, Unity stands out because  everything  we do is about sustainability. We also recognize our responsibility to model how a sustainable business can operate in a manner that’s fiscally viable and socially responsible.

Make An Impact At Unity Environmental University

While the phrase ‘education is power’ may sound cliche, it is also resoundingly true. Higher education has the power to transform individuals and societies. Unity Environmental University understands its power to make a positive impact on the world. That’s why we were the first university to divest from fossil fuels. 

This year, we celebrated our  largest incoming class ever , showing that students want an education system that aligns with their values. In addition to our commitment to sustainability, we offer flexibility to students with start dates all year round for our  online degree programs .

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Meaning & Nature of Education

Meaning of education.

Education is very closely related to civilization and progress and has a huge impact on human life. Therefore, being an important factor in life activity education is also greatly influenced by philosophy.

Different fields of philosophy i.e. social philosophy and economic philosophy and have great influence on the various aspects of education like educational procedures, planning, policies and its implementation, from both the theoretical and practical aspects.

Etymologically, the word education is derived from educare (Latin) “bring up”, which is related to educere “bring out”, “bring forth what is within”, “bring out potential” and e ducere , “to lead”.

Webster defines education as the process of educating or teaching.   Educate is further defined as “to develop the knowledge, skill, or character of…” Thus, from aforesaid definitions, we may assume that the purpose of education is to develop the knowledge, skill and character of students.

Definitions of Education

The Western philosophers have defined the education as under:-

1. Socrates:

“Education means the bringing out of the ideas of universal validity which are latent in the mind of every man”.

“Education is the capacity to feel pleasure and pain at the right moment. It develops in the body and in the soul of the pupil all the beauty and all the perfection which he is capable of.”

3. Aristotle:

“Education is the creation of a sound mind in a sound body. It develops man’s faculty, especially his mind so that he may be able to enjoy the contemplation of supreme truth, goodness and beauty of which perfect happiness essentially consists.

4. Rousseau:

“Education of man commences at his birth; before he can speak, before he can understand he is already instructed. Experience is the forerunner of the perfect”.

5. Herbert Spencer:

“Education is complete living”.

Nature of Education:

As the meaning of education, so its nature which is very complex. The natures of education are:

(a) Education is life-long process- Education is life long process because every stage of life of an individual is important from educational point.

(b) Education is a systematic process- It refers to transact its activities through a systematic institution and regulation.

(c) Education is the development of individual and the society- It is called a force for social development, which brings improvement in every aspect of the society.

(d) Education is modification of behavior- Human behavior is modified and improved through educational process.

(e) Education is a training- Human senses, mind, behavior, activities; skills are trained in a constructive and socially desirable way.

(f) Education is instruction and direction- It directs and instructs an individual to fulfill his desires and needs for exaltation of his whole personality.

(g) Education is life- Life without education is meaningless and like the life of a beast. Every aspect and incident needs education for its sound development.

(h) Education is a continuous reconstruction of our experiences- As per the definition of John Dewey, education reconstructs and remodels our experiences towards socially desirable way.

(i) Education is a power and treasure in the human being through which he is entitled as the supreme master on the earth.

Therefore, the role of education is countless for a perfect society and man. It is necessary for every society and nation to bring holistic happiness and prosperity to its individuals.

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Nature of Education and Its Purpose

Introduction

Past forms and evolution, current state, shifts in expected outcomes, role of education and possible issues.

Knowledge is one of the most important aspects of any civilized society. Since ancient times, people have been collecting information about things surrounding them. It helped to cognize the world, find solutions to the most important problems, and create the basis for future progress and successors’ survival. However, the generation of knowledge introduced the problem of its transfer as new generations should be able to use accumulated data in new projects. That is why the first attempts to transfer knowledge, save and broaden it can be viewed as the emergence of education and its evolution. It became an integral part of human societies, necessary for their progress, survival, and achievement of new goals. At the same time, today, it is impossible to view education only as data exchange as it implies numerous concerns and has diversified goals. Nowadays, education is a continuous process through which a person acquires knowledge and broadens his/her mentality to be prepared for social integration and communication. As a result, there are numerous issues and problems associated with it.

As stated previously, education emerged in the first civilized societies as an attempt to save and broaden existing knowledge. For this reason, the nature of this process implied the continuous interaction between an experienced and a skilled person and an individual who lacked this information (Tierney & Pearson, 2021). However, the development of science, human thought, and the sophistication of societies stipulated the reconsideration of the attitude to education and its nature. The focus on mainly practical skills necessary for the survival of primal communities was gradually replaced with the necessity to address both theoretical and practical knowledge, combine them, and ensure their interaction to establish the basis for future evolution (Tierney & Pearson, 2021). Today, education is a lifelong, continuous, and systematic process aimed at transferring and generating different types of knowledge. However, it continues to evolve, meaning that new aspects might emerge.

In such a way, education passed a long way to acquire new features and peculiarities. Initially, it implied the interaction between a skilled or experienced person and a pupil (Tierney & Pearson, 2021). It was the simplest way to transfer knowledge and ensure it would be saved. However, the further development of science and society introduced the necessity to work with a bigger number of learners. It resulted in the emergence of a school as a fundamental education institution and teaching aids (Habiger Institute for Catholic Leadership, 2020). The first texts helped to familiarize individuals with available information and promote learning. At the same time, the scholastic methods implying lecturing and discussion appeared (Habiger Institute for Catholic Leadership, 2020). It was a step towards developing critical thinking and ensuring the increased flexibility of knowledge.

Moreover, humanity needed more effective ways to teach students and ensure they can expand existing knowledge. Under these conditions, the evolution of education has always been a continuous process that acquired new features. The technological progress and the emergence of new values in society resulted in reconsidering the nature of education and its purposes. The teaching process became more complex as it relied on a developed infrastructure consisting of basic and higher education establishments responsible for providing different types of information (Department for Education, 2019). The 20th century became a critical step in rethinking old views on education. Its accessibility and effectiveness became the central goal of numerous governments, including the Australian one (Bahr & Mellor, 2016). As a result, the basis of the current system was established.

Today, the methods and approaches used in the education system radically differ from the past ones. For instance, Australia focuses on promoting and integrating innovative teaching methods to increase the effectiveness of data transfer. The country focuses on student research, group projects, visual presentations, interactive classrooms and e-learning (Bahr & Mellor, 2016). These methods are critical for the modern digitalized world as they help learners to acquire different sets of skills and knowledge related to various spheres. Innovative methods also promote critical thinking, moving away from learning and repeating lectures or other materials (Bahr & Mellor, 2016). As a result, the modern teaching methods differ from the past ones. Moreover, they promote the further rise of the sphere and its becoming more technology-driven and student-oriented (Bahr & Mellor, 2016). It helps to meet the current demand for knowledge and education.

The constant evolution of the given social institution resulted in its constantly growing importance. Nowadays, it is viewed as the fundamental aspect of any country’s evolution because of its contribution to the nation’s rise. Australia views it as a way to educate individuals within society and ensure they are ready to work in various spheres of the state’s economy and science (Department for Education, 2019). It also helps to teach pupils values and morals accepted in the Australian society and necessary for individuals’ integration into its functioning (Department for Education, 2019). In this regard, the education system can be viewed as a central nation-building institution employed to support society’s efforts to continue its evolution and enjoy numerous benefits. This role also explains the increased attention to knowledge transfer and attempts to increase its accessibility and affordability for individuals.

The changes in education and methods mentioned above also promoted one significant shift in the expected outcomes. The ability to recall all crucial facts linked to a particular event, issue, or question is not enough today. On the contrary, pure knowledge should serve as the basis for further learning and improvement. Under these conditions, the educational systems of states, including Australia, focus on cultivating the critical thinking and analytic skills of students (Department for Education, n.d.). It is viewed as the most desired result of teaching. The body of knowledge constantly expands today because of numerous research projects, and it is impossible to learn everything linked to a particular concept. For this reason, the evolution of education can be linked to the necessity to promote the critical thinking and self-learning capabilities of students (Allen, 2017). Possessing the background knowledge taught at schools, colleges, and universities, they should be able to continue their education.

Moreover, education is a potent tool to shape people’s mentalities and views. Since the first stages of its evolution, data transfer implied sharing visions and attitudes and understanding of knowledge through the prism of these aspects (Johnston et al., 2019). Teachers have always influenced their learners and cultivated specific worldviews and responses. Today, this process acquires the top priority as a way to unite the nation and guarantee its integrity. For instance, the Australian curriculum devotes much attention to ethics, cultivating values, such as diversity, inclusion and patriotism (Johnston et al., 2019). As a result, education becomes an effective instrument to guarantee individuals realize social intercourse and are ready to become active community members.

From another perspective, education is connected to numerous important issues. It can be used to address inequality, discrimination, harassment, and biased or stereotypic attitudes. For instance, educational institutions of the past were segregated based on racial and social principles (Yaish & Gabay-Egozi, 2019). Today, it is viewed as the remnant of the past; however, disparities remain. In Australia, social segregation between private and public schools accounts for 16% of the total segregation in schools (Department for Education, 2019). It means that the evolution of education is also accompanied by issues representing the current state of society and the problems it faces. However, the available resources and methods can also be employed to address these issues, meaning that education is a perfect tool for addressing the issues in the education sphere. It can be viewed as a result of the sector’s evolution and becoming a fundamental institution in modern society.

In such a way, the changes in the education sphere observed nowadays, its nature and evolution can help to determine its purpose in the modern world. As stated previously, knowledge transfer remains a fundamental goal of modern schools and colleges in Australia. However, the primary objective is broader as it implies the formation of specific mentalities, development of critical thinking skills, and establishment of the basis for future success. In such a way, the purpose of education is to prepare an individual for future social interactions and integrate within the economic system to ensure he/she can make a specific contribution to the nation’s development (Department for Education, n.d.). It explains the increased attention from the government and numerous resources devoted to the further development of the sector and becoming more effective in addressing the challenges society faces.

Altogether, today education is viewed as a continuous process through which a person acquires knowledge and broadens his/her mentality to be prepared for social integration and communication. It emerged at the dawn of civilization as the method to transfer knowledge and ensure it will be expanded. However, the development of science and technologies, along with the change in human values, required more complex and effective teaching methods and approaches. As a result, education evolved and acquired new features. Today, it is a complex segment with a developed infrastructure and numerous issues. It implies a long and structured process to prepare an individual for future interactions and ensure he/she can help society to evolve.

Allen, A. (2017). Roberts P, Happiness, hope and despair: Rethinking the role of education . Policy Futures in Education, 15 (6), 803–804. Web.

Bahr, N., & Mellor, S. (2016). Australian education review: Building quality in teaching and teacher education . ACER . Web.

Department for Education. (n.d.). Towards 2028: Strategic plan . Web.

Department for Education. (2019). 2019 annual report . Web.

Habiger Institute for Catholic Leadership. (2020). The heart of culture: A brief history of Western education. Cluny Media.

Johnston, O., Wildy, H., & Shand, J. (2019). A decade of teacher expectations research 2008–2018: Historical foundations, new developments, and future pathways. Australian Journal of Education, 63 (1), 44–73. Web.

Tierney, R., & Pearson, D. (2021). A history of literacy education: Waves of research and practice. Teachers College Press.

Yaish, M., & Gabay-Egozi, L. (2019). Intracohort trends in ethnic earnings gaps: The role of education . Socius , 5. Web.

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ChalkyPapers. (2023, October 23). Nature of Education and Its Purpose. https://chalkypapers.com/nature-of-education-and-its-purpose/

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The Nature and Values of Physical Education Essay

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Physical educators have been recognized as contributors to school curriculum after a long and hard fight. Physical education proponents have claimed alliances with psychology, morality, science and medicine; these are the things that have validated physical education in the educational milieu (Singleton, 2009). These claims have influenced the conception of physical educators about the importance of knowledge in physical education.

Performance pedagogy is an education that is based on experience meaning that it does not related to one’s nature but is connected with what has already been experienced through performing.

It is characterized by technocratic rationality because it may be differentiated from discourses of science, psychology, and medicine, and when it is interpreted and translated to study of human development, it gives knowledge that was important to the early physical educators.

Limits of performance pedagogy are that the methods used in its measure are not valid; it is due to the fact that there is no model or theory used in its measure. Also, the selection criterion for the participants is only clear for the researcher.

Learning in constructivist theory is when individuals create understandings in their own new way basing on the interaction between what they know and what they believe, together with the knowledge and ideas they come across.

The theoretical assumptions of constructivist curriculum include the following: a learner actively constructs the meaning of something around a phenomenon, and whatever he or she constructs is idiosyncratic, or rather unique to an individual and these constructions are influenced by his or her prior experiences.

The current curriculum models of physical education that are informed by constructivist theories are sociological and psychological models. The sociological approach focuses on ways in which political, social and economic factors together with power affect the way a crowd of people create their understandings and form knowledge about their surroundings (Richardson, 2003).

On the other hand, psychological model revolves around ways used to create meaning in an individual’s mind and how the meaning that shared is developed in a group process. However, the two models focus on an individual in a social setting and focuses on him or her as a learner.

Richardson warns that constructivism that is psychologically focused shows how shared meaning is developed in a group process; however, there are some curricula which provide a possibility for students to choose activities. Also, there is no document for curriculum, which mentions students’ possibility of generating shared meanings because they are either decided by their instructors or themselves (Richardson, 2003).

He also warns that sociological model constructivism employ students in the production processes of knowledge, and at the same time examines the manner in which power works to give privileges to some people as it marginalizes others.

However, each curriculum of secondary physical education emphasizes the importance of having young people of different background, needs, abilities as well as interests. Marginalization does not encourage equity for girls and ethnic minorities in physical education, which creates an imbalance in both performance and participation.

In the past, physical education was considered to consist of only physical and practical activities, however, the recent research has justified that physical education can be included in the curriculum on the basis of scientific and intellectual merit. According to Laker (2001), justification of scientific and intellectual merit of physical education has eroded the role of physical education in schools.

In the recent years, research has developed theorized curriculum, which has led to a better understanding of the importance of physical education (McNamee, 2005). Constructivist theories have been used widely to develop programs that take students as active players in learning and teachers as facilitators (lee, 2003).

However, despite the progress, physical education is still considered as a component of leisure by some teachers rather than a contribution to the educational process (Kirk & Tinning, 1990).

The constructivist curricula implemented in physical education have enhanced students learning by developing their own understandings, as well as learning processes (Dyson, 2005). The curricula have also provided opportunities for students to challenge existing beliefs and understanding.

Reference List

Dyson, B. (2005). Integrating cooperative learning and tactical games models: Focusing on social interactions and decision making . London: Routledge.

Kirk, D., & Tinning, R. (1990). Introduction: Physical education, curriculum and culture . London: Falmer.

Laker, A. (2001). Developing personal, social and moral education through physical education . London: Routledge.

Lee, A. (2003). Student learning in physical education: Using research to enhance instruction . London: Routledge.

McNamee, M. (2005). The nature and values of physical education . London: Sage.

Richardson, V. (2003). Constructivist Pedagogy. Teach Coll Rec, 105(9), pp.1623-1637.

Singleton, E. (2009). From Command to Constructivism: Canadian Secondary School Physical Education Curriculum and Teaching Games for Understanding . London: University of Western Ontario.

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• Published: 04 September 2024

Does women’s higher education reduce wage inequality? Evidence from Palestine using repeated cross-sectional data

• Najiba Morar 1 , 2 &
• Sameera Awawda 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  1133 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Despite the increase of the share of highly-educated women, gender wage gap remains an ongoing issue in developing countries. The increase in women’s education would provide them with more job opportunities resulting in higher employment rate amongst women and, thus, lower gender pay gap. In Palestine, the share of women with high education is 62% while their labor force participation rate is only 18%. This paper examines the effects of gender higher education on wage inequality in the Palestinian context. The study applied the Mincer equation to study the determinants of wage, while the decomposed Gini coefficient is used to measure the contribution of education and other factors to overall wage inequality. The study used data from the labor force survey (LFS) which is conducted by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) covering the period from 2010 to 2020. Results show that those with higher education have relatively higher wages as compared to those with only high education or with school education. Results also show that gender wage inequality has increased during the study period (2010–2020), but the contribution of both gender and education differences to the overall wage inequality has decreased. In general, the gender pay gap remains a crucial issue in the Palestinian context with a persisting decreasing pay gap over time across all education levels. Policymakers shall orient efforts towards investing in women’s education, thus increasing their empowerment in the labor market, which in turn would improve the level of development and economic growth in the country.

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Gender, education expansion and intergenerational educational mobility around the world

Introduction.

The human capital theory suggests that education affects individual earnings, countries’ economic growth, and level of development. It highlights the undeniable importance of education as an investment in personal and societal economic growth and development (Gregorio and Lee, 2002 ; Kao et al., 1994 ). Empirical evidence shows that education is a key driver of social mobility as it reduces gender inequality, especially the inequality of opportunities (Adnan, 2015 ; Asadullah and Yalonetzky, 2012 ; Jacobs, 1996 ). The expansion of education has been often viewed as a critical policy instrument for combating rising income inequality over the medium term, not only by promoting economic growth but also by breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty and reducing inequality of opportunity (Coady and Dizioli, 2018 ).

Different studies (Autor et al., 2005 ; Menezes-Filho et al., 2006 ) emphasized that higher education enhances productivity and allows individuals to earn higher incomes, thus reducing the gap between high and low earners (compression effect), as identified by Knight and Sabot ( 1983 ). On the other hand, higher education may worsen income inequality by creating a “skill-biased” technological change, where skilled workers expect a higher wage premium in the labor market, therefore, a greater concentration of income among the higher-skilled and educated individuals (composition effect) (Menezes-Filho et al., 2006 ). The interplay between these effects is complex. Abdullah et al. ( 2015 ) argued that while an initial increase in the number of educated workers might increase inequality (the composition effect), after reaching a certain threshold, the increased supply of skilled workers decreases the wage premium for higher-skill workers, thereby lowering income inequality (the compression effect). Their meta-regression analysis of 64 empirical studies reveals that education affects both tails of the income distribution: it reduces the income share of top earners and increases the share of bottom earners.

The impact of gender and higher education on wage variations has received a great deal of attention in the empirical literature. Women’s higher education leads to lower levels of income inequality or a decrease in the gender wage gap (Seneviratne, 2020 ). The increase in women’s education and the changes in the occupational structure would provide more significant opportunities for skilled women to enter professional jobs and higher-end female-dominated occupations (Harkness, 2010 ). This suggests that addressing wage inequality requires improving women’s education, addressing systemic biases, and promoting equal opportunities for career advancement (Bradley, 2000 ; Farkas et al., 1997 ). Fan and Sturman ( 2019 ) showed that there is a gender wage gap among newly graduated students with the same level of education although the share of women with higher education is greater than that of men in the study sample. Other studies focus on the gender wage gap for particular sectors. For example, Sridadia and Prihantonob ( 2020 ) applied the Mincer equation to measure the gender wage gap in Indonesia. Their results revealed that the gender wage gap is higher in the industrial sector as compared to the service sector. Interestingly, other studies found that the field of study has a significant impact on wage inequality, with those involved in numeracy (scientific) fields of education having higher wages compared to those involved in literacy fields of education (Bol and Heisig, 2021 ). This is explained by the fact that those with a scientific background have more skills compared to those with a literacy background, thus they have higher wages. This result is also confirmed elsewhere (e.g., Altonji et al., 2012 ; Kirkeboen et al., 2016 ).

It is worth noting that the impact of education on wage inequality depends on various factors, including government policies (Abdullah et al., 2015 ). While education subsidies can increase opportunities for poor children, public spending on education, particularly higher education, often disproportionately benefits middle- and upper-class families. This underscores the need for targeted policies to ensure that educational expansion benefits those most in need. This perspective aligns with the findings of Gregorio and Lee ( 2002 ), who reviewed empirical literature across countries using a panel data set from 1960 to 1990 at five-year intervals. Their results emphasized the strong impact of educational factors on income inequality, with higher educational attainments playing a more significant role in income distribution. Those findings illustrate that education plays an indispensable role in shaping wage distribution. Other factors affecting income inequality have also been considered in the empirical literature, such as socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors (e.g., Pattayat et al., 2023 ; Hovhannisyan et al., 2022 ; Wu et al., 2021 ). Moreover, wage distribution has a close association with many other factors, including political upheaval, policy decisions, economic stability, and technological progress (Coady and Dizioli, 2018 ). It is commonly argued that education inequality is positively correlated with income inequality; however, the impact of education might be positive or negative on income inequality depending on time and situation (Abdullah et al., 2011 ). Therefore, policies that reduce wage inequality must consider the multiple channels through which education affects income distribution and address the underlying structural and institutional factors contributing to inequality (d’Hombres et al., 2012 ; Ramadan et al., 2015 ).

Today, women worldwide experience significant barriers to labor force participation and struggle to access better employment opportunities. Unfortunately, the situation is not different in the occupied Palestinian territory. Women encounter numerous challenges that prevent them from reaching certain job positions in both the public and private sectors. Moreover, a research by Albotmeh and Irsheid ( 2013 ) suggested that women face disparities in working conditions, such as inadequate health and safety standards and job security, which in turn force them to work in the informal sector. These disparities also result in wage discrimination between men and women, even with the same qualifications and level of education. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the worldwide annual women’s labor participation rate was 45% in 2020, whereas in Palestine, it was about 18%. The employment rate for women was 4% in Palestine, which is lower than the average global level of 6%. Women’s potential labor force rate was 5% globally and 21% in Palestine (ILO, 2016 ). Al Habeel et al. ( 2011 ) indicated that the Palestinian situation is unique because of the Israeli occupation, which significantly influenced gender roles and identity formation.

The Palestinian labor market confronts structural imbalances as it depends on job opportunities in Israel, which are generally restricted to men. This, in turn, may create disparities in local market opportunities for men and women (Khattab, 2002 ). Cultural differences regarding women’s skills also create obstacles to working in the industrial and service sectors (Hilal et al., 2008 ). Male workers dominate both the private and government sectors. The market generally favors hiring men over women, considering their reproductive roles in the household. There are more female graduates compared to male graduates, but there are still fewer employment opportunities for women. Women often face denial of employment due to cultural differences rather than qualifications. Fear of harassment also deters women from seeking jobs (Harkness, 2010 ). Recently, Daoud and Shanti ( 2016 ) emphasized that the government sector in the West Bank has experienced a slight improvement in women’s participation rates, but the participation rate in the private sector remains low. Furthermore, gender discrimination based on political opinions has also emerged in the public sector (Alkafri, 2011 ).

To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, there is extensive literature on wage inequality and education. However, no previous attempt has been made to assess the impact of women’s higher education on earnings and income inequality in Palestine. Moreover, previous studies relied only on the Mincer equation, the Gini index, or other methods. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the impact of women’s higher education on wage inequality in Palestine using a mixed methodology of the Mincer earnings function and the Gini index. Namely, this study tries to answer the following questions: What is the impact of women’s higher education on wages? And What is the contribution of education to wage inequality? Based on the empirical evidence, women’s attainment of higher education is negatively associated with the gender wage gap. Accordingly, the study tested the following main hypothesis: (i) Women’s higher education in Palestine would reduce gender wage inequality, and that (ii) the contribution of higher education to total wage inequality is decreasing over time.

In this paper, the Mincer earnings function measured the rate of returns on education, while the Gini index measured the contribution of inequality in education (part of the inequality of opportunities) to the overall wage inequality. Total wage inequality has been decomposed using the Gini index to analyze the impact of higher education on reducing wage inequality over the years. It is noteworthy that this study utilized data from the Palestinian labor force survey for the period 2010–2020. The Mincer earnings function is a single-equation model that explains wage income as a function of schooling and labor market experience (Mincer, 1974 ). The equation has been examined using different datasets from various countries (Martins and Pereira, 2004 ; Dakić and Savić, 2017 ). Typically, the logarithm of earnings is modeled with a list of explanatory variables, including educational attainment and experience (Waseema, 2022 ; Gregorio and Lee, 2002 ; Martins and Pereira, 2004 ). The Mincer equation has undoubtedly contributed to the advancement of labor and educational economics. It helps understanding the factors affecting wages, the rate of return on education, enrollment in education, the effects of wage discrimination, and the value of on-the-job training and labor market experience (Martins and Pereira, 2004 ). The Gini index has been widely used to measure income inequality (Trapeznikova, 2019 ). Furthermore, many studies have used the decomposed Gini index to measure the different sources of inequality contributing to overall income inequality (Ramadan et al., 2015 ). Wagstaff et al. ( 2003 ) provide a decomposition of the concentration index (the bivariate version of the Gini index) based on regression analysis applied to health data in Vietnam. This approach computes the share of inequality of each cofactor to the overall inequality of the dependent variable. The method has been widely applied in empirical research to measure inequalities in health (e.g., Doroh et al., 2015 ; O’Donnell, 2012 ) as well as income inequalities (e.g., Devkota et al., 2017 ; Zhong, 2011 ).

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. Section two discusses the methods including the data used and the analytical approach. Section three provids descriptive statistics of the data used, the analysis of wage determinants, and the decomposition of wage inequality. Section four displays the main results, while Section five concludes and provides some limitations and policy implications.

We used the Palestinian Labor Force Surveys (LFS), conducted by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) on an annual basis from 2010 to 2020. The LFS covers the two main Palestinian regions (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), and it includes individuals 10 years of age or older who are out of the labor force, unemployed, or employed in any economic sector. The datasets are harmonized for all years, that is the bulk of the questions as well as the structure of each question are similar in all LFS series. The LFS also provides data on demographic characteristics, such as gender, age, level of education, marital status, locality (place of residence: rural, urban and refugee camps), and region (West Bank and Gaza Strip). The survey also includes a question about the employment type which is composed of four categories: employer, self-employed, wage employee, or unpaid family member. For the current study, we choose a sub-sample focusing on wage employees only which forms about 65% to 70% of total employed individuals. We first estimate the wage equation based on (Mincer, 1974 ) as follows

where \(w\) is the average daily wage obtained by each individual; \(d\) is the set of binary education variables (schooling, high education, and higher education), the level of experience is proxied by the age of the individual, and \(y\) is the set of other explanatory variables. The level of education is the main cofactor in the model which is a represented in three binary variables: (i) School: if the highest level of education obtained by each individual is secondary school; (ii) high education: if the highest level of education is diploma or bachelor, and (iii) higher education: if the highest level of education is masters or PhD. Other variables include gender; locality type (whether living in urban, rural or refugee camps), and marital status (whether married or not). Equation 1 is estimated using the ordinary least square method. It is worth noting that the Mincer equation is one of the most widely used approaches in the empirical evidence that captures the impact of schooling and experience as mentioned at the outset. Thus, it is suitable for the estimation of the effect of women’s higher education on wage differences in Palestine.

Then, total inequality in wages is measured using the Gini index. Furthermore, the contribution of each factor to overall wage inequality is measured using the decomposed Gini index built based on regression analysis (Eq. 1 ). Inequality in wages due to variation in education is referred to as legitimate inequality. Wage inequality due to all other variables—classified as variables beyond individuals’ control—is referred to as illegitimate inequality. The decomposed Gini index of wages can be written as follows (Wagstaff et al., 2003 ):

where \(G\left(w\right)\) is the Gini index of wages measuring the overall inequality in the variable; \(G\left({d}_{k}\right)\) is inequality in the education variables/categories ( \({d}_{k},{k}=\mathrm{1,2}\) and \(3\) ); \(G\left({{age}}_{m}\right)\) is the inequality in experience (age); \(G\left({y}_{j}\right)\) is inequality in other contributing factors \({y}_{j}\) ( \(k=1,\ldots ,J\) ); \({\mu }_{\varepsilon }\) is the mean value of error; \({\mu }_{w}\) is the mean value of wages, and \(G\left(\varepsilon \right)\) is inequality in the error term (unexplained inequality). The contribution of education to overall inequality in wages is calculated as \(\mathop{\sum }\nolimits_{k=1}^{3}{\alpha }_{k}G\left({d}_{k}\right)\) where \({\alpha }_{k}={\beta }_{k}{\mu }_{k}/{\mu }_{w}\) ( \({\mu }_{k}\) is the mean value of \({d}_{k}\) ). Similarly, the contribution of each other explanatory variable \({y}_{j}\) to overall wage inequality is \({\alpha }_{j}G\left({y}_{j}\right)\) where \({\alpha }_{j}={\gamma }_{j}{\mu }_{j}/{\mu }_{j}\) ( \({\mu }_{j}\) is the mean value of \({y}_{j}\) ). The Gini index is the commonly-used measure of income inequality which is easily measurable and decomposable based on regression analysis. The decomposition of the Gini index shows which cofactor is more important than others in terms of its contribution to overall wage inequalities.

This section summarizes main data regarding wages across gender and education groups. Then it provides the main results of the regression analysis and the decomposed Gini index.

Descriptive analysis

Table 1 provides data on the average daily wage—measured in New Israeli Shekel (ILS) – based on gender and level of education. The table also shows the gender wage gap—a widely recognized occurrence that describes the disparity in average earnings between men and women in the workforce. Typically, it is measured as the percentage difference between the average hourly or daily wage of men and women, relative to men’s earnings. Two main observations are worth highlighting. First, the average daily wage for men is higher than that of women for all levels of education across all the years. Secondly, the average daily wage is increasing with the level of education for both men and women. For example, in 2010 the average daily wage was 48.79 ILS for women and 60.72 ILS for men with school education resulting in a wage gap of 19.64%. The gender wage gap has increased to 42.41% for those having only a school education. Regarding men and women with high education, the wage gap has decreased from 21.96% in 2010 to 16.27% in 2020 which is still relatively high. As for the higher education group, generally, the wage gap slightly decreased during the period 2011–2019 from 20.21% to 19.88%. It’s important to note that the wage gap in higher education is exceptional because, in 2010 and 2020, men’s wage was 5.97% and 4.67% respectively lower than women’s wages.

Table 2 explains the percentage of male and female employment status. It shows that the percentage of employed males decreased by 3.52% points in 2020 as compared to 2010. However, the unemployment rate remained at 12% with little variation throughout the years. Also, the share of men who are out of the labour force is stable (46.37% in 2010 as compared to 46.58% in 2020). However, the share of women who are out of the labour force has slightly decreased from 87.4% in 2010 to 86.4% in 2020. On the other hand, the unemployment rate among women has increased from 3.13% in 2010 to 5.29% in 2020.

Results presented in Table 3 shows that the male unemployment rate and employment rate negligibly changed from 2010. However, the unemployment rate among females has increased over time reaching almost 39% in 2020 as compared to 24.85% in 2010.

Wage determinants

The results of this section and subsequent section are provided for 2010, 2015, and 2020. Detailed results are available upon request. Table 4 presents the determinants of wages in Palestine for the years 2010, 2015, and 2020. The results indicate that males generally have higher wages than females, with a decreasing wage gap between 2015 and 2020. In 2020, males earned 23.3% higher than females in terms of average wage, compared to 29.8% in 2010 holding other factors constant. Age was found to have an inverted U shaped effect on wages. However, this effect has decreased in 2020 as compared to 2015. Additionally, being married was found to have a positive effect on wages with married individuals having higher wages of 8.3% in 2010 as compared to non-married individuals. This wage difference has decreased to 5.5% and 3.5% in 2015 and 2020, respectively. Finally, results showed that individuals living in rural areas have higher wages than those living in urban areas. Those living in rural and urban areas have higher wages than those living in refugee camps (50.8% and 14.2% respectively).

Regarding the education variable, individuals with higher education earn significantly more than those with lower levels of education. Specifically, individual with higher education earn wages that is 112.5% Footnote 1 higher than those with high education and 176.7% with only school education in 2010 as shown in Table 4 . In 2020, these two differences have been decreased to 92.1% and 116.3%, respectively. Regarding the difference in wage between individuals with high education and school education, results in Table 4 show that the difference has decreased from 64.2% in 2010 to 24.2% in 2020. Although the wage gap still exists, these results indicate that the wage gap has been decreasing between all education groups.

Decomposition of inequality

According to Table 5 , the overall level of education wage inequality has increased from 32.2% in 2010 to 39.3% in 2020. Regarding the decomposition of the Gini index of wages in Palestine in 2020, the contribution of education as the main factor in the analysis is 29% of which 4.6% are due to differences in higher education. The overall contribution of education to wage inequality has decreased from 37.3% in 2010 to 29.0% in 2020. Moreover, the contribution of the variance in higher education has decreased from 9.4% to 4.6% for the same period. As for school education, the share of its inequalities to overall wage inequality was 18.9% in 2010 and decreased to 13% in 2020. Whereas the inequality of high education is responsible for 11.4% of total inequality in 2020. This share has decreased over years from 18.9% in 2010 to 17.2% in 2015. This means that the legitimate inequality due to differences in education is relatively high but decreasing over time. Gender inequalities explain 7.8% of total inequality of wages in 2020, compared to 12% in 2010, and 2015. The locality factors contribute to 30.0% to total wage inequality in 2020 which has tripled as compared to 2010 (11.7%).

This study investigates the role of women’s higher education in reducing wage inequality in the Palestinian territory. We used the LFS conducted between 2010 and 2020 to estimate wage determinants as well as wage inequality, where gender and level of education were the main cofactors. Further, total wage inequality has been decomposed using the standard Gini index to explore the contribution of higher education to total inequality. Many results of this research are worth highlighting. First, results show that males still have higher wages as compared to females but the wage gap has decreased over the period under consideration (2010–2020). Second, education remains a significant factor in determining wages across time, with higher levels of education leading to higher wages. However, the magnitude of the effect decreases over time, particularly for those with higher education (master’s or PhD degrees). These two results can be explained by the fact that the percentage of educated women has increased over time. For example, the percentage of women with high and higher education has increased from 13.55% in 2010 to 23.25% in 2020. This could also be explained by the extensive work on bridging the gender gap policies or societal attitudes towards gender equality over time. It is evident from the Palestinian government work especially the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in collaboration with UNESCO who worked together to improve 97 policies on gender equality and women’s empowerment during the period of 2011–2017 (Hirsh et al., 2020 ). Further, job opportunities in Palestine have been relatively enhanced for skilled women, i.e., women with higher levels of education. This in line with the results of Hillis et al. ( 2018 ) who found a statistically significant impact of master’s and PhD degrees on the gender wage gap in Palestine by using the ordinary least square method. They showed that Skilled women are often found in specific occupations and sectors more than skilled men. In 2013, only 2.9% of full-time workers in medium-sized private enterprises were women. In 2015, 48% of skilled women worked as teaching professionals, compared to 15.2% of skilled men. The education sector employed 55% of skilled women in 2015. Although the gap has been decreased over time, the gender wage gap still an issue in the Palestinian context. This might be because women are overrepresented in lower-paying fields and underrepresented in higher-paying sectors. This concentration of women in certain occupations limits their access to higher-paying jobs and reduces their potential for upward mobility (Morrar, 2022 ; Loewenthal and Miaari, 2020 ; Calì and Miaari, 2018 ; ILO, 2016 ).

Third, another important result is related to the impact of locality type on wages. Results show that individuals in rural areas have higher wages as compared to individuals living in urban areas and refugee camps. This might not be a surprising result in the Palestinian context because many Palestinian “men” living in rural areas choose to work either in urban areas or in Israel where wages are significantly higher. Fourth, the overall wage inequality has increased over time from 32.2% in 2010 to 39.3% in 2020. Interestingly, the part of inequality due to gender differences or education differences has been decreasing over time. This implies that despite their importance in interpreting wage inequality, education and gender differences are not the main determinants of inequality. Other important factors that contribute to wage inequality with increasing share over time include the locality type which has been previously demonstrated. Moreover, some sensitivity analysis (available upon reasonable request) shows that the shares of gender and education to overall inequality are similar to the results obtained in Table 5 . This validates our conclusions regarding the decreasing effect of both variables on wage inequality and confirms our hypothesis regarding the impact of women’s higher education on wage inequalities. Another important result regarding the contribution of education to overall wage inequality is related to the contribution of each level of schooling to total inequality. As shown in the previous section, in general, the contribution of higher education to total wage inequality is lower than the contribution of other levels of education for all years. This might reflect the higher wage gap among individuals with low levels of education.

The Mincer earnings function was used to measure the rate of returns on education, while the Gini index measured the contribution of inequality in education (part of the inequality of opportunities) to the overall wage inequality. Results showed that there is a persisting but decreasing gender pay gap over time, however male wages have consistently been higher than those of female at all levels of education. Moreover, the contribution of higher education to overall inequality is smaller than the contribution of other levels of education (high and school education) for all years. Therefore, addressing this inequality requires a concerted effort from policymakers, employers, and society as a whole to create a more equitable workplace and to invest in higher education, particularly for marginalized women. This also requires the promotion and enforcement of gender equality in the workplace, and the enhancement of social protection system in the labour market. Promotion of gender diversity in leadership can also create a more inclusive work environment. At the educational level, it is important to adopt and advocate policies and action plans (develop and support educational programs, mentorship and career development, etc.) which can bridge the skills gap and reducing gender disparities in sectors that traditionally dominated by men and to help women to advance in their careers and achieve higher-paying positions.

Empirical evidence demonstrated that developing countries investing in women’s education, thus increasing their empowerment in the labor market, are likely to witness an increase in economic growth over time. This has important implications for countries where income inequality and human capital levels are often low. Policymakers should focus on the provision of quality education for women to help them secure high-paying jobs like men, resulting in a reduction in wage inequality. This evidence supports the efforts of the Palestinian Authority regarding the national employment strategy (NES). The main goal of the NES is to enhance the strategic development of the Palestinian labor market through different mechanisms, including promoting both women’s participation in the labor market and the education system in the country. This may require augmenting the government budget share allocated to the education sector. In addition, the government can provide funds or loans for female students to pursue higher education degrees either in the country or abroad. Creating more job opportunities in partnership with the private sector is another approach to enhance income equity.

Some limitations of the current study are worth stating. Generally, factors affecting wages are not limited to those presented in Table 4 . Other factors may include religion, traditions, ethnic background, age at marriage, occupational segregation, access to professions, ability, institutional discrimination, etc. The authors conducted some sensitivity analyses by adding and removing some variables, such as region and occupation. It is concluded that the results are robust. For example, the contribution of higher education to overall inequality in 2020 is about 4.6% under different specifications of Eq. 1 . However, information regarding other variables, such as age at marriage and access to professions, is absent from the LFS used in this study. Another limitation is related to the sample size of women with higher education. This might be a source of bias. As shown in Table 1 , the wage gap was negative in two periods. This is a misleading result since wages are higher for men. Overall, Future research may consider such types of limitations by developing new detailed qualitative indicators that could help provide an in-depth analysis of the missing variables that account for societal and other economic factors that may affect wage inequality in Palestine. In addition, further studies regarding women’s higher education should account for issues related to women’s opportunities, such as access to higher education, college challenges and experiences, family responsibilities, and job matching issues.

Data availability

The authors used data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) under license for this study and under the condition that they were not allowed to publish the raw data. However, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics website, https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/pcbs_2012/PressEn.aspx , displays all the published reports for that data used, especially the labor market reports, including all labor force key indicators.

This percent has been calculated as the exponential of the difference between the coefficients of higher education and high education. Similar calculations have been done for the other education groups.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been completed thanks to the funding provided by the research committee at Birzeit University, the grant number is 60/2021.

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Department of Economics, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, North Cyprus

Najiba Morar

Economics Department, Faculty of Business and Economics, Birzeit University, Ramallah, Palestine

Najiba Morar & Sameera Awawda

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Theoretical Framework: The two authors contributed equally to this section. Literature Review: The first author contributed 70%, and the second author contributed 30%. Data Analysis: The first author contributed 70%, and the second author contributed 30%. Writing: The two authors contributed equally to this section.

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Morar, N., Awawda, S. Does women’s higher education reduce wage inequality? Evidence from Palestine using repeated cross-sectional data. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 1133 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03620-2

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Received : 28 February 2024

Accepted : 19 August 2024

Published : 04 September 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03620-2

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