BUILDING A PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

Dr. V.K. Maheshwari, Former Principal

K.L.D.A.V(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Working together at a practical level and agreeing on minor issues does not however take the place of building an educational philosophy. How can a teacher and /or an educator build a philosophy that his own educational efforts will be based upon and that he will try to propogates as far as possible? Let us consider this question. We shell do so by means of the same categories that have been employed in our analysis of various ancient, medieval and modern education philosophies.

There are today a whole host of problems which impinge on education, educators and individual school systems. Few of the most important of areas of concern are:

Aims of Education-

It is common when teachers, administrators, board of education, parents groups or group of citizens start to think about education that they begin with objectives. In trying to be responsible about the work of the school, it makes sense for them to ask, “just what is it that education is trying to do, or should be trying to do? What do we wish to accomplish in the elementary grade or in the secondary school? or more specifically any one related with education may ask teachers at each grade level just what their objective are for each content area.”

Education is for whatever life is for. These days we hear much speculation to the effect that human life is not for ‘anything’ that in the popular terms, it is ‘meaningless’. The nature of this assertion has probably not been examined thoroughly by some of those who make it. We find meanings in part of situations, relative to the whole, can life as a whole be said to have ‘meaning’ in the same sense that a parts do? The answer seems to depend upon whether there is any larger rational whole into which human life fits. To ask this is to ask the final metaphysical question, what is? The existentialist for example, as an atheist denies that any conscious, rational being designer, created, sustains, governs or has any plan for man. Therefore, he denies that life taken as a whole can possible have any meaning, except the meanings each life has, no rational context beyond itself, one could still make a strong case that each person should simply give life with meaning by what he does thinks and feels. To do something challenging but possible, to do it will. This is the essence of art. But art envision nothing beyond itself. The believer in God and in the afterlife will want to put art in a context to make it serve ethical ends. Art has compensations in its sheer process, but the product must serve man’s supernatural destiny, “for they are all made for man’s use.”

Aims are commonly stated in terms of skills it is expected that the pupil should have mastered at a given grade level and the knowledge’s which he should possess. As this level philosophizing about education-and to charging those who are engaged in it are quite free in referring to it as philosophy- can have dissensions among us. Nevertheless, there are two justifications for this level of educational thinking, which concerned to pinpoint aims. First is that if it is carefully done and fully grounded in more fundamental thinking, it can give very helpful and concrete guidance to classroom teaching. The second justification is that if it is undertaken with responsibility and intellectual penetration, if will disclose the need for philosophizing of another sort. By this mean that to think responsibility about the aims of education will lead to the recognition that aims cannot just be pulled out of a hat but must be derived from more fundamental and general thinking about value, reality and knowledge.

Methodology of Instruction

‘How to teach’ depends quite directly upon the nature of knowledge, which depends quite directly upon the nature of man. The methods that psychology has produced for teachers are, in themselves, mostly good, clearly superior to some methods of the past. Their very efficiency becomes a sort of blinder, thought threatening to eclipse the issue of what they are for.

Different philosophies have treated how the teacher takes the student from known to unknown by a sort of rational discourse, pointing out new relationships among elements the student already “knows”. This can prove or disprove by trying it for a reasonable time. No matter how much or little structuring a teacher does, what he is usually concerned to accomplish for the student to grasp important ideas,

Aside from the theology, how can one prove the exigencies of intellect? One way is by introspection, by noticing what one do when one think, when one solve problems and by indirectly observing what other people seem to do.

Out of various methodical issues, basic one that crops up perennially concerns the relative roles of experience and of reason in learning and in teaching. If man were a physical organism and nothing more, if his ‘intellect’ were mealy a name for certain neurophysiologic functions of correlating and connecting sense-data then experience, mostly direct, would be not merely the ideal way to learn but the only way, if, again, man were a soul somewhat haphazardly materialized, remembering things from a past experience, then Plato’s prescription would apply.  If man is a composite of matter and spiritual soul, then he learns by sensations and imaged, and most importantly, by abstracting from them with his intellect and employing these abstractions in deductions and judgments.

Question of Creativity

Is creativity a common trait? Does the school encourage or discourage creativity. If creativity can be taught, is it a legitimate function of the school to identify, isolate, and teach it? Is creativity a desirable thing in a contemporary, mass-conformity society? Is creativity in the economically and culturally disadvantaged, dangerous to the rest of society?

What definitions of creativity are most valuable for the school? If we value creativity too highly, don’t we infect, run the danger of stifling it?

Question of Segregation-Desegregation

Should the school take society as it finds it and work within the context or should it try to change it? What should the relationship be between segregated housing and the school? Can or should the school as a social institution become an instrument of social policy. At what level should school policy of desegregation be determined? Is it the responsibility of local school board, the state board or the ministry of Education? Assuming that segregation and desegregation have different effects upon student, is this a legitimate educational concern.

What priority should be placed on faculty desegregation. Is there a difference between desegregation and integration? Should the schools strive for desegregation, integration, both or neither. Are the problems of Segregation. Desegregation  different in different settings? Is it necessary to deal differently with segregation that is de-facto and segregation which is de-jure?

Question of Church-State Relationship

To what extent should the school be concerned with religious education. Is it possible to teach without religion? Is it desirable to teach about religion? Is there a moral imperative to ignore the Legal decisions which have severely restricted the place of religion in the schools? Is it a responsibility of the school and of educators in the school to bring all students to knowledge of God? What is the responsibility of the school to students professing to be atheists or whose parents are atheists? What should be the attitude of school be to words the children of faith of minorities. Should the schools allow children time off to go to religious training. Should members of religious orders be permitted to teach in schools?

Curriculum

The treatments of educational philosophies have encountered quite a few curricular issues and varieties. Basically, though the question is where the curriculum should come from? One can concede without argument that is must be limited and shaped to at least a minor extent by the limits of the learner at any given stage. Still why have a curriculum at all? What demands it, if anything? The traditionalist, who is still content to define curriculum, as “a course of study” sees it as resting largely upon reality itself. Certainly any course of studies has its arbitrary, man chosen aspect, but even these are means of accomplishing certain things in a world that is as it is:

A philosophical realist will say, “Teach arithmetic’s because the world has arithmetical aspects”. A pragmatist will say, “Teach arithmetic because, and only so far as, if has proved a useful tool in solving problems”. The Realist thinks of the curriculum as having a certain status and structure in the abstract, in potentiality, the teacher’s goal is to help the students actualize that structure in him. The pragmatist will more likely see the curriculum as having no status at all except in the concrete, teacher and students together produce it  out of their interactions and ‘felt needs’.

If one believes in objective truth, one is logically committed to believe in some sort of fixed, perhaps required, curriculum. It is a face that the mind’s ability to attain certain and unchangeable truth, if the mind has, indeed, the power if seems inescapable that the cumulative culture and wisdom of its past exercise should not be preserved in a curriculum that is, in part unchanging and prescribed.

The respective roles of experience and intellect or of faith and reason, likewise are clearly, pertinent to curriculum. The ‘experience curriculum’ is the child of empiricism, which a moderate intellectualism dictates that children must be taught to reason about the idea presented to them and argues for a methodical, orderly procedure in exposition of subject matter. Again, if God has revealed important truths of his nature and plan for men, those obviously should be taught to young, which, if there is no such revelation, equally obviously it follows that it should not be taught.

The Concept of Student

The nature of man is partly a issue here. If there is no fixed human nature, if man is indefinably perfectible, if genetic inheritance sets no insurmountable limits, then a case and be made for giving everyone as many years of schooling as he wishes. If there is a fixed human nature, if intelligence is largely fixed by heredity (the first issue is ontological, the second empirical), then it is appropriate to expose only the more intelligent students to intellectually demanding courses. Also, if man in the technical sense intended by theologians, a rational creature, and then an education that helps him develop his nature must be aimed at expanding his mental horizons. Such an education must needs be limited by the quantitative potentialities in this respect of each learner.

Among the points in debate here, the chief one is, shall schooling, especially at higher levels, be for everyone who wants it, or for a selected minority? If the latter what shall be the basis of selection? In so far as education stresses “organism adjustment”. The understandable tendency is for its institutions to welcome all who wish to come. In so far as intellectual cultivation or development of specific talents, such as art or music is stressed, there must be some screening, not all can profit substantially from it. The fairly inevitable basis for this screening is specific talent or general academic potential, than is, intelligence. Much emotionalism has been attached to some discussions by life adjustment theorists on this problem. They see it as undemocratic to educate a minority and often were achievement about the development of elite, seeing this as a great evil of course, elitism is apt also to connote social and political favoritism, as well as superiority in specifically academic matters, The connotation has been rather gratuitously attacked by the life adjustments however. There is a natural aristocracy of brains. Some people are brighter than other. One may evaluate the face as one like, but in the end one must accommodate it.

Agencies of Education

Amid contention and bitterness how can one decide what agencies have what right and duties in education?

To decide the proper concerns of family and state therefore there is a need to examine the essential character of each. Some sociologists and others presently view the individual as existing for the family and the family for the state or society. The rearing of children is often held to be a minor concern, and the rather obvious end of the sexual act, the procreating of children is held to be in incidental relation. Few persons deny, however, that the family is a group, as distinct form, a collection of individuals, and few deny that parents owe more to their children than bringing then into the world, feeding, clothing, and housing then. Even the beasts watch their young and teach them.

If the family were a derivative of the state and possessed of on role or function save those with which the state might choose to endow it, the family would have no educational rights or obligations toward the children. If the family is the first and most natural type of human society, with an intrinsic role not bestowed by the state, then it has both rights and duties towards children’s schooling.

Finally what is the state? Its nature dictates it, prerogative. These must always be differentiated from its ‘powers’. Most government exercise many powers that do not rest on any clearly established ‘rights’ If Hegal was right, if the state is the absolute or the closet expression of it man can recognize, then its educational warrant is unlimited. If, however, the state is one society among other, a natural society whose proper end is man’s temporal good, its educational rights duties are limited accordingly.

The School as a Social Institution

What is education about? What should education try to do? These are questions which can be asked collectively as well as individually. To philosophize concerning aims in a social sense, and not just in terms of what the school should do for the individual, is to ask for a rational for the school as an institution. This is not uncommon theme in the literature of educational philosophy. Plato in the ‘Republic’ considered, at least speculatively, the possibility of taking children away from the corrupt society which had given them birth  and in some separate place by means of an expurgated literature giving mankind a fresh start through a proper education, and also there by building an ideal state.

John Amos Comenius, in the seventeenth Century, regarded education as equal to physical procreation as a necessity in making man. He had come across reports of instances in which human infants have been reared by animals and as a result followed a pattern of life closer to that of the animals with which they have lived than to human patterns. He argued therefore that the culture of man had to give form to the human potentialities with which we are born, in order for us to be men. And this is the task of education. This is why he characterized education as “a true forging place of men”.

John Dewey, has argued that the school exists to provide a special environment for the formative years of human life. Such a special environment is needed in past because civilization is too complex to provide an economic setting for learning. A special environment such as the school can also eliminate the unworthy features of human society as it is. And further the school as special environment can provide a balance of influence which society itself will not give, providing greater breadth from other cultures and avoiding parochialism.

Theodore. M. Greene tried to work out a division of labor among the institutions of society according to which the school is the “mind” of the body politic. The state being the “Sword and shield”, the family the “heart”, the Church the “soul”, and business the “hands”. Most readers would readily agree with Dr. Greene that these are risky metaphors. The big question is of course, on what grounds can roles or tasks be assigned to the school or any other institution? Can we say that we prefer to think of the school in this or that particular way, and just leave it there? Or must we not have some validation for assigning functions.

Academic Freedom and Indoctrination

Teachers through the ages have been searching for definite criteria for deciding how free the teacher should be to teach whatever and however he wants. No thoughtful person could say the problem is even now fully solved. At one extreme some teachers and professors have been discharged and even persecuted for teaching conclusions that were demonstrably true, simply because someone in a powerful position found them discomforting. The vigilance with which some communities scrutinize text books for sentences and phrases that might sound ‘socialists’ illustrates this mentality at its extreme. At the other extreme, some teachers have held that they have a right to teach what so ever they choose, whether it is demonstrably true even if it is demonstrably false, and even if they do not themselves, believe it. Obviously, the thing has frequently been discussed with more heat than light.

There is a need, as always some philosophical criterion. The question can be approached in various ways, but seems to be mainly an epistemological one. If no conclusions are beyond reasonable doubt then no conclusion or even ‘fact’ deserves a monopoly over others competing with it. By the same token, however, it is difficult to say, then, why it is of great importance to stress any given line of thought. If, however, certain things can be known beyond reasonable doubt, then the teacher has no justifiable options as to whether they shall be taught. A certain freedom of inquiry and expression is necessary to scholars, but in the end the mind to teacher and students alike must be determined by what is question of the indoctrination hinge on the same epistemological question. If all is open to legitimate doubt, anyone is indoctrinating who does more than indicate various possible alternative beliefs and such, indoctrination is not justified. If however there is objective knowledge, the teacher should present it as knowledge and opinions as opinion. To present either as the other is wrong. Now and then teachers present established truth as if it were merely personal belief, which is just as misleading as presenting the later as the former.

The division of causality in the teaching learning process is also quite relevant here. If the student is the principle cause of his own learning and the teacher an instrumental cause, the heart of indoctrination’s evil lies in the “Because I say so” sort of answer. The teacher is presumed sometimes on scant evidence-to be an expert in a field, but his status as such does not justify his operating behind a smoke-screen of alleged personal infallibility. “Expert must be held accountable”. The teacher’s job is not simply to say “This is the way it is” but to help the learner to “see why it is this way”.

Theory of Knowledge

While discussing knowledge theory now the first question one confronts is, where shall one begin? Does one begin with reality? Does one begin with the self that wants the knowledge? Or is this a false antithesis, as Dewey has argued because the theory of evolution shown that man and Nature are one, there being fundamentally no knowledge problem? The question actually needs to be rephrased where must we begin? How can we begin with reality, when it is we ourselves who are making the beginning and asking for knowledge of ‘reality’? And how can we begin with the continuity of man and Nature, when this is a point of beginning at least once removed from selfhood, namely, an assumption about a relationship which is at least partly outside of ourselves.

The next question has to do with the kind of relation we find ourselves to have with the world which is beyond us. Does the world make no sense to us what so ever? That is, is it so completely disparate with selfhood that there is no harmony, no communication, no trace of synchronization between the patterns of world and patterns of the self? Is this what we find in our experience of the world? Or do we instead find that there is some degree of correspondence between the experience of the self and its environment, that there is some communication, that man has some native psychological sense of being at home in the world? Our recognition of what we observe concerning the relation of the self to the world is of almost significance. For if there is complete disparity and disjointedness, then there is no effective relation at all. In this case, we have the conditions of insanity and no way of knowing anything beyond our own subjective enclosure. But if the latter set of questions more closely suggests our relation with the world, then we can rather certainly say that man is an interpreter who lives in a world that lends itself to interpretation. And if man is an interpreter in an interpret-able world, the implication is that in essence reality partakes of the nature of self-hood and not of an essence which is entirely foreign to it, such as a cause-effect machine or an impersonal process of events and relations.

One major word in this section on knowledge theory, is concerns the subject of openness to the building of a philosophy of education. Education has been hounded in the past, and is not infrequently assailed today, by religious bigotry which cannot avoid operating as a vested interest as it confronts the organized educational institution of society. At the same time, however, today we are as frequently bound in the loyalty to secularism which is just as much as impediment to truth seeking as is domination by religion. True religion, now is opposed to both of these tyrannies. Is opposes totalitarianism in ideas regardless of whether the controlling authority is religious or secular. How can the truth be known unless we are willing to know what it means, among other things, openness to the possibility of revelation. And, if  there is God. He certainly must be able to reveal himself. The critical question as to whether or not God has revealed himself in history and whether he continue to reveal himself, is a further question which may be beyond the subject of educational philosophy.

Theory of Reality

This will involve the consideration of question both about reality in the large, as in the cosmos or the totally of whatever is, and about reality in the more immediate and concrete, as represented in man and in ourselves as individuals.

There have been of course many views of the nature of reality. There is a simple or naïve naturalism, according to which reality and nature are made identical and fondly thought of in the likeness of a perfect-perpetual-motion machine, operating with perfect efficiency and obeying implicitly such laws as gravitation and cause-and-effect. Here values in our human experience just grow; they can be rich and refined as anyone’s taste would prefer, but they are still just a gardener variety which grows in the soil of Nature. Education has a place as guide and augmentation of nature maturation. Its function of course is to harmonize the life of the individual with Nature and reduce to minimum the artificialities by which human society. So easily complicate things and pulls man’s roots from the soil of Nature.

On the other hand pragmatism, experimentalism,  etc hold that Nature is not a simple machine nor does it operates according to fixed laws. Nature is rather a process in which all things are flowing and changing within its process is a kind of other like matrix in which normal life with the usual occurrence and abnormality is at a maximum. In this fluid order of natural events, man, and society, the values which we enjoy arise and have their normal habitat. Here is the range for all the enrichment and refinement possible to human experience but again, the value are a garden  variety which just grow in the soil of the natural-human order, Education in this metaphysical context has the task of representing the social process to children and youth in the manner depicted earlier in the first reference to Dewey. The task of the school is to provide a special environment for the young which will simply purify and balance the environment of man as it grows naturally.  The purpose to which the school is directed is that of equipping children to cope with the emergencies of a changing order and to keep them in relationship throughout with the human social process.

Another view of reality is quite different, is that whatever reality is “it is real”. This means that reality is what it is in spite of man’s knowledge of it, his relations with it, or any manipulations of it which he may attempt. Reality according to this view is completely objective and independent of man and is devoid of any fundamentally spiritual quality, on the contrary some realists reality is spiritual at the same time that it is physical, or it is fundamentally spiritual in a sense prior to the physical, or even it is positively supernatural. But being spiritual in essence, it is still independent and objective as far as man is concerned. Thus knowledge is of consummate importance for adjustment in life. For it the knowledge of history of world, man’s past, his culture and civilizations are also important. The school in such a context is primarily, the medium of transmission of dependable knowledge and of the conforming of individuals and new generations to reality as it is, until it opens itself to the possibility that man may become related to God and be oriented toward a life which is eternal as well as to a life of human relationship. There is a theistic or theological view  of reality. According to it man reflects how ever imperfectly. The  ONE BEING. Man as a soul or spirit as well as body is made in the image of this one Being, who is ultimate. The work of education can never be complete, however well it accomplishes is task in terms of human relationship

There are two desperate elements in any complete conception of man. The first of these is the essential nature of man, an answer to the question, what is that constitutes him? And the second is the moral condition of man, and appraisal of his ethical status and potential as compared to what he may become.

The view of essential nature of man range from a description of him as a physical organism, to an understanding of him as a soul,  made in the image of God. One view is that man is a highly developed animal, a child of Nature, But one for whom ageless antecedents of evolutionary developments have prepare the way, an organism with such a highly developed nervous system that has highly refined powers for responding to the stimuli around him, Another view as that man is a social-vocal organism, an abstraction, unless he is in social relationship, but having unprecedented powers for communication, and there by equipped for group life at a level for beyond that of animals.

That last view to be mentioned is that man is a creation of God into whom has been breathed a soul which has potentialities for life the spirit. According to this way of looking at man, he has powers of freedom and self determination which animals do not have and is therefore not only equipped for group life but also has potentiality for an eternal life of the spirit.

As regards to moral condition of man, for some people, consideration of moral status of man is relevant, because they consider man is a non-moral species in a non-moral universe where morality has nothing to do with existence. There are many, however, for whom this concern is highly relevant one, and they offer differing specific answers as to what the moral status of man is. There are those who say that man is fundamentally good, the child of a reality which is fundamentally good, his evil beings the result of mistakes, or of blocks standing in the way of his natural goodness.

Another view is that man is a mixture of good and evil, not purely one or the other. Some of his acts are good and some  are bad, and so we have a world in which good and evil are intermixed. There is also the view of man’s moral stature according to which, he is morally sick creature who needs to be healed. Which he is fundamentally good in intention and always seeks well in everything he does, there is an ailment in his judgment and sometimes in his will which makes him choose evil when it is really good, he assumes his choice will bring. Finally there are also those who, viewing man’s moral condition, say that there is more wrong with him morally than a sickness of judgment and will which needs healing. He has gone through a change since his original creation which is so radical as to amount to a fall from original goodness to a sinful state. He is therefore described by the adjective “depraved” and is regarded as being corrupted in his entire nature, unable to make right judgments, good choices, or even to have fully valid knowledge of truth, until he is restored, to his original condition.

The consequence of such views of man for education is quite as direct as is that of views of the cosmos. For views of man are also assumptions concerning the one who is to be educated, paralleling the context to a world view provides for the task of education.

Theory of Value

One important question is this: what is the status of values in existence? Are all values purely transient, as some say, and exists only because there is some sentient subject who enjoys them? And will all values cease to be when mankind has passed from the scene or has blasted himself out of existence by his achievements in nuclear physics? Or are there some values which are permanent and abiding? Are there values which exist independently of man and are good and to be desired whether man desires and possesses them or not. If there are such abiding values, do thing exist, as it were, under their own power, as Platonic ideas are supposed to exist or as the law of gravity and mathematical relations are alleged to exist? Or instead, do these abiding values have permanence because they are attributes or qualities of character which God has, and are of and dependent open one being that alone has ultimate existence?

An important value question has to do with the manner in which human subjects come into the experience of their possessors, who are assumed to be perfectly passive recipients? Or must the human subject somehow put himself out, as we say, exert efforts, or participate in some way in order to embrace value in his experience? If value experiences come to us without any reference to our actions in relation to them, then it would appear that there is no significance for education in value theory. It might even be that education itself has no significance, and that value experience will be ours whether we are educated or not. In the other hand, if effort is involved in value experience, then it becomes clear that the growth and development of the human individual, together with the teaching thrust of human cultures in their institutions of education, reflects a profound aspect of value, namely, that implicit in the nature of value in the necessity for education.

One more major value question is whether or not of a root value from which all other values stem, and what it may be, Now, if all values are transitory and contingent solely upon the sentient life of man, individual and collective, then human society and the individual man’s relation to it become of prime importance, If one want to enter into the fullest possible value that one have in short span of living, it is imperative that one maintain unbroken relation with the social process. There is nothing but nothingness to be gained by withdrawing into and ivory tower, or escaping into one’s own private world. Education in such a value context must necessarily be social –education in society and for social relationship.

However, if some values exist independently of man and if they have their existence as qualities of one who alone has being, then the source of value for man is quite different. The importance of human society is not made less, but it is longer the exclusive source of value, Individual man is still a unit of mankind. But God is the source of value both for individual and for social man. And accordingly some kind of effectual relation to God become the gate way to value and value experience-at least to ultimate value. Education in such a value context should be no less social, but it will

Face the difficult fact that man’s value experiences are contingent upon theological concerns as well as social concerns. It will recognize that the full import of man’s value experiences is not understood unless it is viewed as having a horizon beyond which there is an abiding value experiences with which it has some connection.

There are all sort of other subject of major importance to educators. Just a list of few areas of controversy without any comment:

  • Sex Education
  • Role of mass-media in Education
  • Deviant Behavior (Juvenile Delinquency)
  • Vocation Training, Technical Training, or Academic Training
  • “Frills” in the school (Music band, Games etc.)

To suggest that there is any single correct answer to these and to the dozens of the other questions which are the constant concerns for educators would be foolish indeed. Everything we have said to this point should indicate that here are a variety of different ways of approaching any of these questions. Logic, however, would seems to indicate that manner which we deal with any of these questions be consistent. It is in the study of a variety of logical, self contained and internally consistent frame works for viewing education, that the study of educational philosophy becomes important.

 

 

 


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