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Education and Belief: Ontology

Educational philosophy raises four distinct but related questions:  What is education for? What is the nature of the child? What is the role of adults? Who decides which view is right?

The last post highlighted several prominent disputes about the purpose of education. Even if we agreed about the purpose of education (say, that it existed to transmit knowledge and to foster democratic citizenship), the second and third questions – how we think about the nature of the child and the role of adults – are also deeply contested and lead to quite different pedagogies. This is because they ask us to consider our basic assumptions about human nature. This is what the Greeks called an ontological question, since it concerns the essence or the nature of a thing.

Two broad conflicts have played out in American education: the first between the traditionalist and the progressive, the second between the religionist and the secularist. What are the ontological distinctions between them?

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Education and Belief: Telos

“Formal education…presents pictures or maps of reality that reflect, unavoidably, particular choices about what is certain and what in question, what is significant and what unworthy of notice.  No aspect of schooling can be truly neutral.” – Charles Glenn, The Myth of the Common School (1988).

If Glenn is correct that knowledge occurs within a map of reality, then we need to look at the map’s assumptions. This is the work of educational philosophy, which asks four key questions:

  1. What is the purpose of education?
  2. What is the nature of the child?
  3. What is the role of the teacher?
  4. Who has or should have educational authority?

Schooling addresses these questions, even if implicitly.  An insistence upon high academic standards, for instance, implies something about the purpose of education, our view of the child who is being educated, and the locus of authority.

What I’d like to do in the next few posts is to look at each question and some of the ways each has been answered in the United States. My intent is not to argue that any one answer is right or wrong (although I do have my personal preferences). Rather, I want to highlight the sheer variety of responses and then examine how America and other liberal democracies differ in managing them.

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Education and Belief

Thank you to Mark Movsesian and Marc DeGirolami for the chance to participate in the Center for Law and Religion’s blog. I am delighted to work with them in addressing questions about the relationship between religion, law and culture. My primary interest in the next few weeks is exploring these concerns in the context of American education.

America’s current educational battles are about competing beliefs and commitments. This may sound like a strange assertion, given the practical nature of the debates on No Child Left Behind, vouchers, teachers unions, the curriculum, and so on. However, beneath such disagreements are deeper and more profound ones that are philosophical and cultural in nature: about the purpose of education, the nature of the child, and the question of authority.

Put differently: educational policy always rests upon particular views about who the child is and what education is for. In this sense, schooling is always about philosophy – explicitly or implicitly. Whose philosophy, though? Why one set of assumptions and not another? How does American public education reflect past debates about pluralism and democracy? Finally, how might our present disputes be improved, and perhaps fresh solutions achieved, by re-visiting these foundational questions?

This task is difficult because of the inescapable nature of culture, the taken-for-granted backdrop to our individual experiences and social encounters.  Speaking in sociological terms, “culture” consists of the ideas and institutions Read more