education, philosophy of

Application of philosophical methods to problems and issues in education.

Among the topics investigated in the philosophy of education are the nature of learning, especially in children, and the purpose of education, including the question of whether, and if so how, educators should attempt to develop or instill moral virtues and political values. Major figures in the history of the philosophy of education include Plato, Rousseau, and John Dewey.

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Introduction

      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 (law, philosophy of), the philosophy of science (science, philosophy of), 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.

Principal historical figures

      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 (reason) 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 (Dewey, John) (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 (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques) (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 (Aquinas, Thomas, Saint), Augustine (Augustine, Saint), Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes, Thomas), René Descartes (Descartes, René), John Locke (Locke, John), David Hume (Hume, David), Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel), John Stuart Mill (Mill, John Stuart), Karl Marx (Marx, Karl), Bertrand Russell (Russell, Bertrand), 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.

Problems, issues, and tasks

      There are a number of basic philosophical problems and tasks that have occupied philosophers of education throughout the history of the subject.

The aims of education

      The most basic problem of philosophy of education is that concerning aims: what are the proper aims and guiding ideals of education? What are the proper criteria for evaluating educational efforts, institutions, practices, and products? Many aims have been proposed by philosophers and other educational theorists; they include the cultivation of curiosity and the disposition to inquire; the fostering of creativity; the production of knowledge and of knowledgeable students; the enhancement of understanding; the promotion of moral thinking, feeling, and action; the enlargement of the imagination; the fostering of growth, development, and self-realization; the fulfillment of potential; the cultivation of “liberally educated” persons; the overcoming of provincialism and close-mindedness; the development of sound judgment; the cultivation of docility and obedience to authority; the fostering of autonomy; the maximization of freedom, happiness, or self-esteem; the development of care, concern, and related attitudes and dispositions; the fostering of feelings of community, social solidarity, citizenship, and civic-mindedness; the production of good citizens; the “civilizing” of students; the protection of students from the deleterious effects of civilization; the development of piety, religious faith, and spiritual fulfillment; the fostering of ideological purity; the cultivation of political awareness and action; the integration or balancing of the needs and interests of the individual student and the larger society; and the fostering of skills and dispositions constitutive of rationality or critical thinking.

      All such proposed aims require careful articulation and defense, and all have been subjected to sustained criticism. Both contemporary and historical philosophers of education have devoted themselves, at least in part, to defending a particular conception of the aims of education or to criticizing the conceptions of others. The great range of aims that have been proposed makes vivid the philosopher of education's need to appeal to other areas of philosophy, to other disciplines (e.g., psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the physical sciences), and to educational practice itself. Given that consideration of education's proper aims is of fundamental importance for the intelligent guidance of educational activities, it is unfortunate that contemporary discussions of educational policy rarely address the matter.

Clarification of educational concepts

      A perennial conception of the nature of philosophy is that it is chiefly concerned with the clarification of concepts, such as knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, mind, meaning, and existence. One of the tasks of the philosophy of education, accordingly, has been the elucidation of key educational concepts, including the concept of education itself, as well as related concepts such as teaching, learning, schooling, child rearing, and indoctrination. Although this clarificatory task has sometimes been pursued overzealously—especially during the period of so-called ordinary language analysis in the 1960s and '70s, when much work in the field seemed to lose sight of the basic normative issues to which these concepts were relevant—it remains the case that work in the philosophy of education, as in other areas of philosophy, must rely at least in part on conceptual clarification. Such analysis seeks not necessarily, or only, to identify the particular meanings of charged or contested concepts but also to identify alternative meanings, render ambiguities explicit, reveal hidden metaphysical, normative, or cultural assumptions, illuminate the consequences of alternative interpretations, explore the semantic connections between related concepts, and elucidate the inferential relationships obtaining among the philosophical claims and theses in which they are embedded.

Rights, power, and authority

      There are several issues that fall under this heading. What justifies the state in compelling children to attend school—in what does its authority to mandate attendance lie? What is the nature and justification of the authority that teachers exercise over their students? Is the freedom of students rightly curtailed by the state? Is the public school system rightly entitled to the power it exercises in establishing curricula that parents might find objectionable—e.g., science curricula that mandate the teaching of human evolution but not creationism or intelligent design and literature curricula that mandate the teaching of novels dealing with sexual themes? Should parents or their children have the right to opt out of material they think is inappropriate? Should schools encourage students to be reflective and critical generally—as urged by the American philosophers Israel Scheffler and Amy Gutmann, following Socrates and the tradition he established—or should they refrain from encouraging students to subject their own ways of life to critical scrutiny, as the American political scientist William Galston has recommended?

      The issue of legitimate authority has been raised recently in the United States in connection with the practice of standardized testing, which some critics believe discriminates against the children of some racial, cultural, religious, or ethnic groups (because the test questions rely, implicitly or explicitly, on various culturally specific cues or assumptions that members of some groups may not understand or accept). In such controversial cases, what power should members of allegedly disadvantaged groups have to protect their children from discrimination or injustice? The answer to this question, as to the others raised above, may depend in part on the status of the particular school as public (state-supported) or private. But it can also be asked whether private schools should enjoy more authority with respect to curricular matters than public schools do, particularly in cases where they receive state subsidies of one form or another.

      These questions are primarily matters of ethics and political philosophy, but they also require attention to metaphysics (e.g., how are “groups” to be individuated and understood?), philosophy of science (e.g., is “intelligent design” a genuinely scientific theory?), psychology (e.g., do IQ tests discriminate against members of certain minority groups?), and other areas of philosophy, social science, and law.

Critical thinking

      Many educators and educational scholars have championed the educational aim of critical thinking. It is not obvious what critical thinking is, and philosophers of education accordingly have developed accounts of critical thinking that attempt to state what it is and why it is valuable—i.e., why educational systems should aim to cultivate it in students. These accounts generally (though not universally) agree that critical thinkers share at least the following two characteristics: (1) they are able to reason well—i.e., to construct and evaluate various reasons that have been or can be offered for or against candidate beliefs, judgments, and actions; and (2) they are disposed or inclined to be guided by reasons so evaluated—i.e., actually to believe, judge, and act in accordance with the results of such reasoned evaluations. Beyond this level of agreement lie a range of contentious issues.

      One cluster of issues is epistemological in nature. What is it to reason well? What makes a reason, in this sense, good or bad? More generally, what epistemological assumptions underlie (or should underlie) the notion of critical thinking? Does critical thinking presuppose conceptions of truth, knowledge, or justification that are objective and “absolute,” or is it compatible with more “relativistic” accounts emphasizing culture, race, class, gender, or conceptual scheme?

      These questions have given rise to other, more specific and hotly contested issues. Is critical thinking relevantly “neutral” with respect to the groups who use it, or is it in fact politically biased, unduly favouring a type of thinking once valued by white European males—the philosophers of the Enlightenment and later eras—while undervaluing or demeaning types of thinking sometimes associated with other groups, such as women, nonwhites, and non-Westerners—i.e., thinking that is collaborative rather than individual, cooperative rather than confrontational, intuitive or emotional rather than linear and impersonal? Do standard accounts of critical thinking in these ways favour and help to perpetuate the beliefs, values, and practices of dominant groups in society and devalue those of marginalized or oppressed groups? Is reason itself, as some feminist and postmodern philosophers have claimed, a form of hegemony?

      Other issues concern whether the skills, abilities, and dispositions that are constitutive of critical thinking are general or subject-specific. In addition, the dispositions of the critical thinker noted above suggest that the ideal of critical thinking can be extended beyond the bounds of the epistemic to the area of moral character, leading to questions regarding the nature of such character and the best means of instilling it.

Indoctrination

      A much-debated question is whether and how education differs from indoctrination. Many theorists have assumed that the two are distinct and that indoctrination is undesirable, but others have argued that there is no difference in principle and that indoctrination is not intrinsically bad. Theories of indoctrination generally define it in terms of aim, method, or doctrine. Thus, indoctrination is either: (1) any form of teaching aimed at getting students to adopt beliefs independent of the evidential support those beliefs may have (or lack); (2) any form of teaching based on methods that instill beliefs in students in such a way that they are unwilling or unable to question or evaluate those beliefs independently; or (3) any form of teaching that causes students to embrace a specific set of beliefs—e.g., a certain political ideology or a religious doctrine—without regard for its evidential status. These ways of characterizing indoctrination emphasize its alleged contrast with critical thinking: the critical thinker (according to standard accounts) strives to base his beliefs, judgments, and actions on the competent assessment of relevant reasons and evidence, which is something the victim of indoctrination tends not to do. But this apparent contrast depends upon the alleged avoidability of indoctrination, which itself is a philosophically contested issue.

The individual and society

 A number of interrelated problems and issues fall under this heading. What is the place of schools in a just or democratic society? Should they serve the needs of society by preparing students to fill specific social needs or roles, or should they rather strive to maximize the potential—or serve the interests—of each student? When these goals conflict, as they appear inevitably to do, which set of interests—those of society or those of individuals—should take precedence? Should educational institutions strive to treat all students equally? If so, should they seek equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? Should individual autonomy be valued more highly than the character of society? More generally, should educational practice favour a more-liberal view of the relation between the individual and society, according to which the independence of the individual is of fundamental importance, or a more-communitarian view that emphasizes the individual's far-reaching dependence on the society in which she lives? These questions are basically moral and political in nature, though they have epistemological analogues, as noted above with respect to critical thinking.

Moral education

      Another set of problems and issues has to do with the proper educational approach to morality. Should education strive to instill particular moral beliefs and values in students? Or should it aim rather to enhance students' ability to think through moral issues for themselves? If the latter, how should educators distinguish between good and bad ways to think about moral issues? Should moral education focus on students' character—rather than on either the inculcation of particular beliefs and values or the development of the ability to think well about moral matters—and endeavour to produce particular traits, such as honesty and sensitivity? Or are all these approaches problematic in that they inevitably involve indoctrination (of an undesirable kind)? A related objection to the approaches mentioned is that moral beliefs and values are in some sense relative to culture or community; therefore, attempts to teach morality at least presuppose an indefensible moral absolutism and may even constitute a kind of moral “imperialism.” These large and complex questions are intimately connected with metaethics and moral epistemology—i.e., the part of moral philosophy concerned with the epistemic status of moral claims and judgments. Moral psychology and developmental psychology are also highly relevant to the resolution of these questions.

teaching, learning, and curriculum

      Many problems of educational practice that raise philosophical issues fall under this heading. Which subjects are most worth teaching or learning? What constitutes knowledge of them, and is such knowledge discovered or constructed? Should there be a single, common curriculum for all students, or should different students study different subjects, depending on their needs or interests, as Dewey thought? If the latter, should students be tracked according to ability? Should less-able students be directed to vocational studies? Is there even a legitimate distinction to be drawn between academic and vocational education? More broadly, should students be grouped together—according to age, ability, gender, race, culture, socioeconomic status, or some other characteristic—or should educators seek diversity in the classroom along any or all of these dimensions?

      Whatever the curriculum, how should students be taught? Should they be regarded as “blank slates” and expected to absorb information passively, as Locke's conception of the mind as a tabula rasa suggests, or should they rather be understood as active learners, encouraged to engage in self-directed discovery and learning, as Dewey and many psychologists and educators have held? How, more generally, should teaching be conceived and conducted? Should all students be expected to learn the same things from their studies? If not, as many argue, does it make sense to utilize standardized testing to measure educational outcome, attainment, or success? What are the effects of grading and evaluation in general and of high-stakes standardized testing in particular? Some have argued that any sort of grading or evaluation is educationally counterproductive because it inhibits cooperation and undermines any natural motivation to learn. More recently, critics of high-stakes testing have argued that the effects of such testing are largely negative—dilution (“dumbing down”) of the curriculum, teaching to the test, undue pressure on both students and teachers, and distraction from the real purposes of schooling. If these claims are correct, how should the seemingly legitimate demands of parents, administrators, and politicians for accountability from teachers and schools be met? These are complex matters, involving philosophical questions concerning the aims and legitimate means of education and the nature of the human mind, the psychology of learning (and of teaching), the organizational (and political) demands of schooling, and a host of other matters to which social-scientific research is relevant.

      Finally, here fall questions concerning the aims of particular curriculum areas. For example, should science education aim at conveying to students merely the content of current theories or rather an understanding of scientific method, a grasp of the tentativeness and fallibility of scientific hypotheses, and an understanding of the criteria by which theories are evaluated? Should science classes focus solely on current theories, or should they include attention to the history, philosophy, and sociology of the subject? Should they seek to impart only beliefs or also skills? Similar questions can be asked of nearly every curriculum area; they are at least partly philosophical and so are routinely addressed by philosophers of education as well as by curriculum theorists and subject-matter specialists.

Educational research

      A large amount of research in education is published every year; such research drives much educational policy and practice. But educational research raises many philosophical issues. How is it best conducted, and how are its results best interpreted and translated into policy? Should it be modeled on research in the natural sciences? In what ways (if any) does competent research in the social sciences differ from that in the natural sciences? Can educational research aim at objectivity and the production of objective results, or is it inevitably subjective? Should researchers utilize quantitative methods or qualitative ones? How is this distinction best understood? Are both legitimate modes of research, or is the first problematically scientistic or positivistic, or the second problematically subjective, impressionistic, or unreliable? These and related issues are largely philosophical, involving philosophy of science (both natural and social) and epistemology, but they clearly involve the social sciences as well.

Feminist (feminism), multiculturalist, and postmodern criticisms

      Feminist, multiculturalist, and postmodern criticisms of education extend far beyond the issue of critical thinking, addressing much more general features of philosophy and educational theory and practice. These three critical movements are neither internally univocal nor unproblematically combinable; what follows is therefore oversimplified.

      Feminist philosophers of education often argue for the importance of educational aims typically excluded from the traditional male-oriented set. One feminist aim is that of caring—i.e., the fostering of students' abilities and propensities to care for themselves and others. A more general aim is that of focusing less on the cognitive and more on the emotional, intuitive, and conative development of all students. Relatedly, many feminist philosophers of education call into question the traditional distinction between the public and the private realms, and they argue that education should focus not only on the development of abilities and characteristics typically exercised in the public sphere—e.g., reason, objectivity, and impartiality—but also on abilities and characteristics traditionally consigned to the private sphere of home and family—e.g., emotional connection, compassion, intuition, and sensitivity to the physical and psychological needs of others.

      It must be noted that this characterization of feminist philosophy of education papers over some important internal disagreements and debates. For example, while some feminist philosophers of education suggest that girls and boys should master both traditional male and traditional female roles and abilities, others reject these familiar categories, while still others distrust or explicitly reject reason and objectivity themselves as problematically “male.” Debate on these matters is complex and resists brief summary.

      Multiculturalist philosophers of education, as the label suggests, emphasize the significance of cultural diversity as it manifests itself in education and its philosophy. Paying particular attention to such diversity, multiculturalists point out the ways in which actual educational aims and practices favour the interests of particular cultural groups at the expense of others. They emphasize differences not only of language, custom, and lifestyle but, more fundamentally, of basic beliefs, values, and worldviews. They argue that education must not privilege the cultures of certain groups but treat all groups with equal seriousness and respect.

      What this means in practice, however, is far from clear. Some multiculturalists argue that justice and respect require that each group's traditions, beliefs, and values be regarded as equally legitimate; others hold that it is possible to respect a group while still regarding its beliefs as false or its values as deficient. This debate has important consequences in the particular curricular domain of science education, but the general issue arises in virtually every curriculum domain. There is also the problem that the conceptions of justice and respect that multiculturalists tend to appeal to are themselves not universally shared but rather taken from particular cultural locations, thus apparently privileging those culturally specific beliefs and values, contrary to the movement's motivating impulse. How best to resolve this problem remains a subject of debate within the multiculturalist camp, with some opting for some form of cultural relativism and others for a mix of multiculturalism and universalism.

      Postmodern philosophers and philosophers of education challenge basic aspects of traditional philosophical theorizing by calling into question the possibility of objectivity, the neutrality of reason, the stability of meaning, and the distinction between truth and power. They raise doubts about all general theories—of philosophy, education, or anything else—by suggesting that all such “grand narratives” arise in particular historical circumstances and thus inevitably reflect the worldviews, beliefs, values, and interests of the groups that happen to be dominant in those circumstances.

      Like feminists and multiculturalists, postmodernists do not speak with a single voice. Some, emphasizing power and justice, strive to expose illegitimate exercises of dominating power in order to bring about a more-just social arrangement in which the dominated are no longer so. Others, emphasizing the instability of meaning and the defects of grand narratives, call into question the narratives of domination and justice, thereby undermining the justification of political efforts aimed at eliminating the former and enhancing the latter.

      These distinct but partially overlapping movements have in common the insistence that education and its philosophy are inevitably political and the impulse to reveal relations of power in educational theory and practice and to develop philosophical accounts of education that take full account of the values and interests of groups that have traditionally been excluded from educational thinking. These movements also often question the very possibility of universal educational ideals and values. As such they in some ways challenge the very possibility of the philosophy of education and philosophy more generally, at least as these disciplines have traditionally been practiced. Critical responses to these challenges have been many and varied; one of the most notable consists of pointing out the apparent inconsistency involved in claiming that, as a general matter, general accounts of education, justice, and the like are impossible. As elsewhere, the issues here are complex and far from resolved.

Conclusion

      The list of problems, issues, and tasks presented above is necessarily partial, and for most of them the proposed solutions have been few or not widely agreed upon. This is in part a function of the inherent openness of philosophical inquiry. Nevertheless, some proposed resolutions are better than others, and philosophical argumentation and analysis have helped to reveal that difference. This is true of philosophy in general and of philosophy of education in particular.

      All educational activities, from classroom practice to curriculum decisions to the setting of policies at the school, district, state, and federal levels, inevitably rest upon philosophical assumptions, claims, and positions. Consequently, thoughtful and defensible educational practice depends upon philosophical awareness and understanding. To that extent, the philosophy of education is essential to the proper guidance of educational practice. Knowledge of philosophy of education would benefit not only teachers, administrators, and policy makers at all levels but also students, parents, and citizens generally. Societies that value education and desire that it be conducted in a thoughtful and informed way ignore the philosophy of education at their peril. Its relevance, reach, and potential impact make it perhaps the most fundamental and wide-ranging area of applied philosophy.

Harvey Siegel

Additional Reading

The history of the philosophy of education is surveyed in Randall Curren, “Education, History of Philosophy of,” in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3 (1998), pp. 222–231; J.J. Chambliss, “History of Philosophy of Education,” in J.J. Chambliss (ed.), Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia (1996), pp. 461–472; D.C. Phillips, “Philosophy of Education: Historical Overview,” in Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite (eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd edition (1994), vol. 8, pp. 4447–56; and D.C. Phillips, “Educational Philosophy, Historical Perspectives,” in Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2001), vol. 6, pp. 4286–92. Recent essays on the educational views of the major figures in the history of philosophy may be found in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives (1998).Two recent comprehensive introductions to the field are Nel Noddings, Philosophy of Education, 2nd ed. (2007); and David Carr, Making Sense of Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Theory of Education and Teaching (2003). Three useful collections are Randall Curren (ed.), Philosophy of Education: An Anthology (2007), and A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (2003); and Nigel Blake et al. (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (2003). Each of these volumes deftly integrates historical and contemporary discussions and concerns.The Marxist tradition in educational theory is treated in N.C. Burbules, “Marxism and Educational Thought,” in Torsten Husén and T. Neville Postlethwaite, eds., The International Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd edition (1994), vol. 6, pp. 3617–22. The Continental tradition in philosophy of education is discussed in Paul Smeyers, “Philosophy of Education: Western European Perspectives,” also in The International Encyclopedia of Education, vol. 8, pp. 4456–61. Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (1995), is a recent treatment of the place of imagination in education in the existentialist tradition. Two classics of the ordinary language analysis tradition in philosophy of education are R.S. Peters, Ethics and Education (1966); and Paul H. Hirst and R.S. Peters, The Logic of Education (1970). A recent collection on aims is Roger Marples (ed.), The Aims of Education (1999).Matters of social justice, democracy, multiculturalism, and schooling are discussed in Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (1997); Harry Brighouse, On Education (2006), and School Choice and Social Justice (2000); Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education, rev. ed. (1999); Kenneth R. Howe, Understanding Equal Educational Opportunity: Social Justice, Democracy, and Schooling (1997); Walter Feinberg, Common Schools/Uncommon Identities: National Unity and Cultural Difference (1998); Donald Arnstine, Democracy and the Arts of Schooling (1995); Robert K. Fullinwider (ed.), Public Education in a Multicultural Society: Policy, Theory, Critique (1996); and William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (2002).A collection on feminism and education that treats many of the major figures, issues, and literature is Ann Diller et al., The Gender Question in Education: Theory, Pedagogy, and Politics (1996). Two influential monographs are Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984); and Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (1985).Moral education is systematically surveyed in Randall Curren, “Moral Education,” in Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd edition (2001), pp. 1127–31. Randall Curren, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education (2000), discusses moral education in the context of ancient Greek philosophy. The topic is helpfully treated from the perspective of programs in philosophy for children in Michael S. Pritchard, Reasonable Children: Moral Education and Moral Learning (1996). Nel Noddings, Educating Moral People (2002), defends an approach to moral education based on caring. Three recent collections are David Carr and Jan Steutel (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Moral Education (1999); J. Mark Halstead and Terence H. McLaughlin (eds.), Education in Morality (1999); and Stephen Macedo and Yael Tamir, Moral and Political Education (2002).Teaching is treated in William Hare, What Makes a Good Teacher: Reflections on Some Characteristics Central to the Educational Enterprise (1993). Open-mindedness and its place in education are treated in the same author's Open-Mindedness and Education (1979).An instructive guide to the philosophical issues raised by educational research is D.C. Phillips, The Expanded Social Scientist's Bestiary: A Guide to Fabled Threats to, and Defenses of, Naturalistic Social Science (2000). An important book on science education is Michael R. Matthews, Science Teaching: The Role of History and Philosophy of Science (1994).Studies of critical thinking, including its philosophical underpinnings and its place in education, are Israel Scheffler, Reason and Teaching (1973, reprinted 1989); and Harvey Siegel, Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education (1988), and Rationality Redeemed?: Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal (1997). An important collection on the generalizability issue is Stephen P. Norris (ed.), The Generalizability of Critical Thinking: Multiple Perspectives on an Educational Ideal (1992). Two classic works that discuss critical thinking and the philosophy of education in the context of general treatments of knowledge and language are Israel Scheffler, Conditions of Knowledge: An Introduction to Epistemology and Education (1965, reprinted 1983), and The Language of Education (1960).Harvey Siegel

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