Abstract
In this chapter, we argue that education has a double purpose: the formation of individuals and the formation of societies. We examine how these educational aspirations were formed in antiquity, in Aristotle ’s views about education outlined in his Nicomachean Ethics and in his Politics. We argue that these views are still relevant today and that any contemporary theory regarding the education of persons still requires a complementary theory of politics. Together, both education and politics shape the formation of individuals and potentially enable us all to ‘live well in a world worth living in ’. Finally, we contend that education is an initiation, not just into knowledge , but also into practices .
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this book, we have used footnotes to elaborate particular points, to invite you to think further about particular issues, and to clarify ideas . The footnotes are thus in a kind of conversation with the main text .
- 2.
The discussion of the double, individual and social, purpose of education runs back through Dewey to the ancients, like Plato (424/423–348/347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) in Ancient Greece. Dewey’s (1916) Democracy and education is a classical statement of the view.
- 3.
The social nature of individual identity is not always clear in contemporary discussions of society, particularly by those whose view of society is based on ‘atomistic individualism’. This is the view expressed in former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s proclamation that there is no society, only individuals . For an eloquent critique of this view, see Taylor (1991).
- 4.
- 5.
A technical division of labour is a division between tasks (like the division between managing a school and teaching a class, or between cooking and cleaning). A social division of labour is a division between categories of people based on what they do (like being a school principal and being a teacher in the school, or between being a chef and being a cleaner).
- 6.
Several books of Foucault (for example, 1970, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1988; for an introduction and commentary, see Ball 1990) show the rise of new institutions to cope with the masses of people in cities as urbanisation and industrialisation progressed—workhouses, the police, prisons, and hospitals, to name a few.
- 7.
In his book After virtue, MacIntyre (1981) described the consequences of this differentiation and fragmentation for the morality of the present. MacIntyre argues that we are now prisoners of bureaucratic forms of life that arose in the nineteenth century, and became dominant in the twentieth, to the point where we are no longer principally guided by the moral and intellectual virtues prized by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
- 8.
For the classical postmodernist challenge to the idea of progress and the aspirations for a coherent narrative of history and progress through science, see Lyotard (1984). For eloquent responses to postmodernist challenges to the notion that rationality offers no substantial promise for human progress, see Habermas (1987) and Benhabib (1992, especially the chapter ‘Feminisms and the Question of Postmodernism’).
- 9.
On sustainable development, see, for example, Black (2004).
- 10.
On the ill effects of the excesses of neo-liberalism, see Sennett (1998) The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism.
- 11.
This ‘negative’ approach derives from the view that understanding justice might more readily be approached by the study of the nature of injustice, as suggested by Young (1990) in her argument that injustice is of two main kinds—domination , the unreasonable constraint on self-determination , and oppression, the unreasonable constraint on self-expression and self-development .
- 12.
A classic argument about the role of care in education is presented in Noddings (1992) The challenge to care: An alternative approach to education.
- 13.
The field that is called ‘Education Studies’ in much of the English-speaking world is known in Europe as Pedagogy (or Pedagogik in Swedish, or Pädagogik in German, for example). (In current usage in English, ‘pedagogy’ is roughly synonymous with ‘teaching ’ or ‘the art of teaching .’) The European field of Pedagogy explores the nature of education, and its purposes. It is supplemented by its subfield Didactics, which covers particular ways of doing education, for example in subject didactics, like mathematics education or geography education or science education. Like Education Studies, Pedagogy in Europe covers many fields concerning the upbringing of children and adults in many different settings, like youth work or outdoor education, as well as education in institutional settings like primary and secondary schools, early childhood education, adult and vocational education, and higher education.
- 14.
- 15.
BCE = Before the Christian Era.
- 16.
- 17.
To say that education is ‘normative’ is to say that it is guided by particular values , that it is value-laden and in some way prescriptive. Saying that education is normative is to assert that education is not, as some might wish, a value-free or merely technical activity (for example, of transmitting value-free knowledge or skills). In our view, education is always guided by values , whether those values are explicit, unnoticed, invisible or actively concealed.
- 18.
By contrast, Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), for example, took a more modern ‘humanist’ view of education (as represented , for example in Woodward’s (1904) study Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education). John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), who, like Erasmus, contends for the title of ‘the father of modern education’, was an advocate for universal education; his Didactica Magna (1633–1638) set out his views. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) described his view of education as the development of young people from earliest childhood, based on the idea that children are innately good, in his book Emile, or On Education (1762). John Dewey (1859–1952) made many contributions to progressive views of education as the process of forming liberal individuals to participate in a liberal democratic society (including the society of the school), for example in his book Democracy and Education (first published in 1916).
- 19.
Like other texts of Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, the Nicomachean Ethics (thought to have been dictated by Aristotle and written down by his son Nicomachus) was probably written in the form of aids to memory or ‘lecture notes’ which guided Aristotle ’s teaching of the young men who gathered around him. Later, others acquired copies of these notes, and re-copied them—not always faithfully. In ancient times, books were regarded as scarce and exceptionally valuable.
- 20.
The moral virtues, all except one of which, in Aristotle ’s view, are ‘means’ (averages) that steer between ‘extremes’ of excess and insufficiency, are: courage (acting in a way that accords with the ‘mean’ that steers between the excess of recklessness and the insufficiency of cowardice), moderation (between the extremes of licentiousness and ‘insensibility’), liberality (between prodigality and stinginess), magnificence (between vulgarity and parsimony), greatness of soul (between vanity and smallness of soul), ambition (between an excess of ambition and lack of ambition), gentleness (between irascibility and ‘unirascibility’), truthfulness (between boastfulness and irony), wittiness and tact (between buffoonery and crudity, and boorishness and dourness), friendliness (between obsequiousness or flattery, and surliness and quarrelsomeness) and justice (which is a mean without extremes, but whose opposite is injustice) (after Bartlett and Collins 2011, pp. 303–4).
- 21.
Note that by ‘the rationality of the cosmos’, we do not mean, and Aristotle did not mean, a deity. In their interpretive essay on the Ethics , Bartlett and Collins (2011, p. 261) note that Aristotle did not include piety among the moral virtues, and they note (pp. 298–302) that his references to gods and the divine are surely insincere, merely intended to placate readers or hearers who might otherwise charge him, as Socrates was charged and condemned, for corrupting the youth of Athens with his ideas and for impiety. When Alexander of Macedon (Alexander the Great, Aristotle ’s former pupil) suspected Aristotle of conspiring against him, and wrote letters threatening Aristotle , in 322 BCE Aristotle left Athens for his mother’s estate at Chalcis, saying “I will not allow Athens to sin against philosophy a second time”, a reference to the trial and death of Socrates. He died in Euboea of natural causes in the same year.
- 22.
These distinctions are further elaborated and developed in Book VI of the Ethics .
- 23.
As indicated in the last chapter in the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics , Book IX, Chap. 8, which is the transition to The Politics.
- 24.
Young (1990, Chap. 2) describes five “faces” of oppression: exploitation, marginalisation , powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence.
- 25.
By ‘reason’ here, we do not mean a narrow rationalistic view of knowledge , but also the reason of the heart. As Pascal (1623–1662) put it (Pensées, 1670/2013, §iv, 277), “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know ”. On this view, we should include reasonableness and reason giving as part of what is meant by ‘a culture based on reason ’.
- 26.
Habermas uses the term ‘media’ to describe the media in which we encounter and connect with one another—what we have referred to as ‘intersubjective spaces’: semantic space , physical space–time , and social space .
- 27.
The symbol ‘§’ followed by a number indicates the ‘paragraphs’ or propositions that make up Wittgenstein’s book The Philosophical Investigations.
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Kemmis, S., Edwards-Groves, C. (2018). Studying Education. In: Understanding Education. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6433-3_1
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