Introduction

The questions of whether or not philosophy has a continuing role to play in teacher education, and, if so, on what grounds, are lines of inquiry that have been pursued by expert practitioners and policy-makers, many of whom favour procedural know-how in teacher education programmes over more theoretical subjects that are not directly related to ameliorating classroom practice. Those who remain convinced that subjects such as philosophy are superfluous to professional practice often question the ‘added value’ of philosophy on teacher education programmes (Brennan and Canny 2021). On the one side, we have the expert practitioner purists (EPPs), whose epistemic domain and conditions for success when it comes to teaching and learning rest predominantly on accumulated know-how that has been primarily acquired from expert pedagogues in tandem with accrued learnings that have been derived from their own and others’ classroom practices. On the other hand, we have philosophers of education (anti-reductionist educators or AREs), who see teaching and learning as amounting to something more than a professionally curated series of flat-pack behaviourist pedagogical activities that take place during the school day. Supporters of both claims perceive their epistemic principles and values as being undermined or having their credibility challenged. EPPs emphasise the importance of grounding in expert procedural knowledge, while AREs hold steadfast to the fundamental claim that the life of an educator is, in part, inescapably bound up with a series of emancipatory or oppressive professional activities to which teachers directly contribute, as there can be no such thing as a value-free education (see Giroux 1983; Colgan and Maxwell 2020).Footnote 1

In what follows, I argue that the disengagementFootnote 2 of pre-service teachers from the philosophy of education can be understood in terms of five category mistakes.Footnote 3 The first of these is: (1) the wrongful charge of designating philosophers as epistemic trespassers. All four of the other epistemic vicesFootnote 4 or mistakes that I single out feed into this foundational error in either a narrow or a global sense. They are: (2) misunderstanding standpoint epistemology (SE) in terms of automatic privilege being coextensive with first-personal authority (FPA); (3) overestimating the added value of deliberate/rational ignorance; (4) misguided intellectualist views of skills and expertise; and, (5) uncritical technicist attempts to emulate TikTok Exemplars with the allure of ‘Insta results’. I expound upon each of these below, beginning with the wrongful charge of ‘epistemic trespassing’.

Mistake 1: Wrongfully Designating Philosophers as Epistemic Trespassers

This section presents an explanatory account of ‘epistemic trespassing’ in the specific context of teacher education in Ireland. In this setting, I argue, a series of deleterious changes have occurred, which have been promulgated by the unchecked exaltation of expert practitioner principles: according to these, teachers should spend their time mastering the ‘science of learning’, focusing on inclusive learning pedagogies, behavioural management strategies, and professional ethics, rather than learning and thinking about issues that they (or others) do not deem to be directly applicable to and/or of value to classroom practice (see Mayer 2021).

What, though, are epistemic trespassers,Footnote 5 exactly? Nathan Ballantyne (2019) has usefully classified epistemic trespassers as ‘thinkers who have competence or expertise to make good judgments in one field, but move to another field where they lack competence—and pass judgment nevertheless’ (p. 195). In order to be considered an expert, he continues to suggest, two conditions must be met. The first is that those who are ‘experts’ must possess ‘enough relevant evidence to answer reliably or responsibly their [respective] field’s questions’. The second is that they must the relevant skills to evaluate or interpret the field’s evidence well (p.195). However, he is also clear in pointing out that for this to be achieved, ‘we must trespass to answer most important questions’ (p. 217). Indeed, what is required ‘is an easement or right of way for travel beyond our fields’ boundaries […] secured by our collaboration with cross-field experts’ (p. 217).

My central claim here is that some pre-service teachers classify philosophers as epistemic trespassers—in other words, scholars who need to stay in their own lane—since much of what the philosophers theorise about, at least in the minds of the teachers, has little or nothing to do with the real world of classroom practice. Only practitioners can engage meaningfully in responsible and effective inquiry since they are in the trenches, so to speak. Such teachers fail to see the merits of transdisciplinary, hybridised, zetetic practices that can generate novel insights from the cross-fertilisation of ideas and concepts—some of which will have important ramifications for teaching practice, while others will not. In the minds of the teachers, then, only those who are doing the job on a daily basis with some degree of success are authorities who are worth listening to. Philosophers, by contrast, are spectators, who offer judgements on matters in which they are not competent and about which they have no real knowledge. Naturally, there is a prima facie case for this way of thinking. Nonetheless, it is ultimately a mistaken view. Most notably, it neglects the fundamentally hybridised nature of education—and, as a result, insights from other fields or domains tend to be excluded. Let us consider a simple example to explain why this is the case. Soccer players typically want to learn from soccer managers who have played the game at a high level, not from those who have learned it from the book. Yet, there are several examples of managers who did not play the game at such a high level but are still considered expert coaches. Second, a professional soccer player might think that they have nothing to learn from a yoga instructor—but, as numerous players have testified, yoga has certainly prolonged, and even in some cases enhanced, the professional careers of a number of players.

As such, it has to be accepted that education is a hybridised field of inquiry. Proof for this assertion can be found by virtue of closer examination of the range of scholarly pursuits which typically interest philosophers of education, all of which involve hybridised modes of inquiry:

  • Normative inquiries directed at determining the merits of challenging the conceptualisation of schools as institutions of social reproduction and normalisation;

  • Ethical and non-paternalist curricular content-generation in contested curricula spaces (such as sex education, religious education, values education, and cancel culture);

  • The pursuit of character education outcomes;

  • The nature and scope of teacher agency in diverse state-regulated settings;

  • Transformative experiences and epiphanies;

  • Effective means–ends pedagogies and ‘what works’ discourses;

  • Learnification discourses and agendas;

  • Moral practices aimed at avoiding harms in teacher–student pedagogical relationships;

  • Authentically integrating student voice;

  • Operationalising social models of critically reflective practices;

  • Assessments measuring what someone values, as opposed to what truly matters;

  • Directive or non-directive moral teachings;

  • Proportional and defensible modes of punishment;

  • Gamification ideologies in education;

  • The debunking of flourishing as an aim of education; and/or,

  • Unpacking the principles underpinning the teaching of competing value systems.

Clearly, then, there is a practically orientated dimension to philosophical inquiries that involve pursuing and marshalling compelling evidence relating to the above considerations, which are captured at an initial level in policy documentation, mandatory frameworks, and so on. In specific relation to classroom practice, such evidence informs research handbooks, the contents of textbooks, and teacher-led lesson-sharing platforms. One way of demonstrating relevant expertise in teaching is the capacity to do it well—that is, to teach with a high degree of success, where ‘success’ is defined as the frequency at which students attain suitably aligned learner outcomes based on effective instruction.Footnote 6 But this is not the only way. Although it is a valid goal for pedagogues, it is ultimately a technicist conception, which has been reduced to the accumulation of procedural know-how, employed in sanitised educational settings, in pursuit of narrowly predefined behaviourist learner outcomes.

For these educators, the reduction of learning to the mechanistic employment of purportedly ‘reliable’ pedagogical strategies that ultimately depend on probability theory (success being a measure of the outcomes achieved) betrays a myopic understanding of fundamental educative processes, not least because students come to school with much more than the schoolbags on their backs. Verstehen (understanding) and phronesis (practical judgement/wisdom) are therefore required. These are, I suggest, what pre-service teachers overlook or neglect by pursuing such a technicist mastery of pedagogy. Verstehen, in its strongest incarnation, entails subjectively reliving the experience of the social actor or rethinking his or her thoughts, while its weaker forms merely involve reconstructing a rationale for acting. Phronêsis,Footnote 7 on the other hand, ‘is a state accompanied by reason, which is true, which is about the good and bad things for humans, and which is conducive to action’ (EN VI.5 1140b4-6; 20- 21). More generally, one can characterize phronêsis as the virtue of excellent decision-making. Acting virtuously, then, being a phronimos, consists in doing the right thing, to the right person, in the right amount, at the right time, with the right aim in view and in the right way. Together, Verstehen and phronesis are required in order to accurately discern which rules (and which reasons), if any, should be regarded as being decisive in a given situation (Dunne 1993). I adopt a pluralist, hybrid account for this paper, with the context ultimately determining whether strong or weak forms are required for proper understanding.Footnote 8

More generally, ‘understanding’ relates a subject of understanding (S) to an object that is to be understood. In everyday attributions of understanding, S typically denotes an individual human being. However, in a world in which we are epistemic co-dependents, in which teaching acts as a catalyst for deepened cognition and extended collaborative inquiry, we can also speak about ‘group understandings’. In this respect, understanding requires more than accepting or believing, or even knowing, isolated pieces of information; rather the agent must also work out the connections between those pieces. What is necessary, then, is the ‘grasping of explanatory and other coherence-making relationships in a large and comprehensive body of information’ (Kvanvig 2003, p. 192), ‘seeing the way things fit together’ (Riggs 2003, p. 218), and to ‘grasp or see how the various parts of the model relate to one another’ (Grimm 2011, p. 88).

Indeed, scholars such as Alison Hills (2009) have specified that understanding, in the right sort of circumstances, requires an individual to successfully to go through the following stages (pp. 102–3):

  1. (1)

    Follow some explanation of why p given by someone else;

  2. (2)

    Explain why p in your own words;

  3. (3)

    Draw the conclusion that p (or that probably p) from the information that q;

  4. (4)

    Draw the conclusion that p* (or that probably p*) from the information that q*

    (where p* and q* are similar but not identical to p and q);

  5. (5)

    Given the information that p, give the right explanation, q; and

  6. (6)

    Given the information that p*, give the right explanation, q*.

Conditions (3) and (5) involve the ability to apply the explanation to a particular case (see Dunne 1993), while conditions (4) and (6) refer to the ability to judge similar or counterfactual cases. Meanwhile, condition (4) is the ability to answer ‘what if’ questions. Because students come through the school gates with irreducibly complex life stories, inner lifeworlds, and clusters of fluid dispositions and characterological, cognitive, axiological, and ontological potentialities, most of which do not always fall into neat predetermined categories, it soon becomes clear to see the extent to which Verstehen is required in the successful navigation of modern learning environments. What is more, students remain free not to learn as intended, not to listen, to refuse to engage, to refuse to be interested, and so on—ultimately, to not ‘play by the rules’. Challenging as this is likely to sound, student agency is not something that can be bent into shape or moulded according to the arbitrary desires of teachers, unless we forsake the limited autonomy of students altogether (who obviously do not have full autonomy while they are at school). Similarly, not every student will conform to or submit to narrowly defined determinist behaviourist principles in the form of black and white learner outcomes. What educators occasionally forget, as Harðarson (2012, p. 224) sagaciously points out, is that ‘a successful course of education serves purposes that cannot be completely stated in advance’. A more textured and nuanced understanding is therefore required in order to move away from predetermined ‘banking’ approaches to education, which does not perceive the individual minds of individual students merely as bank accounts to be filled—a dehumanising process in which “a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator” (Freire 1970, p. 75).

Contrary to EPPs, proponents of ARE maintain that responsibly responding to evidence, vis-à-vis teaching as well as education more broadly, requires a richer level of understanding,Footnote 9 beyond the ability to replicate good practice at the level of an ‘executive technician’ (Winch 2017). Winch et al. (2015) further identify this capacity as ‘professional judgement’ and claim that it has an important theoretical dimension, which has often been misunderstood. In order to illustrate this point, it is helpful to draw on Francis Bacon’s distinction between ‘experts’ and ‘the learned’. On his account, ‘expert men can execute, & perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots, and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned’ (p. 163). Later on, he suggests that study is a means of perfecting experience, emphasising that study must be the handmaiden of experience. On this view, expertise sits at the midpoint of a continuum between two extremes: a person who simply has experience in a domain, by virtue of doing X, and a person who studies that domain in a more scholarly sense. For Bacon, the intersection of the two is the sweet spot. In this sense, an expert is someone whose experience has been enhanced, but not yet entirely subsumed under study (Watson 2021). In short, the most profitable way forward involves a triangulated approach that exploits the insights from both modes of inquiry, working in concert. When the two extremes remain isolated and insulated from one another, their cross-fertilisation is understandably minimised. As such, it is clear to see the consequences of situations where a practitioner ascribes a credibility deficit to theorists and vice versa.

Another dimension of Ballantyne’s account of expertise concerns having ‘enough relevant skills to evaluate or interpret the field’s evidence well’ (p. 371). Once again, a practical as well as philosophically informed understanding of skill and expertise in teaching has to be considered, given its applied nature and the value of learning from experience (see Ellis and Orchard 2014). Even so, the questions of interpretation and evaluation that expert teachers need to engage with still rely on language and categories that ultimately originate in the abstractions of theory. Given the hybridised nature of the field of education, the evidence in this regard suggests that appropriate interpretations and weightings must be generated and then critically examined, not only by drawing on classroom data and pockets of first-personal experience, but also by taking salient scholarly texts into account, some of which might be routinely dismissed owing to the continuing uncertainties around ‘what has this to do with classroom practice’ and/or identity prejudices stemming from an individual not having taught for several years or not even having taught at the respective level at all. In other words, I am arguing that not all of the important insights into classroom practice—or education more broadly—can come from practitioners alone, either in an epistemic or a moral sense. Indeed, teachers are more than mere deliverers of content or transmitters of knowledge. If this were not the case, Chat-GPT 4 would by now be a professional—or existential—threat. And it goes without saying that there are complex hybridised epistemic–moral dimensions at the centre of their professional practice. Potential knowers are vulnerable, interpersonal dynamics are not always straightforward to negotiate successfully, and pedagogy is by no means value-neutral.Footnote 10

Consider a researcher in educational psychology, for example, who is well placed to share their expertise with teachers, based on rigorously designed and executed studies that draw on the authoritative literature in the field. This researcher may or may not teach well in a higher education context, but in any case, the true value of their contribution to teacher education will be a consequence of their scholarly excellence, rather than their classroom know-how. They may, for instance, focus on character education in their teaching, which would involve surveying the psychological literature on finkish dispositions and situationism. They may question the conditional understandings of these dispositions—something that C. B. Martin first called to our attention many years earlier, showing that ‘finkish’ dispositions are dispositions that, when put to the test, are not manifested, but instead disappear. On this basis, then, ‘if x is finkishly disposed to give response r to stimulus s, it is not so that if x were subjected to stimulus r, x would give response z; so finkish dispositions afford a counter‐example to the simplest conditional analysis of dispositions’ (Lewis 1997, p. 143). Such an understanding poses an obvious challenge to character education, which is built upon dispositional principles, with moral and intellectual virtues leading to affective aretai being manifested (see Darnell and Kristjannson 2021). Similarly, this researcher may also choose to work on situationism, which, in a nutshell, states that there is no reliable heart–mind trait or virtue that will reliably manifest itself under operative conditions, since the context changes an agent’s dispositional leanings, even under favourable operative conditions where the expected behaviour or manifestation is X (Fairweather and Alfano 2017). On this basis, an honest person may end up being dishonest in some contexts. This kind of scholarly input may cause teachers to question reductionist behaviourist principles, according to which a stimulus X results in a behaviour Y. It may also, arguably, encourage them to become more critical of specific curricular innovations. Indeed, surely a strong case can be made that teachers cannot be deemed experts in their craft without being exposed to knowledge and understanding that ultimately deepens their perception of what it means to be a critically reflective teacher?

It is not clear, however, that policy-makers seeking to reform teacher education in Ireland (following England) with a view to reducing the theoretical elements fully grasp or see how both fields are, in fact, complementary. And this extends to the pre-service teachers in question, too. Indeed, I contend on a conceptual level (because I do not offer empirical evidence) that this phenomenon of vice-charging, with philosophers being identified as epistemic trespassers, is pervasive among pre-service teachers. I furthermore suggest that this mistaken vice-attribution is rooted in wrongful credibility deficits that have been affixed to philosophers working in and alongside teacher education programmes. I interpret this as a form of testimonial injustice, as an epistemic harm of sorts, insofar as philosophers of education are being wronged in their capacity as knowers (Fricker 2007). To put the matter more precisely, identity-based credibility deficits of this nature rest on pre-judgements about what sort of person is worth listening to and, as a consequence, what sort of learning is worth pursuing and acquiring.

Any worthwhile speculation about the possible causes of this wrongful attribution has to wrestle with the mistakes that students often make about the nature of disciplinary boundaries—and in particular about the connections between professional practice and education. I suggest that such errors hinge on category mistakes. Some pre-service teachersFootnote 11 believe that the world of professional practice stands totally apart from the lofty world of the theorist, with the result that the two domains must necessarily remain distinct. They perceive the world of the professional practitioner as comprising a specific domain of expertise, with clear disciplinary boundaries excluding anything not considered relevant or directly applicable to successful classroom practice (see Kirschner and Hendrick 2020). Philosophers of education, by contrast, view the world of the professional practitioner as being fundamentally interdisciplinary, almost rhizomatic, since education and practice are hybridised fields. These, accordingly, require hybridised modes of inquiry, which, in turn, require combined evidence from more than one domain in order to rightfully determine what ought to be accepted, believed, or done.

The charge of ‘epistemic trespassing’ that has been levelled against philosophers of education can therefore be explained as stemming from a category mistake. The professional practitioner only considers the testimonies of practising experts and admirable pedagogues as carrying evidential weight. By contrast, the work of the philosopher is adjudged to be irrelevant—a credibility deficit is assigned to their testimony, which is subsequently relegated as having little to no evidential value. Such a category mistake, as previously suggested, is largely attributable to the fact that some pre-service teachers fail to view professional practice as a fundamentally interdisciplinary endeavour. What is more, they also fail to perceive hybridised issues, such as, for instance, the necessity of an exemplary practitioner drawing on evidence from a range of different fields and employing zetetic techniques.

Admittedly, this problem is partially a result of disciplinary boundaries not always being clear cut. Indeed, the constitution of an ‘exemplary practitioner’ not only involves the pedagogue and the philosopher, but also the parent, the psychologist, and the sociologist. Similarly, the question ‘How can teachers help students to flourish?’ is also a question that concerns parents, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. Without doubt, there are occasions where fields overlap or converge. A simple question makes as much clear. But hybridised questions require a triangulated response, which results in the confusion that contributes to philosophers being wrongfully classified as epistemic trespassers. Indeed, as previously emphasised, the above questions about expertise necessitate (1) the evidence that is required to answer a question reliably or responsibly coming from two or more fields, and (2) the skills required to evaluate the evidence coming from two or more field (Ballantyne 2019).Footnote 12 As such,only a coordinated approach, which draws on the different findings from different domains, will satisfy the requirement of responsible and effective inquiry into an issue of understanding. Given that the experts in one field will not have the same skills and not be able to offer the same evidence as the experts in another field, and given, moreover, that the skills and evidence that constitute ‘expertise’ will differ within each domain, it stands to reason that experts ought to make efforts to answer such questions using resources germane to their own field or discipline.

Mistake 2: Misunderstanding Standpoint Epistemology

The second mistake is that SE has been misunderstood as being coextensive with FPA and expertise. Broadly construed, standpoint theorists tend to make some combination of the following four claims, which both refine and extend this basic idea. Note that I am taking this theory as applying not only to marginalisation, but also to FPA and the evidential weight of professional ‘expertise’ and authority.

  • The situated knowledge thesis agents are necessarily socially situated. Their knowledge reflects this, since what they know remains necessarily incomplete and is shaped by their contingent histories, their cultural and axiological backgrounds and assumptions and their epistemic resources (see Wylie 2003; Táíwò 2020).

  • The inversion thesis those who are socially marginalised are epistemically advantaged in some critical respects—they may have access to better or more relevant evidence (Collins 1986; Wylie 2003; Kukla 2021); they may develop clarifying conceptual resources (Wylie 2012; Toole 2020); their experiences and values may prompt them to consider alternative hypotheses that are often overlooked (Harding 1991; Wylie and Nelson 2007); or they may produce accounts of the world that are better suited to envisioning more just social relations (Collins 2002; Pohlhaus 2002).

  • The achievement thesis standpoints are not a given or, indeed, automatic. Experience of marginalisation or a phenomenon X (say, teaching, in this case) does not entail a more lucid or accurate understanding of professional epistemic practices or the world. Standpoints are the fruits of epistemic and emotional labour (Harding 1991; Collins 2002; Pohlhaus 2002; Wylie 2003).

  • The Methodological Imperative (some) inquiries should take the lives of the marginalised or the situated experience (teaching) as their starting points, because those lives provide resources that enable more accurate investigations of the structure of our social world (Bright 2018; Táíwò 2020).

Although SE may involve elements of each of these desiderata, there is an argument that pre-service teachers subscribe to the ‘automatic privilege thesis’, according to which SE is coextensive with FPA. The ‘automatic privilege thesis’ suggests that direct professional experience of a phenomenon X is sufficient for knowing better. Others have taken this further, suggesting that direct professional experience of a phenomenon X is not sufficient, but necessary. Despite persistent misunderstandings to the contrary, standpoint theorists are not committed to an ‘automatic privilege thesis’ (Wylie 2003, p. 27). For such a position to hold true, those who occupy specific social positions with direct professional experience of a phenomenon X (such as teaching) would have to automatically know more or, indeed, know better, by virtue of their particular experience and social location. Briana Toole (2021) has cleared up some of this confusion with a measured appraisal:

A standpoint thus emerges as a critical perspective on the social world that takes as its starting point the social location of some particular group. For instance, women, and the experiences of women qua women, form the basis of a feminist standpoint. However, inclusion in a standpoint is not limited to those who form the basis of that standpoint; a feminist standpoint may include men who have participated in feminist consciousness-raising and may exclude women who have not. Thus, the situated knowledge made available from a particular standpoint is in principle accessible to those who do not occupy the social location that forms the basis of that standpoint. (p. 342)

I suggest that that misunderstanding that Toole clarifies in the above passage is partly what leads pre-service teachers to label philosophers of education as epistemic trespassers: because they are not teachers in exactly the same way or because they have not been in a classroom for a certain length of time, their testimonies and their interpretations of educational phenomena are automatically discarded, since they are non-classroom teachers. To recap, I consider this to be a mistake for several reasons. First, learning and teaching, the related activities that constitute the life of an educator, involve more than merely achieving successful learner outcomes. Every student is a growing person with an irreducibly complex lived experience, so the professional interactions of teachers must involve relationships of care. To use Freirean (1972) language, the minds of students are not simply mental bank accounts that are waiting to be filled. Rather, there is an art to teaching well, to embodying Verstehen and understanding students as more than fungible cognitive processors who are responding to stimuli in certain predetermined ways. An educator stretches the mind, expands its intellectual and moral horizons, and teases out that which resides within, while a technicist, to use contemporary parlance, focuses on parts in isolation, without ever fully grasping that the learning subject is more than the sum of its parts—more, indeed, than one person could possibly conceive.

Mistake 3: The Bewitchment of ‘Rational’ Ignorance

The third mistake that some pre-service teachers make can be explained by their misunderstanding of the added value that is inherent in what they may perceive as ‘rational ignorance’. Rational ignorance is a term that is used to describe situations in which the costs of acquiring knowledge outweigh the potential benefits of possessing it (Stigler 1961). Naturally enough, sourcing, assimilating, decoding, interpreting, and scrutinising data all have opportunity costs. Students value their time, their effort, and their cognitive abilities as finite and precious resources. Data have no satiation point. Because the seeking out and sifting of information is a costly activity, we are forced to make choices, even to ‘satisfice’,Footnote 13 on occasion (Simon 1956). As such, it makes sense for a rational decision maker only to expend resources up to a point where the expected returns will exceed the expenditure (Stigler 1961). For this reason, preserving one’s ignorance owing to the anticipated costs of being informed outweighing the anticipated benefits of being informed is a natural consequence of the fact that we are finite creatures with limited time, energy, interests, and cognitive resources. I contend that this is, quite plausibly, a justification that some students are likely to proffer in order to explain their lack of engagement with philosophical analyses of education practice, broadly construed.

What is more, I also suggest that a related but distinct form of ignorance is able to explain why some pre-service teachers actively avoid domain-specific knowledge and understanding in settings relating to the philosophy of education, likely due to their having a pre-existing identity prejudice that wrongfully ascribes a credibility deficit to the testimonies of philosophers. I frame this as faux rational ignorance. I recalibrate Stigler’s original definition in order to conceptualise faux rational ignorance as ‘attitudes and practices where the anticipated costs of acquiring knowledge outweigh the purported benefits of possessing it’, there being a new emphasis on practices. I suggest that pre-service teachers engage in faux rational ignorance at times because they mistakenly see the anticipated costs of knowledge acquisition in domain A as outweighing the purported benefits of possessing that knowledge. In this case, then, their ignorance is not rational at all. By contrast, such ‘active ignorance’ is likely to be fed by epistemic vices such as laziness, closed-mindedness, and myopia. Scholars such as Medina (2013) have classified active ignorance as.

an ignorance that occurs with the active participation of the subject and with a battery of defense mechanisms, an ignorance that is not easy to undo and correct, for this requires retraining the reconfiguration of epistemic attitudes and habits—as well as social change. (p. 39)

In simpler terms, Golman et al. (2017, p. 97) claim that it is a form of active information avoidance. To be rightly considered active, it must satisfy the following two conditions: ‘(1) the individual is aware that the information is available, and (2) the individual has free access to the information or would avoid the information even if access were free’. Condition 1 stipulates that ignorance can only ever be a choice in circumstances where individuals are aware that potential knowledge exists, while condition 2 makes it clear that, even if any acquisitional costs were removed, those exhibiting active information avoidance would still choose to remain ignorant. Recent work in agnotology has labelled this behaviour ‘deliberate ignorance’—that is, actively choosing not to know X. According to Hertwig and Engel (2016), it is a ‘conscious choice not to seek or use knowledge or information’ (p. 3). In my view, this is one of the most concerning issues in initial teacher education (ITE) programmes, where the students (and some of the facultyFootnote 14) downplay or degrade the new knowledge and understanding that can potentially be acquired from disciplines that do not have immediate and direct causal relationships with what they judge to be ‘the mechanics of classroom practice’.

Mistake 4: Moving Beyond Crude Intellectualist Views About Skills and Expertise

The fourth mistake that I suggest as plausibly applying to pre-service teachers centres on misunderstandings relating to skills and expertise. ‘Knowledge-how’ is a term that describes the knowledge that one has when one knows how to do something—such as dance salsa, fit a door, or drive a car. Initially introduced by Ryle (1949), the traditional view of knowledge-how comprised two components: (1) a negative claim (anti-intellectualism) that knowledge-how is not any kind of knowledge (or any other propositional attitude state); and (2) a positive claim (abilitism or dispositionalism) that knowledge-how is some kind of ability or complex dispositional state. This traditional Rylean view remained a largely unquestioned feature of philosophical orthodoxy for a long time, until the arrival of ‘Knowing How’, a paper by Stanley and Williamson (2001), which defends a view called intellectualism. Contra Ryle, Stanley and Williamson maintained that ‘knowing-how’ is ultimately a form of ‘knowing-that’. On this view, ‘knowing how to’ is a matter of knowing a proposition that answers the embedded ‘how to’ question.

Naturally, there are obvious parallels between intellectualism as it relates to skill and intellectualism as it relates to know-how. Although they are distinct proposals, occasionally they are wrongly conflated, because intellectualists sometimes assume that skilled performance always depends on know-how. Stanley and Williamson (2001, 2017), who are proponents of the latter view, have challenged the lingering Ryle-inspired view that knowing-how and knowing-that are distinct. Their intellectualist account of know-how, which is posited in contradistinction to Ryle and others, specifies that “when you learned how to swim, what happened was you learned some facts about swimming” (Stanley 2011, p. 7). According to Stanley, what makes this action an exercise of skill, rather than a mere reflex, is the fact that it is guided by “the intellectual apprehension of truths” (2011, p. 174). In summary, intellectualism as it relates to know-how is the view that know-how is ultimately reducible to propositional knowledge (see Brown 1970), while intellectualism as it relates to skill involves the contention that skilled action is, without exception, guided only by propositional knowledge. For the purpose of the current analysis, not much hinges on this distinction in philosophical terms, but it nonetheless matters, because pre-service teachers may conceivably subscribe to principles that are broadly aligned to either of these views.

I consider the intellectualist view to be mistaken. In order to lay out my argument, I identify two key objections to the perception of teaching and learning as constituting a science (a learning science) and seek to demonstrate how a cognitive-focused reductionist view of both practices relying on thin understandings of intellectualism is a mistake. It is important to be clear: I do not deny that obvious merits are to be derived from much of the work in cognitive science (see Willingham 2017; Kirschner and Hendrick 2020). Rather, I seek to establish a prima facie case that some pre-service teachers overestimate the epistemic authority of resources that have been generated in cognitive psychology when it comes to the so-called ‘science’ of teaching and learning. I begin by discussing the phenomenon of ‘the science of learning’, before considering two key objections to its majesty within ITE settings.

The first objection that I consider is what I call the ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’ fallacy. This is the view—which is often based on a misunderstanding of the reach and reliability of operationalised cognitive science principles and misconceptions relating to intellectualism in the form of skilled performance—that with a set of ingredients (students, textbooks, teaching resources, a sensible pedagogical approach, and knowing the tools of the trade) and by closely following the recipe (a lesson plan), you can be reasonably sure that your lesson (and its outcomes) will work out as planned. This view is highly influenced by input–output models, the practice of teaching being reduced to following a recipe, with the result that skilled performance is intelligent only by virtue of it being guided by the agent’s propositional knowledge of a method that can be successfully enacted (Stanley and Williamson 2001, 2017; Pavese 2017).

I suggest that this intellectualist ‘Ready Steady Cook’ fallacy is a pervasive problem in ITE. Indeed, some students judge effective teaching as being ultimately reducible to a series of sub-skills—learnable propositions that are acquired during a finite period of time. What is more, in some cases effective teaching is further reduced to a tools-of-the-trade approach, where knowledge and use of X in situation Y gives a good probability of obtaining Z in the context of the classroom.Footnote 15 Given the existence of clear incremental guidelines governing the acquisition and continuous refinement of the use of such tools, as well as clear conditions for success, this is often deemed the best path forward in terms of professional development.Footnote 16On view, however, the lifeworlds of students are fungible; they are cognitive processors who conform to behaviourist principles of cause and effect, so that effective teaching becomes simply a matter of picking the correct pedagogical means (with the most probability of success) in order to achieve externally imposed predetermined ends. I liken this conception of teaching to painting by numbers: as long as you follow the numbers, you will paint the picture that someone else has imagined before you. Similarly, as with Ready, Steady, Cook, you have limited ingredients, limited equipment, and a time limit. Success is just a matter of picking out the right tool and following the instructions correctly.

My contention here is that teaching should not be reduced to universal principles of content delivery, which are based on specific facts about what good or effective teaching looks like or amounts to. Practical judgement, or phronesis (Aristotle 2011: EN Bk. VI), is ultimately what determines success when it comes to understanding the individual needs of students, managing complex classroom dynamics, making dynamic real-time pedagogical adjustments, and adeptly handling unexpected and atypical situations in order to avoid procrustean applications of the general rule. In other words, imitating without understanding—or blindly following a recipe—risks reducing pedagogy to the mindless application of generalised principles. To further elaborate, effective teaching requires a deep understanding of the nature of pedagogical relationships, and the intricacies that are involved in motivating students both intrinsically and extrinsically, in order to foster a positive and respectful learning environment. All of these do not come easily. And although helpful principles are available, there is no instruction manual that works infallibly across all contexts. An effective teacher requires an authentic embodied virtue, strong interpersonal skills, and the disposition as well as the ability to connect meaningfully with students on a personal level.

Mistake 5: Uncritically Emulating TikTok Teacher Exemplars Based on the Allure of Insta Results

Following on from the above, the second objection to ‘the science of learning’ that I consider is the uncritical and even deferential compliance in modelling the apparently exemplary pedagogues who appear on TikTok and Instagram, sharing their professional successes via social media platforms. Examples of the reach of this phenomenon can be seen in profiles of @misskindergarden, for instance, with acolytes totalling more than 165,000.Footnote 17 Once again, it is important for me to be clear about the scope of my claim here. These platforms are helpful to many teachers, despite the risks relating to cults of personality. That much is not in doubt. Even so, pre-service teachers may harbour the mistaken view that emulating the skilled performance of such exemplars is an attainable professional goal—one that they may believe will make them exemplary teachers, too, as and when they learn to skilfully imitate their procedural knowledge correctly. On this view, these social media accounts can provide a roadmap for such endeavours. Again, for some, there may be an element of truth in this. For others, however, attempts to emulate unattainable exemplars without any critical thought, leading to copying without understanding, can be harmful. In this instance, the harm appears in the form of NIWB, or Negative Influence on Well-Being, where ‘what it is for an event e to harm an individual S is for e to adversely affect S’s well-being’ (Johansson and Risberg 2023, p. 3).

I suggest that the exaltation of TikTok and Instagram exemplars—based on highly curated and idealised professional personas who carry out their practice in heavily pre-rehearsed and unrealistic scenarios, which are heavily edited and in no way representative of real-world experience—comes at the cost of pre-service and early career teachers engaging with relatable and attainable exemplars, who make mistakes and are not immediately sure how to diagnose what has gone wrong (see Kotsonis and Dunne 2023). What is more, those practitioners who seek to imitate or emulate the supposed achievements of unattainable and unrelatable pedagogical exemplars also risk adversely affecting their well-being, because their efforts, no matter how hard they try, are likely to fall short of the curated and idealised practices that are to be found on social media platforms. Similarly, as previously mentioned, given that such teachers are likely to imitate without truly understanding, such practices also raise serious questions about educators taking on roles like ‘actors’—professionals who may know their lines, yet fail to fully grasp their professional roles or, indeed, fail to truly understand what those lines actually mean.

The nature of upward social comparison, where unfavourable comparisons to those who we deem to be superior to ourselves (e.g. a better teacher) give rise to chronic forms of comparison anxiety, is again likely to have damaging effects on well-being (see Monin et al. 2008; Huang 2022). Accordingly, attempting to emulate exemplars who you do not fully understand—false idols—is a recipe for disaster. Recent empirical studies have shown that upward social comparisons on social media sites generate feelings of envy and can also lead to increased anxiety, depression, and loneliness (see Pera 2018; Li 2019; Verduyn et al. 2020). Negative effects on well-being are even more likely in the realm of TikTok, where pre-service teachers habitually compare themselves to the heavily curated and idealised professional personas that are portrayed, most of which are by no means representative of the many imperfect teachers who are carrying out their imperfect professional practice in a range of imperfect settings.

Conclusions

This paper has covered a lot of ground. Its central claim is that pre-service teachers engage in epistemically exclusionary practices that have the effect of locking philosophers of education out of meaning-making expertise-informed discourses in ITE settings. Five of the key mistakes that pre-service teachers are likely to make have been identified and explained: (1) wrongfully designating philosophers of education as epistemic trespassers; (2) misunderstanding SE; (3) the bewitchment of faux rational ignorance; (4) assuming crude intellectualist views of expertise; and (5) uncritically emulating TikTok teacher exemplars without fully understanding them, nor grasping how such particularities may or may not be able to come into harmony with their own context-specific circumstances. Based on the analyses provided, hopefully the importance of the topic has been made clear and potentially leads to a richer and collaborative series of critical conversations about teacher education and the foundation disciplines.