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40 Philosophy of Education Examples, Plus How To Write Your Own

Learn how to define and share your teaching philosophy.

These days, it’s become common for educators to be asked what their personal teaching philosophy is. Whether it’s for a job interview, a college class, or to share with your principal, crafting a philosophy of education can seem like a daunting task. So set aside some time to consider your own teaching philosophy (we’ll walk you through it), and be sure to look at philosophy of education examples from others (we’ve got those too!).

What is a philosophy of education?

Before we dive into the examples, it’s important to understand the purpose of a philosophy of education. This statement will provide an explanation of your teaching values and beliefs. Your teaching philosophy is ultimately a combination of the methods you studied in college and any professional experiences you’ve learned from since. It incorporates your own experiences (negative or positive) in education.

Many teachers have two versions of their teaching philosophy: a long form (a page or so of text) and a short form. The longer form is useful for job application cover letters or to include as part of your teacher portfolio. The short form distills the longer philosophy into a couple of succinct sentences that you can use to answer teacher job interview questions or even share with parents.

What’s the best teaching philosophy?

Here’s one key thing to remember: There’s no one right answer to “What’s your teaching philosophy?” Every teacher’s will be a little bit different, depending on their own teaching style, experiences, and expectations. And many teachers find that their philosophies change over time, as they learn and grow in their careers.

When someone asks for your philosophy of education, what they really want to know is that you’ve given thought to how you prepare lessons and interact with students in and out of the classroom. They’re interested in finding out what you expect from your students and from yourself, and how you’ll apply those expectations. And they want to hear examples of how you put your teaching philosophy into action.

What’s included in strong teaching philosophy examples?

Depending on who you ask, a philosophy of education statement can include a variety of values, beliefs, and information. As you build your own teaching philosophy statement, consider these aspects, and write down your answers to the questions.

Purpose of Education (Core Beliefs)

What do you believe is the purpose of teaching and learning? Why does education matter to today’s children? How will time spent in your classroom help prepare them for the future?

Use your answers to draft the opening statement of your philosophy of education, like these:

• Education isn’t just about what students learn, but about learning how to learn.
• A good education prepares students to be productive and empathetic members of society.
• Teachers help students embrace new information and new ways of seeing the world around them.
• A strong education with a focus on fundamentals ensures students can take on any challenges that come their way.
• I believe education is key to empowering today’s youth, so they’ll feel confident in their future careers, relationships, and duties as members of their community.
• Well-educated students are open-minded, welcoming the opinions of others and knowing how to evaluate information critically and carefully.

Teaching Style and Practices

Do you believe in student-led learning, or do you like to use the Socratic method instead? Is your classroom a place for quiet concentration or sociable collaboration? Do you focus on play-based learning, hands-on practice, debate and discussion, problem-solving, or project-based learning? All teachers use a mix of teaching practices and styles, of course, but there are some you’re likely more comfortable with than others. Possible examples:

• I frequently use project-based learning in my classrooms because I believe it helps make learning more relevant to my students. When students work together to address real-world problems, they use their [subject] knowledge and skills and develop communication and critical thinking abilities too.
• Play-based learning is a big part of my teaching philosophy. Kids who learn through play have more authentic experiences, exploring and discovering the world naturally in ways that make the process more engaging and likely to make a lasting impact.
• In my classroom, technology is key. I believe in teaching students how to use today’s technology in responsible ways, embracing new possibilities and using technology as a tool, not a crutch.
• While I believe in trying new teaching methods, I also find that traditional learning activities can still be effective. My teaching is mainly a mix of lecture, Socratic seminar, and small-group discussions.
• I’m a big believer in formative assessment , taking every opportunity to measure my students’ understanding and progress. I use tools like exit tickets and Kahoot! quizzes, and watch my students closely to see if they’re engaged and on track.
• Group work and discussions play a major role in my instructional style. Students who learn to work cooperatively at a young age are better equipped to succeed in school, in their future careers, and in their communities.

Students and Learning Styles

Why is it important to recognize all learning styles? How do you accommodate different learning styles in your classroom? What are your beliefs on diversity, equity, and inclusion? How do you ensure every student in your classroom receives the same opportunities to learn? How do you expect students to behave, and how do you measure success?

Sample teaching philosophy statements about students might sound like this:

• Every student has their own unique talents, skills, challenges, and background. By getting to know my students as individuals, I can help them find the learning styles that work best for them, now and throughout their education.
• I find that motivated students learn best. They’re more engaged in the classroom and more diligent when working alone. I work to motivate students by making learning relevant, meaningful, and enjoyable.
• We must give every student equal opportunities to learn and grow. Not all students have the same support outside the classroom. So as a teacher, I try to help bridge gaps when I see them and give struggling students a chance to succeed academically.
• I believe every student has their own story and deserves a chance to create and share it. I encourage my students to approach learning as individuals, and I know I’m succeeding when they show a real interest in showing up and learning more every day.
• In my classroom, students take responsibility for their own success. I help them craft their own learning goals, then encourage them to evaluate their progress honestly and ask for help when they need it.
• To me, the best classrooms are those that are the most diverse. Students learn to recognize and respect each other’s differences, celebrating what each brings to the community. They also have the opportunity to find common ground, sometimes in ways that surprise them.

How do I write my philosophy of education?

Think back to any essay you’ve ever written and follow a similar format. Write in the present tense; your philosophy isn’t aspirational, it’s something you already live and follow. This is true even if you’re applying for your first teaching job. Your philosophy is informed by your student teaching, internships, and other teaching experiences.

Lead with your core beliefs about teaching and learning. These beliefs should be reflected throughout the rest of your teaching philosophy statement.

Then, explain your teaching style and practices, being sure to include concrete examples of how you put those practices into action. Transition into your beliefs about students and learning styles, with more examples. Explain why you believe in these teaching and learning styles, and how you’ve seen them work in your experiences.

A long-form philosophy of education statement usually takes a few paragraphs (not generally more than a page or two). From that long-form philosophy, highlight a few key statements and phrases and use them to sum up your teaching philosophy in a couple of well-crafted sentences for your short-form teaching philosophy.

Still feeling overwhelmed? Try answering these three key questions:

• Why do you teach?
• What are your favorite, tried-and-true methods for teaching and learning?
• How do you help students of all abilities and backgrounds learn?

If you can answer those three questions, you can write your teaching philosophy!

Short Philosophy of Education Examples

We asked real educators in the We Are Teachers HELPLINE group on Facebook to share their teaching philosophy examples in a few sentences . Here’s what they had to say:

I am always trying to turn my students into self-sufficient learners who use their resources to figure it out instead of resorting to just asking someone for the answers. —Amy J.

My philosophy is that all students can learn. Good educators meet all students’ differentiated learning needs to help all students meet their maximum learning potential. —Lisa B.

I believe that all students are unique and need a teacher that caters to their individual needs in a safe and stimulating environment. I want to create a classroom where students can flourish and explore to reach their full potential. My goal is also to create a warm, loving environment, so students feel safe to take risks and express themselves. —Valerie T.

In my classroom, I like to focus on the student-teacher relationships/one-on-one interactions. Flexibility is a must, and I’ve learned that you do the best you can with the students you have for however long you have them in your class. —Elizabeth Y

I want to prepare my students to be able to get along without me and take ownership of their learning. I have implemented a growth mindset. —Kirk H.

My teaching philosophy is centered around seeing the whole student and allowing the student to use their whole self to direct their own learning. As a secondary teacher, I also believe strongly in exposing all students to the same core content of my subject so that they have equal opportunities for careers and other experiences dependent upon that content in the future. —Jacky B.

All children learn best when learning is hands-on. This works for the high students and the low students too, even the ones in between. I teach by creating experiences, not giving information. —Jessica R.

As teachers, it’s our job to foster creativity. In order to do that, it’s important for me to embrace the mistakes of my students, create a learning environment that allows them to feel comfortable enough to take chances, and try new methods. —Chelsie L.

I believe that every child can learn and deserves the best, well-trained teacher possible who has high expectations for them. I differentiate all my lessons and include all learning modalities. —Amy S.

All students can learn and want to learn. It is my job to meet them where they are and move them forward. —Holli A.

I believe learning comes from making sense of chaos. My job is to design work that will allow students to process, explore, and discuss concepts to own the learning. I need to be part of the process to guide and challenge perceptions. —Shelly G.

I want my students to know that they are valued members of our classroom community, and I want to teach each of them what they need to continue to grow in my classroom. —Doreen G.

Teach to every child’s passion and encourage a joy for and love of education and school. —Iris B.

I believe in creating a classroom culture of learning through mistakes and overcoming obstacles through teamwork. —Jenn B.

It’s our job to introduce our kids to many, many different things and help them find what they excel in and what they don’t. Then nurture their excellence and help them figure out how to compensate for their problem areas. That way, they will become happy, successful adults. —Haley T.

Longer Philosophy of Education Examples

Looking for longer teaching philosophy examples? Check out these selections from experienced teachers of all ages and grades.

• Learning To Wear the Big Shoes: One Step at a Time
• Nellie Edge: My Kindergarten Teaching Philosophy
• Faculty Focus: My Philosophy of Teaching
• Robinson Elementary School: My Teaching Philosophy
• David Orace Kelly: Philosophy of Education
• Explorations in Higher Education: My Teaching Philosophy Statement
• University of Washington Medical School Faculty Teaching Philosophy Statements

Do you have any philosophy of education examples? Share them in the We Are Teachers HELPLINE Group on Facebook!

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What Is a Teaching Philosophy? Examples and Prompts

The life of a teacher is an extremely busy one. From early morning until long after dark, teachers dedicate the better part of their day to their students. Amid the lesson planning, the snack breaks, the recess duty, grading and the myriad other daily tasks, it can be easy to lose sight of the why of teaching. 

Why are you drawn to the classroom, and what is it about your love of teaching that makes it a fulfilling career? What’s the overarching philosophy that guides your teaching practice? Even on the busiest school days, every teacher should be able to explain their “why” by returning to their teaching philosophy.

What Is a Teaching Philosophy Statement?

Teaching philosophy prompts, components of a teaching philosophy statement, formatting your teaching philosophy statement [plus best practices], teaching philosophy examples , faqs about teaching philosophies, helpful resource links.

Simply put, a teaching philosophy is a written statement that includes: 

• Your core belief(s) about the purpose of teaching and learning 
• A high-level description of how you teach 
• An explanation of why you teach that way
• Any primary specializations 
• Examples of your teaching philosophy in practice in the classroom (if space allows)

A teaching philosophy statement should demonstrate that you are purposeful, reflective and goal-oriented each time you stand at the front of your class. Not only does committing this statement to writing help to solidify your own beliefs — it can help you collaborate with other teachers, apply for jobs and even write grant proposals. Ideally, evidence of your philosophy will be apparent in your resume and portfolio content. 

Depending on the context, a teaching philosophy statement can be several sentences or several pages long. You will occasionally be asked to provide some form of this statement when applying for certain academic or administrative positions. Versions of it may also appear as the introduction to your teaching portfolio, as your LinkedIn bio, your resume objective statement or your bio for any accreditations (such as for contributions to a publication, awards, volunteer work, etc.). 

You will likely never be asked to recite it. That said, when sitting for interviews, teaching applicants should demonstrate a clear teaching philosophy through their answers.

Think about your teaching philosophy as your teaching portrait. 

Portraits can look different depending on the subject’s age and life experiences, and a teaching philosophy is no different. Younger teachers may focus on their goals and any areas of interest they studied in college. More senior teachers may update their philosophy statements to reflect their lived experiences in the classroom and how those experiences informed (or resulted from) their teaching philosophy.  

The clearer and more crystallized your teaching philosophy is, the easier it will be to draw upon it in the classroom. Use any combination of the following prompts — organized from immediate to future-facing — to begin writing your own philosophy statement.  

The basics 

Why did you decide to become a teacher? 

What teaching methods do you use?

How do you assess your students’ learning and growth?

Do you follow certain standards?

What are your strongest qualities as a teacher?

Do you have an academic specialization?

Why do you like to teach certain subjects?

How do you use technology in the classroom ?

How do you incorporate new techniques, activities, curriculum and technology into your teaching?

Student advocacy  

How do you motivate your students?

How do you think students learn best? 

How do you approach learners who are struggling?

How do you promote and maintain educational equity ?

How would you describe your interactions with your students?

Preservation in the classroom

What’s your classroom management style ? 

How do you handle stress ?

Describe a time you handled a challenging situation.

The Big Questions 

How do you define learning? 

How do you define teaching? 

What is the purpose of education?

How does education improve society?

Do you believe all students can learn?

What does it take to be a good teacher?

Looking ahead

What goals do you have for your students?

What goals do you have for yourself?

What achievements do you like to see at the end of every school year? 

Why do you continue to want to teach?

How will you continue to grow professionally?

Just like leading students through an essay prompt, begin by creating an outline around a single thesis statement. Build a case for your core belief by giving specific examples and demonstrating an in-depth knowledge of pedagogy. Be sure to connect philosophical statements to practical outcomes or examples; otherwise, you risk the “word salad” problem, wherein the statement sounds nice but means very little to the average reader. (See Formatting Your Teaching Philosophy Statement [Plus Best Practices] below for more tips.)

>>Related Reading: 5 Reasons Why Continuing Education Matters for Educators

Be prepared for your philosophy to change over time — it’s not meant to live in stone! If you feel you need to re-write it, follow the prompts above to recrystallize your beliefs and objectives.

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In a one- or two-sentence teaching philosophy statement, you’ll likely touch on your experience, grade and subject specialization, preferred methods and high-level goals. When crafting a longer statement, it should contain some specific components that paint the clearest picture of your teaching style. 

According to the University of Minnesota , strong teaching philosophy statements share the following elements:

• Offer evidence of practice (specific examples)
• Are student-centered
• Demonstrate reflectiveness
• Demonstrate that the writer values teaching
• Are well written, clear and readable

Long-form teaching philosophy statements should follow the same tried-and-true format as a well-crafted student essay:

Introduction

This first section should include mention of: 

• Your teaching methods
• Any subject or pedagogical specialties
• Your preferred method of assessment
• Your high-level goals for all students

As you go into more detail about your experience and teaching practice, it’s a good idea to give examples that support your philosophy. If you choose to cite any educational researchers or studies, be sure you credit your sources. You may want to touch upon:

• A list of courses you have taught
• A list or short descriptions of effective learning engagements
• What you consider the ideal classroom environment
• Your personal approach to classroom management
• How you facilitate age-appropriate learning
• How you facilitate learning for students of differing abilities
• How you involve students in their own learning and assessment
• An example of a challenge you solved in the classroom 

Conclusion 

A good teacher is never done growing and learning. Wrap up your philosophy statement by describing your objectives, which should include student-oriented academic goals, professional development goals and the ideal outcomes of your teaching career. Your conclusion could include: 

• content mastery
• discovery and knowledge generation
• critical thinking
• problem solving
• individual fulfillment
• self-directed learning
• experiential learning
• engaged citizenship
• …or something else?
• The goals you’ve already achieved as a teacher, as well as those in progress
• What makes you unique as an educator

If you are asked for supplemental materials as part of a teaching job application, you can provide: 

• Peer reviews
• Letters of recommendation
• Students’ comments
• Performance ratings
• Lesson plans
• Teaching activities

Your teaching philosophy is unique to you, so there is no right or wrong way to go about it. That said, there are some best practices to follow when it comes to formatting and readability to make it easy for potential employers and others to read. 

Write in the first person: You’re writing about your own goals, vision and philosophy — it’s okay to use “I” statements! 

Write in the present tense: Your philosophy statement should reflect your current views and experience level, not those you hope to have someday.

Avoid wordiness: Your teaching philosophy should be easy enough for an eighth-grade reader to understand, barring any pedagogical terminology. Making simple concepts more complicated for show is an easy way to lose your reader. Unless you’re going for a university lecturer position, avoid the AP-level vocabulary words on principle. 

Use specific examples: Potential employers — or readers of your academic papers — want to know how your philosophy plays out in the classroom. Your expertise in project-based learning (PBL) will carry more weight if you can describe a specific assignment you designed around PBL, and what the outcome was. 

Skip the clichés: If you say you want to teach to “change the world,” or that you believe “children are our future,” be prepared to give concrete examples of what you mean. Teaching philosophies are not meant to be abstract or even overly aspirational — leave this to motivational posters. 

If you find you are struggling to craft your ideal philosophy statement, ask a colleague to review and highlight possible areas for expansion or clarification. You can even ask this colleague to note any recurring themes they notice, so you can mention them briefly in your introduction. Compare your draft to others in your field with similar specialities or levels of experience and make changes as necessary.

The easiest way to maintain and share your philosophy statement and portfolio is to keep everything in a digital format. Whether that’s an editable PDF you can make small changes or updates to, or a cloud-based folder you can invite others to view, digital is the safest and most portable format.  

Here are some examples of teaching philosophy statements from real teachers. Note that each statement will not follow all of the prompts above, but this is because each statement should be unique and personal to each educator. 

“My philosophy of education is that all children are unique and must have a stimulating educational environment where they can grow mentally, emotionally, and socially. It is my desire to create this type of atmosphere where students can meet their full potential. I will provide a safe environment where students are invited to share their ideas and take risks. They should be able to have choices and let their curiosity direct their learning as I operate as a facilitator.” Mr. B., Language Arts, 5th & 6th grade

Do I need a teaching philosophy to get a teaching job?

Most teachers who earn master’s degrees are asked to write a philosophy statement as part of their program. Whether or not you have a master’s degree in education, you may be asked to provide some form of a teaching philosophy statement when applying for certain academic or administrative positions. You may also want to craft a version of this statement as the introduction to your teaching portfolio, as your LinkedIn bio, your resume objective statement or your bio for any accreditations (such as for contributions to a publication, awards, volunteer work, etc.).

You will likely never be asked to recite your teaching philosophy, and a lack of a formal written philosophy should not bar you from consideration for teaching jobs. That said, when sitting for interviews, teaching applicants should demonstrate a clear teaching philosophy through their answers.

Can I change my teaching philosophy?

Yes! In fact, teachers should expect their philosophy to change with time, experience, and professional and personal development. If at any point you feel you need to re-write your philosophy statement, follow the prompts in this article to recrystallize your beliefs and objectives.

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How To Build Your Personal Philosophy of Education

Written by Maria Kampen

Help inspire your students to love learning with Prodigy's online learning platform.

• Teacher Resources

What is a philosophy of education?

Basic examples of educational philosophies, questions to ask within your own philosophy, prodigy's philosophy of education.

• How to constantly refine your learning process

Why did you become a teacher?

Whether it’s in a job interview or a dinner with friends, chances are you’ve been asked some version of that question. But it’s not always an easy question to answer!

Creating a personal philosophy of education can help you articulate your approach to teaching in a clear, concise way. It can also help you express why you think being a teacher is so important. 

Whether you’re deciding on a course of action in your classroom or answering interview questions, an educational philosophy can help you make sure you’re sticking close to what matters most to you.

A philosophy of education is a set of beliefs and guiding principles for teachers. It helps you make decisions about how you teach your students.

It’s also a useful tool when it comes time to communicate your beliefs to other people, including:

• Your teaching team
• School administrators
• Potential employers in a job interview

Creating a philosophy of education is a great way to set teaching goals for yourself, and can even help you identify areas for further professional development .

Some educational philosophies are short and sweet, while others are one to two pages long and have more detail. Shorter versions are appropriate for a quick summary on a classroom website or resume. 

Every teacher is different — and so are their educational philosophies! 

 Dr. Josh Prieur, director of educational efficacy at Prodigy Education, notes that “as you develop your philosophy of education, a best practice is to lean on research-based best practices and understand how to leverage technology and other resources appropriately.”

His advice is to think of the big picture and imagine all the things surrounding a student, whether it’s social and emotional learning , promoting equity in the classroom or integrating technology . 

As a teacher, you should be able to articulate the research and theories you believe in. “You’ll write many educational philosophies, and you should constantly revisit them,” says Prieur. “ It really is fundamental to who you are as an educator .”

We also asked teachers who use Prodigy what their educational philosophies are. Here’s what they said:

“Every student is capable of learning. Parents and teachers are a team working together for their child’s education. Inquiry and discovery are the basis for lifelong learning. These are things that I believe, without them, teaching would be ineffective or pointless!” | Samantha H., teacher

“My educational philosophy is to guide students to be independent learners who have a lifelong desire to learn and use a growth mindset.” | Diana C., teacher

“I believe the purpose of education is to ensure all students learn and grow to the best of their ability. I believe students learn best when they are shown exactly how to do something and are given a path to follow. Also, students learn through their learning style and as an educator it’s my job to teach them using all three learning styles.” | Carrie H., teacher

Most teachers don’t subscribe to only one hard-lined philosophy in practice. Taking ideas from a few different schools of thought can help strengthen and balance your teaching approach.

Sample teaching philosophies to help you create your own

• Structure and repetition is key. Teachers should work from well-organized plans and schedules in a consistent manner so students have a supportive learning environment.
• Teachers must hold students to high expectations. Every student has the ability to succeed, given the right teaching methods, resources and support. It’s the teacher’s job to encourage students to be diligent and strive for growth in their learning. 
• Students need effective tools and resources. Teachers should have access to a wide variety of excellent learning and educational resources in order to fully support student learning. 
• Teachers should be great examples. A person in leadership has a responsibility to lead by example. This will cover many aspects, but teachers should model respect, discipline and problem-solving for their students.
• Teachers offer the gift of learning . An educator's job is to guide students through the principles of learning and fulfill their need for education. A teacher's gift to their students should be motivating them to continue to learn, and helping them succeed in the process through good classroom management, solid educational theory and consistent teaching practices.
• Learning goes beyond the classroom. Everyone, from parents to teachers to members of the community, has a role to play in developing a well-rounded education. Involving stakeholders in the education process in a meaningful way helps students understand multiple perspectives and build critical thinking skills. 
• Feedback, in both directions, is a key part of the learning process. While teachers generally give feedback to students in the form of assignments, regular communication and feedback can help improve teaching. Short feedback forms and creating a culture where students feel safe to speak out can improve the quality of learning for teachers and students. 

Because there are so many different facets to teaching, many teachers have teaching statements made up of several paragraphs, with each paragraph organized around a key idea. 

As you progress in your teaching career, it’s natural for your beliefs and attitudes to change . Revisit your educational philosophy frequently to make sure it’s still up to date and aligned with your current practices.

You know how you want to teach, but it’s not always easy to articulate your beliefs in writing. We’ve put together a list of questions you can ask yourself to help clarify your view and provide a starting point for your own teaching philosophy.

• What does effective learning look like in your classroom? Do you prioritize engagement? Learning for mastery ? 
• What kinds of goals do you set for your students? How do you encourage them? Do you set the goals, or do you ask for their input?
• How do you interact with students? What kind of relationship do you have with students? How do you build trust in the classroom?
• What types of assessment do you use? How do you determine mastery? Which assessment styles do you think are the most effective?
• What is the purpose of education in society? Is it for social justice, to build good citizens, to prepare students for life outside of school or something else?
• What qualities should good teachers possess? Patience, compassion and authority are all qualities you need as a teacher — but what’s most important to you?
• What kind of learning environment do you want to create? Is your classroom individualized or collaborative? Do you use a lot of technology, or prefer an analog approach?
• How do you approach differences in learning styles? Do you use differentiation, unique resources, tailored teaching methods or other pedagogical approaches to reach all students?
• What helps students learn effectively? This answer can change depending on whether you teach high school or elementary school, but what are your core teaching strategies? How flexible are you willing to be?
• What do you see as the teacher’s role in learning? Is your teaching style more student-centered or teacher-centered? How does hands-on learning or techniques like inquiry-based learning fit into your classroom?

Your philosophy of education doesn’t have to answer every single question. But it should give a big-picture perspective on who you are as a teacher, and what you value.

At Prodigy Education, we’re always working to define our approach to education and our beliefs about how we can support students, teachers and parents to help them learn best. 

Prodigy’s educational philosophy centers around using motivation as an anchor for building a lifelong life of learning. Here’s how we’re doing it:

Leveraging student motivation helps develop a lifelong love of learning

When students are excited to learn, they’re more likely to persevere through new skills and hard problems. Prodigy is designed to help students stay focused through a game-based learning platform that makes practicing math skills fun.

Learn more about Prodigy’s “Motivation First” approach to learning here.

To maximize student motivation, Prodigy uses research-based pedagogical approaches to put learners at the center of everything we do, whether it’s:

• Building an engaging math game
• Creating an accessible tutoring platform
• Offering tools to help parents and teachers support students
• Developing Prodigy English , a world-building game designed to help students practice key ELA skills

Our approach to personalized learning combines an adaptive algorithm with teacher tools that help you differentiate math practice in just a few clicks, so the individual needs of students are always front and center. 

Constantly refining your learning process

An educator’s work is never done — and neither is your educational philosophy! 

To make sure your philosophy reflects current best practices, your own learning and new research or technology, seek out information from subject matter experts and other teachers:

• On the Prodigy Blog
• On Instagram or Twitter
• In online or physical education journals
• In communities like Prodigy’s Facebook teacher community

When your educational philosophy is aligned with what you’re doing in your classroom, everyone benefits — including your students! 

Prodigy Math Game is an adaptive, game-based learning platform that offers time-saving tools for teachers. Easily differentiate, motivate and assess learning when you sign up for your free teacher account today.

3 Educational Philosophies

“Theories are more than academic words that folx with degrees throw around at coffee shops and poetry slams; they work to explain to us how the world works, who the world denies, and how the structures uphold oppression.”

Bettina L. Love, 2019

Learning Objectives

• Learn the four key Educational Philosophies
• Explore non-systemically dominant educational systems and their philosophical roots
• Compare how the privileging of educational thought and philosophy in the US  is based in social, political, and economic power
• Develop an initial personal philosophy of education through self-reflection and self examination taking into account narratives and counterstories

Activity – Educational Philosophy Assessment

In order to start reflecting on your own philosophy of education, complete the following:

• Educational Philosophies Self Assessment – https://evaeducation.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/6/9/19692577/self_assessment.pdf
• Scoring Guide for the Self Assessment: https://evaeducation.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/6/9/19692577/self_assessment_scoring_guide.pdf

What does this survey reveal about your underlying philosophy?

Do you agree or disagree with this assessment? Explain.

What might this survey reveal with your reasons in becoming a teacher?

Foundations of Educational Philosophy

Pause and Ponder – Education

You may have heard comments implying that education in the United States is not political, separate from religion, and accessible to everyone. The reality is that from its early existence in the western hemisphere in the 1600s, it was indeed political, religious, and accessible only to a select few. These traits continue to influence the evolution of education in the United States today.

The education system in the United States is a social institution. A social institution is a pattern of behaviors and social arrangements that have evolved to meet the needs of society. Quite often, how those needs are defined in official conversations is dependent on who has the social, economic, and legal power to do the defining.

Given this, and since the current system in the US was derived from a system that was explicitly designed to reproduce wealth and privilege for societal elites, it should be no surprise that the foundational theorists upon which the US education rests are representative of a narrow range of perspectives on education. Many educational approaches, perspectives, and philosophies have been neglected in the development of the US system. For instance, the educational system in the US is not rooted at all in the philosophies of Aztec or Mayan civilizations. Nor does it include understandings about teaching, learning, or intellectual growth from Muslim, Hindu, or Yoruba societies. It is accurate to say the US system of education and the philosophies on which it rests are decidedly Eurocentric.

Critical Lens – Eurocentrism

Eurocentrism (also Eurocentricity) is a worldview that is centered on or privileges European-based civilization or a biased view that favors it over nonEuropean-based civilizations.

In order to understand the educational system in the US in a way that supports educators in meeting the needs of all students, we offer the following orientation to the educational philosophies on which this system was founded.

A philosophy grounds or guides practice in the study of existence and knowledge while developing an ontology (the study of being) on what it means for something or someone to be—or exist. Educational philosophy, then, provides a foundation which constructs and guides the ways knowledge is generated and passed on to others. Therefore, when thinking and reflecting about your own philosophy of education, you need to acknowledge your values, beliefs and attitudes towards the educational system, as this will guide your practice. Therefore, it is of critical importance that teachers begin to develop a clear understanding of philosophical traditions and how the philosophical underpinnings inform their educational philosophies. Philosophies need to translate ideas into action. If you want to use certain techniques, then you need to understand how they are effective in the classroom to create that portion of your education philosophy.

Over the course of history, philosophy has experienced several paradigm shifts that influence teaching and learning. Philosophical traditions from the 19th century helped anchor the early foundations of educational philosophy and the development of public education in Europe and the United States.

Activity – Think and Reflect

Think and reflect on the following guiding questions:

• What does being a teacher mean to you?
• What are the skills that, from your perspective, effective teachers have?
• What should be taught?
• How should it be taught?
• What is knowledge?
• Why is it important to establish a trusting relationships between students, teachers and the community?

Whether you are aware or not, you have begun writing philosophical statements about education and being a teacher.

3.1 Philosophical Perspectives of Education

As students ourselves, we may have a particular notion of what schooling is and should be as well as what teachers do and should do. In his book entitled Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, Dan Lortie (1975) called this the “apprenticeship of observation” (p. 62). Many people who pursue teaching think they already know what it entails because they have generally spent at least 13 years observing teachers as they work. The role of a teacher can seem simplistic because as a student, you only see one piece of what teachers actually do day in and day out. This one-dimensional perspective can contribute to a person’s idea of what the role of teachers in schools is, as well as what the purpose of schooling should be. The idea of the purpose of schooling can also be seen as an individual’s philosophy of schooling.

Philosophy can be defined as the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. In the case of education, one’s philosophy is what one believes to be true about the essentials of education. When thinking about your philosophy of education, consider your beliefs about the roles of schools, teachers, learners, families, and communities. There are four philosophical perspectives currently used in educational settings: essentialism, perennialism, progressivism, and social reconstructionism/critical pedagogy. Unlike the more abstract philosophical perspectives of ontology and axiology, these four perspectives focus primarily on what should be taught and how it should be taught, i.e. the curriculum. These are explained below.

3.2 Four Key Educational Philosophies

Essentialism.

Essentialism adheres to a belief that a core set of essential skills must be taught to all students. Essentialists tend to privilege traditional academic disciplines that will develop prescribed skills and objectives in different content areas as well as develop a common culture. Typically, Essentialism argues for a back-to-basics approach on teaching intellectual and moral standards. Schools should prepare all students to be productive members of society. The Essentialist curriculum focuses on reading, writing, computing clearly and logically about objective facts concerning the real world. Schools should be sites of rigor where students learn to work hard and respect authority. Because of this stance, Essentialism tends to subscribe to tenets of Realism. Essentialist classrooms tend to be teacher-centered in instructional delivery with an emphasis on lecture and teacher demonstrations.

Perennialism:

Perennialism advocates for seeking, teaching, and learning universal truths that span across historical time periods. These truths, Perennialists argue, have everlasting importance in helping humans solve problems regardless of time and place. While Perennialism resembles essentialism at first glance, Perennialism focuses on the individual development of the student rather than emphasizing skills. Perennialism supports liberal arts curricula that helps produce well-rounded individuals with some knowledge across the arts and sciences. All students should take classes in English Language Arts, foreign languages, mathematics, natural sciences, fine arts, and philosophy. Like Essentialism, Perennialism may tend to favor teacher-centered instruction; however, Perennialists do utilize student-centered instructional activities like Socratic Seminar, which values and encourages students to think, rationalize, and develop their own ideas on topics.

Progressivism

Progressivism focuses its educational stance toward experiential learning with a focus on developing the whole child. Students learn by doing rather than being lectured to by teachers. Curriculum is usually integrated across contents instead of siloed into different disciplines. Progressivism’s stance is in stark contrast to both Essentialism and Perennialism in this manner. Progressivism follows a clear pragmatic ontology where the learner focuses on solving real-world problems through real experiences. Progressivist classrooms are student-centered where students will work in cooperative/collaborative groups to do project-based, expeditionary, problem-based, and/or service-learning activities. In progressivist classrooms, students have opportunities to follow their interests and have shared authority in planning and decision making with teachers.

3.3 A Response to Dominant Systems:

Social reconstructionism.

Social reconstructionism was founded as a response to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust to assuage human cruelty. Social reform in response to helping prepare students to make a better world through instilling liberatory values. Critical pedagogy emerged from the foundation of the early social reconstructionist movement.

Critical Lens – Liberatory Thinking

“Liberatory thinking is the re- imagining of one’s assumptions and beliefs about others and their capabilities by interrupting internal beliefs that undermine productive relationships and actions. Liberatory thinking goes beyond simply changing mindsets to creating concrete opportunities for others to experience liberation. The opportunities provides cover for and centers underrepresented and marginalized people. It pushes people to interrogate their own multiple identities in relation to others and to think about the consequences of our actions, especially for students of critical need. It explores how mindsets can impede or ignite progress in the classroom, school, and district.”

Chicago Public Schools

For more information in Liberatory Thinking, please refer to the Equity Framework  from the Chicago Public Schools

Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy is the application of critical theory to education. For critical pedagogues, teaching and learning is inherently a political act and they declare that knowledge and language are not neutral, nor can they be objective. Therefore, issues involving social, environmental, or economic justice cannot be separated from the curriculum. Critical pedagogy’s goal is to emancipate marginalized or oppressed groups by developing, according to Paulo Freire, conscientização, or critical consciousness in students.

Critical pedagogy de-centers the traditional classroom, which positions teachers at the center. The curriculum and classroom with a critical pedagogy stance is student-centered and focuses its content on social critique and political action.

3.4 Ways of Knowing

Pause and Ponder – Ways of Knowing

In addition to the historically neglected  thinkers and the theories presented above, it is important for educators to consider that there are many ways of knowing and acquiring knowledge

How do you know something is true?

In the US school system, for instance, students begin the day when a bell or signal goes off at the same predetermined time every day. This scheduling system shapes students’ awareness of how days in their lives will most likely be structured. Consider an alternative: What would happen if the school day started every day when the sun passes a certain point across the horizon. What would students learn about the world? How would students’ way of knowing about time and responsibility be changed?

Critical Lens – Cultural Practices

Here are two news stories with examples of cultural practices that are not taught in mainstream schools because they have been steered away from in this imperialistic, colonizing culture. Nevertheless, they have been sustained by thinkers and teachers and continue to be sustained today.

Culturally informed childbirth practices: Navajo woman starts nonprofit to improve maternal health

Traditional care of the land: For tribes, ‘good fire’ a key to restoring nature and people

3.5 Educational Thinkers

The thinkers and perspectives in the preceding section of this text are considered foundational thinkers in mainstream formal education in the US, other thinkers from the same time period and throughout history are considered foundational contributors to education throughout the world. Some of this has to do with the notion of US colonialism, imperialism, exceptionalism (the belief that the United States is either distinctive, unique, or exemplary compared to other nations), and the legacy of the enslavement of Black Americans in the United States. Because of these legacies, very few people of color were accepted into the cannon of formal educational thinkers. As a result, the US system has been shaped by a very narrow sample of foundational theorists, and many educators who trained in the 20th and 21st centuries in the US had their perspectives formed under this narrow umbrella.

The following individuals and theories are presented so that you can broaden your perspective and better serve all students during your career in education.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Du Bois completed his graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

In an effort to portray the genius and humanity of the Black race, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of 14 essays. The introduction of the book famously proclaimed that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Each chapter begins with two epigraphs – one from a White poet, and one from a Black spiritualist – to demonstrate intellectual and cultural parity between Black and White cultures.

A major theme of The Souls of Black Folk is the double consciousness faced by African Americans: being both American and Black. This was a unique identity which, according to Du Bois, had been a handicap in the past, but could be a strength in the future: “Henceforth, the destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation.”

Double consciousness is the internal conflict experienced by subordinated or colonized groups in an oppressive society. Originally, double consciousness was specifically the psychological challenge African Americans experienced of “always looking at oneself through the eyes” of a racist white society and “measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt”. The term also referred to Du Bois’s experiences of reconciling his African heritage with an upbringing in a European-dominated society.

More recently, the concept of double consciousness has been expanded to other situations of social inequality, notably women living in patriarchal societies as well as LGBTQ2S+ people living in homophobic and transphobic societies.

The idea of double consciousness is important because it illuminates the experiences of Black people living in post-slavery America, and also because it sets a framework for understanding the position of oppressed people in an oppressive world. As a result, it became used to explain the dynamics of gender, colonialism, xenophobia and more alongside race. This theory laid a strong foundation for other critical theorists to expand upon.

Carter Godwin Woodson

Woodson was an American educator, historian, author, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He achieved a graduate degree at the University of Chicago and in 1912 was the second African American, after W. E. B. Du Bois , to obtain a PhD from Harvard University . Woodson remains the only person whose parents were enslaved in the United States to obtain a PhD . He taught at two historically Black colleges: “ Howard University and West Virginia State University ”. Woodson believed that education and increasing social and professional contacts among Black and white people could reduce racism, and he promoted the organized study of African-American history partly for that purpose. He would later promote the first Negro History Week in Washington, D.C., in 1926, forerunner of Black History Month.

Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. Believing that history belonged to everybody, not just the historians, Woodson sought to engage Black civic leaders, high school teachers, clergy, women’s groups and fraternal associations in his project to improve the understanding of African-American history. He founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History whose purpose he described as the “scientific study” of the “neglected aspects of Negro life and history” by training a new generation of Black people in historical research and methodology

hooks is a US based educational theorist and social activist. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, she argues that a teacher’s use of control over students dulls the students’ enthusiasm and teaches obedience to authority, and keeps students from learning critical thinking. hook’s pedagogical practices exist as an interplay of anti-colonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies and are based on freedom. hooks also built a bridge between critical thinking and real-life situations, to enable educators to show students the everyday world instead of the stereotypical perspective of the world. hooks argues that teachers and students should engage in interrogations of cultural assumptions that are supported by oppression.

note: bell hooks intentionally does not capitalize her name, which follows her critical stance that language, even how we write one’s own name, is political and ideological.

Henry Giroux

Giroux is a foundational critical theorist in the US and Canada, best known for his pioneering work in critical pedagogy in K-12 and higher ed. His work advocates supporting students developing a consciousness of freedom and connecting knowledge to power, and the ability to take constructive action. His latest work examines the pitting of people against each other through the lens of class, race, and any other differences that don’t embrace white nationalism.

3.6 Latin American Thinkers

We will now analyze the impact of the pedagogical practice, as well as the educational thought, of different key educators in Latin America. These educators influenced a cultural change with ideas and concepts that modified the parameters of the educational system that was established in LatinAmerica.

Some of these educators have not been recognized in the educational system around the world. However, their work has been a catalyst in  giving way to cultural and educational transformations in Latin America. The following educators stand out for their innovative tendencies who fought for an educational system to which all people had access.

When studying these Latin American educators, it should be noted that they generated a change that had a great impact on socio-cultural problems and that their success, or failure, depended on the government policies carried out in the corresponding countries.

Deeper Dive – Latin American Thinkers

You can watch the history of each Latin American thinkers in Spanish in the following video:

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire

Freire is a Brazilian philosopher and educator, was one of the most influential thinkers behind social reconstructionism. He criticized the banking model of education in his best known writing, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is generally considered one of the fundamental texts of the critical pedagogy movement. Banking models of education view students as empty vessels to be filled by the teacher’s expertise, like a teacher putting “coins” of information into the students’ “piggy banks.” Instead, Freire supported problem-posing models of education that recognized the prior knowledge everyone has and can share with others. Conservative critics of social reconstructionists suggest that they have abandoned intellectual pursuits in education, whereas social reconstructionists believe that the analyzing of moral decisions leads to being good citizens in a democracy.

The installment dedicated to Paulo Freire covers the different stages of the life of the Brazilian pedagogue and politician. The documentary shows his Christian roots and his first steps related to literacy and adult education in Brazil, especially the one carried out in Angicos. Then, it continues with Freire’s years in exile, which included a diverse tour of Chile, the US, Nicaragua, etc. and the publication, in 1970, of two of his most important works: Education as a practice for freedom and Pedagogy of the oppressed. At the same time, it is argued that these works strengthened a political idea that became the organizer of the movement of the oppressed in Latin America.

Pause and Ponder – Dominant Narrative

The work of Freire, Giroux, and hooks are included as necessary responses to the exclusionary and marginalizing nature of the dominant narrative of educational systems. Even today, although educators may study their work, the systems they’re employed with tend to perpetuate the inequalities and dynamics Freire, Giroux, hooks, and others address.

Gabriela Mistral

Mistral, pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, was a Chilean poet, diplomat and pedagogue. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945 for her poetic work, she was the first Ibero-American woman and the second Latin American person to receive a Nobel Prize.

Her political-ideological profile is represented as a hybrid between her Catholic, but not conservative, beliefs and her liberal traits, although she is not strictly defined as liberal. Her words and poetry, which frequently gave life to various newspaper articles, generated multiple conflicts with the most conservative sectors of society. Mistral, however, continued on her way and affirmed her work in the rural and indigenous sectors. During her trip to Mexico, at the invitation of Vasconcelos, she fulfilled her full potential as a teacher, promoting a pedagogy based on the child, with Christian roots and that took into account the singularities of the rural and indigenous areas in which she worked. In 1945 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, something that made visible the impact of her teaching practice, intellectual and poetic practice.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Sarmiento was an Argentine politician, writer, teacher, journalist, serviceman and statesman; governor of the province of San Juan between 1862 and 1864, president of the Argentine Nation between 1868 and 1874, national senator for his province between 1874 and 1879 and minister of the interior in 1879.

His controversial, anti-racist and unitary side is reaffirmed, and the fact that he belongs to a generation that understood writing as a political practice. He questioned what was the best educational system for all of the students in Latina America. He starts investigating the opposite approaches of education in Massachusetts and Prussia. He believed that the students had a better option to succeed and learn independently in a society under the Prussian system, which was centralized and under the management of the state. The educational system in Massachusetts, on the contrary, was decentralized and the society was the principal entity to promote education. Therefore, the habits of each state were instilled in the students. For example, a republican state will have a republican approach to education and he did not agree with this approach. Therefore, after his investigations he laid the programmatic foundations of a national educational system, in where it was centralized and Popular Education was provided to all of the children in Argentina.

Later on, his side as a statesman is taken up again with the contributions he made in the elaboration of the Law of Common Education of Buenos Aires (1875) and the sanction under his presidency of the National Law of Common Education (1884).

Jesualdo Sosa

Sosa, better known as Jesualdo, was a Uruguayan teacher, writer, pedagogue and journalist. His teaching led him to dedicate himself with greater purpose  and knowledge on the activities, interests and needs of the child.

Starting from a critique of the traditional school and the capitalist system, Sosa combined there a proposal with Escolanovist overtones, which promoted the autonomy of children, their creativity, their expression, their work training, and was articulated with the activities of the community. That experience was collected in Vida de un maestro, a production that, despite the censorship attempts it suffered from dictatorial governments, was able to expand worldwide. After that publication, his life is described as a time of maturation, systematization and recognition, which gave him the chance to be called to collaborate in different parts of Latin America.

Simón Narciso de Jesús Carreño Rodríguez

de Jesús Carreño Rodríguez was a Venezuelan hero, educator, and politician. He was the tutor of Simón Bolívar and Andrés Bello. He contributed concepts and ideas including written works aimed at  the process of freedom and American integration.

In the seventh installment, Simón Rodríguez is recognized as a great precursor of our American pedagogical thought, as a fighter for the emancipation of Latin America and for public education for all as a form of social progress. His philosophy favored the equality in education as he believed this was a right for all citizens. He highlights his conception of equality, which was not restrictive as  he believed that equality started in educational practices. He sacrificed all his belongings and left everything for his ideals. In the miniseries,

José Vasconcelos Calderón

Vasconcelos Calderón was a Mexican lawyer, politician, writer, educator, public official and philosopher. He was part of the revolutionary movement led by Francisco Madero, which promoted the democratic transformation of a country that, at that time, was shaken by the dictatorships of Porfirio Díaz Mori. As a result of a political setup, Vasconcelos became Secretary of Education of the Federal Government (1921-1924). His management in this position is distinguished as short and intense, since there he carried out, with the support of Gabriela Mistral, his most recognized work, promoting high culture, rural literacy missions and muralism as ways of recovering Latin American roots. His work, The Cosmic Race, is considered a condensation of his position in favor of mestizaje, which is the biological and cultural encounter or its arrangement between different ethnic groups, in which they mix, giving birth to new species of families and new genotypes. This was a very controversial work as it was not aligned with the thinking of the people from this time.

José Carlos Mariátegui

Mariátegui, La Chira, was a Peruvian writer, journalist and political thinker, a prolific author despite his early death. He is also known in his country by the name of El Amauta. He was one of the main scholars of Socialism in Latin America.

“The revolution is not only the fight for bread, but also the conquest of beauty” is a representative phrase of José Carlos Mariátegui, which marks the beginning of the installment referring to the Peruvian writer, journalist and intellectual. At first, the documentary goes through what is considered his first school, recounting his initial steps in the writing of the newspaper La Razón, where he grew as a journalist and became involved in workers’ struggles and reformist ideals. Then it is analyzed how during his exile in Europe, Mariátegui was nurtured by Marxist ideas, the struggles of Italian workers and began to work on the notion of indigenism as a creative and revolutionary myth. During his return, it is stated that he strengthened his political proposal of autochthonous socialism, marked by a juxtaposition between Marxist theory, Latin Americanism and indigenism, with a strong emphasis also on gender equality and the depatriarchalizing of educational practices. These aspects are present in its most important editorial offering, Amauta. In 1928, he created the Peruvian Socialist Party and published Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, from which he criticized the liberal model of education (which placed the problem of indigenous people in education) and the lack of their recognition as subjects of law.

José Julián Martí Pérez

Martí Pérez was a writer and politician of Cuban origin. Democratic republican politician, thinker, journalist, philosopher and Cuban poet, creator of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and organizer of the War of 95 or Necessary War, named after the Cuban War of Independence. He suffered the vicissitudes of critical thought from a very young age, when he was imprisoned and exiled. Strongly involved in the struggles against Spanish colonization and US interference in the Caribbean, he claimed Bolivarian principles. His political and educational thought is described through four topics: the decolonization of Latin American knowledge, the formation of good people and the role of love in pedagogy, the special place given to creative work and the recovery of Latin American identity. In 1892, a time of exile, he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party as a tool for the independence of the island and finally died on the battlefield years later.

Jorge J. E. Gracia

Gracia was born in Cuba in 1942 and was a Cuban refugee in the USA. He studied at both Universidad de La Habana and Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana before moving to the U.S., where he  earned a degree in philosophy from Wheaton College in 1965. He went on to receive a master’s degree in philosophy from University of Chicago in 1966, a licentiate in medieval studies from Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 1970 and his doctorate in medieval philosophy from University of Toronto in 1971.

Gracia’s areas of research included metaphysics, ethnic and racial issues, philosophy of religion, and medieval and Latin American philosophy. These topics led him to author over 20 books and edit more than two dozen volumes of works by others. One of his most notable contributions was his 1984 edited anthology on Latin American philosophy, “Philosophical Analysis in Latin America,” which was the first work of its kind published in English by a philosopher.

Beyond his vast collection of writings, he was also a leader for many important organizations. He was the founding chair for the American Philosophical Association’s Committee for Hispanics in Philosophy and sat as president of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, Society for Iberian and Latin American Thought, American Catholic Philosophical Association and the Metaphysical Society of America.

Gracia worked for the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1971 until he retired in January 2020 as SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Chair in the departments of philosophy and comparative literature.

Héctor-Neri Castañeda

Castañeda was a Guatemalan American philosopher who emigrated to the U.S. in 1948 as a refugee. He attended the University of Minnesota to earn his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees.

After graduating with his PhD, Castañeda studied at Oxford University for a year before returning to the U.S. to work at Duke University for a short period of time. He went on to work at Wayne State University, where he founded the philosophical journal Noûs , which is still in production to this day.

Eventually, he moved to Indiana University in 1969 and became the Mahlon Powell Professor of philosophy as well as that university’s first dean of Latino affairs.

Castañeda is most notable for developing the guise theory , which applies to the analysis of thought, language and the structure of the world through abstract objects. He is also credited with the discovery of the concept of the quasi-indexical or quasi-indicator. This is a linguistic expression in which a person referencing another can shift from context to context, much like in the way ‘you’ can refer to a specific person in one context and another person in a different context.

In addition to his research, he was awarded a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation. He was also given the Presidential Medal of Honor by the government of Guatemala in 1991, among many other accomplishments.

Activities – Personal Philosophy of Education

In order to start building your own personal philosophy of education, it’s important to be able to articulate how you will incorporate diverse perspectives and ways of knowing into your teaching.

Instructions:

• Select a mainstream-culture based  single story about education and analyze it. Examine how an ideology or stereotype is perpetuated through  it
• Explore some or all of the story’s origins functions  impact on education
• Then examine the alternative stories: those told by the survivors of the single story
• Propose ways to change the story both in your teaching  and in the educational system in general

Like learning, teaching is always developing; it is never realized once and for all. Our public schools have always served as sites of moral, economic, political, religious and social conflict and assimilation into a narrowly defined standard image of what it means to be an American. According to Britzman (as quoted by Kelle, 1996), “the context of teaching is political, it is an ideological context that privileges the interests, values, and practices necessary to maintain the status quo.” Teaching is by no means “innocent of ideology,” she declares. Rather, the context of education tends to preserve “the institutional values of compliance to authority, social conformity, efficiency, standardization, competition, and the objectification of knowledge” (p. 66-67).

It should be no surprise then that contemporary debates over public education continue to reflect our deepest ideological differences. As Tyack and Cuban (1995) have noted in their historical study of school reform, the nation’s perception toward schooling often “shift[s]… from panacea to scapegoat” (p. 14). We would go a long way in solving academic achievement and closing educational gaps by addressing the broader structural issues that institutionalize and perpetuate poverty and inequality.

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Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (A. R. Luria, M. Lopez-Morillas & M. Cole [with J. V. Wertsch], Trans.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (Original work [ca. 1930-1934)

Wamba, Philippe (1999). Kinship. New York, New York: Penguin Group. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-525-94387-7.

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Your teaching philosophy is a self-reflective statement of your beliefs about teaching and learning. It's a one to two page narrative that conveys your core ideas about being an effective teacher in the context of your discipline. It develops these ideas with specific, concrete examples of what the teacher and learners will do to achieve those goals. Importantly, your teaching philosophy statement also explains why you choose these options.

+ Getting Started

Your reasons for writing a teaching philosophy may vary. You might be writing it as an exercise in concisely documenting your beliefs so that you can easily articulate them to your students, peers, or a search committee. It might serve as the introduction to your teaching portfolio. Or, it can serve as a means of professional growth as it requires you to give examples of how you enact your philosophy, thus requiring you to consider the degree to which your teaching is congruent with your beliefs.

Generating ideas

Teaching philosophies express your values and beliefs about teaching. They are personal statements that introduce you, as a teacher, to your reader. As such, they are written in the first person and convey a confident, professional tone. When writing a teaching philosophy, use specific examples to illustrate your points. You should also discuss how your values and beliefs about teaching fit into the context of your discipline.

Below are categories you might address with prompts to help you begin generating ideas. Work through each category, spending time thinking about the prompts and writing your ideas down. These notes will comprise the material you’ll use to write the first draft of your teaching philosophy statement. It will help if you include both general ideas (‘I endeavor to create lifelong learners’) as well as specifics about how you will enact those goals. A teaching philosophy template is also available to help you get started.

Questions to prompt your thinking

Your concept of learning.

What do you mean by learning? What happens in a successful learning situation? Note what constitutes "learning" or "mastery" in your discipline.

Your concept of teaching

What are your values, beliefs, and aspirations as a teacher? Do you wish to encourage mastery, competency, transformational learning, lifelong learning, general transference of skills, critical thinking? What does a perfect teaching situation look like to you and why? How are the values and beliefs realized in classroom activities? You may discuss course materials, lesson plans, activities, assignments, and assessment instruments.

Your goals for students

What skills should students obtain as a result of your teaching? Think about your ideal student and what the outcomes of your teaching would be in terms of this student's knowledge or behavior. Address the goals you have for specific classes or curricula and that rational behind them (i.e., critical thinking, writing, or problem solving).

Your teaching methods

What methods will you consider to reach these goals and objectives? What are your beliefs regarding learning theory and specific strategies you would use, such as case studies, group work, simulations, interactive lectures? You might also want to include any new ideas or strategies you want to try.

Your interaction with students

What are you attitudes towards advising and mentoring students? How would an observer see you interact with students? Why do you want to work with students?

Assessing learning

How will you assess student growth and learning? What are your beliefs about grading? Do you grade students on a percentage scale (criterion referenced) or on a curve (norm referenced)? What different types of assessment will you use (i.e. traditional tests, projects, portfolios,  presentations) and why?

Professional growth

How will you continue growing as a teacher? What goals do you have for yourself and how will you reach them? How have your attitudes towards teaching and learning changed over time? How will you use student evaluations to improve your teaching? How might you learn new skills? How do you know when you've taught effectively?

+ Creating a Draft

Two ways of organizing your draft.

Now that you've written down your values, attitudes, and beliefs about teaching and learning, it's time to organize those thoughts into a coherent form. Perhaps the easiest way of organizing this material would be to write a paragraph covering each of the seven prompts you answered in the Getting Started section. These would then become the seven major sections of your teaching philosophy.

Another way of knitting your reflections together—and one that is more personal—is to read through your notes and underscore ideas or observations that come up more than once. Think of these as "themes" that might point you toward an organizational structure for the essay. For example, you read through your notes and realize that you spend a good deal of time writing about your interest in mentoring students. This might become one of the three or four major foci of your teaching philosophy. You should then discuss what it says about your attitudes toward teaching, learning, and what's important in your discipline.

No matter which style you choose, make sure to keep your writing succinct. Aim for two double-spaced pages. And don't forget to start with a "hook." Your job is to make your readers want to read more; their level of engagement is highest when they read your opening line. Hook your readers by beginning with a question, a statement, or even an event from your past.

Using specific examples

Remember to provide concrete examples from your teaching practice to illustrate the general claims you make in your teaching philosophy. The following general statements about teaching are intended as prompts to help you come up with examples to illustrate your claims about teaching. For each statement, how would you describe what happens in your classroom? Is your description specific enough to bring the scene to life in a teaching philosophy?

"I value helping my students understand difficult information. I am an expert, and my role is to model for them complex ways of thinking so that they can develop the same habits of mind as professionals in the medical field."

"I enjoy lecturing, and I'm good at it. I always make an effort to engage and motivate my students when I lecture."

"It is crucial for students of geology to learn the techniques of field research. An important part of my job as a professor of geology is to provide these opportunities."

"I believe that beginning physics students should be introduced to the principles of hypothesis generation, experimentation, data collection, and analysis. By learning the scientific method, they develop critical thinking skills they can apply to other areas of their lives. Small group work is a crucial tool for teaching the scientific method."

"As a teacher of writing, I am committed to using peer review in my classes. By reading and commenting on other students' work in small cooperative groups, my students learn to find their voice, to understand the important connection between writer and audience, and to hone their editing skills. Small group work is indispensible in the writing classroom."

Go back to the notes you made when getting started and underline the general statements you’ve made about teaching and learning. As you start drafting, make sure to note the specific approaches, methods, or products you use to realize those goals.

+ Assessing Your Draft

Assessing your draft teaching philosophy.

According to a survey of search committee chairs by the University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, there are five elements that are shared by strong teaching philosophy statements:

• They offer evidence of practice (specific examples)
• They are student-centered
• They demonstrate reflectiveness
• They demonstrate that the writer values teaching
• They are well written, clear, and readable

Now that you’ve completed an initial draft, ask whether your statement captures these elements and how well you articulate them.

You might find it useful to compare your draft to other teaching philosophies in your discipline. It can also be useful to have a colleague review your draft and offer recommendations for revision. Consider printing out a teaching philosophy rubric from our “Rubrics and Samples” tab to provide your reviewer with guidelines to assess your draft. These exercises will give you the critical distance necessary to see your teaching philosophy objectively and revise it accordingly.

+ Rubrics and Samples

Rubrics and sample teaching philosophies.

Here are links to three teaching philosophy rubrics to help you assess your statement. We have included four different rubrics for you to choose from. These rubrics cover similar elements, and one is not necessarily better than the other. Your choice of which to use should be guided by how comfortable you feel with the particular instrument and how usable you find it. 

• Teaching Philosophy Rubric 1   This rubric allows a reader to rate several elements of persuasiveness and format on a scale of 1 to 5.
• Teaching Philosophy Rubric 2   This rubric contains prompts for assessing purpose and audience, voice, beliefs and support, and conventions.
• Teaching Philosophy Rubric 3   This rubric contains prompts for assessing content, format, and writing quality.
• Rubric for Statements of Teaching Philosophy  This rubric was developed by Kaplan et. al. from the University of Michigan.
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What Is Your Educational Philosophy?

While lesson planning this summer, educators might also take time to reflect on their core beliefs about learning and teaching.

Over the summer, teachers reflect on the year and often redesign and perfect their teaching strategies and plans. In essence, they get back to the basics of what they believe is the best way to inspire learning in their students -- in other words, they revisit and refine their philosophy of education.

A school district might ask a teacher or principal applying for a job about her or his philosophy of education. In this post, I've decide to share mine, and I am curious to see if any of my beliefs resonate with you. So here they are:

1. Students need to learn.

Students want and need to learn as much as they need food, clothing, and shelter. An educator's primary job is to fill that primal need for learning by creating engaging and relevant learning experiences every day. The greatest gift a teacher can give students is motivating them to experience repeated learning success.

2. Students need to be active participants in learning.

Students learn best by doing, and active teaching encourages active learning. Teachers should treat students as active participants in the learning process, providing them with skills, such as:

• How to study
• How to take notes
• How to memorize
• How to express themselves effectively

These skills will help them be part of a high-performance learning team. Also, students need to be encouraged to explore and research information beyond the confines of the classroom and textbook.

3. Learning is a physiological activity involving the whole body.

The best way to engage a student is to have a solid classroom management plan and a well-planned lesson that is grounded in relevant, purposeful activities designed to enhance that student's knowledge and skills and leave her or him wanting to learn more. Teachers should be strongly aligned with student-centered and student-directed learning that embraces exploration, discovery, experiential learning, and the production of academically rigorous products.

4. Students need timely feedback to improve.

Teachers gather data on student performance to adjust the learning environment and instruction so that they can target students' learning needs. Teachers administer pretests to find a starting point for learning and post-tests to determine the students' increase in performance level as well as the teachers' effectiveness.

5. Students need structure and repetition to learn.

A teacher should be able to organize a standards-based lesson sequence, successfully implement the plan, and then evaluate student learning. A teacher should be able to create an exciting learning environment that makes it difficult for students to not learn. A teacher should know how to include all students in learning at their own level, and a teacher should be able to inspire the students to push themselves to the next level.

6. Students need information, knowledge, and skills.

Having access to knowledge resources is as important to a child's education as the actual curriculum content. Relevant and current information must be at the teachers' and students' fingertips to provide answers when the questions are still fresh. Information "on demand" is more valuable than information "just in case."

7. Students need tools and resources.

Students should know how their taxon and locale memory systems work. Students should have skills and strategies to be able to work effectively in the different levels of the cognitive domain as defined by Benjamin Bloom. Students should be aware of their own learning preferences, and teachers should assist with creating a plan to develop other learning skills. Educational tools are a means to an end. For example, technology used appropriately can greatly magnify the students' capacity to learn and the teachers' capacity to teach, inspire, and motivate.

Please share your philosophy in the comment section below. Also, if you wish to analyze mine and give me feedback, I would appreciate that, too.

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How to write your philosophy of education statement

The Philosophy of Education Statement is an important piece in your educator portfolio. It may be requested by hiring personnel at schools to be included with a cover letter and resume. Your teaching philosophy should be thoughtful, organized and well-written. The summary should be between 1-2 pages and should document and support your core educational principles.

• First, state your objectives as a teacher. These need to be achievable through some form of assessment.
• Second, you will want to outline the methods by which you will achieve your teaching objectives.
• Third, you will need to have demonstrated evidence of your achievements. This may take the form of standardized assessments or evaluations.
• Forth, allude to the factors that motivate you to be in the teaching profession. This is where you can be cerebral. State what motivates you to be in the teaching profession. 

Some Important Considerations

Your core values and beliefs.

The statement should reflect your core values and beliefs in terms of teaching. Consider your thoughts regarding the nature of students, the purpose of education and how people learn, and the role of teacher. As you develop your educational philosophy, think about completing the following statements: 

• I believe the purposes of education are ... 
• I believe that students learn best when... 
• I believe that the following curriculum basics will contribute to the social, emotional, intellectual and physical development of my students ... 
• I believe that a good learning environment is one in which ... 
• I believe that all students have the following basic needs ... 
• In order to further the growth and learning of my students, these basic needs will be met in my classroom through ... 
• I believe that teachers should have the following qualities ... 

Why You Teach

• What is the purpose of education? 
• What is your role as an educator?

Whom You Teach

• How will you reach the diverse students in your classroom? 
• How do you define your community of learners?

How and What You Teach

• What are your beliefs about how students learn?
• How will your beliefs affect your teaching? Think about management, instructional strategies, curriculum design and assessment.
• How do you balance the needs of the individual learner with the needs of the classroom community?
• What are your goals for students? 

Where You Teach

• How will you bring a global awareness to your classroom? 
• What will be your relationship with the community, parents, teaching colleagues and administration? 

Completing the Application 

Don't cut corners! As you are completing your applications, keep in mind that they are as important to your job search as your resume, letter of interest and other documents in your application packet. You are encouraged not to rush through completing your applications. Regional applications may be required instead of or in addition to the employer’s individual application.

• Be consistent with the information you provide on the application and on your resume. Make sure there are no contradictions of dates and places of employment and education.
• Do not make up an answer. Be honest. If you embellish, it will eventually catch up with you and you will leave a negative impression on the employer.
• Extra-curricular activities, which you may be willing to sponsor or coach, may be listed on most applications. Your willingness to sponsor activities can sometimes enhance your consideration for positions.
• Follow the application directions exactly. The directions may be different for each application you complete, so read all the directions carefully. Enter the correct information in the correct fields.
• Grammatical rules should be followed at all times. Teachers are held to high standards. Errors are unacceptable.
• Humor in your responses on an application can come across as sarcastic or flippant.
• Remember, an application may be a prospective employer’s first introduction to you; make it a professional one.
• Incomplete applications give the appearance of poor attention to detail. It is always best to respond to each question posed on an application whenever possible. An employer would not ask it if s/he did not want an answer.
• Never answer a question with “See my resume.”

Developing a Personal Teaching Philosophy Statement

August 2, 2021.

Have you ever been asked about your teaching philosophy by a potential employer? Oftentimes, teachers are asked to include their teaching philosophy statement as part of their application or interviewing process.

If you haven’t defined your personal teaching philosophy, let’s break down how to develop and refine your statement — and why it’s so valuable to have one.

What is personal teaching philosophy?

A statement of teaching philosophy, or teaching statement , is a summation of your teaching strategies, beliefs, and practices, along with concrete examples of the ways those beliefs materialize in the learning environment, curriculum development, and more. It is developed over the course of an educator’s career and experiences, and it stays dynamic and “living” throughout their years in education. Whether you work in primary school or higher education, a personal teaching philosophy is applicable and valuable for all educators.

Put simply, your personal teaching philosophy is part of what makes you a unique and extraordinary educator. It is both your “why” and your “how.”

What are the elements of a personal teaching philosophy?

A taaching statement describes your concept of teaching and learning , your understanding of the learning process, your approach to facilitating successful learning, your goals for your students, how you set them, and how you measure success. It also describes your teaching methods and strategy, and your professional growth goals and aspirations.

Other common elements of a personal teaching philosophy statement include:

• Your definition of good teaching — along with an explanation of why you define it that way.
• In that same vein: how do you implement your version of good teaching? How do you measure your effectiveness as a teacher?
• Who have you taught? Who are your students? What have their unique goals and learning challenges taught you about teaching and learning?
• Your goals — what are your goals for improving your teaching?

What is an example of a teaching philosophy?

Your teaching philosophy statement should include an introduction, body, and a conclusion.

Introduction. What will your students take away from your class? How will your guidance impact them? Discuss your general belief about education as well as your ideals. For example, your introduction might read something like:

I believe that education is a right, not a privilege. Working in low-income districts has revealed many gaps and cracks (in the curricula, community resources, and more) that my students are more at risk of falling into. In order to prioritize inclusion and equity for my students, I believe in engaging in deeper listening, intentional reflection, and continuous growth. It is my role as an educator to support and motivate my students to live authentically and courageously, to accept others despite the differences between them, and to immerse themselves in learning more about the world they live in — despite the fact that the world does not always make accommodations for them.

Body. Describe the ideal classroom/learning environment. What makes it ideal? How do you bring it to fruition? Clearly state your goals and objectives for students.

The ideal learning environment is endlessly engaging and fun. My curricula always consist of hands-on, project-based learning. My classroom acts as a safe space for students to express themselves, even when they’re struggling. To ensure that this occurs, I commit to using only positive teaching rather than punishment and discipline, being emotionally available to my students and weaving in emotional intelligence into our lessons, and developing and packaging a curriculum that is considerate and representative of the diversity in the classroom and the community at large.

Conclusion. What are your goals as a teacher? What is your unique approach to reaching these goals? End strong. Tell them what makes you stand out as an educator.

My goal as an educator has always been the same: Do right by my students. However, how this materializes has evolved over the years. I make sure that my students understand that I am their teacher — not their friend — but that teachers can be mentors, guides, and trusted guardians. I foster relationships with each student so that I can better understand their needs and teach and support them accordingly. I promise to always take the time and effort to provide individual attention so that each and every student can thrive.

Check out a few solid examples of personal teaching statements on ThoughtCo.

How to describe your teaching style

If you’re having trouble concretely defining your personal teaching philosophy, try asking some of these reflective questions for inspiration:

• Who of my teachers, professors, or mentors in education have inspired me? How?
• How do I approach situations in which a student is struggling or falling behind?
• To what standards do I hold myself and my students? How do I foster an inclusive classroom environment and address diverse learning needs?
• What would my students, colleagues, or employers say about me and my teaching style?
• What are my most successful (or memorable) teaching moments?

Why having a teaching philosophy statement is important

Your personal teaching philosophy is important for both you and your students, primarily because it guides your practices in the classroom in a very real way. For employers, it provides context as to your teaching style and serves as a concrete way to gauge whether or not you’re a good fit for their school or organization. But your teaching philosophy also shapes how you inject your identity into your teaching, how you put your values and beliefs into practice, and how you develop as a professional. It also allows for and encourages continuous reflection , which is arguably the most important element of teaching and learning.

Guidelines for writing your teaching philosophy statement

Although there are no hard-and-fast rules for formatting your statement of personal teaching philosophy, there are generally agreed-upon guidelines to making your statement have the most impact:

• Grab the reader’s attention from the start. It doesn’t have to be dry or stiff. Make it your own.
• Keep it brief and concise. For hiring purposes, teaching statements should typically be 1 to 2 double-sided pages in length. Include generous white space by ensuring your line spacing is 1.15 or higher. This will allow the reader to scan the statement with ease.
• Write your statement from the first-person point of view — this is about you , after all.
• Be authentic. Avoid using cliches about how passionate you are about teaching.
• Use concrete examples. Don’t just write about hypotheticals.
• Don’t summarize your résumé or CV. The contents of your teaching statement should not be found anywhere else in your application materials.
• Avoid using jargon and technical terms. It can be clunky in this context.
• Demonstrate your humility and willingness to learn from your students and colleagues to improve and adapt throughout your teaching career.
• Revise and iterate as necessary. Both teaching and writing are continuously evolving and reflective processes, so don’t feel like your teaching strategy and philosophy can’t evolve with you.

The process of developing a teaching philosophy is ongoing. Every teaching experience and interaction with students and colleagues can impact your teaching philosophy. The first version of your personal teaching philosophy statement may not ring true years down the road, but that’s okay. Think of it as a reminder of how you’re evolving in the ever-changing field of education. Good luck!

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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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autonomy: personal | Dewey, John | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | Foucault, Michel | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | liberalism | Locke, John | Lyotard, Jean François | -->ordinary language --> | Plato | postmodernism | Rawls, John | rights: of children | Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Acknowledgments

The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

Copyright © 2018 by Harvey Siegel D.C. Phillips Eamonn Callan

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