If we are going to try to clarify our thinking about educational matters, it may seem sensible to start at the beginning with the notion of education. That is what we shall do, but unfortunately we may not get quite the illumination we might hope for.

The word "education" is one we use as a "catch-all" for what we are trying to achieve as teachers, or in the school system. It is perhaps a bit like the way we think that "beauty" refers to what artists are generally trying to achieve when they paint pictures. But if you are struggling with a particular picture, you won't get much help from someone who says "try to make it beautiful"; you want something much more specific by way of guidance. When we use "education" in the catch-all way, it seems to mean little more than "whatever people get out of their schooling" or more accurately "whatever people are intended to get out of their schooling"¹ By covering so much, it tells us virtually nothing.

You might respond to what I've just said by claiming that education isn't just to be had from the school system; it’s much wider than that. Parents educate their children; the so-called communications media educate, or at least have the potential for educating; perhaps churches educate; perhaps many other institutions do too. You might even wonder whether schools do educate; certainly you can find several radical critics of schooling who would say that educating is about the last thing that schools actually do.

If you've begun to get into the sorts of things philosophers do when faced with a conceptual problem, you might note that we typically make various contrasts using words related to "education." We call some people "educated," others "uneducated" (and that is true even if you react by saying that no one is really uneducated, or that it is always a matter of degree: you may have scruples about how people talk and think, but at the moment the thing is simply to note what they do). We may contrast education with training (it was meant to be significant when British Teacher Training Colleges were renamed "Colleges of Education"), or differently with indoctrination. We may contrast an educated person with a knowledgeable one, even an expert: an uneducated educational expert is by no means a logical impossibility.

I'm trying to suggest very briefly to you that the word "education" and its cognates are used in a variety of ways, and that it certainly is not clear that they are doing the same job in these different uses. If we wanted to describe English usage, we could look in a dictionary and discover that the 18th century historian, Gibbon, wrote about the education of silkworms, that we talk about a wine-taster's educated palate, and so on and on. We might find common threads running through all these cases, but it is not likely they would help us in any specific case where we wanted clarification.

My interest in mapping our concepts is not so much descriptive as pragmatic: to give you tools for more efficient thought. So I shall tell a story that I think fits a lot of what people do, and then suggest how we might best proceed if that story is on the right lines.

Social realism

Living things, of the sorts we are normally interested in, grow. It takes them time to reach what we regard as a fully-formed, adult stage. (I shall leave aside the fact that they do not stop changing once they have reached this stage, indeed that they do not stop changing at least until they die.) We may wish to refer to this sequence, from some early point up until the fully-formed stage; let us call it "growing" or "development."

Animals of our sort are social. They cannot reach the fully-formed stage without interaction with fully-formed members of the same species. To talk about growth among social animals we can borrow from the sociologists and use the word, "socialization." To be a human being you have to be socialized. The only creatures who are biologically homo sapiens but are not socialized in this sense would be "wolf-children" (who have at least had interaction with members of other species) or some cases of babies with extreme handicaps that we are able now to keep alive. Neither group seem to me to impugn the biological generalization regarding socialization.

Every human we have to deal with is socialized in the sense just given. If we use the word, "socialization," to pick out not the process but the product, it will cover all the vast variety of human life: poets, priests, prostitutes,.... Such a term may be of use to sociologists, but it is not much good for the rest of us, at least when we are wondering what should be done by our schools or teachers. It will tell us nothing because it will impartially apply to almost anything we may choose. Some writers on education say they are using the word, "education," in as broad a way as this; but I doubt it.

People end up in all kinds of ways and some are not so pretty. When we are concerned with what to do with our schools we want something a little more selective. In fact, I think that when non-sociologists use the word, "socialization," they are often being much more restrictive than I have been; they are thinking of people developing into socially acceptable modes — the Girl Guides may help socialize young people, but do drug-pushers?

Even if we restrict ourselves to what "society" thinks of as socially or at least morally acceptable ways of being, people still end up in all kinds of ways. But typically, some kinds of person will be more highly valued in a social formation than other kinds. Doctors tend to be more socially acceptable than garbage collectors. Ways of socializing people that tend to lead to people with higher social prestige will, understandably, come to be specially important; we may want a word to pick them out, and I suggest that nowadays one of the prime jobs for "education" is to do just that: to gesture towards ("pick out" would make it sound much more exact than it is) the kinds of socialization normal for more prestigious members of a society. An educated person is one upon whom these processes have left some mark.²

It is worth noting that the "marks" of education thus understood may have little extrinsic value; they are cultural values rather than technological or practical ones. An uneducated person may be very knowledgeable, very rich, very powerful; it may be the absence of a few snippets of Homer or a "posh" accent that makes the difference. A corollary of this is that the content of an education is culturally or socially relative (like being literate and unlike being numerate): a literate Japanese may not read the Roman alphabet, but if she's numerate she will know the same algebra as the rest of us.³

Another point of tremendous importance is the very recent phenomenon of "mass" schooling. Traditionally very few people ever got anywhere near an education in the sense explained; schools served as one avenue for the lesser élites. It is only for a little more than 100 years in the English-speaking world that it has been widely assumed that everybody should go to school, that everybody should become literate, and so that everybody should start on a road that might give them an education in the older sense. But clearly, in that sense, it would be impossible for everyone to get an education, or rather, they could get the "marks" but not the prestige that was meant to go with them, and so pretty quickly the marks would lose their educational value. Typically, too, one can expect two sorts of educational values: those associated with entrenched élites, and those associated with the nouveaux riches: classics and computers.

The preceding picture is something of a caricature, but it is meant also to be recognizable. One good reason people have for wondering whether schools have anything to do with education is that for so many children schools neither give them the cultural possessions of the élites nor the certification needed simply to get on in life. Whatever such children get, it can hardly count as an education, for anyone using the word in the way I have been describing. Nor can those people who advocate more "vocational" training for such children hope to catch any reflected glory: plumbing is never going to make it as an educational activity in the sense we have been exploring.

The story I have told seems to me realistic, though you might think it merely cynical. Education is widely valued; why? Because it is a passport to prestige. When kids know they don't stand a chance of getting an entry visa, they reject what schools stand for, which is precisely education in the above sense (schools can stand for this without doing much to distribute it).

Disguising social reality

Remembering that prestigious groups come in various types and often espousing conflicting values, the story I have offered says that for something to be educational is very roughly for it to belong to the socialization of prestigious groups. It offers a relational account; something is educational not because of anything intrinsic to it but because of how it fits into the production and reproduction of élites.

It is a consequence of this story that if we imagine a very different society we might have to make very different judgments of what is educational. In the world as we know it, opera and ballet are in the educational stream; dance-hall and the Bogle dance are not. Let us imagine a world in which La Scala and the Met are given over to dance-hall music, while the ghetto blasters pump out Wagner and Mozart. My story would require me to say that, in this imagined world, dance-hall would be in the educational stream, while Mozart would not. I must admit that I am not very happy with this consequence of the story, but I think it is probably right.

One way to avoid such a consequence would be to do what most philosophers of education have done, and try to give education some more intrinsic content. Instead of saying with me that education is any socialization into élite groups they say that education is any socialization that includes X and excludes Y. It doesn't matter to them then where education gets you, though it must be comforting that, at least until recently, it seemed to be a paying proposition.

The title of this section indicates one thing I would say about such a strategy. It disguises the social reality I caricatured above. I think this can be seen in the most famous account of education in recent English philosophy of education, that offered by R.S. Peters early in his career (Kleinig discusses it in chapter 2, especially pp. 15-18). In terms of my formula in the previous paragraph, Peters requires an education to include engagement in "worthwhile activities" where three criteria are given for being worthwhile:

1. involving a broad cognitive perspective, which
2. is not inert but transforms a person's view of things, and
3. demands "a kind of commitment that comes from being on the inside of a form of thought or awareness."

The second thing I would say about the suggested strategy is not so negative. My account so far doesn't give you anything useful for making decisions, or at least it doesn't give you anything for making autonomous decisions: it says, more or less, let the dominant groups in society tell you what they value. It gives you no standard by which to judge their current values. But self-styled educators want such standards; they want to say that X is educationally better than Y because of something about X itself, whatever dominant groups or fashion may say. However venal and corrupt they may in fact be, dominant groups tend to see themselves in a very good light: they are responsible, original, sophisticated, adaptable, critical, reliable.... they will think that the educational processes which produce them help to foster such independently valuable traits. To the extent that any of this is true, it might be of very considerable utility to be able to say that X rather than Y can contribute to a person's critical insight or moral reliability.

What I am suggesting, then, is that it may be sensible to learn from the standard discussions (and other sources) by focussing on more specific matters than whether something is educational. These more specific things will then be the valuable things we want to achieve, valuable for anyone, we may hope. By restricting ourselves to such more specific values, we will have to recognize the variety of things we value (both the variety each one of us values, and the variety amongst us) and we may have to adjust and compromise in the face of it. Just as "that's nice" tells us nothing, so "that's educational" is a waste of breath. But "that contributes to a more complex awareness of tastes" or "that clarifies a range of ambiguous expressions" or "that is necessary to understand a theory of chemical reactions" do tell us something that we can get our teeth into.

Putting it another way, what I am saying is to stop worrying about education and concentrate instead on the various things people have called its "aims." But I don't think we can finally avoid recognizing something of the social facts about schooling that I have glanced at above.

Some specific suggestions

Cognitive transformation

Let us start by going back to Peters. One theme we can profitably extract from his discussion (a theme whose terms he himself borrows from Whitehead) is the contrast of "inert" ideas with cognitive transformation. One of the great dangers of institutionalized education is a mental compartmentalization: I learn what the teacher or text-book says and regurgitate it on the appropriate occasions, but it doesn't become part of me; it doesn't affect how I really see things; it is not "internalized." Or I do the expected things, I read the "set books," but again my own tastes or values are unaffected; it is mere play acting.

There are a lot of issues here. Given the amount of rubbish, or the amount of cultural imperialism, found in schools, perhaps people are better off play-acting. At a more rarefied level, it may be that some of the things we teach each other have got to be isolated from our everyday picture of the world. But for all that, the basic point surely holds: what we think is really worth learning is stuff that we want people to make their own; they are going to be better off (intellectually; emotionally; in sensitivity) working with it than without it.

What I have called "compartmentalization" is a matter of how we stand with respect to some claims or some practices. There are various stances we can adopt. Let us take the case of a claim, something factual. I might simply record it, possibly with a memo about what to do with it [Mr T said that the earth goes spinning round the sun and wobbles a bit; use when asked about day and night and the seasons]; I might passively believe it, possibly because I've nothing else in store on the matter or because something impresses me about it — I saw it was so; I might actively decide to accept it, having reviewed the pros and cons and wanting to come to a view of the matter.

One thing this reminds us is that often learners do already have some views on the topics we are trying to teach them. (Science teachers have recently made a big fuss about children's "intuitive" ideas — it is pretty obvious that the earth is standing still, with the sun and the moon and the rest moving around us, isn't it?) My own view is that this fact puts an extra burden on teachers: they should show not merely why people ought to accept the teacher's view but also "explain away" the attractions of the position the learners start with. Unfortunately, too often teachers do neither of these things; so it is little wonder if learners merely recognize the voice of intermittent power and say what teacher wants when it is demanded of them.

What I hope you noticed about the three stances is that what you say you are usually aiming at is the third: positive, reflective acceptance of a view. The learner makes it his or her own; it transforms thought; it is relatively secure because the learner is not deferring to authority but has worked through the arguments and evidence. But how often are conditions in a schoolroom conducive to such acceptance; and if for some, how often for all the children?

Of course, there is a lot that gets transmitted in school that doesn’t require this third sort of active acceptance. If you want kids to know that the capital of Nicaragua is Managua, that's about it; no more need to weigh the pros and cons than there is when you tell me your phone number. What a focus on Peters' second criterion — cognitive transformation — may do for you here is to make you ask whether all this passive stuff can claim any educational right to a place in the curriculum. Learning lists may help you win quiz shows, but is it something one human being ought to require of another? Sometimes, I will agree, one needs the information immediately to hand (and where better than in your head?); but how much can really be justified in such ways?

Cognitive perspective/Understanding

The first criterion Peters offered for a worthwhile educational activity was that it should provide a broad cognitive perspective on things. This idea is frequently invoked in explaining the education/training contrast: training in X is said to be narrow, limited, a matter perhaps of following a routine or recipe blindly or with only one blurred eye, at the extreme in drill a mindless repetition; while an education in X provides a wider appreciation both of what X is, how it fits into the scheme of things, and of why it works the way it does, so that the learner comes away with a rationale for the routines and the insight necessary to adapt them to new circumstances.

Clearly we have here again a question of more or less. And we can find decent reasons for keeping some things at the narrow end of the range. That "G" and "H"come after "F" in the alphabet has just got to be accepted; there's no rationale to be had here, and any historical explorations of older alphabets are irrelevant to the very limited pedagogical point at stake. Getting children to follow some of our conventions (using a knife and fork; being polite; ... ) is best started long before we can hope to provide intelligible rationales, though I think it should not be done in such a way as to suggest that requiring a rationale is out of place.⁴ But the demand for reflective acceptance we looked at above goes along with a demand that we move as much of our teaching as we can in the direction of broader cognitive perspectives.

One thing to note here is that the vistas in the direction of broader cognitive perspectives are virtually endless. We can always go more thoroughly into X and its place in the world. A certain judiciousness is required to judge how far to go for an particular group of students. Similarly, we need to judge how far to go in the preparation of the teachers themselves. When teaching rises above the mere inculcation of lists, I think it could be reasonably claimed that the teacher should always have at least as wide a cognitive perspective on what she is teaching as her students (and so very often a wider grasp than what she teaches them). There is a serious danger that if you teach teachers of X about the deeper matters X₁ they will go out and teach their students X₁ as well; my point is that you do not do it for that reason but because the teachers' knowledge of X₁ should structure and inform their teaching of X.

One last remark here. One criticism of Peters has been that his vision was too dominated by cognitive considerations (as Kleinig notes, pp. 18-19, Peters' later views go some way to modifying this, though not far enough for Kleinig's tastes). To the extent that his account matches "our" ordinary usage of words like "education" I do not think he is mistaken. Cognitive matters have been central to what people are concerned about. People may have wanted other things as well, but cognitive change was essential. We cannot now enter into the place of emotions, feelings, willpower, involvement in action, the development of personhood, etc. among the aims of education. But to see one direction in which the argument might go, I offer you some extracts that relate these issues to the position of women in Western societies. I shall not try to take up these questions, but I hope you will get some idea of the very different kinds of issue (logical; psychological; sociological; etc.) that arise when we begin to examine the aims of education carefully.

NOT SO OPTIONAL INTERLUDE: Women and Education à la Peters

{The following conventions have been used: … represent omission's within a sentence; .... represent longer omissions within what I have made into paragraphs; other omissions are not indicated; [] enclose material originally in footnotes; {} enclose my own remarks.}

R.S. Peters calls it an ideal.... The educated man!.... It is now the early 1980s. Peters's use of the phrase "educated man" no longer troubles me for I think it fair to say that he intended it in a gender neutral way. Despite one serious lapse which indicates that on some occasions he was thinking of the educated man as male, I do not doubt that the ideal he set forth was meant for males and females alike. Today my concern is not Peters's language but his conception of the educated man — or person, as I will henceforth say. I will begin by outlining Peters's ideal for you and will then show that it does serious harm to women. From there I will go on to argue that Peters's ideal is inadequate for men as well as women and, furthermore, that its inadequacy for men is intimately connected to the injustice it does women. In conclusion I will explore some of the requirements an adequate ideal must satisfy.

Peters claims to have captured our concept of the educated person, and he may well have done so.... Whereas "education" in the broad sense refers to any process of rearing, etc., "education" in the narrower, and to him philosophically more important sense refers to the family of processes which have as their outcome the development of an educated person.

Briefly, an educated person is one who does not simply possess knowledge. An educated person has a body of knowledge and some kind of conceptual scheme to raise this knowledge above the level of a collection of disjointed facts which in turn implies some understanding of principles for organizing facts and of the "reason why" of things. Furthermore, the educated person's knowledge is not inert: it characterizes the person's way of looking at things and involves "the kind of commitment that comes from getting on the inside of a form of thought or awareness"; that is to say, the educated person cares about the standards of evidence implicit in science or the canons of proof inherent in mathematics. Finally, the educated person has cognitive perspective. ... Peters added to this portrait that the educated person's pursuits can be practical as well as theoretical so long as the person delights in them for their own sake, and that both sorts of pursuits involve standards to which the person must be sensitive. He also made it clear that knowledge enters into his conception of the educated person in three ways, namely, depth, breadth and knowledge of good.

Consider now the knowledge, the conceptual scheme which raises this knowledge above the level of disjointed facts and the cognitive perspective Peters's educated person must have. It is quite clear that Peters does not intend that these be acquired through the study of cooking and driving. Mathematics, science, history, literature, philosophy — these are the subjects which constitute the curriculum for his educated person. In short, his educated person is one who has had — and profited from — a liberal education of the sort outlined by Paul Hirst in his famous essay, "Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge." {In Paul Hirst (1974), Knowledge and the Curriculum, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.} …. These disciplines will not necessarily be studied separately: an interdisciplinary curriculum is compatible with the Peters-Hirst ideal. But it is nonetheless their subject matter, their conceptual apparatus, their standards of proof and adequate evidence, their way of looking at things that must be acquired if the ideal is to be realized.

What is this certain way in which the educated person comes to look at things? .... A body of literature documenting the many respects in which the disciplines of knowledge ignore or misrepresent the experience and lives of women has developed over the last decade. …. Through the use of examples, however, I will try to give you some sense of the extent to which the intellectual disciplines incorporate a male cognitive perspective.

Let me begin with history. …. History has defined itself as the record of the public and political aspects of the past; in other words, as the record of the productive processes — sphere — of society. Small wonder that women are scarcely mentioned in historical narratives! .... The reproductive processes of society which have traditionally been carried on by women are excluded by definition from the purview of the discipline.

Even as literature and the fine arts exclude women's works from their subject matter, they include works which construct women according to the male image of her. One might expect this tendency to construct the female to be limited to the arts, but it is not. Naomi Weisstein has shown that psychology constructs the female personality to fit the preconceptions of its male practitioners, clinicians either accepting theory without evidence or finding in their data what they want to find.

In sum, the intellectual disciplines into which a person must be initiated to become an educated person exclude women and their works, construct the female to the male image of her and deny the truly feminine qualities she does possess. The question remains of whether the male cognitive perspective of the disciplines is integral to Peters's ideal of the educated person. The answer ... is to be found in Hirst's essay, "The Forms of Knowledge Revisited." There he presents the view that at any given time a liberal education consists in an initiation into existing forms of knowledge. Hirst acknowledges that new forms can develop and that old ones call disappear...... In our time the existing forms embody a male point of view. The initiation into them envisioned by Hirst and Peters is, therefore, one in male cognitive perspectives.

Peters's educated person is expected to have grasped the basic structure of science, history and the like rather than the superficial details of content. Is it possible that the feminist critique of the disciplines therefore leaves his ideal untouched? It would be a grave misreading of the literature to suppose that this critique presents simply a surface challenge to the disciplines….. Its targets include the questions asked by the various fields of inquiry and the answers given them; the aims of those fields and the ways they define their subject matter; the methods they use, their canons of objectivity, and their ruling metaphors.

The masculinity of Peters's educated person is not solely a function of a curriculum in the intellectual disciplines, however. Consider the traits or characteristics Peters attributes to the educated person. Feelings and emotions only enter into the makeup of the educated person to the extent that being committed to the standards of a theoretical pursuit such as science, or a practical one such as architecture, counts as such. Concern for people and for interpersonal relationships has no role to play: the educated person's sensitivity is to the standards immanent in activities, not to other human beings; an imaginative awareness of emotional atmosphere and interpersonal relationships need be no part of this person’s makeup, nor is the educated person thought to be empathetic or supportive or nurturant. Intuition is also neglected.

The educated person as portrayed by Peters ... coincides with our cultural stereotype of a male human being. According to that stereotype men are objective, analytic, rational; they are interested in ideas and things; they have no interpersonal orientation; they are neither nurturant nor supportive, empathetic or sensitive.

Now it might seem that if the mold is a good one, it does not matter that it is masculine. .... It does matter that the traits Peters assigns the educated person are considered in our culture to be masculine, however. It matters because some traits which males and females can both possess are genderized; that is, they are appraised differently according to sex.

Consider aggressiveness. …. Here is the list of adjectives the women used to describe an aggressive man: "masculine" "dominating," "successful," "heroic," "capable," "strong," "forceful," "'manly." Need I tell you the list of adjectives they used to describe an aggressive woman?: "harsh," "pushy," "bitchly," "domineering," "obnoxious," emasculating," "uncaring."

While it is possible for a woman to possess the traits of Peters's educated person, she will do so it her peril: her possession of talent will cause her to be viewed as unfeminine, i.e., as an unnatural or abnormal woman. The woman whose self-confidence is bolstered by an education which transmits the message that females are inferior human beings is rare. …. Peters's ideal .... puts females in a no-win situation. Yes, men and women can both achieve Peters's ideal. However, women suffer, as men do not, for doing so.

Peters's masculine ideal of the educated person harms males as well as females. .... The Peters-Hirst educated person will have knowledge about others, but will not have been taught to care about their welfare, let alone to act kindly toward them. That person will have some understanding of society, but will not have been taught to feel its injustices or even to be concerned over its fate. The Peters-Hirst educated person is an ivory tower person: a person who can reason yet has no desire to solve real problems in the real world; a person who understands science but does not worry about the uses to which it is put; a person who can reach flawless moral conclusions but feels no care or concern for others. Because it presupposes a divorce of mind from body, thought from action, and reason from feeling and emotion, it provides at best an ideal of an educated mind, not an educated person.

Peters would vehemently deny that he conceives of education as production. Nonetheless, he implicitly attributes to education the task of turning raw material, namely the uneducated person, into an end product whose specification he sets forth in his account of the concept of the educated person. Peters would deny even more vehemently that he assigns to education a societal function. Yet an examination of his conception of the educated person reveals that the end product of the education he envisions is designed to fit into a specific place in the social order; that he assigns to education the function of developing the traits and qualities and to some extent the skills of one whose role is to use and produce ideas. […. It should be noted that an understanding of the societal role for which Peters's educated person is intended illuminates both the sex bias and the class bias his ideal embodies.]

Peters would doubtless say that the production and consumption of ideas is everyone's business .... Yet think of the two parts into which the social order has traditionally been divided. Theorists have put different labels on them, some referring to the split between work and home, others to the public and private domains and still others to productive and reproductive processes. .... I will speak here of productive and reproductive processes. .... I use it {"reproduction"} here to include not simply biological reproduction of the species, but the whole process of reproduction from conception until the individual reaches more or less independence from the family. This process I take to include not simply childcare and rearing, but the related activities of keeping house, running the household and serving the needs and purposes of all the family members. Similarly, I interpret the term "production" broadly to include political, social and cultural activities and processes as well as economic ones.

Now this traditional division drawn within the social order is accompanied by a separation of the sexes. For the ideal of the educated person to be as broad as it should be, the two kinds of societal processes which Peters divorces from one another must be joined together. An adequate ideal of the educated person must give the reproductive processes of society their due.

The existence of genderized traits is not the only reason for giving the reproductive processes of society their due in an ideal of an educated person, however. …. Marriage, childrearing, family life: these involve difficult, complex, learned activities which can be done well or badly. Just as an educated person should be one in whom head, hand and heart are integrated, he or she should be one who is at home carrying on the reproductive processes of society, broadly understood, as well as the productive processes.

An adequate ideal of the educated person must give the reproductive processes of society their due, but it must do more than this. We need a conception which does not fall into the trap of assigning males and females to the different processes of society, yet does not make the mistake of ignoring one kind of process altogether. .... An adequate ideal ... must also reflect a realistic understanding of the limitations of existing forms or disciplines of knowledge.

The effects of an initiation into male cognitive perspectives constitute a hidden curriculum. Alternative courses of action are open to us when we find a hidden curriculum. …. We can show it to its recipients. …. A curriculum which, through critical analysis, exposes the biased view of women embodied in the disciplines and which, by granting ample space to the study of women shows how unjust that view is, is certainly preferable to a curriculum which, by its silence on the subject, gives students the impression that the ways in which the disciplines look at the world are impartial and unbiased.

We do not even have a vocabulary for discussing education in relation to the reproductive processes of society, for the distinction between liberal and vocational education which we use to cover the kinds of education we take to be philosophically important applies within productive processes.... The aims of education we analyze — critical thinking, rationality, individual autonomy, even creativity — are also associated in our culture with the productive, not the reproductive, processes of society. …. Education, as we conceive of it, is an intentional activity. Teaching is too. Thus, we do not consider the unintended outcomes of education to be our concern. Moreover, following Peters and his colleagues, we draw a sharp line between logical and contingent relationships and treat the latter as if they were none of our business even when they are the expected outcomes of educational processes.

In conclusion I would like to draw for you two morals... The first is that Plato was wrong when, in Book V of the Republic, he said that sex was a difference which makes no difference. I do not mean by this that there are inborn differences which suit males and females for separate and unequal roles in society. Rather, I mean that identical educational treatment of males and females may not yield identical results so long as that treatment contains a male bias. .... For some time I assumed that the sole alternative to a sex-biased conception of the educated person such as Peters sets forth was a gender-free ideal, that is to say an ideal which did not take sex or gender into account. I now realize that sex or gender has to be taken into account if an ideal of the educated person is not to be biased. To opt at this time for a gender-free ideal is to beg the question. What is needed is a gender-sensitive ideal, one which takes sex or gender into account when it makes a difference and ignores it when it does not. Such an ideal would truly be gender-just.

The second moral is that everyone suffers when an ideal of the educated person fails to give the reproductive processes of society their due.

Jane Roland Martin (1981), The Ideal of the Educated Person, Educational Theory, 31, 97-109.

We are agreed that gender-justice should be a criterion for an educational ideal, I should think. But how is gender-justice to be defined? As the judicious balancing in the ideal of two distinct cognitive perspectives, the male and female? That would seem to be Professor Martin's answer; it sounds promising, but leads us to ask: What, exactly, is it to be a cognitive perspective (or a "cogspec," as I shall shorten it henceforth)? .... Does everyone have one or two or more? Exactly how does one have a cogspec? As one may have the measles or tickets to the opera, or a nasty disposition, etc? When did peoplefirst start to have them: back in our primitive days or in more recent historical times?

The fact that such questions can be iterated indefinitely leads one to suspect that Professor Martin has run afoul of a fundamental rule of analysis....: never lean any weight on an abstract noun unless you can back it up by reference to some quantifiable entities. (Quantifiable logically, not necessarily statistically.)

But what, literally now, is 'cogspec' a metaphor for? .... I can see two possibilities, there may be more.

1. For the first, we may use a modism: pernaps she's referring to the 'head' that a person gets into as a result of being taught the Peters-Hirst curriculum, especially if taught by an Oakshottian pedagogy. A 'head' is a material state of an organism, primarily of the organism's central nervous system. .... Is cogspec likely to be a scientifically useful concept? A 'yes' is warranted only if there is something in common among all the different 'heads' ... that people get into as a result of having received (among other things) a so-called 'liberal education.' Some who pursue that curriculum, according to Gilbert and Sullivan, become little liberals and their classmates little conservatives — according to Isaiah Berlin, some become hedgehogs, others foxes. Etc. Now, which of these cogspecs is male and which female? I think Professor Martin's claims require her to regard all those 'heads' as equally male cogspecs. Which gives me reason to doubt that there is any pragmatic utility to the whole concept interpreted as a particular 'head.'
2. The second would allow 'cogspec' to designate some feature in the material to be taught, a property of the disciplines themselves.... ; it is ... an abstract feature or property of that subject matter itself. .... But what property, exactly, is exemplified or "incorporated" in all those disciplines? The property of ignoring or misrepresenting "the experience and lives of women," says Professor Martin, and who can doubt the truth of that?

But why does, say, mathematics as taught in schools ignore or misrepresent the lives and experiences of women? Because mathematics as such incorporates a male cogspec, says Professor Martin, as nearly as I can make out. But that answer is not only conceptually absurd, it is politically pernicious. The curriculum ignores and misrepresents the truth of many things because the dominant ideas in a society are those of the dominant class, the dominant sex, the dominant race. It is not an abstract property like a cogspec, male or female, that determines what biases will be found in a society's curriculum for its young but rather the material relations of power, wealth, and ownership sustained among different segments of that society. Thus on neither interpretation of 'cogspec' can I find it a useful concept for further philosophical or political work.

Were we to study the human species with the same conceptual framework we use in studying any other animal species, we should regard production and reproduction as complementary moments in the same organic process...... Socially organized production of the necessities of species life is found in various species other than our own, though no other species, thank God! acts as if the entire universe were created merely to provide new materials for its own productive capacities. We are becoming an excrescence the universe can scarce afford; koros, hubris, ate, as the old saying goes, excess, pride, death.

The sequence begins historically with the separation of production from reproduction. But it reaches its apogee only in capitalism where production, eventually all of production, is carried on to maximize the profits going to the capitalist class.

The final point is this: as Professor Martin says, it seems "a relatively simple matter to give the reproductive processes of society their due in the ideal of the educated person." All we have to do is to be true to our scientific commitments, which means to recognize that "male biased" science is simply bad science, that our scientific study of ourselves ... has been forcibly repressed when the appropriate political passions are systematically excluded from the curriculum. Relatively simple ... in the ideal, enormously complex in practice. For THEY control the curriculum, the tests, the performance criteria, the whole sorting sifting process that makes the school the form of social reproduction that it is.

So what do WE control? {What should we do with a hidden curriculum when we find it?} The answer is: Seize it! Let it become the forum where the "forms of thinking, feeling and acting" that THEY find so threatening shall rise to full consciousness.

James E. McClellan (1981), Response to Jane Martin, Educational Theory, 31, 111-114

Martin claims that "Peters' educated person is intended to inhabit a world in which feelings and emotions such as caring, compassion, empathy and nurturance have no legitimate role to play." {The quotation is from J. R. Martin (1982), Excluding Women from the Educational Realm Harvard Educational Review, 52, 133-148, page 147.} Although these particular emotions may not figure into Peters's concept of the educated person, he does provide an account of emotions which must be carefully examined if we are to unravel the paths to genderism....

Peters begins with the directive that a moral position is needed for deciding the "appropriate" emotions to be developed. Here "appropriate" refers to an emotion's moral appropriateness, not to whether or not persons have based their emotion on appropriate beliefs or information. Peters does not, however, provide such a moral context for deciding which emotions should be developed. Rather, he leaves us with the comforting thought that psychologists can provide us with guidance in our choice of emotions.

Despite this absence of a moral justification, Peters does not hesitate to advocate abolishing particular emotions and developing others. …. Peters urges elimination of irrational or "wild and intuitive" emotions and the development of "self transcendent" emotions. Self-transcendent emotions such as "love, respect, the sense of justice and concern for truth" are advocated not for their appropriateness to the development of a particular morality, but because they control more primitive or irrational emotions. …. In addition, Peters admonishes us to eliminate the passive element of emotions by either connecting appraisals to specific actions or to forms of gestural or symbolic expression. …. Intuition, passivity, and sublimation are, of course, terms that have particular meaning for scholars of women's history.

.... Freud’s influence is clear. …. Freud's Civilization and its Discontents states that "only men are capable of sublimating their passions and thus capable of the justice that civil life demands." …. Important issues, such as the possible conflicts between the emotions of love and a sense of justice, are not covered in Peters's analysis.

Ann L. Sherman (1984), Genderism and the Reconstitution of Philosophy of Education, Educational Theory, 34, 321-325

We do not believe that Martin's proposals would achieve her objectives.... Instead of correcting male bias in the ideal of the educated person, Martin's position is self-defeating in entailing a new … ideal — the ideal of the educated (or undereducated) woman.

This can be seen in the arguments Martin presents in support of three charges she brings .... First, women are "excluded from the subject matter" of these academic disciplines; second, the disciplines "distort the female according to the male image of her"; and third, they "deny the feminine by forcing women into a masculine mold." …. We shall ... treat the third charge as an aspect of the second.

One worry about these allegations is whether philosophy or any other discipline can be guilty of both offenses simultaneously.

We must register our puzzlement at Martin's treatment of such instruction as occurs under such rubrics as "home economics" and "domestic science." The point is not simply that this sort of education has been extensively provided in schools, but that, as Martin acknowledges but curiously brushes aside in a footnote, it "has historically been classified as vocational education. " Her stated reason for a curt dismissal of home economics teaching as irrelevant to the present discussion is that, according to her construal of "production", home economics cannot count as vocational education, since it is not preparation for productive work, which is work sought in the labor market, and vocational education is necessarily education for production. Home economics is education for reproduction and therefore not vocational. .... This muddle virtually destroys Martin's case that the traditional education of females is excluded from current definitions of "vocational education" (except of course, her own!).

Now this denigration — not distortion or molding — of the vocational education received by many if not most females is precisely what philosophy of education should be criticized for, along, indeed, with its denigration of vocational education as a whole.

Whereas changing diapers and methods of entertaining one’s husband's business colleagues may not be its content, liberal education can be culturally related to such activities, especially the latter kind, in an indirect way. …. An imprecise but relevant analogy is the Oxbridge classics education which for a long period was a highly regarded preparation for the British imperial civil service, although Greek and Latin were not a specific training in how to run India. The claim on behalf of Greek and Latin was that they teach a person "how to think." Just so: a liberal education for females teaches them how to think.

Martin equivocates on the issue of gender in education...... Either the culturally determined sex stereotypes are objectionable and any educational ideal including them should be degenderized by acknowledging the desirability of the relevant traits for both sexes, or the sex stereotypes reflect a socially desirable differential distribution of traits. .... Martin's overall position clearly endorses a theory of sex-specific educational ideals. This is so because of her insistence that the "truly feminine" — as distinct, it is implied, from the merely accidental or falsely feminine — be presented in education. .... Clearly Martin does not want the "truly feminine" nor "their own way of thinking and experiencing" to be relinquished by women. Granted this position, the origin of femininity — cultural or whatever — is irrelevant.

We wish to suggest that these properties are not essentially female and should not be presented as such. …. Being misled by her theory of the exclusion of females, Martin confuses two things which are quite different. First, she claims that such qualities as nurturance are valued in females rather than in males and that aggression, critical thought, and so forth, are valued in males and not in females. ...Assuming it for the sake of argument, we would point out that it does not entail — and this is the second thing — that the "female" and the "male" qualities are equally valued by males, females, or society generally, nor that they should be. It does not entail that the admission of the "truly feminine" into philosophy of education and educational ideals would lead to gender justice.

We would suggest that women should be telling people, both female and male, that maternal thought is a historically conditioned form of oppression for women; that in the interests of women, children, and men all three groups should get together to work out, equally, nonpatriarchal (and nonmatriarchal) roles for everyone.

J.C. Walker and M.A. O'Loughlin (1984), The Ideal of the Educated Woman: Jane Roland Martin on Education and Gender, Educational Theory, 34, 327-340

Does my proposal for a gender sensitive ideal commit me to separate educational ideals for males and females? Not at all. To suppose that it does is to commit the very mistake — the fallacy of false dilemmas — I warned against in my discussion of Peters's ideal.... There is another alternative available which is that sex or gender makes a difference in some respects and not others.

In praising Sophie's {Rousseau's girl character in Emile} virtues, am I contributing to women's oppression? Quite the contrary. Walker and O'Loughlin make the terrible mistake of assuming that since the traditional female role has been a source of women's oppression, no trait or task associated with it can be projected into women's future without that oppression continuing.

Jane Roland Martin (1984), Bringing Women into Educational Thought, Educational Theory, 34, 341-353.

END OF INTERLUDE

Realising potential

Some educators talk of realising a person's potential, or of the total development of the person. I mention this simply to indicate its uselessness and to link our concerns now with the general drive for eradicating nonsense and confusion that inspired Argument Analysis.

What were my potentialities, when I was at school? I could have studied more physics and become a physicist; I could have learned to play the piano and become unemployed; I could have taken up shoplifting and made myself a life of crime. And that’s just for starters. There are clearly an enormous number of things I could well have done, that I had the potential for. Some of them praiseworthy; some of them extremely nasty. Some of them that could fit with others in a coherent package; others that would have ruled some things out — it would appear that if you set out to be a ballerina or an Olympic gymnast you won't have much time left to win a Nobel prize in molecular genetics, and bring up six adopted children, and ....

Just as people overlook that pimps and drug-pushers' are as much socializers as anyone else, so here people usually tag on an unspoken "morally acceptable" to their talk of "potentialities" or "development." Or perhaps they add "not morally unacceptable." Or perhaps they add "socially acceptable to the more prominent members of my audience." Or perhaps they add "all the rest and feasible in the light of So-and-so's psychological speculations." Or, perhaps... The point is we haven’t the least idea what they add, so we don't know what they are talking about. lt is pretty clear they don't mean what they literally say — I wouldn't want to send my children to a school where it was on the cards they would be encouraged to be murderers — but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. That isn’t the kind of language to use among responsible people.

Even if, with charity and a good deal of cross-questioning or by extrapolation from what they actually do, we were able to extract some boundaries around the potentialities or the kinds of development in question, the second objection I raised above reminds us that not all good things are compossible for each person, and that not all distributions of good are possible for a group. You cannot enjoy both the joys of motherhood and those of perpetual virginity; we couldn't all be football spectators if no one played football. I have used logical examples just then, but the more important point was made originally: life is too short to do all the things one would like to do, even for the most frenetic. Bland talk of total development ignores the hard choices that often have to be made and the need students have for advice and discussion in making them wisely.

Healthy, wealthy, and wise?

Virtually everyone wants to be healthy. (Not that that stops them smoking cigarettes or doing gymnastics or lots of other things that put their normal healthy state in jeopardy — no one said people were simple.) Virtually everyone would like to be wealthier than they already are. People talking about education (and that usually means that they are talking about schooling or what goes on in tertiary institutions)⁵ often give the impression that the same story can be told for education: virtually everyone wants to incarnate all the wonderful things educators aim at.

The problem is that in fact they don't. Part of the answer comes from the point I borrowed from Peters and Whitehead: education involves cognitive and evaluative transformations; you end up a rather different person from what you were at the start and from what you would have become if you hadn't got yourself an education. When that sort of transformed person is pretty unusual in your environment, why ever would most people opt for the transformation? Better to be normal. Better to enjoy dance-hall than hope to hear some Mozart. Better to check your horoscope and believe what you're told than insist on thinking things through for yourself and by reference to the evidence. As Gray said, where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.

Normally when you are persuading someone to do something or justifying to yourself one out of a set of possible choices, you will appeal to how things will affect the person in question's future. You should have a glass of water rather than a bottle of beer because you want to lose weight. It will be the same you, whatever you do, only one you will be marginally fatter than the other. The problem with education (to the extent that it does involve transformations of the sort we have looked at) is that you may not want to accept that it's the same you, whatever happens. You are going to become a different kind of person. And so the normal strategies for justification can no longer get a grip; arguments will seem to "beg the question." Yes, you may get a lot more satisfaction out of a Mozart string quintet than from D-J music, if you become that sort of person; but equally, if you don't, the Mozart will seem a lot of meaningless noise while you can relate to Shabba Ranks.

There are at least two responses which testify to the problem I have sketched. Some discussions of education and its aims push them in the direction of health and wealth, things that everybody wants without qualification. Thus you will be told that knowledge is power, or that education can make you free in some way. If there is any truth in such claims, it is clearly not a particularly persuasive truth for the thousands of drop-outs from our schools. The other kind of response "moralizes" the question by suggesting that there is something disreputable about ignorance, about ways of life that do not prize education. But while social stigma often takes on a moral tone, we don't really think it is wrong to live these other sorts of life. We know there can be villains in any walk of life. A person's cultural baggage is morally neutral.⁶ Both these ways of trying to "sell" education hope to avoid the problem of self-transformation by invoking something that remains stable: everyone wants power, no one should aim at turpitude. Their failure means we must acknowledge the problem. Educators are "selling" a distinctive product; they should not be surprised that some people don't want it.

Another part of the explanation of why many people don't want what education says it offers them brings us back to the social realities we sketched earlier. School systems take everyone, but they are designed to provide only for some. The aims of education you formulate may indeed be valuable for anyone, but a school system will "particularize" them, will dress them up in some group's clothing, and thereby make it pretty clear who the intended recipients are. For a clear, if extreme case, I have taken musical taste in the discussion above; but the point is general. Intelligence is going to be cashed in terms of maths and computer programming rather than navigating taxis through rush-hour streets; biological understanding will be offered in terms of dissecting frogs and regurgitating genetics rather than the insights of animal trainers or "folk medicine." I am not denying that there might be good non-social reasons for some of these choices. The point is that the way educators package their aims is contaminated with the sort of social exclusivity I said was summed up in one common use of the word, "education." If you tell people to keep out, they might not come in and take even when you are giving away something that is good for them.

Footnotes

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