Course material for ED20H: Introduction to Argument in Education, UWIDITE and the Department of Educational Studies, UWI, Mona, prepared for 1992/93
A Guide to Reading
This part of the ED20H course introduced you to various arguments in education, some of the many issues and controversies that arise when people think about education and schooling. The ones we look at are some of those that can reasonably be said to be, in part at least, philosophical.
You will, I hope, have met some of the issues before: in staffroom discussions With your colleagues; in talking to parents; in reading newspapers. But just as in the first half of the course we tried to go a bit beyond our usual informal ways of dealing with arguments so here we will be trying to look more thoroughly and carefully at the chosen issues. For this reason it is essential that you become acquainted with some of the things people have thought about these topics before.
The course has developed around one particular book, John Kleinig's Philosophical Issues in Education. I hope that each UWIDITE site has a copy of this book for you to use. One reason I like Kleinig's book is that he covers a wide range of issues, many more than we will have time for now, so we won't be reading all of it, though I hope that some of you will find topics that you want to follow up outside of the selection I have made. For each of the sessions on UWIDITE, you will find some chapters of Kleinig's book listed. Try to read this material before the session and try to discuss it with your colleagues, so that you have a good grasp of the main ideas Kleinig is talking about, even if you are not too sure of all the details.
The notes that follow here are intended to give you some pointers to the various problems, to suggest what I see as the more important issues, and to comment on some of what Kleinig is saying. Given your limited access to Kleinig and any other literature, I shall try to provide as much as I can here; but these notes should not stand alone. Other people see things differently; you need to weigh the thoughts offered here against your own reactions and what you can find offered by other writers. (In a few cases I have attempted to give you a feel for alternative positions by including extracts from other people's work, but only in a couple of cases; for the rest, you must try to read Kleinig or other people.) Again, it is important that you read and try to discuss these notes before we meet on UWIDITE.
A course closely related to ED20H was taught on UWIDITE for several years, and so some sites may have books that can help you now. Any of the following books are worth consulting, though they do not cover everything we shall be looking at:
Besides texts that may exist at the UWIDITE sites, you may find a few books in public or college libraries. Those of you at campus sites should find a good number of books in the UWI libraries. But as with the argument analysis material, it is not so much the number of different authors as the mere fact of seeing how someone else deals with the issues that can help you understand what the course is all about.
Acknowledgement, Request, and Warning
The following notes are a fairly rushed first draft; the first two sections have benefitted from the comments of Peter Whiteley, but the rest are quite unrevised.
I would therefore be most pleased if readers would send me any comments on the notes which might help to improve any subsequent version.
Partly as a result of the circumstances of their creation, and partly because most of you will not have a well-resoured library to use, I have not been very careful in giving references in these notes. Sometimes you will find a proper reference; sometimes just mention of the author,: very often no indication at all of the sources from which I have taken ideas. Such slackness should not be imitated.
29th September, 1992
URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/stepsintro.html
© Ed Brandon, 1992, 2001. HTML prepared using 1st Page 2000, last revised June 21st, 2001.