Philosophy has also been largely ignored by contemporary educators. Both disciplines would benefit greatly from increased engagement and communication

Counterpoint: Philosophy has long been ignored by contemporary education

I expected the author to reference or at least speak about Ivan Illich at some point.

We can totally think about education in other forms than school and I regret this article ignores it completely.

"Speak for yourself, colonizers."

- India

The essay appears imho to do most of its pitching for studying philosophy of education by pitching the philosophy of other topics, like epistemology.

>With this in view, it seems obvious that education should matter to philosophy. And not just because education raises new and unexplored issues, but because it provides opportunity for a fresh approach to old issues that philosophy has traditionally struggled with. We start to see, for instance, that an adequate epistemology must recognise that the manner in which knowledge is acquired, communicated and shared is internal to the nature of knowledge itself, and that the metaphysics of personhood needs to countenance the formation of reason if we are to understand how rationality and animality are united in the human person.

He makes only a cursory mention of any "new and unexplored" issues, gives a critical section to a rather strange proposal by Kitchener at the end as the extent of mentioning old issues in the field, and spends the bulk talking about the "formation of reason", from which I learned nothing about the philosophy of education. Just because the "formation of reason" requires a person to undergo education (in his argument) does not make that automatically within the philosophy of education category -- there's points of common interest intersecting all over among subfields, but intersecting such a point does not mean that entire category is relevant to that subfield. If it did in practice then everyone in every field would be taking interest in their fields' education research subfield, and that's definitely never been the case.

Afaik, philosophy of education was handled seriously within history and philosophy of science over the recent decades -- probably more seriously than how education was handled by the bulk of academics in other fields. I think it was only in the late '90s and '00s that education in STEM and medicine especially became a much more serious issue within those departments, in part because countries like the US started getting more serious about more controlled experiments and a wider experimentation with techniques. When the data showed as dramatic results as it did, old-guard medical lecturers were willing to completely change formats -- an important note to consider, because one of the hurdles to education reform in the US is the inertial resistance to technique changes from old-guard teachers. This hints at just a few areas in which philosophy can investigate further, with no mention of everything that's been studied in terms of teacher-student communication, the changing student psychology and cultural identity (and that political pile of worms), addressing the US controversy over college indoctrination (hey, you don't even have to leave your campus for that one!).

A wasted potential for this essay imho. Sorry.

> That is a myopic view that must change

normative theory they adhere to, ah?

At the end of the day, Philosophy is just people trying to make sense out of life ... being, truth, knowledge, etc. ... just how to live. These are topics that would be helpful for young people to begin to explore. They have all the questions ... just need a little help getting started.

Thank goodness someone is saying it. It needs to be said more, and louder.

An significant portion of philosophy is utterly irrelevant precisely because it fails to address human development. Even Existentialism, which seems to attend to development across a lifetime, rarely dwells with any seriousness on childhood. Kristeva's "subject-in-process" is perhaps the only model I've ever encountered that begins in childhood and considers learning and its systematization across a lifetime with any concordance with lived experience, physiological/neurological development, and interdisciplinary validity.

And this piece itself is rather limited, despite its claim to open up a much wider definition of "education" -- are we talking only about that which is systematized through public, communally funded institutions? Or are we also talking about churches? And the family home?

Learning and Education are not the same thing. Learning is an inevitable feature of the organism; "education" is a byproduct of managing a community of organisms.

It should also be noted that "Philosophy" itself, in the history of education, is today largely a dissociated branch of an older education system, the Trivium, occupying the space where Logic used to be found against its partners Grammar (Linguistics) and Rhetoric (Language Arts). Philosophy will have to contend with itself as an artifice of systematized education, which mainly and merely reifies itself within that system.

This article presents too limited an overview of the history of education, its developments, and the relationship between classical structures and more recent ones -- which is to say nothing of its fascistic and economic purposes in generating national identities and reifying power and capital. If attended through philosophy alone, it would be pointless -- psychology and sociology here are vastly more central to the issue, nevermind political science and biology. There is no such thing as "intelligence," for example -- IQ, as a measure of intelligence, is a byproduct of the standardization of the education system, not a natural phenomenon that the education system surrounds. And this objectification of intelligence is what produces the system that itself produces the concept of "abnormal" psychologies that are wholly systemic byproducts (things like ADHD and Giftedness).

G-factor, for example, is a fascinating example of how statistical output measures of the education system become translated into a priori conceptualizations of learning for that very system, closing a loop. G-factor is used to validate the quality of intelligence measures, but it is itself a product of measure of performance on intelligence measures... The mirror regards itself.

And at the core of education and learning is the issue of consciousness itself. If the leading theory of the day is Kastrup's Analytic Idealism, we're all in trouble. He would observe very quickly that the entire "dashboard" concept is a post-pubescent developmental feature of the mind, perhaps wholly a product of the later development of the prefrontal cortex. The mind is not the "mind" that the Kastrup discusses until late in neurophysiological development.

>he laments that most philosophers think of the sub-discipline of ‘philosophy of education’ as an academic slum occupied by intellectual mediocrities who produce dull and unsophisticated work.

I mean, the problem is, this is right. Most philosophy of education being produced is not worth reading. It tends not to attract the best and brightest... which is a self-perpetuating pattern.

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