Читать книгу Educational Explanations - Christopher Winch - Страница 11

So much for the categorial conception which has minimal although significant content. As to education in any particular society or community we can, however, say much more. Education is intimately connected with the society in which it takes place. This cannot be otherwise, since education is primarily concerned with preparing young people for life in that society and must reflect its main features, concerns and priorities. We can add that in societies with any significant degree of complexity, there will be different kinds of preparations for different kinds of roles within that society. Societies with gradations of social class, caste, division of labour, religion, regional variation, will tend to differentiate education according to preparation for living within (and occasionally between) these gradations. The education offered to young people within these different gradations of society will also differ, often to a quite striking degree. One only has to look at Plato’s Republic and Laws (Plato 1950, 2016) to note the radically different education proposed for future citizens and workers or helots, for whom a form of industrial training was deemed appropriate.

If this is true for any particular society, then the differences between educational aims and practices in different societies are also likely to be very great. The question arises then as to whether we have any useful overarching concepts that can at least allow us the beginnings of a conceptual framework for thinking about, comparing and studying the vast variety of educational practices that exist in the world. A tentative answer to this question is ‘yes’, that there is such a categorial framework available if we use it with care.

We have already mentioned the constraints of human biology which guarantee the existence of educational practices in any society. But we can add more. Any society has non-negotiable conceptions of the good and the worthwhile which it regards as non-negotiable because constitutive of what a worthwhile life is in that society.⁶ These are its values. And, given these values and the exigencies of life in that society, concerned with making a living and getting one with one’s fellow humans, the aims of education would normally be expected to reflect these values and exigencies. It is important to note that such aims may be implicit rather than explicit, more often than not, the former. They may also be variegated, some applying to one group within the society rather than another, while others apply to other groups. Aims of education are nothing more than the overriding purposes for which the society’s educational practices exist. They may be difficult to discern clearly if their articulation risks exposing divisions, sometimes painful, within the society.

If aims of education are to be met, then there must be some content in terms of knowledge and know-how to be imparted to young people which allows those aims to be met. This applies to any educational practice, whether formal or informal. That content is prescribed (Barrow 1976) and is what is deemed necessary to the achievement of educational aims.⁷ Where aims are implicit as they very often are, then they may be inferred from the prescribed content of education, the curriculum. Just as there must be a prescribed content in order for education to embody values and to be purposeful, so there must be methods of learning and teaching which are deemed to be the best way, both pragmatically and morally, for acquiring the prescribed knowledge and know-how. Again, these may be formal or informal, but they do need to exist. These can be called the pedagogical practices sanctioned by the society and, like the curriculum, they will not normally be allowed to contradict the aims and values of education.

There need to be success criteria for any educational practice. We assume that such practices are purposeful and therefore that there are means of determining whether or not those purposes have been achieved, whether that be at the level of an individual session of instruction or learning, at the systemic level or at the level of completion of someone’s education. The family of such practices can be called assessment. Finally, educational practices require resources for their purposes to be achieved (Naik 1975). These include not only physical resources such as buildings and playgrounds but also intellectual resources such as textbooks, software and last, but by no means least, teachers.

A case has been made out for a categorial framework for thinking about education as set out briefly above. It is a corollary of our categorial account of the concept of education that there will be multiple realisations or conceptions of what education is. This follows from the fact that there are many different conceptions of a worthwhile life both between and within different societies. ‘X is a worthwhile life’ is in fact a concealed two-place predicate which, properly understood, amounts to ‘X is a worthwhile life for Y’ where Y is a particular person or category of people. It does not follow therefore that ‘X is a worthwhile life for Z’ where Z is not identical with Y.⁸ A conception of education is a particular instantiation of an educational practice within a society or within a particular social group within a society. A particular conception may also contain within itself views concerning whom the conception is appropriate for. It is more likely to be an exception rather than the rule that any preferred conception is considered to be universal, applying without exception to all groups at all times and places. In particular, it is often the case that an educational conception suitable for a group or individual X may be considered unsuitable for a group or individual Y, when what is considered to be worthwhile for X is not considered to be worthwhile for Y and vice versa. We may also expect to find disagreement among groups concerning what kind of education is suitable or worthwhile for them.