R. S. Peters' Normative Conception of Education and Educational Aims

Few analytic philosophers have contributed more substantively to advancing the field of philosophy of education than R. S. Peters. Moreover, none has emphasized ‘the concept of education’ more than he did. In addition, few philosophers of education have done more important work to elucidate its meaning, its connection to other key concepts and its logical terrain than has Peters. In this article, I will try to highlight the importance of that analytical contribution in three ways: 1) by explicating Peters' conception of philosophy of education as a field of philosophy and by explaining his approach to the philosophical analysis of concepts—its purpose and its limitations; 2) by highlighting several (normative) features of Peters' conception of education, while suggesting a couple of oversights; and 3) by briefly suggesting how Peters' analysis might be used to reinvigorate a conversation on how we might educate citizens for the 21^st century.

I THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION AND CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIs

When R. S. Peters edited The Philosophy of Education in 1973, analytic efforts to make philosophy of education into a respected field for philosophers were in their infancy. While the United States could claim having its own analytic champions in Israel Scheffler, James McClellan, Thomas Green, Paul Komisar, Leonard Waks and others, Peters sought to lead British colleagues such as Paul Hirst, Richard Pring, D. W. Hamlyn, John White and Patricia White in making philosophy of education more intellectually respectable (Waks, 2008; 1968). Of the early British philosophers of education in the 1960s, R.S. Peters became its foremost leader, committed to enhancing the field's philosophical work and improving its stature as a field of inquiry.

How did Peters conceive of the field of philosophy of education? Although Peters did not doubt that philosophy of education was a ‘branch of philosophy’, he did not see it as having a separate status apart from established branches of philosophy such as epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. For him, philosophy of education was a field of philosophy that would draw on established branches of philosophy to illuminate critical concepts and issues central to the domain of education—concepts such as education, freedom, rights, teaching, learning, understanding, the curriculum, etc. (Peters, 1973a, p. 2). Peters believed that philosophical work in other fields such as political philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of mind had to be applied appropriately to educational issues, not in a mechanical way, but in a way that acknowledged the unique qualities of the educational context. Thus, in his preface to The Philosophy of Education, he writes about the notion of ‘punishment’ applied to school settings:

However, Peters realised that with a concept like that of ‘education’ philosophers could not take advantage of established work in philosophy. Such work, he argued, did not yet exist. From this vantage point, he argued that philosophers of education must till new conceptual ground and map out new logical terrain. Peters spelled out what he thinks this conceptual mapping must consist of for the notion of education.

Thus, Peters, it seems, viewed himself as leading others to create a carefully conceived conceptual landscape for careful, informed discussions about important educational issues.

With this view of his starting point, and given the unexcavated terrain of ‘education’ as a concept, how did Peters conceive of ‘conceptual analysis’? And how would he engage in the process? First, he did not think of the process as one of his early critics, John Woods did—as a rather tightly defined form of logical analysis, one which conforms very closely with the appropriate ways we ordinarily speak, such as how we speak of ‘being a bachelor’ (Woods, 1973, pp. 29–30). In Woods' paradigm, one spells out the necessary and sufficient conditions for using words properly in one of their senses. Thus, in his article ‘The Aims of Education—A Conceptual Inquiry’ (Peter, 1973b, henceforth AE) Peters responds to Woods' logical critique of his analysis of education:

In criticising Peters' conception of the notion of ‘aims of education’, Woods argues that Peters provides essentially a de facto analysis of how people sometimes use the term ‘educational aims’ to achieve something far and distant, something that one might seek more specificity about. In response, Peters admits that if that is all he was doing, the analysis would be defective. However, he defends himself by claiming that what he has in mind is exploring the conceptual connections that reveal what he calls ‘a more sophisticated notion of meaning’—not something that merely falls under its denotative sense (AE, p. 45).

Here, R. S. Peters implicitly invokes the Wittgensteinean notion of how we use concepts within a purposeful kind of talk, a ‘language game’—this language game being viewed as a ‘form of life’. Moreover, within this ‘form of life’, there are dominant ways of using words, and other ways that are ‘derivative upon’ or ‘parasitic upon’ these. In his earlier work, Ethics and Education, Peters explicitly invokes his debt to Wittgenstein:

In doing conceptual analysis, Peters aims to make useful conceptual connections and illuminate the ways in which concepts are deeply embedded in our normal ways of thinking and talking; however, he does not seek to satisfy the ‘ordinary language’ purist by merely doing a ‘de facto’ analysis of the ways in which people do, in fact, generally speak. The main point, as he indicates, is ‘to become clearer and clearer about the contours of the concepts which have emerged’ (emphases added).

This kind of analysis aims to elucidate important problems, eliminate conceptual confusion, and make the waters of serious educational discourse less opaque. Peters distinguishes conceptual analysis from philosophical justification. The latter seeks to provide compelling ethical arguments for why we should think of education in a certain way and what the content of that education should consist of.

For Peters, education is a concept with necessary normative connections built logically into it. Although he admits that sociologists and anthropologists may use the term ‘education’ in a value neutral way to refer to a cultural or social artifact, namely the systematic ways the culture transmits itself to future generations, he argues that even sociologists and anthropologists would acknowledge that, from the inside of the culture or society, people use the term as a normative concept (AE, p. 50). Its central use relies ineluctably on that the sense that in being educated, people are not merely changed, but are made ‘better’. Even in his non-justificatory discussion of education, Peters puts some flesh on the bare bones of what education must consist of: for him, certain features constitute the very meaning of ‘education’: 1) it must initiate people into activities that are worth-while; 2) it must provide people with breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding; 3) it must dispose people to examine their beliefs and conduct critically, 4) it must make people willing to submit to the demands of reason in their efforts to discover what is true; 5) it must be conducted in morally unobjectionable ways; 6) it must enable people to enjoy some activities associated with it, in a non-instrumental way, for their own sake.

As I indicated earlier, Peters clearly seeks to distinguish between conceptual analysis—whose object is to illuminate the connections between concepts within a particular form of discourse—and philosophical justification, which aims to provide compelling ethical arguments for a substantive conception of what educational activities are ‘worth-while’ and why they are so. Peters provides several justificatory arguments for education in his Ethics and Education (see, for example, the contributions of Michael Hand and Christopher Martin to this issue), but I will not focus my critique on those arguments, as others do in this volume. What I want to emphasize is that Peters is willing both to clarify and justify his conception of education and that he sees these tasks as fundamentally different, although related. Peters believed that one cannot know where to start one's justification of something without a clear-headed view of what it is that one is justifying.

II PETERS' CONCEPTION OF EDUCATION AND SOME OF ITS NORMATIVE IMPLICATIONS

Peters understood well that words acquire a life of their own in particular forms of discourse, within particular cultures and particular historical periods. For example, he understood that the term ‘education’ for much of its early history was used to refer to ‘training or bringing up children’. But this broader pre-20th century usage also had ‘education’ referring to bringing up animals and plants. In these earlier senses, the connection of education to breadth and depth of knowledge was minimal. Thus, Peters' writes: ‘The Latin word “educere” was usually, though not always used of physical development. In Silver Latin “educere” was used to the rearing of plants and animals as well as children. In English, the word “education” was originally used to talk in a very general ways about the bringing up of children and animals’ (AE, p. 53). As Peters focuses on the etymological roots of the older, more generalised use of the education as ‘training or bringing up’, he notes how it is not closely connected with knowledge and understanding; but he appears to overlook, or at least deemphasize, education's central normative focus on what I would call ‘proper child rearing’ (emphases added). Moreover, in some of its forms ‘proper child rearing’ had critical connections to knowledge and understanding, albeit different kinds of knowledge and understanding than those Peters emphasizes. For example, the early Puritans were so concerned that Puritan parents educate their children well, i.e. bring them up as ‘good Puritans’, that they passed compulsory education laws in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1642 and 1648. These laws were designed to insure that all children learned to read (the Bible) and to understand the principles of Puritanism and the laws of the Commonwealth (Katz, 1976).

In discussing contemporary policies aimed at parents in England, Judith Suissa has re-invoked the older notion of education as a form of proper child rearing (Suissa, 2009). Peters rightly concludes that education necessarily makes a person better by initiating her into a worth-while form of life. Thus, it is a fundamentally normative conception of education, not a value-neutral conception. But Peters' focus on the etymological roots of education as suggesting child-rearing is rather dismissive. Thus, he writes: ‘Arguments from etymology, of course, establish very little. At best they provide clues which may be worthwhile to follow up. In this case, for instance, it seems the word originally had a very generalized meaning’ (AE, p. 53). By discussing education as ‘child rearing’ in this way, Peters underemphasizes its critical normative force. In my view, his casual dismissal of child rearing as a form of normative education belies Peters' deep appreciation for how words inhabit historical contexts, contexts which give them social and political significance. For the Puritans, the failure to educate their children properly was a serious moral and legal offense; special offices of oversight were established to insure that the offense was not widespread. Today, dissatisfied with public schooling, increasing numbers of parents in the US are home schooling their children. Moreover, state-supported programs for parental education provide testimony to the normative importance parents attach to bringing their children up well—the older pre-20th century notion of schooling. Its older normative force remains significant, even if Peters has chosen to underemphasize it.

R. S. Peters also notes another important dimension of how we often use the term ‘education’—its modern linguistic narrowing to formal schooling. Thus, he writes:

Although Peters acknowledges the emerging association of education and formal schooling, this acknowledgement is not central to his conceptual analysis, However, I believe it warrants some further discussion here because it obscures two important points: 1) the way in which schooling became the only socially legitimated form of education, and 2) the increasing possibility that schooling might be ‘mis-educative’ rather than educative (Illich, 1970). Peters suggested that we talk primarily of education as schooling because it relates to the development of knowledge and understanding. But another reason seems more critical. We naturally speak of ‘education’ as linguistically equivalent to ‘schooling’ because of the way society requires the symbols of educational achievement in schools—diplomas, certificates, and credentials—as necessary for entrance into, and competition within, the socio-economic system. Schooling has become not merely legally compulsory but socio-economically compulsory. In fact, the socio-economic compulsion underlying schooling gives the equation of ‘education’ with ‘schooling’ its social-political force (Katz, 2008). Thus, when we ask of someone ‘Where did you get your education?’, we recognise that society will recognise as legitimate only that kind of formal instruction in schools that has led to a diploma, certificate, or credential. In many industrialised societies, we often value what Thomas Green calls ‘the secondary goods’ of education—diplomas, certificates and credentials—as more than its primary goods—knowledge, skills and understandings (Green, 1980).

Green has argued that schooling is not regulated primarily according to any philosophically enlightened view of what a moderately or well educated person should know or understand but rather on what society considers intolerable. The extraordinary regulation of literacy in the US through high stakes testing provides ample support for Green's claim—namely that we regulate schooling to reduce or eliminate the most intolerable social outcomes rather than to foster any elevated form of educational achievement. It is simply not tolerable to give high school diplomas to students who are either illiterate or barely literate, in math and reading.

The fact that education came to be associated with formal schooling is correct on its surface; but it obscures another obvious fact—that ‘schooling’ often has little to do with the kind of knowledge, understanding and perspective Peters associates with education. In fact, as we know, schools historically have often emphasized memorisation, recitation, and regurgitation of poorly understood bits of verbal information—leading not to the knowledge and understanding central to Peters' conception. Moreover, Donald Arnstine, a contemporary critic of schooling, has argued quite persuasively that contemporary schooling largely mis-educates students rather than educates them. (Arnstine, 1995) Why is schooling so often mis-educative? Simply because it does not cultivate the habits of thought and inquiry, reasonableness and curiosity, reflectiveness, and critical perspective that most would associate with developing an educated person.

Having digressed a bit, let us return to the heart of Peters' conceptual analysis of ‘education’. Here one can differentiate between a word's becoming ambiguous and a word's being ‘vague’ in one of its uses. Ambiguity involves words having different meanings in their various uses. Thus, ‘education,’ because it has several meanings, remains ambiguous; we can refer to it as ‘a field of study.’ For example, we can ask someone what s/he is majoring in and get ‘education’ as an answer. We can also ask how much have we spent on ‘education’ in the US in the past year? In this question, ‘education’ denotes a system of schooling. But as a process or a set of processes, ‘education’ remains vague, not merely ambiguous. Its vagueness has to do with our uncertainty about the proper criteria for its use in one of its senses. This is where Peters' conceptual analysis provides the most force. For Peters, ‘‘education’‘cannot logically refer to a particular activity or process but must refer to a family of processes culminating in a person becoming educated and thus made better. The concept of education, as a family of processes, culminates in a person having an outlook and form of life that is in some way desirable (AE, p. 55).

In this sense, Peters' claims that ‘education’ is a normative term like ‘reform’ in that it would be a logical contradiction to say ‘My son has been educated, but nothing desirable happened to him’ just as it would be illogical to say ‘my son has been reformed but has changed in no way for the better’ (p. 15). Although education implies that one has been changed for the better by becoming educated, Peters emphasizes that what it means to be ‘educated’ remains vague, for the criteria for judging one to be educated will always be subject to debate. Here his insight remains quite powerful and right on the mark. In clarifying the notion of ‘aims in education’, he points out that those discussing aims are often asking for more specificity in what educators are actually striving for. Finally Peters argues that the criteria for considering someone well educated will remain largely indeterminate. He writes:

Although Peters does sketch his own notion of what he thinks those criteria for being educated must include and also tries to justify what he regards as the essential curricular content of education, what seems critical to his conceptual analysis is his conclusion that the aims of education are indeterminate.

Let me summarise the core features of Peters' analysis. First, Peters emphasizes that the notion that education cannot refer to or denote any particular kind of process or activity. Second, Peters reminds us that ‘education’ like ‘reform’ is a normative term, one that is a special case of what Ryle calls an ‘achievement verb’. He emphasizes that education, unlike other achievement verbs like winning, finding, remembering, etc. does not have a specific activity associated with it, but it must culminate in something of value. Third, Peters views education as an intentional set of processes, albeit not an individual activity. At its core, education aims to initiate people into a worth-while form of life. Fourth, education necessarily is associated with breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding. In being educated, individuals acquire the kind of knowledge and understanding that enables them to assess their choices of activities critically; it also provides them with intrinsic satisfaction as they pursue their chosen activities thoughtfully. Moreover, as Peters argues, an educated person will continue to pursue such life-enhancing activities when s/he is no longer required to do so, i.e. when compulsory schooling has ended. In this regard, education will necessarily transform and enhance the quality of an educated man's life:

For Peters the educated person becomes someone who ‘works with precision, passion, and taste at worth-while things that lie to hand’ (p. 20). He is not someone who is too narrowly specialised and not someone who sees learning as merely an instrumental vehicle to other social goods like status, wealth, and power.

While education is a normative term connected to an individual's development, it also has normative cultural and social dimensions. Peters emphasizes that education is ‘a form of initiation into worth-while activities’. Thus, he recognises that education can be seen as a form of cultural transmission. In this regard, he notes that ‘the values of a community provide the background of content’ to which pleas for particular emphases or principles can be made (p. 24). And he emphasizes that ‘education consists essentially in the initiation of others into a public world picked out by the language and concepts of a people and structured by rules governing their purposes and interactions with others’ (p. 27). And in his justificatory arguments for education, Peters emphasizes such critical cultural values as social justice, equality of opportunity, and respect for persons.

Although Peters clearly acknowledges the public, social, and cultural features of education, he focuses most significantly, I think, on the intrinsic goods of being educated, emphasizing the quasi-universal features of pursuing truth and reason, the value of traditional academic subjects like science, literature, art and philosophy—the staples of a liberal arts education. What appears much less prominently is what others have associated with a critical, socially conscious education—namely the ability to see the gaps between public rhetoric and reality, to explode cultural myths, to notice how textbooks provide a distorted view of social history, and to question official forms of political indoctrination in society. Critical theorists like Paulo Freire, Ronald Glass, Michael Apple, Peter McClaren and others urge us to enable our students to do what Peters does not seem to emphasize in his conception of education; namely, to criticise the subtle, taken-for-granted transmission of their own cultures and to notice how cultures often privilege a few, marginalise some, and oppress others (Glass, 2008). In addition, Peters does not emphasize a view of education I would associate with John Dewey, Amy Guttman, or Eamonn Callan—namely developing citizens as active political participants seeking to perpetuate the critical values of democracy (Dewey, 1916; Guttman, 1987; Callan, 1997). Indeed, as Leonard Waks (2009) has pointed out to me, Peters came in for some very harsh, even viciously hostile, criticism for his own emphasis on a more traditional liberal arts education. My point here is simply to have mentioned very briefly not what Peters' conception of education highlights, but what it seems to underemphasize.

III PETERS' INDETERMINACY OF EDUCATIONAL AIMS AND THE NEED FOR SUSTAINED DIALOGUE

In the final section, I shall speculate on how R. S. Peters' analysis might serve a useful purpose today for contemporary educational policy makers: namely, to encourage them to reinvigorate their dialogue about the aims of education. One central virtue of R. S. Peters' conceptual analysis is his distinction between the meaning of education in one of its central uses and the content of education. He argues that education is unlike medicine where there is broad consensus about what it means to be ‘cured’; no such consensus exists about what constitutes ‘being educated’ (AE, p. 52). Peters focuses on two essential but rather vague conditions that are inextricably attached to the notion of education—its desirability and its connection to the depth and breadth of knowledge. Nevertheless, he also argues that the aims of education remain largely indeterminate. As an indeterminate concept, ‘education’ provides us with a useful starting point for reconsidering how we might develop sensible educational policy. Peters' analysis, I believe, encourages us to rethink the aims of education with each new generation. We must re-examine these aims specifically within our contemporary political, social, and economic contexts. In no other way can we give meaningful substance to our commitment to the ideal of universal education.

Peters has reminded us of something we cannot afford to forget: namely that we need to justify the content of education not once and for all time, but over and over again with each new generation. In this way, we can give political force to his core premise: that the aims of education are fundamentally indeterminate and must be made relevant to each historical period. Peters implied no less than this when he wrote: ‘as Dewey shrewdly remarks: “For the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time”‘ (AE, p. 20). For Peters, the aims of education are both indeterminate and matters of emphasis at a given time. Remembering that can serve a very useful purpose: namely, to remind educators and policy makers that they cannot avoid a sustained, vigorous, and critical dialogue over the purposes and content of education.

Why is such dialogue so critical today? The reason, I think, is straightforward: the cultural realities that we confront—increased threats to our environment, global economic interdependency, increasing cultural diversity, rapid technological change, and widespread international terrorism—are serious. But the educational system that we created at the turn of the 20^th century to accommodate industrialisation and urbanisation has acquired a life of its own, one that appears largely resistant to change (Katz and Denti, 1996). In the US it aims, for the most part, to do what it has done so well for the past century: namely, to socialise students to schooling, to sort them by their differing educational achievements, and to assign them to their appropriate slots within a given social structure. These schooling functions have little to do with educating people in the sense R. S. Peters discussed. But Peters was not blind to the crass instrumentalism he viewed among educational policy makers. He clearly acknowledged that many of them had a narrowly economic view of education seen as formal schooling, Thus, he writes: ‘A politician or administrator, in an economic frame of mind, might think of education as the means by which a supply of trained manpower is assured’ (AE, p. 27). But Peters, while acknowledging this viewpoint, did not regard it as a serious threat to educating people. Thus, he continues: ‘Of course, looking at what goes on in schools and universities from this economic point of view is not necessarily antagonistic to being concerned with education in the more specific sense’ (AE, p. 52). Not ‘necessarily’ antagonistic.

Here is where R. S. Peters and I part company. The crass economic instrumentalism that Peters did not fear brings me almost to despair. The conventional wisdom informing American education is blinded by such economic instrumentalism. It is based on the notion that schooling's central purpose is to promote economic competitiveness through the production of skilled workers. Accompanying this belief is the view that teachers and administrators cannot be trusted to perform their educational tasks well but must be critically evaluated through only one mechanism: the performance of their students on high stakes tests. The results of these tests, however unrelated they are to the curriculum in the schools, will be the central measure for determining the value of formal schooling. Moreover, the test results are being used in the US to reward or punish schools for student improvement. Schools are labelled as ‘underperforming’ unless significant year-to-year progress is made by students on these tests. In addition, schools with a great deal of cultural diversity are often punished for their diversity, since the scores on the tests are disaggregated by ethnic and demographic groups, all of which need to make standard forms of progress (Sleeter, 2007).

One could go on, but the point is simple. In the US, at least, we have implemented a set of policies and practices alien to any informed notion of educating people well for the 21^st century. Moreover, these policies, practices and the intellectual mindset underlying them have acquired a life of their own that naturally seems to sustain itself. What is even more striking is that these policies and practices have had an even more dangerous consequence: namely, to make having a serious, informed discussion on the aims of education less likely to occur. Now more than ever, we need vigorous a dialogue about the aims of education so that we might subject present educational policies to critical scrutiny. However, in the US no such serious dialogue seems to be occurring among educators, legislators, policy makers and other informed citizens. Rather the economic mindset and the concomitant views of assessment and accountability reinforce an uncritical taken-for-granted view, namely that schooling has as its central purpose the creation of skilled workers.

The present state of affairs in the US may have parallels in other countries, for I suspect that narrow versions of school accountability emphasizing student outcomes by standardised measures is not a uniquely US phenomenon. But it should remind all of us that Peters' earlier analysis of education needs to be transformed into a substantive dialogue about the current aims of education. Peters' analysis of education as initiating us into what is worthwhile requires that we rethink what is really worthwhile and why it is so. Aside from Peters' concern with knowledge and understanding, what kinds of educational dispositions and reasoning skills will people need to flourish in this new world? We cannot afford to neglect these questions if we aim to prepare our children to live intelligently in 21^st century. Clearly the world they will inherit will be far different from that which Peters inhabited when he wrote his early essays. It will be a world where we face far too much information and too little time to use it well, a world where widespread indoctrination may still impede the likelihood of informed political judgment, and a world where disparities between the rich and poor will threaten the well being of many groups. Peters reminded us that we not only need to think clearly about what education means, but also need to justify what we regard as its worth-while content. If we take his charge seriously, we will reinvigorate the dialogue over the aims of education in the 21^st century. To do less is to dishonour his philosophical legacy.