Preface

Abstract

Anyone with an interest in philosophy's pertinence to education is likely to have been struck by the poverty of current discussions amongst practitioners on the topic of knowledge in the curriculum. This is the case where the urgency of policy imperatives and the manner of their construction stand in the way of considered argument, as well as in the frenetic exchanges of the blogosphere, where ideas are sometimes too easily disseminated and enthusiasms and antagonisms too quickly kindled. Policy-makers, of course, seek straplines and soundbites to shore up their position, while conscientious teachers struggle to find a rationale that will give them confidence in what they (are required to) teach. Since its inception this journal has been committed to addressing questions of epistemology, a branch of philosophy that has typically been taken, with ethics, as foundational for its field of enquiry. In the early decades of the journal, the work of Paul Hirst and of R.S. Peters stands out as illustrative respectively of these twin commitments. What was also progressively clear in their work was that these components could not be simply kept apart, certainly not where education was concerned, because questions about what knowledge was worth having, no less than about the nature of truth itself, were ineluctably themselves questions about matters of value (hence, ethics). When it comes to the consideration of teaching and learning, this interconnection becomes all the more pertinent: it is only through an abstracted notion of teaching, and through the inflation of a fantasy of generic learning skills, that the shared investment of teacher and student in the knowledge to be acquired is hidden. As the testimony of teachers so often shows, ethics and epistemology interweave.