Reply to Betty A. Sichel's “Plato's Divided Line and Piaget: A Response to Kieran Egan”

Abstract

Sichel notes in her first paragraph that rise of the behavioral and social sciences signaled the relative abandonment of Plato by educational theorists and policy makers. From other comments in her response I am sure she would agree that the relative abandonment of Plato is a symptom of a wider move away from a particular kind of educational thinking towards what seem like more scientific and technological models. The main characteristics of the relatively abandoned kind of educational thinking are those which generate educationally useful theories. These theories are marked by an imaginative specification of new ideals for the educational process in changing times, within a context of a political philosophy and moral scheme, along with the prescription of practical steps by which that ideal may be realized developmentally. The difficulty of constructing so complex a theory perhaps helps to explain why we have so few educational theories and why so many educators find it more comfortable to seek implications for education from the relative security of precisely confined psychological theories. Only Plato and Rousseau have articulated full educational theories of the kind which seem to me useful for educators. (Dewey, with some qualification, has produced something in this direction.) Despite the complexity of the task, however, we can all contribute towards it, by use of analysis, criticism, and the usual uses of reason. What we cannot do with any hope of educational fruit, I argued, is try to infer educational findings from psychological theories. We can seem to do something like this, but only at the cost of deforming education. Psychology and the other human sciences seek to describe and explain phenomena which are in the world; there is no such thing as an educational process out there waiting to be described or explained. Education exists only as we bring it into existence by our prescriptions. This is a simple way of stressing a rather stark difference between what psychologists and educators are up to. Central to my article was to argue the inappropriateness of applied psychology