Reply to Livingstone's "On Moral Philosophy and Educational Practice"

Abstract

I welcome the opportunity to reply to Livingstone's essay review of my book because his remarks raise a problem of prime importance for all educational research and, indeed, educational practice. It is about this problem that educators need to make up their minds: The book and the review are symptoms of different reactions to the problem. Put as briefly as possible, the problem is this: Are there some things in the world, and in any conceivable world, which are given? Are there concepts, principles, practices, or other features which are inescapable, inalienable, inherent in any form of human or social life-things which we are, as it were, just landed with, whether we like it or not? Or is everything merely a matter, as the reviewer puts it, of intellectual interpretations, one's particular vantage point or alignment? The reviewer takes, though he does not argue for, the latter position. He adopts an intellectual perspective most compatible with these (sc. his own) predispositions. . .that of historical materialism, and proceeds to comment from that alignment. Not surprisingly, he treats the book as if it were a piece of sociology based on my own vantage point and values such as an uncritical acceptance of the institutional status quo. Read as a work in sociology my book is indeed a poor one. But to read it as such is to misread it.