Schools of Thought: a review

Abstract

This is an odd sortie into the philosophy of education, and one of the oddest things about it is its title. Frankly I expected to find Mary Warnock's usual measured case for the importance of standards in schools, of things being done properly with an emphasis on the supreme value of critical thought. But I was completely mistaken. Reason and critical thought do not even feature in her triadic conception of the good life with which she ends the book morality, work and the imagination. The book in fact purports to set out various schools of thought about some central educational topics. As such it is patchy. It ranges from a proliferation of views about equality to her own, and only her own, vision of the good life. In the Introduction two points are made. Firstly it is argued convincingly enough that questions about the philosophy of education are not optional in the way in which questions about the philosophy of football might be. Secondly, the assumption often made that political and educational questions are distinct is queried. Some discussion here of Martin Hollis' forceful article on the subject [i], might have made her thesis more distinctive. The first chapter is concerned with the extent to which the principle of equality can determine questions about the distribution of education an obvious enough example of an issue in which political and educational questions are closely linked. She expounds and comments on the standard articles on the subject by Wollheim, Berlin, Williams, Crossland, etc., raises difficulties about Rawls' approach and conclusions, and eventually comes to the unsurprising conclusion that questions of distribution cannot be settled without account being taken of the value of what is to be distributed. If 'schools of thought' are being dealt with one would have expected the views of some anti-equalitarians such as J. R. Lucas and D. Cooper to be given an airing especially as Cooper has argued, admittedly from a Rawlsian viewpoint, that equality in education must be at the expense of its quality [2]. The second chapter 'Equality as a Curriculum Aim' deals with two issues: firstly the alleged equality between teacher and taught and secondly the issues of the common curriculum. On the first issue Mary Warnock stresses the general responsibility of teachers over children while at school and hence their authority granted by the law, but queries their status in the classroom-a somewhat subtle distinction. (I was mildly astonished to find myself as having expressed the 'traditional' view which I take to be paternalistic and authoritarian, whereas I have always argued only for the rational use of authority.) This 'traditional' view of the teacher is contrasted with the 'enquiry' theory of education as represented by Postman and Weingartner, etc. Mary Warnock gives some