Values and Purposes in Citizenship, Social and Economic Education: From Instrumentalism to Argument

Abstract

This article is intended to contextualise some of the ways in which values and purposes are embedded in facticity, and to provide a backdrop to the collection that follows. The first section examines some of the philosophical and social assumptions that underpin instrumental reasoning, a form that Horkheimer said presupposed ‘the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory’. The second section asks if the conceptual separateness of instrumental rationality from its substantive counterpart implies, therefore, a bifurcation of approaches to research that emerge from one or other of the forms of reasoning, and whether this infers a ‘false dichotomy’ between quantitative and qualitative research. The final section turns to the nature of argument that emerges as an epistemological necessity and as an ‘ontological illusion’ when contextualised in unequal social practices. The article concludes by suggesting that argument and engagement about values and purposes may be mandatory in the domain of citizenship, social and economic education, but that running alongside it are counter philosophical and cultural pressures which limit it — the growing predilection for instrumental reasoning, a preference for non-judgementalism, the separation of empirical from normative enquiry and so on, which penetrate deep into many aspects of education policy and practice today.