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Introduction: Education and Teaching

Why This Book?

This is a philosophical essay on the knowledge and know-how of teachers.1 There are a number of reasons for undertaking such an exercise now, particularly if one wishes, as I do, to reach beyond the immediate philosophy of the education community to address some of the most pressing current worries about the quality of education that are alive in the minds of policymakers, the public and parents, as well as teachers. Since I published Quality and Education in (1996a), the focus of public concern about education has undergone something of a shift from a preoccupation with the effectiveness of schools and the possibilities for their improvement (Mortimore et al. 1988; Tizard et al. 1988) to a growing concern with the quality of teachers and teaching (e.g. Hattie 2009). Although the research on improvement and effectiveness drove much education policy in the last 20 years or so, the results have generally been judged not to have fully lived up to their original promise. 'School effects' although significant, are small and the importance of background factors like school intake characteristics (Butler and Webber 2007) and relative social inequalities (Wilkinson 2005; Wilkinson and Pickett 2010), not to mention the stability of 'value-added' data (Gorard 2010), continue to exercise a powerful effect on the outcomes of education at the national level.

However, it is interesting to note that, despite the apparent importance of background social factors in determining school effectiveness (Gorard 2006), there is evidence that within-school effects are of greater significance than between-school ones (OECD 2013, p. 46). In other words, whatever the background effects, the role of teachers and the ways in which they teach are very important for the progress of pupils and students (see also Tizard et al. 1988), and there are wide differences in individual teacher effectiveness within individual schools. Although the political nature and the culture of a society are critical in contributing to educational achievement, we cannot ignore the possibility that improvements will, to a large degree, be dependent on improving the quality of teachers and teaching. This remains true even when one acknowledges the very important interaction effects that exist between a society and the kind of education system that it is prepared to support. Failure to understand this has led to a rash of policy borrowing in the developed countries which, because it is not based on careful analysis of the background to success in the countries from which the policy is borrowed, has led to limited improvement (cf. Harbourne in Baker et al. 2013).

The focus of policymaking has thus tended to shift towards scrutiny of teacher effectiveness and, inevitably within the 'Anglo-Saxon' (shorthand for the UK, US, Australian, Canadian and NZ polities), has led to the reinforcement of performance management systems relying on a mix of command and control and market mechanisms, approaches which, despite their favour with liberally minded politicians and policymakers, have had at best limited success. Not least amongst the problems has been that of the provision of overwhelming incentives to gaming behaviour in an attempt to mitigate the negative consequences of high-stakes accountability systems. I do not believe that there is a general 'agent-principal' problem in the public services, but it is very easy to create one with the wrong sort of accountability mechanisms. To use the language of le Grand (2003), if educators like all public servants lie somewhere on the spectrum between altruistic 'knights' and egoistic 'knaves', the wrong accountability system will not turn knaves into knights but make knaves of knights, hardly a desirable outcome for anyone who is not a fanatical believer in Public Choice Theory (cf. Stretton and Orchard 1994). 'Knights' in le Grand's classification are relatively altruistic employees; 'knaves' lie at the egoistic end of the spectrum. There are, of course, intermediate positions between these two.2

Much the same problem threatens with the new focus on teachers, not because teachers and teaching are unimportant (they undoubtedly are important), but because insufficient attention has been given to the nature of teaching as an occupation, what the nature of teacher expertise consists in, how teachers should be recruited and prepared for their roles, how their careers should develop and what the governance and broader civic role of teachers should be. There has been in particular a disturbing tendency to adopt a regressive model of teaching as a kind of craft, best acquired through a traditional form of apprenticeship, which prepares the teacher to work within a particular school or group of schools, rather than within the education system as a whole. This development is associated with a tendency to fragment schools into small, quasi-private bodies working within a market. This in turn is itself partly the outcome of the misapplication of research into the effectiveness of schools, which misunderstands the relationship between the school and the society in which it exists (see Grant 2009). This craft model will be subjected to critical scrutiny while the kernel of truth that it contains will be, hopefully, extracted.

There is a significant role for philosophy and philosophy of education in particular in enabling us to get clearer answers to these questions. Philosophy enables us to tackle such vital questions as what makes an education a good education and the role of teachers in providing a good education, however the latter is conceived. However, even more than this, it has a critical responsibility to engage with questions concerning the nature of teaching, the kinds of knowledge, know-how and personal characteristics that make good teachers and teaching, and the broader role of teachers within a society. It thus has a crucial role to play in framing the kinds of empirical questions that we should be asking about teachers and teaching, questions that are often taken to be obvious when they are not actually so, unless one takes certain presuppositions about the aims of education and teaching for granted.

Philosophical work on teaching and teachers has been carried out since antiquity and includes such notable contributions as Plato's Meno and Rousseau's Émile ou de l'Education, works that continue to exert enormous indirect influence on thinking about the nature of teaching. More recently, the topic has received a lot of attention in the analytical tradition since the 1960s. This chapter builds on work done in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (Hirst and Peters 1970; Kleinig 1982) on the nature of teacher ability and the relationship between teaching and learning. It also pays attention to the work of Passmore (1989), which focussed particularly, but not exclusively, on the various kinds of matter that a teacher should teach and the different modes of teaching. This work will focus on the know-how involved in teaching in the broadest sense of 'know-how', which will include the knowledge as well as the various practical abilities that teachers require, including, of course, the way in which the knowledge is integrated and realised in their practical abilities. 'Know-how' will also include consideration of what, if any, theoretical knowledge teachers should possess in order to make their practice effective. This is a highly contested area to which I shall devote considerable attention. It bears strongly on the question of whether or not teaching is to be considered as a 'profession' as that term is usually understood. Inevitably, the enquiry will be directed at the role of the teacher in formally constituted educational systems where the school plays a central institutional role, but it will approach the role of the schoolteacher through consideration of universal issues concerning teaching and learning, while situating these within the contemporary institutional practice of public school-centred education.3,4

Education

It is possible to distinguish between a categorial concept of education and particular conceptions that reflect different perspectives on, or interpretations of, that categorial concept. The distinction, which owes much to Gallie's (1956) account of essentially contested concepts, focusses on the one hand on what is universal about education as a human practice, namely the bringing up of a society's young to be adults, and on the other hand on local versions of that human practice, which may be subject not just to the requirements of particular beliefs about learning and teaching, but also to the predominant values and social divisions within that society (Winch 1996a). This distinction was endorsed in the later work of R.S. Peters (1982) and has also received some more recent cautious support from adherents to Peters' categorial view of education (e.g. Barrow 2014).

This study endorses the distinction, while also acknowledging that the boundary between the universal and the local in education is often difficult to keep in mind, even if one is constantly and conscientiously straining to do so. For the purposes of the argument, the categorial concept of education will refer to preparation for adulthood based...