Philosophy is often understood as a discipline with a distinct subject matter. It refers, negatively, to unempirical matters. More positively. that means philosophy studies concepts that are characteristics of existence itself rather than some aspect of physical, biological and social nature and is therefore non comparative, each of those natural fields various and therefore comparable in that they have more or less of one thing or another, or are comparative in that comedy differs from tragedy or landscapes from portraits. Each of the philosophical fields are sui generis and include such things as concepts found in metaphysics, such as cause and effect, time. and being itself, and also such concepts as beauty, ethics, justice, and the nature of knowledge, all of those unempirical in that the concepts cannot be reduced to the description of a natural process. A critic can find how a play creates its effects and decide it is beautiful but will not be able to define beauty, which is itself a distinct concept, even if David Konstan is so daring as to say that beauty can be reduced to attractiveness, which is part of the natural world, and so people can be said to be more or less attractive and it is possible to describe the dynamics of attractiveness. Moreover, ethical systems are also unempirical in that it is possible to show the consistency of Stoicism or Epicureanism or Pragmatism (which means considering short term consequences, so as to consider a loved one as attractive in form or with a certain tone and rhythm of voice rather than some “deeper” matter) without being able to prove that one of the ethical systems are morally preferable to another, just pointing out their particular advantages, such as a Stoic forearmed that things in life can go bad.
How can you study unempirical concepts? Philosophers do so by rigorously attending to what is necessary or unavoidable, invoking what is sometimes called “entailed” or “required” or “otherwise without sense”, and so philosophers will claim to prove the existence of God, even though, over the centuries, that doesn’t pan out, or an idea of free will, which has endured partly thanks to Kant, who shows in language that you cannot do without the word “should'', which posits choice or free will. Other concepts fall by the wayside as is the dictum of “I think; therefore, I am” because any experience, whether to feel the breeze or think of God, requires a self conscious awareness that the breeze is happening so as to infer that there is a mind behind it, but that means there is a shifting collection of self awarenesses that create a somewhat permanent identity whereby a person can recognize itself, in which case self has been reduiced to identity, which is an empirical matter. Another method for the philosopher is to treat language as the sure-fired evidence of concepts, just as Kant had done with “should''. Philosophy is, after all, a matter of words, and so the royal road to these words is the way language cannot err, though languages do err in thinking, for example, that there are just two “natural” genders and so disguise the variety of sexualities, or that “ sovereign” has to mean “King'', as Carl Schmitt thinks, or that “howdy” is a meaningless cipher when it actually means “I am friendly”, which is clearly a description or intention about reality rather than a meaningless word, which is what ordinary language philosophers sometimes prefer. These philosophical statements can be debated but are quite aside from obvious mistakes as when Bertrand Russell said a thing was a continuous piece of matter when it is clear that an atom or a solar system has many spaces in between and so “thing” should be defined as a system rather than a contiguous object.
But what if philosophy is all wrong in thinking that it has a distinctive subject matter? Maybe philosophy mobilizes exact and categorical reasoning about what has to be and what cannot be only because it has no other way to deal with difficult and recondite matters. In that case, it is always dealing with empirical things. Social philosophies arise out of historical circumstances and particular imaginations rather than because Stoicism is an inevitable possibility in the catalog of moral philosophies. Democracy is not an ideal but a generalization of New England Town Square democracy, that combined, over time, with public opinion and the mechanisms to assure a closed ballot. Beauty comes to include the grotesque in the early Nineteenth Century. The theory of mind is just a set of speculations about how mind and memory and thinking are to be elaborated, that topic largely still unknown during its heyday in the Eighteenth Century rather than unempirical. Science is just the beginning of the task of filling out its knowledge rather than declaring some parts of the conceptual arena as forever terra incognita. Everything is empirical because it is whatever it is at which the inquiring mind looks that way.
Now, in this light, think of the philosophy of education, whether to think of it as an exception to the standard view of philosophy in that it does consider the actual processes whereby people learn and learn to learn, and their institutions and beliefs about education people have considered, and so empirical, even if poorly understood, or else consider the philosophy of education to be in keeping with the unempirical subject matter which can never resolve what education is but only offer education as an opinion about some essential quality of existence. So let us consider two philosophers of education, Immanuel Kant and John Dewey, very different from one another, Kant an idealist who thought education was very hard, and John Dewey, who was a pragmatist and therefore dedicated to the idea that everything is open to science and thought education very easy, both of them suggesting, at the least, that education is an expression of tastes rather than an objective matter where people of different points of view are disciplined so as to see the same thing when they speak of education.
Immanuel Kant wanted to get to the essence of things, to the mother lode of an idea rather than for the dross that surrounds it. So morality was not to be confused with sentiment or custom or preference or even what was prudent, which meant what was a means to an end, but rather to something that had a ‘’should” as a modifier, enjoined by a command on high or what a bureaucratic superior also asked. Kant applied the same analysis to education, which is a subject you might not think concerned Kant in that it deals with school structures and the inculcation of patriotism, but education has been the concern of philosophers ever since Socrates because it deals with the nature of knowledge and how a person can get to learn or appreciate knowledge.
An important contribution of Kant’s “On Education” (1803), aside from his insistence on a catechism as the best way to learn, is a sharp distinction between mere training which is a set of procedures to arrive at a result and education properly understood as the appreciation of concepts. Another way to say that is that training provides people with how to do something while education conveys why things happen. Training is a set of procedures that provide a result. A soldier is trained to operate a howitzer while a military engineer like Stonewall Jackson learns how to aim artillery by applying mathematics to design the trajectories of canonfire. Not only science and engineering can distinguish between the two. People can be trained to learn the Catechism, which is what most Catholics are required to do, and so can repeat the words they are supposed to believe, while some Catholics will learn the Catechism, in that they know the reasons that are offered and which they have figured out as to why the doctrines make sense or are at least plausible. A scientist once said that it wasn’t much to become a literary scholar because all you had to do was read most of the books for a dozen major authors, their biographies and the criticism already written about it, and then you had it. Frank Kermode, a very distinguished literary scholar and critic, said that indeed that was sufficient because such a student had developed a sense of the forms of literature and the arguments and perspectives about them and that was about it. The scientist presumed that the knowledge of a field also included overtly learning the theory of a field, whether through physics or mathematics, but very little theory can go into biology and is learned in inference and some writers about literary theory. So theory is not what can turn training into education. Something else does.
Moreover, the magic of the thing is that training diligently pursued can appear to be and can become education. If you learn the procedures for conjugating the verbs and become familiar with the vocabulary then the mastery of a language can pop up so that a person can speak fluently and even start to think in that language and so one has actually accomplished learning another language in the full sense of having learned it. Rote learning can be real learning. On the other hand, you can master any number of the proofs of God without deeply considering whether they are true or not and so a naive trainee in religion-- or is that indeed possible in that you have to consider the substance of its meaning, not just the verbal formulas by which one is trained into being a clergyman. We are back then to St. Anselm’s fool who can say anything he wants, such as that there is no God, because he does not understand what he means in what he says, that a paradox in the nature of words, whereby they can but may not convey meaning.
There are a number of academic disciplines which are difficult to master but which supposedly allow students to hone their minds so that they can apply their minds to many other things, even though we all know that people who deeply appreciate some things but not others even if learning has been an ordeal or the pursuit of which cost time and money. A cardiologist may not know about politics and a theoretical physicist for poort may not know how to build a lawn. But we persist in thinking that some people, if you just allow them to generalize, are better developed and that this applies to a number of topics to which an educated mind might apply itself, and so those who ruled the British Empire learned about the Roman Empire, but Henry Clay influenced his nation without much education. Among those hard disciplines used to make a person educated and so capable of applying their minds to a great number of topics, was, across the ages, philosophy; foreign languages, both dead and living; science, both mathematical and experimental; and, even for a while, close textual analysis and Chomsky linguistics. All were learned in elite settings by people who were the sons of the wealthy who had the time to go through the ordeal.
John Dewey was revolutionary, along with Horace Mann, in thinking that education did not have to be an ordeal or so expensive. That was because it was easy to learn and straightforward if students generalized from the abilities they encountered with the manuel arts, this encountered by the working class rather than the elite class.Thinking is thinking and so solving how to fix a lathe requires figuring out mechanical processes and applying exactness so that the lathe works. Moreover, it either works when it is repaired or it doesn’t work. No approximations for reading and arithmetic as a substitute for hard thinking. High falutin’ words are replaced by technological expertise which is the royal road to all expertise.
Whether the idea that practice precedes theory in that all theory is derived from practice is an idea which is unavoidable and axiomatic, ingrained in the nature of thought, or else that what seems an axiom is a generalization about how people are observed to think, Dewey remains true to that principle and also to the idea that schools have to be placed in the context of societies, supplementing or amplifying what social experience requires. Dewey thinks that people were practical minded when they made their clothes and sowed their seeds while city people are not engaged in those mental processes and so these have to be supplied through schools. As he put it in “The School and the State”, written in 1900 : “[Schools will be] instrumentalities through which a school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.” The organization of the school will teach the substance to be learned.
Here I think Dewey exhibits a blind side. So convinced that what we would call today as constructivist learning is a way to compensate for the decline of the practical skills during the past century and there being a functional interdependence between the institutions of a society and so education doing something useful and also because Dewey thought that constructivism, which means problem solving, is the essential form of education, he neglects that people have for a very long time have also been instructed through lectures and discourse rather than experimentalism and those are particularly good mechanisms for conveying concepts and systems of thought. Indeed, one might suspect that those methods are necessary in that it is very difficult to approach history, literature and philosophy from generalizing the experimental method. History reduced to being the archaeology of land dumps and social history reduced to studying the inscriptions on gravestones. Abandoning constructionism also means recognizing that knowledge is autonomous in that it has to do with what I consider secret societies driven for their own scholarly purposes rather than to aid society. Deep down, which means philosophically, learning is for its own sake.
Here are three generalizations to make about education even when considering just two examples, Dewey and Kant, and whether you think that education is a description of what happens in education and replicated in any number of examples, or is regarded as inevitable components of education, the problem on how to fix your lathe means learning about the concept of the lathe. First, education always accomplishes changing the way people think about things so that students can be said to have been transformed in their consciousnesses rather than just acquired new facts or theories. Students have learned used a way to learn that they did not know before, whether that means that philosophy, as in Kant, means to find inevitable things by looking critically at what merely appear to be things, and so discover that morality or justice are within, respectively, the individual or collective will, while Dewey shows that reason is indivisible in that being thoughtful and creative applies to art as well as mastering machinery, in that a person has to figure out how the machine parts work with one another, or when an art student thinks how to use color to make an effect or draw a face to convey one emotion rather than another.
It was wrong to think Erving Goffman’s idea in “Asylums” that humiliation was necessary for destroying the self before it could be reconstructed into a soldier or a sane person except in the sense that the student had to be disabused of his or her ignorance so as to appreciate a fuller understanding of matters sufficiently more profound so as to think one’s mind had been transformed. And that is the second factor of the educational process, which is that a person is open enough to trust new ideas to be considered, many students so needy of their own previous predilections as to avoid considering new possibilities, that the case for most students in that there is a great resistance to learn new things and new habits of thought, whether because of previous ideologies or a previous familiarity with elemental reasoning processes whereby, for example, there is a lack of fluidity with words. And, thirdly, the process of education requires a method for education, whether that means through reducing propositions to mathematics, or looking closely at texts, or always saying “on the other hand”, or being, like Dewey, “constructivist”, in thinking that learning is problem solving, or what still seems to me the best kind of teaching, especially for poor students, which is didactic rather than Socratic, because it means students are exposed to how thinkers think, how they organize their thoughts, so that the teachers can be emulated.