Abstract

Philosophers who have turned their thoughts to the subject of education have most often concerned themselves with the construction of very abstract models of cognition by means of which the activities of teaching and learning are to be understood. Such attention as they have given to the subject matter of instruction has tended to be dominated by a concern with the morally or practically beneficial effects to be expected from a child’s acquisition of a certain kind of knowledge. It would appear, too, that the decisive index used in assessing the value of such knowledge has often been the degree to which it approximated to an antecedently established archetype of knowledge. While the primary emphasis that has been given to these matters by Plato and by most of the modern philosophers of education from Locke to Dewey is understandable and has led to the elaboration of important theses in general epistemology, there are good reasons for thinking that this commentary needs to be more broadly based than it has often been in the past. More specifically, it will need to be informed by a better understanding of the distinctive character of the several subjects of instruction. Whatever contribution general epistemology may be able to make to the understanding of teaching and learning, its theses clearly stand in need of the kind of amplification that can come only from a survey of the particular types of knowledge to which the divisions of academic subject-matter correspond. In the absence of such a survey, there will be a very strong tendency for a single type of knowledge to be treated as the perfect exemplification of the general model of knowledge produced by our epistemology and for other subjects to be regarded simply as inferior approximations to that epistemic standard which will itself very likely become harder and harder to distinguish from its paradigm instance. What I am suggesting then is that the philosophy of education needs to orient itself to a much greater degree than it has previously done on the various ‘philosophies of’, e. g. the philosophies of science, of history and the social sciences, of law, and of art, which have come to occupy such an important place in contemporary philosophy. My special concern in this paper will be to argue that much discussion of the humanities and of their place within the instructional programs of the schools could benefit from work that has recently been done in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of history and the social sciences. My guiding assumption which I will try to make as plausible as I can is that a consideration of the distinctive logical and conceptual features of the humanities does not have a merely theoretical interest but offers important clues to the nature of the educational and broadly moral importance which we traditionally impute to these studies.