Philosophy and the Meaning of `Education'

Abstract

Although it is hard to see how any coherent theorizing about education might proceed in the absence of some answer to the question of what `education' means, recent educational philosophy seems to be a source of some scepticism about the possibility of any such answer, given the (alleged) inherently ambiguous and/or contested character of education. This article dismisses the idea that instabilities of ordinary usage constitute serious obstacles to useful theoretical refinement of the term `education', and then proceeds by exploring and rejecting philosophical objections to one ambitious modern account of the nature of education on the grounds that it relies upon an untenable objectivist conception of knowledge and truth. Still, despite upholding the possibility of a theoretically coherent general answer to the question of the meaning of education, the paper concludes with some reservations about its practical consequences for curriculum policy and planning.