Education at the heart of the humanities1

Abstract

As schools of education are currently organized, philosophers of education lead a marginal and furtive existence. As education comes more and more to be understood as social scientific research into «what works» in the schools, philosophers seem like a poor lot indeed. Even our role in teacher education, once secured by the metaphor of foundations, is now questionable. Debates in teacher education are lively enough: Do teachers need more coursework or more clinical experience? And if they need more coursework, do they need more classes in curriculum and instruction or more background in their «content area»? Notice, though, that the kind of experience educational philosophers are best suited to provide for teachers is not even in the picture. What is this experience? In a word, it is liberal learning about and for education. If education is a space of humanistic questions, philosophy a love of these questions in their openness, and educational philosophy the craft of keeping alive the texts and conversation that helps us re-open such questions, then philosophical teacher education is an invitation to teachers to be humane intellectuals of their field. It is an invitation to join a conversation of millennial interest. Under the conception I have advanced, educational philosophy is far from marginal. It stands to remind how each positive program of research into what works begs key questions. And it stands to remind the university that, to paraphrase the famous essay by Sartre, education is a humanism. When education and the humanities are reconnected their place at the center of the university becomes clear.