Abstract
What is philosophy of education? This question has been answered in as many ways as there are those who self-identify as philosophers of education. However, the questions our field asks and the research conducted to answer them often produce papers, essays, and manuscripts that we can read, evaluate, and ponder. This paper turns to those tangible products of our scholarly activities. The titles, abstracts, and keywords from every article published from 2000 to 2010 in four journals of educational philosophy were analyzed to find out what kind of research is being published in the field of philosophy of education. Over 143 different concepts were identified and analyzed from 1,572 articles. The data suggests that philosophy and education, while primarily concerned with theory, teaching, and learning, tackles a diversity of subjects in a slightly narrowing band of thematic topics.
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Notes
Admittedly, this question suggests that ‘philosophy’ exists separate from ‘philosophy of education,’ a distinction, and contestation, that is a cause for this paper.
I owe a great debt to Mintz for sharing with me a paper he presented at the 2006 Graduate Student Conference on Philosophy of Education for which he highlighted this information in McClintock’s book. Mintz’s paper was largely a critique of the lack of work in the history of philosophy and education, the result of which could very well be the problem Biesta notes about scholars in our field using philosophy sources rather than educational theorists or philosophers of education. If we are ignorant of the historical development of theories and philosophy in and of education, we are in danger of, quoting Biesta, “reinventing the wheel” [Biesta, “Publishing in Studies in Philosophy an Education,” 3] and losing the opportunity to build upon the work of scholars in this field because many authors go to traditional ‘philosophical’ sources rather than original educational philosophy to build their work. Mintz notes that the history of philosophy of education is properly part of our intellectual domain and going to those sources can strengthen our field and that if we neglect the history of educational philosophy, who else would tend to it?
McClintock surveyed titles Educational Theory from 1995 to 2000 and found 12 articles about Dewey, one each about Plato, Rousseau, and Marx. He also surveyed History of Education Quarterly from 1961 to 1998 and found a similar ratio: Dewey 13, Plato 4, Aristotle 3, Rousseau 3, and Herbart 2. In Political Theory (from 1973 to 2000) he found Socrates 18, Plato 11, Aristotle 24, Locke 16, Hume 3, Montesquieu 4, Rousseau 18, Wollstonecraft 1, Tocqueville 5, Bentham 8, Mill 16, Burke 8, Hegel 25, Marx 28, Nietzsche 15, Oakeshott 10, Habermas 8, Rawls 12, and Foucault 15.
The state requires ‘competencies’ in historical and philosophical issues rather than ‘courses’ so that a school of education can choose to eliminate stand-alone courses in philosophy of education or social foundations, and may instead attempt to integrate this material into more general introductory or ‘practical’ courses. These actions have been taken at the University of Scranton, and others are sure to follow. This means, of course, that philosophy and social foundations will receive very cursory or basic treatment and play a decreasing role in teacher preparation.
Other publications considered were Philosophy and Education Society Yearbook and Theory and Research in Education. The former was excluded because it is a compendium of conference presentations, and though peer-reviewed, different considerations are used in evaluating a conference presentation from that of a journal publication. The latter was eliminated because it began in 2003, and thus comparisons over time would have become problematic. Other journals in which philosophers of education publish were found to be either too general (i.e., Teachers College Record, Harvard Education Review) or too specialized (i.e., Journal of Curriculum Studies, Curriculum Inquiry, and Journal of Moral Education) to investigate philosophy of education only.
‘Education’ was by far the most frequent word in the journals and is used in many different ways with variable meanings. It was not used as a concept in this study partly because the frequency and variability of its use preclude a general understanding of what is meant by it in its many contexts, and partly because this project is itself an attempt to say something about education via philosophy of education. Underscoring this problem is that it works differently in other languages as well. Some of these problems are illustrated by the different ways in which the Anglo and German traditions organize their thinking about education such as the difference between ‘Erziehung’ and ‘Bildung’ in German. See Biesta (2011 in press) for discussion of these differences as well as Gundem and Hopmann (1998), Hopmann (2007), Oelkers (1993).
A complete list of the concepts and themes is available at http://columbia.academia.edu/MatthewHayden/Teaching, along with tables, source files, and raw data, all of which is available for download.
Admittedly, this is not always the case. For instance, the article “An Educational Journey” (Marshall 2009), does not tell us much about its contents whereas “The Revolutionary Party in Gramsci's Pre-Prison Educational and Political Theory and Practice” (Holst 2009) provides quite a bit of information.
This is due primarily to the practice of not including references or citations in titles, abstracts, or keywords.
r(1,570) = 0.112, p < 0.01. While 0.112 represents a weak correlation, as correlations go, it was relatively strong compared to other correlations in this study. Due to the generally weak correlations in this analysis few will be reported in this paper, but will be referenced when they show strength relative to others. For all correlations that follow r(1,570) and p < 0.01.
It should be noted that this is in reference to the ‘great thinkers’ identified for this study using the methods already indicated. There are articles in these journals written about ‘great thinkers’ who not utilized in this analysis, though generally fewer in number, and thus the percentage of articles written about ‘great thinkers’ is likely higher.
SPE and the Thinkers theme correlated a statistically significant r(1,570) = 0.161, p < 0.01. This was the strongest correlation of any journal to any theme.
There was a statistically significant positive correlation between Politics and Citizenship Education (0.278).
No requests for such data were made to any of the journals in the project.
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Hayden, M.J. What Do Philosophers of Education Do? An Empirical Study of Philosophy of Education Journals. Stud Philos Educ 31, 1–27 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9262-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9262-7