The Rise And Fall Of Philosophy Law Of Education
Chapter 1 Problem and Theoretical Framework
In the spring of 2012, I was alerted by a colleague to a panel discussion at
the annual Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) conference
entitled “The Fate of the Philosophy of Education.” The doomsday title piqued my
interest. I had assumed philosophy had remained a healthy pillar of initial teacher
preparation programs (ITPPs) but was surprised to learn it had been experiencing a
long decline. A subsequent literature search found references to this decline from
as early as the 1950s, with no shortage of ongoing discussion. The CSSE 2012
panel also led me to find that my own Faculty of Education at Western University
—as well as others across Canada—now teach a sliver of philosophy as a part of a
larger “Social Foundations” course (0.75 course equivalent at Western) within
which philosophy bunks with sociology, law, history, and administration. In
Western’s case, the time allotted for direct instruction in philosophy had been
rationed to a fifth of three quarters (about a seventh) of the time I received in my
own ITPP at D’Youville College, Buffalo, in the United States in 2007. This fact
particularly hit home as I had assumed teachers in Ontario received a program
similar to my own, with an explicit philosophy component as a framework for
practising the profession of teaching. This finding led me to question what pre-
service teachers could reasonably expect to receive from their ITPP: what kinds of
experiences, both academic and in practicum, are necessary? And, more
specifically, what is the place of philosophy in ITPPs and how and why does this
appear to have changed over time?
The philosophy of education course I had experienced as part of my ITPP
included many discussions of philosophical issues in education, with students often
being asked to adopt and argue for different perspectives. The perspectives
presented in the course were framed in the typical “isms” approach of philosophy
of education: realism, idealism, pragmatism, existentialism, as well as non-
traditional positions such as Eastern mysticism (Buddhism). The encompassing
idea was that these various approaches toward or assumptions about educational
thinking framed or at least narrowed one’s educational conclusions; coherent
practice demanded this philosophical awareness. For example, if one accepted that
children learn best by experience, by doing and working out answers for
themselves (pragmatism), then a teacher was obligated to refrain from lectures and
rely on projects and demonstrations with hands-on components. Or, if one accepted
that the aim of education was to set children on a path of salvation leading to a
good and just religious life, a teacher was obligated to indoctrinate appropriate
canons, instruct in moral education, reprimand deviance, and so forth.
The two main aims of this kind of philosophy of education course are
usually understood as being to (1) develop a foundational worldview and
philosophical position on metaphysics (e.g., what is man and his purpose) and
epistemology (e.g., what is knowledge? Are we born with knowledge?); and (2)
from these metaphysical and epistemological positions, derive ethical positions
from which to justify our method of education, particularly in light of values and
aims. The time spent on this material was believed to encourage contemplation and
reflection of the act and aims of teaching, one’s personal stance on issues in
education and how they permeate one’s practice, and encourage the beginning of
an integration of the daily routines of teaching into a larger vision of the
educational process. Another intention of learning about these perspectives is to
provide awareness of the multiplicity of education philosophies operating in
education, as represented, for example, in diverse views of parents, teachers,
principals, schools, and Ministry policies. To understand the inherent philosophy
of an idea is to understand its root: its source, assumptions, and structure, and if
this root can be disputed, the idea itself can be disputed. Fear
of the absence of this awakening and individually empowering content is, as John
Dewey remarked, a “conservatism of practice” where practice and already
established operations of practice capture the autonomy and stultify the growth of
beginning teachers.6
My initial exploration of the literature led me to suspect that the value of this
kind of reflection and “pause”7 in the study of education for beginning teachers
seemed to have been discontinued, in Canada at least. A question that began to
emerge was whether this discontinuance of explicit philosophy for teacher
candidates was a result of the longstanding “practical” bias typical of professional
programs such as teaching, or whether the underlying cause of the decline of
philosophy was more ominous, insidious, and systematic, sourced in the very
institutions in which philosophy of education was supposed to flourish. Table 1
below will serve to forecast the bleak journey on which I was about to embark.
The Problem
As Counts pointed out, education is reflective of a particular group at a
particular time in history; it is contextual. For Plato, “man belonged to the state,
and education was to mould him to its service and survival.”13 Likewise, “Aristotle
glorified the Spartans for making education ‘the business of the state.’ ‘The
citizen,’ he said, ‘should be moulded to suit the form of government under which
he lives if the laws are democratic, democratically, or oligarchically, if the laws are
oligarchical.”14 The appropriate proportion (and purpose) of philosophy in any
education enterprise is also contextual and can be reasonably expected to depend
on the conditions of society and the nature of its people. A totalitarian state, to
maintain its hegemony, would be required to control to the utmost the inculcation
of a single and total philosophy within and across its entire ITPP. This is because
the aim of education in such a context would be to indoctrinate the young to
support the regime, with the teachers as overt and compliant agents of the state.
Note the mono-philosophy permeating such a program might be espoused—and
even formally, if emptily, criticized—in a specialized “philosophy of education”
course, or might be simply assumed and promoted as an implicit framework
throughout all courses in the design and delivery of the program.
In our present situation, as conscious, tragic, fallible, mortal human beings
living in more or less open and democratic states, we arrive at a different case.
Given democracies grant political power to all citizens—both in the form of
electing local representatives, and in the potential for the public to create sufficient
public interest and scrutiny to unseat an elected government official or promote
interest in a new issue or idea—its sustainability depending on the education of the
individual citizen, led Rorty to conclude that philosophy is nowhere more
important. Without educated voters, democracy can only be an illusion, with
elections devolving to contests of popularity and charisma. For a populace to be
willing to maintain democracy requires preparing new voters in an awareness of
what it means to wield political power. This would ideally take the form of open
discussions about political philosophy, sustaining conversation and debate
regarding relationships between man and the state, encouraging participants to
actively engage political proposals and their advocates such that every time a
politician speaks, a debate in the mind emerges, deconstructing premises in the
arguments espoused, and the like. If we accept that democracy hinges on a
philosophicallyminded populace, resting on ample education of the young, what
may this suggest for teachers and thus, teacher preparation?
Statement of Problem
The fundamental problem is the appropriate place and contribution of
philosophy in the teaching of teachers. While this very important problem
clamours for and deserves treatment, it was considered to be beyond the realistic
scope of a dissertation. On reflection, the essential issue is the assumption or the
arrogation of implicit neutrality toward philosophy of education in teacher
preparation institutions. What seemed most pressing as I began this work was to
seek an understanding of the decline of philosophy of education by way of:
How philosophy of education as part of teacher preparation has changed
over time, why it changed, and the consequences going forward.
The problem seeks to understand a possible mechanism behind the changing nature
of teacher preparation and its institutions in the wider political, economic and
social forces of their eras, and how this changing “survival environment” impacted
philosophy of education in its attempts to adapt. Central to the problem is to
explain the relationship between philosophy, teacher preparation and its
institutions.
Treating philosophy of education as an academic subject was necessary to
apply focus, specificity and adequate disclosure of the boundaries of this inquiry.
There are a variety of physical and conceptual entities one could enlist as providing
evidence of or at least accounts of the state of philosophy of education, including:
(1) living people who label themselves philosophers of education; (2) the
explicitness of ideas and thoughts typically labelled philosophical that are applied
to education, past and present, including their use by teachers and others in their
educational practice; (3) conferences, academic journals, and books which store
and display work; (4) the work itself, including the content of activities such as
teaching, writing, and speaking engagements; (5) university and college courses in,
about, or which contain philosophy of education; (6) faculty positions in
universities or other educational institutions; (7) professional organizations; (8) the
belief (or perception) that the field exists; (9) other documents which reference
philosophy of education but are not considered work of the field, including
accreditation standards of ITPPs, or university standards for appointments and
promotion. Each of these foci promises insights into philosophy of education’s
existence, including its nature, identity, function, origin, organization, and
development, each thread creating different but not unrelated time lines of
prominence (and despair) for the field. The analysis I have undertaken focusses the
inquiry through the historical and current threads of the most concrete of the above
list philosophy of education’s institutional assets—namely (3), (5), (6), and (7),
including (1) in the case study of the J. G. Althouse Faculty of Education in
Ontario, Canada.
Thus the study became about philosophy of education’s institutional
existence, that is, its reified existence in documents, faculty positions, etc., as the
main target, but I could not alienate, still less ignore, other sources of insight and
understandings of the nature and state of philosophy of education, especially in
describing the conditions from which philosophy of education emerged before
entering the teacher education enterprise with an explicit existence in the form of
dedicated faculty and coursework, giving birth to the field as such.
Even the idea of “decline” regularly described in the philosophy of education
literature is an open question, for what exactly is in decline? As is usually argued
by philosophers, teacher education cannot be alienated from philosophical
discussions because values and ethics are unavoidable topics. Thus, philosophy in
ITPPs cannot be destroyed, it must be hidden, or implicit (in all coursework, likely
without an expert interpreter). But to be hidden, it once must have been explicit (or
institutionalized). Tracking the process is an important part of this study as an
institutional existence means those who construct coursework or standards see it as
important, that it is worthy of mention, of academic merit, and of being separately
treated in ITPPs by an expert. Likewise, the demand for experts creates programs
to produce them, and the growing population collects to solidify a field, fortifying
their institutional existence. Examining the establishment of philosophy of
education as a university subject—its rise—would help explain its eventual fall or
“decline,” which may be attributed to its modern implicit institutional
“existence” in most ITPPs. In this state philosophy becomes hidden in
unquestioned prejudices, disorganized slogans, and competing ideas the students
receive from diverse instructors and courses, “straightened” by ethical
prescriptions delivered in professional courses advised by external organizations
which accredit the ITPPs, namely the teacher associations and state authorities.
Education research is also theoretically impacted when philosophers of education
are no longer available to education colleagues in a faculty of education, thus
providing an explanation for what happened to philosophy of education in ITPPs
may have wider consequences for graduate programs and education research, but
these latter areas are not the focus of this study.
Methodology
This section will stake out the plan to tackle the research problem. This
includes declaring the material to be researched, the time periods and geography
appropriate to tackle the problem, and the theoretical frame which will analyze the
data. A case study is also planned of my own Faculty of Education to test the wider
account and examine a detailed case of how philosophy fared in one institution,
and how that institution changed over time.
Each subsequent chapter covers an era of time unearthed through academic
literature in the history of education, describing the status of teacher preparation
institutions as the “survival environment” of philosophy of education as found in
teacher preparation. This is informed by such things as state accreditation
requirements of teacher preparation, the status of the study of education as a
research field, and other conditions. Referring to literature in the history of
philosophy of education reveals the conditions of philosophy in each of these eras,
including the sources of teacher preparation curriculum, examining the accounts of
literature published in each era for their view of the purpose of the incorporation of
philosophy in ITPPs of that era, and the like. Of particular interest are the
conditions of which philosophy fared most positively, and what conditions
changed to threaten its survival and trigger its adaptation. Overall, primary and
secondary sources in the history of teacher education literature and of philosophy
of education will provide most of the context and data that will later be analyzed
through the theoretical frame, which will be described shortly.
The time period chosen for the study must begin in the 19th century to
observe the role of philosophy in schools and teacher preparation prior to their
institutionalization. A hundred years of time was believed to be a sufficient slice of
historical data of both teacher preparation and its institutions, and philosophy of
education, for the study. Thus, the main body text ends approximately in the 1970s,
but continuing the analysis from this point into the present era is found in
Appendix 2. For example, Chapter 2 describes the conditions of 19th century
teacher preparation, while the rest of this dissertation is directed to the 20th century,
describing the introduction, stabilization and subsequent decline of philosophy of
education as a university subject.
In order to shed light on the decline, I decided it was paramount to consider
the English language field in North America and Britain, with some reference to
Australasia as appeared appropriate, complementing this general case with a
specific and local case in Canada—that being the case of philosophy of education’s
rise and fall in my own Faculty of Education. I believed choosing this large
geographical area and surveying the conditions of philosophy of education in these
areas—a broad study with the drawbacks of generalization—was necessary and
required to be able to grasp the problem of the decline of philosophy of education
as a whole and to be reasonably armed with the context of knowledge required to
provide insights and a solution to the problem.
For example, more detail could have been obtained in choosing a narrow
study of the philosophy of education in ITPPs only in Canada, or even in Ontario,
but this approach would not have lent insight into the conditions of philosophy of
education in the diverse and more research intense areas of Britain or the United
States, especially since these nations impact Canada to a much greater extent than
Canada impacts them. In addition, since the decline appeared to be similar across
these nations, a wider net was deemed advantageous at the cost of specificity. I
also considered having the case study of my own Faculty as the focus of the
dissertation, how philosophy of education fared in one institution, but again it is
possible that the peculiar reasons for decline of philosophy in one institution could
become the focus, and while interesting, would be less useful toward
understanding the wider problem of decline of philosophy of education across
institutions and across nations. Due to this reasoning, the general case of the
decline of the field became the focus, complemented by a detailed case study, in
order to differentiate and identify the causes of decline shared by both the wider
world and the single case, and those peculiar to the case. Therefore, and somewhat
uncommon to research in the 21st century, for this research project I chose to side
with the general over the narrow due to the needs of the research problem chosen.
Choosing my own Faculty of Education made acquiring data highly
convenient (although there were difficulties obtaining it, and some important data
was unavailable), but the main reason for choosing this institution in fact, it was
part of the reason for embarking on this project was due to the institution’s history
being an excellent “case” in the decline of philosophy. Offering its first secondary
teacher training programs in 1965 and requiring a course in philosophy put on by a
department of philosophers, and through multiple transitions, by the turn of the 21st
century philosophy courses and faculty had almost vanished completely. Due to
this rapid decline, it seemed my Faculty was an excellent case since it followed the
general trend of decline, and the events that led to the loss of philosophy’s
institutional assets at my Faculty in under a half century would be extremely
interesting to the wider field, especially if it was found to be not an atypical story.
Putting together data for the case would include interviews with retired philosophy
faculty and others, as well as browsing university calendars for course and faculty
lists. Combining these two data sets enabled me to describe the conditions at my
Faculty for philosophy and its ITPP, from its establishment, through its transitions,
and into the present day, and put it into the context of the wider evolution of
teaching and thus teacher preparation.
More details on the design of this case study can be found in Chapter 5.
Overall, to contribute to an understanding of the decline and provide
solutions to the problem, the host of philosophy of education is an important target
for study, but to understand this host, the institutions of teacher preparation, it was
necessary to explore how these institutions also change due to world and national
events. In other words, it was judged necessary to maintain the same scale for the
study as appeared the scale of the problem.
In selecting an appropriate theory that examines the changing nature of
institutions, I decided to frame the inquiry within the institutional school of
organizational theory within which I view philosophy of education as an
institutional progeny dependent on its host organizations—Faculties of Education
for its existence in ITPPs. This relationship is what I hypothesize to be a
considerable force explaining the changing institutional status of philosophy of
education during the 20th century. The apparent rise of philosophy of education in
the first half of the 20th century and its subsequent fall in the last half offers an
intriguing correlation with the changing organizational structure of ITPPs in North
America. These changing structures have altered the various power and interest
groups that influence ITPPs, including philosophy of education itself which, in its
changing forms, has always resided therein. I investigated parallels within these
two inseparable histories—that is philosophy of education and teacher education—
starting with their roots in pedagogy, which was the form of teacher education in
the 19th century. I continued into the 20th century, treating philosophy of education
as an academic subject, drawing on its literature to track its primordial phase as
academic philosophy (including apparent reasons for its insertion into ITPPs), its
adoption into the academic subject area known as philosophy of education, and its
subsequent decline.
Approach to Inquiry – Institutional Organizational Analysis
I chose to investigate the dynamic status of the academic subject area of
philosophy of education within the evolving context of ITPPs through the
theoretical framework offered by institutional organizational theory (IOT). This
has been characterized by Scott as a “natural systems” theory of formal
organizations founded by the work of Selznick and complemented by that of
Perrow. An integral component of IOT is the use of case studies of empirical
instances not only to anchor theoretical claims in real-world events and generate
and treat data for analysis, but also to explore how individual cases manifest
unique aspects and accommodations within broader theoretical claims. Perrow has
characterized aspects of this approach as providing an “exposé” aspect that
searches the “myriad subterranean processes of informal groups, conflicts between
groups, dependencies on outside groups and constituencies, . . . local community
power structure, and legal institutions”22 that influence and direct organizational
behaviour.
A classic example of this phenomenon is the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Originally chartered in 1933 for both local and national purposes, the TVA was
intended to modernize farming in the area, preserve forestation, help with local
recreation development, institute flood control, improve navigation and,
secondarily, promote power generation at the national level. In many ways the
TVA was a contemporary masterpiece of rational planning and design, yet
Selznick described and documented how local interests infiltrated the organization,
subverting local goals via a process of “co-optation,” and how this and national
pressures eventually made its national goals the primary focus. As a result, power
generation became an increasingly preeminent task of the TVA, eventually
instigating U.S. Supreme Court hearings. Viewed through IOT, this co-optation
process ensured “institutional survival” through goal displacement, protecting local
employment and other interests which, in essence, constituted the technical core of
the organization.
The case study used institutional analysis of the TVA. This analysis pays
particular attention to the effects of “normative pressures” as well as regulative
(coercive) and cognitive effects found either internally or externally to the
organization or type of organization under study. These pressures are viewed as
encouraging responses from organizational decisionmakers and other actors who
seek to maintain the organization’s internal stability through the adoption and
perpetuation of standards, practices and policies that are justified through various
claims to legitimation. In a common case, new or modified externally imposed
rules arise which require changes in the “technical core” of an established
organization or type of organization, or even the formation of new organizations or
sub-organizations. Decisions are taken in the organizations in question to comply
with the new requirements, but internal adaptations typically occur which serve to
perpetuate previously established practices, especially those embedded in the
technical core which is viewed by participants as defining and legitimating the
organization’s—and to a variable degree, their own—purpose and identity.
Particularly in Perrow and Selznick’s brand of institutional theory, state control is
linked to the apparently inevitable—but unintended—institutionalization of
dysfunctional processes in organizations. From the perspectives of external
regulators, publics and clients, these processes are typically seen as impeding an
organization’s pursuit of its intended task performance as it conforms and adapts to
newly imposed external rules and circumstances (as it must), limiting the
organization’s decision-makers’ boundaries of discretion. As task performance
(action) is undermined by external pressures on structure, one theoretical
consequence is a process of “decoupling” in which prescribed (rule-bound) actions
of members of the organization begin to correlate less and less directly with the
intended results of their actions. As these effects build, the continued existence of
an organization becomes threatened because of lower task performance, initiating
“survival” measures. This can lead to a process of isomorphism in which decision
makers seek more rapid ways of “matching” environmental demands, resulting in
further declines in task performance as greater priority is accorded to responding to
external demands and pressures. In a sense, governance begins to shift from being
internally constituted to being externally driven—the internal demoted to carrying
out the orders of the external.
Returning to the thesis subject, the initiation of teacher training into colleges
and universities represented a major shift in external control and an expansion of
the interests involved in ITPPs. Clark and Marker writing in the National Society
for the Study of Education (NSSE) 74th Yearbook pointed to the “reluctan[ce]” of
universities to accept the task of teacher education, especially as a public “service.”
This move from semi-independent colleges to Faculties made changes to the
governance of ITPPs through new external rules and changes to teacher
qualifications (especially the requirement of a Bachelor’s degree recognized by the
host university), more academic university staffing, course development (approved
by host university senates), and creation and control of budgets by university
authorities. Each one of these carried the threat of extensive challenge and change
to established activities, including challenges to beliefs and values that had
constituted the established technical core of ITPPs, both in their classrooms and
practicum placements where candidate teachers interacted directly with school
teachers and their students. Viewed through the lens of IOT, these challenges can
be seen as triggering cycles of adaptation and institutionalized responses such as
goal displacement, decoupling and associated reductions in task performance as
discussed in the literature.
Talcott Parsons’ typology of organizations provides a structural framework
for the dynamic processes considered by IOT. His three level typology of
organization structure is described as follows: the technical level constitutes the
core and most inner level; the institutional level resides furthest from the core and
is most vulnerable to external influence; and mediating between the institutional
level and the core is the managerial level which attempts to satisfy influences from
the institutional level with minimal disturbance to the technical level. The technical
core (or level or system) is considered to give an organization its identity and
reason for existing and surviving. All members of an organization have an interest
in protecting the core from disturbances, although the managerial level has the
“greatest stake.”
As an example, a typical Faculty of Education in Ontario contains the
following “forces” in its institutional level: accreditation standards as currently
imposed and administered by the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT), “internal”
university program standards established and applied through Senate and
administration policies and decisions, Ministry of Education funding, and policy
demands of various public interest groups. Each generates pressures for change
within and in how a Faculty of Education performs its activities, all these forces
interacting to “determine its domain, establish its boundaries, and secure its
legitimacy.”38 As applied to an individual Faculty of Education, Parsonsian
organization theory sees these influences (or dictates) as being primarily handled
by managerial staff such as deans, department heads, and program coordinators,
but also engaging other faculty members, especially committee chairs and senior
faculty, as well as various non-academic administrative staff. Pressures for change
emerging from the institutional level will inevitably require modifications or more
substantial upheavals to the technical core of the Faculty in the form of
modifications to one or more of admission standards, programs of studies, staffing,
evaluation or—always of central interest in professional Faculties—the balance
between classroom and professional induction. It is at this core level where the
very identity and soul of the organization is forged and protected by those who
both perform the defining activities of teaching and in the case of university units
such as Faculties of Education contribute to developing and modifying the policies
and procedures through which the technical core is managed. Here in the core,
according to IOT, is where philosophy of education has its institutional being
where it appears to have taken root, flourished, mutated and withered.
It is safe to assume that the subject area of philosophy of education should
(and can only) reside in the technical core—if and only if—it is seen by policy-
makers as part of the technical core, that is, an integral and indispensable part of
ITPPs. I argue that changes in ITPPs over time, such as in curriculum and program
organization, and faculty expertise and department structure, have resulted in
changes to the technical core of Faculties of Education, explicitly affecting
philosophy of education. For example, Tozer and Miretzky discuss two ways of
formulating ITPP curriculum, namely: (1) “curriculum requirements,” specifying
what teachers should know; and (2) “outcome assessments,” through courses
selected via their link to later achievement, also called “evidence-based” practice.
This can be viewed as a change in the technical core of ITPPs, the move to the
latter form causing a “loss of protection of social foundation courses.”
I previously delineated philosophy of education as an academic subject in
order to treat it as an institutional artifact, as it were. In other words, the very
existence of philosophy of education, its lifeline, are the ITPPs provided by host
organizations such as normal schools, teachers’ colleges, and faculties of education
(with only minor interest from philosophy departments elsewhere in the
university). John Dewey’s famous remark that philosophy of education is the
“general theory of education” could perhaps be likened to saying that philosophy
of education is and constructs the entire technical core of ITPP institutions,
whether past, present, or future. Upon the reorganization of ITPP institutions from
separate, semi-autonomous or government-run colleges into Faculties of Education
in larger university settings, the subsequent expansion of the institutional level,
including stronger and more dictatorial forces, could be seen as a shifting of power
from the managerial to the institutional level, beginning a process of subverting the
traditional governance of the technical core of ITPPs. This preliminary finding of
IOT analysis appears consistent with contemporary characterizations of philosophy
of education’s decline by philosophers of education by way of describing how it
continues to be alienated from the technical core of ITPPs, damaging philosophy of
education’s institutional existence, manufacturing its decline. Still, much work is
needed to be done to tease out accounts and data to substantiate, modify, extend, or
displace this tentative initial view in my search for a well-grounded and informed
account.
Institutional analysis can shed informative light on past and present
conditions in Faculties of Education, and the environment in which each and any
subject area within their technical core (such as philosophy of education)
“survives.” As Perrow writes, “The organization is tangled in a web of
relationships that prevent it from fulfilling its real goals, and we can see how it
deviates by examining this web.” This is what is meant by organizations as
“recalcitrant tools,” meaning they resist intended organizational targets and
inadvertently shift their purposes and goals. One can consider Faculties of
Education enduring the external pressures of the larger government and College of
Teachers compliance spheres and, also, philosophy of education enduring the
larger external pressures of Faculties of Education at the managerial level. This
theoretical framework aids in answering the research questions by providing an
initial working hypothesis, namely that both the rise and decline of philosophy of
education have been connected to institutional conditions of ITPPs.
The logical starting place to qualify and substantiate these claims made
about the connection between the fate of philosophy of education as an academic
field, and the changing nature of ITPPs, is to survey the history of the field of
philosophy of education. The next three chapters attempt this with a view to
providing the necessary context to understand how ITPPs have changed, including
notable cultural and higher education restructuring events, all illustrating the
conditions with which the growth and decline of philosophy of education had to
contend.
In particular, the next chapter surveys the 19th century of North America
where teacher education was mostly in a decentralized form, and teaching
certificates were locally administered. Philosophy enjoyed by teachers was part of
pedagogy and the implicit framework of the Great Educators, their philosophies
often the basis of numerous voluntary teacher associations formed at this time. The
purpose of this chapter is to set a starting place, this being the pre-institutionalized
forms of teacher preparation and philosophy as it was available to teachers, and a
look at how teacher education and philosophy transformed in the first normal
school programs. In Chapter 3 I survey their early institutional forms, normal
schools and teachers’ colleges, and their use of academic philosophy in teacher
preparation, up to the end of the Second World War. Chapter 4 continues the
survey into the 1970s as the early institutional forms mature into university
research-intensive faculties of education, with academic philosophy tending to
transform into philosophy of education courses and instructors. Appendix 2
completes the survey by finishing the account of the fate of philosophy of
education to the present day. Chapter 5 narrows the survey to the province of
Ontario, Canada, in order to provide context for a case study of a single institution
to complement the broader survey of the field. I track its internal developments
from its origin as primarily a secondary teacher training institution into a modern
faculty of education, and how philosophy began as a strong, required component of
its teacher education program and subsequently lost its courses and faculty.
Chapter 6, the final chapter, concludes the study and provides implications and
insights going forward.
Chapter 2 Schoolkeeping: Pedagogy and Teacher Education in the
Nineteenth Century
Philosophy in pedagogy is a pivotal concept in this dissertation that seeks to
capture both the philosophy animating the pedagogy of an era and its practical
manifestations. The philosophy in the pedagogy of any era is rooted in
practitioners—the Great Educators, and those they inspired, the veteran teachers
and headmasters, who staffed the schools and instructed in the forms of teacher
education available. Pedagogy is often used as an omnibus term for most of what
goes on in teaching, but the term throughout this dissertation is used to describe a
particular era’s type of teaching philosophy and practice. This was not yet
scientific in the laboratory and statistical, perhaps positivistic sense often used
today. Rather in the 19th century, pedagogy was informed mostly by personal
experience embedded in the philosophies of the Great Educators who were often
European, and provided a general yet synthetic view of the education process.
In this chapter, I sketch an account of philosophy in pedagogy as it existed
prior to institutional ITPPs, that is, in the relatively de-centralized or locally
administered teacher education found in 19th century North America and Britain in
the form of summer or evening courses, and the first regulated normal schools. I
characterize the form of teacher education and practice in this period to be
“schoolkeeping” grounded in a pedagogy in which philosophy remained an
intrinsic framework or meta-theory. This was delivered by headmasters and other
veteran teacher educators, inspired by German pedagogues and emerging
American thinkers. In this era, along with the two following eras as discussed in
the next two chapters, I argue that the form of philosophy in teacher education is
connected to the organization of ITPPs. Each stage of teacher education forms and
is formed by an institutionalization process which drives the generation and
allocation of organizational resources to fulfill its “technical level” as identified in
Parsonsian sociology or, as amended by J. D. Thomson, the “technical core” of the
organization as discussed by the institutional theories earlier introduced.
Status of Teacher Education
The most pertinent place to start is with the first institutes of teacher training.
These arose in the 19th century in Britain, the United States, and Canada, and a
century prior in Europe. The influence of European thought in the United States
during this period is profound, most Americans seeking higher education still
traveling to Europe, especially Germany, for their A.B. degrees. Before detailing
the rationale and composition of the early normal schools, I wish to briefly outline
their predecessor: teacher seminars. These lectures and workshops, provided in
teacher institutes or model schools for in-service and pre-service common school
teachers, can be likened to the bare form of the “technical core” of the times which,
like the evolution of mitochondria captured by the cell, would soon come to be
hosted within the normal schools.
Hosted temporarily in the summer or for several weeks at various times
during the year, these seminars were composed of lectures provided by notable
educators in the state or local area, each lecture detailing the teaching of various
subjects such as reading, geography and arithmetic, but with attention also given to
lectures on school governance, hygiene, and strategies for teacher
professionalization. These often occurred at “teacher institutes” modelled on those
originally founded by Henry Barnard, superintendent of Common Schools and
Secretary of Education in Connecticut. He published in 1851 an overview of early
teacher education institutions in several eastern states of the United States,
including the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada.
According to Barnard’s survey, the initial rationale for seminars, as given in
an 1839 report, was to improve all aspects of the common schools by enhancing
the preparation and selection of teachers. The “supply would create the demand,” it
was explained in the report, driving public support for the common schools
through improvement of education via better qualified and dedicated educators.
Not only would new standards bar the inept and the transient, the experience would
be common, providing both modern methods and an initial peer association which
would grow into professional associations for the purposes of forwarding the status
of teachers in the eyes of the public.
It is important to stress that the goals and intentions of teacher training, at
this first stage (and for all time), were to improve the common schools. Whatever
the schools are deemed to need, as demanded by the “institutional level,” teacher
training would conform, via its “managerial level,” to meet this need and maintain
its role in the improvement of schools. Therefore, while the rationale for the work
done in the technical core of teacher training is the improvement of state schools,
as the schools changed especially in role driven by wider social change, whether
economic, religious, cultural, etc., so would the teacher, and thus so would teacher
training. This is what Swoboda describes as the sociological dimension of the
audience changing recipients drive the evolution of knowledge. In other words, and
as I will describe later, the pedagogy of this time was predicated on a kind of
teacher, and if one changed, so would the other. In the 19th century, the most
pertinent strategy to deliver improvement of state schools was believed to be the
improvement of their teachers, both in their craft and their professionalization, the
latter by way of better selection of teacher candidates to combat transients,10 and
improving the legitimacy of teachers by elevating their status in society.
At this time and into the 20th century, many common schools were one-room
school houses, especially in rural areas, providing education up to age 12-14. They
were irregularly attended, with truancy laws in effect yet typically not enforced
especially in rural areas. Many teachers expected to be sole proprietors of
education for their town or local area, and with the irregular attendance of students,
could only hope to transfer to them a basic standard of literacy and numeracy.
These poor and uncertain working conditions necessarily required teachers to work
independently with a personal rather than professional approach to educating. This
entrepreneurial approach was documented in Barnard:
Every good teacher will himself become a pioneer, and a missionary in the
cause of educational improvement. The necessity of giving such a teacher
every facility of a well-located, well-ventilated, and well-seated
schoolhouse, of giving the teacher a timely supply of the best text books
and apparatus, and of keeping him employed through the year, and from
year to year, with just such pupils and students as he can teach to the best
advantage—these things will be seen and felt by parents, and by districts.
Teachers would also be called the “chosen priesthood of education,”
emphasizing the hope of newly trained teachers to be leaders in a new common
school movement of universal education. An equally important somewhat older
contemporary of Barnard, Horace Mann, also suggested, in 1840, that the normal
schools must train teachers with the “power to manage and govern a school
successfully.” To manage a school required training in schoolkeeping—these
teachers were the sole organizers of an ungraded elementary education process.
This fact manifested both in the teacher being the sole member in the schoolhouse,
as well as the teacher overseeing the entire educational process, including
registration of students. As I will discuss in more detail later, this solitary business
of running a school, the whole building and the whole educational process, was to
underlie the emergence of pedagogy for teacher training.
In addition, the new teachers of this time were expected to have a role in the moral
development of their pupils. This anticipation of the common school framers was
understandably hostile to most teachers at the time being transients; these teachers
needed to be filtered out or rehabilitated, and the new supply to the schools highly
scrutinized. Horace Mann, speaking to those who provided letters of
recommendation and certificates of character to block the entry of transients, said
the following:
In the contemplation of the law, the school committee are sentinels
stationed at the door of every schoolhouse in the State, to see that no teacher
ever crosses its threshold, who is not clothed, from the crown of his head to
the sole of his foot, in garments of virtue; and they are the enemies of the
human race—not of contemporaries only, but of posterity.
The evolution of the common schools, the centralization of education
delivery, and thus adjustments to teacher training, would reduce this solitary status,
and also reduce the appropriateness of the pedagogy. Over time, teacher training
has narrowed in scope from schoolkeeping to classroom teaching, the latter
consolidating fellow teachers and administrators as team members. This modern
method has not only multiplied the teachers involved in a student’s education, it
also has fragmented the educational process, and leaves to yearly documents and
report cards the previous role of a teacher having a view of a student’s total
progress. Certainly the need for schoolkeeping was a practical solution, the work of
school teachers in the 19th century being far more autonomous and precarious than
it is today. As
Horace Mann points out regarding the conditions of teaching in 1840,
It is utterly impractical for any committee to prepare a code of regulations
coextensive with all the details, which belong to the management of a
school, it must be left with the teacher; and hence the necessity of skill in
this item of the long list of his qualifications.
The conditions of teaching were more precarious given the equipment, building
(not always dedicated), living conditions, and students with which teachers
worked, making protocols of practice and standard operating procedures
impractical. Tenuous student numbers and attendance made the rural schools small
and the urban schools unstable. Teachers as “pioneers” was an apt descriptor from
Henry Barnard—much like the colonists of the New World. Provided with some
knowledge and tools, teachers were expected to venture out and make their own
life and subsistence, despite the adversity surrounding their work and position.
Normal Schools
If the conditions of teaching were made regular and isomorphic across all
schools, it would allow teacher training to be standardized and effectively
institutionalized. While seminars continued to dominate teacher training, normal
schools were founded in the 19th century to consolidate these seminars in one
central location.21 Much of their efforts at this time were remedial, teachers in the
common schools often being poor in “basic skills.”22 Inspectors would increasingly
oversee entry standards to balance the uncertain preferences and thriftiness of local
trustees in urban areas. These usually took the form of examinations, for instance
the 1844 common school act in Canada West established “numerous examinations”
to be passed by prospective teachers in order to obtain “certificates of
qualification” to teach in the common schools.23 The “examinations” of prospective
teachers held by county inspectors were often informal oral tests. As Allison and
Wells put it, “these early superintendents sometimes discharged their duties in a
somewhat casual manner, as witnessed by William Hutton’s examination of a
teacher as they strolled across a field, the centrepiece of the examination being the
task of parsing a sentence containing nine “that’s.”24 Initially the normal schools
were experimental—many were unstable and liable to fail (due to attendance, lack
of stable funds, and other reasons), only finding stability in the last half of the
century. In (Upper) Canada, the first normal school opened in Toronto in 1847,
though it was required to relocate several times.
The introduction of normal schools in North America and the adoption of
their name, “normal,” is tied to their use in Europe, probably because the founders
of normal schools in Canada and the United States all traveled to Europe to learn
of the various institutions already established. In France, the école normale meant
“norm” or rule school: an educational institution where students learned
standardized principles or rules of teaching. While the name had a French origin,
the structure and curriculum of American normal schools (as well as the common
schools) had a decisively Prussian character, many North American school
reformers seeing Prussia as having the most advanced common schools in the
world at the time. They would serve to promote the regimented, normalized
schooling system that would feed socialized workers into the burgeoning factories,
social services and military forces of the era, as well as the stability needed to
regularize the practice of teaching, fostering the institutionalization of teacher
education over the next century. While this process was in its infancy, teacher
training for now would need to be heavily invested in each teacher’s independent,
personal practice, most expecting to work alone and distant from central authority,
making attendance in the unstable urban teacher associations difficult. This need
would be met by a pedagogy largely imported from Europe and spread through
influential educators such as Col. Francis W. Parker, the “father of progressive
education.”26
Horace Mann, important in the organization of the first normal schools in the
United States, selected the first principals of the normal schools of Massachusetts.
For Lexington, he selected Rev. Cyrus Peirce, and Mann’s description offers a
glimpse of a kind of teacher education at this time.
Mann himself said of Peirce’s power . . . that it surpassed what he had before
seen in any school. “The exercises were conducted,” he said, “in the most
thorough manner: the principles being stated and then applied to various
combinations of facts, so that the pupils were not only led to a clearer
apprehension of the principle itself, but taught to look through combinations
of facts, however different, to find the principle which underlies them all;
and they were taught, too, that it is not the form of the fact which determines
the principle, but the principle which gives character to the fact.”28
The teaching of principles to teachers would be the common theme of early
teacher education, explicit in the course titles, such as Principles of Education and
Principles of Teaching, used in the normal schools and the successor teachers’
colleges which became dominant in the first half of the 20th century. The principles
were often derived from and clearly evident in the educational literature at the
time, but were also presented as fact. These facts were then induced into principles,
and deduced again into facts. This cycle of learning ideas was the demonstration of
their truth, including encouragement of teachers to perform this cycle in self-study
of the pedagogy contained in educational literature of this time. Diversity of
pedagogy was based on a difference of fact—demonstrations—which were
induced to different principles.
It is also important to point out that teachers at this time were not likely to be
given a critical assessment of these ideas, and while the philosophy behind the
pedagogy may have been revealed in terms of its principles, and several
pedagogies may have been introduced, the teacher was unlikely to be, at least as a
pre-service teacher, engaging in the construction of pedagogy. Rather, teachers
were led to adopt a particular pedagogy (aligned with parochial beliefs) and,
having studied its underlying philosophy, were then posted to their schoolhouses to
begin the empirical work of realizing it with support from colleagues at the
institutes and the educational literature available to them.
In the modern period, facts would become the monopoly of science, altering
the very basis for pedagogy as demonstrations of “fact” moved from personal,
philosophical, theological grounds to scientific. But for Cyrus Peirce and his
contemporary educators, professional knowledge was rooted in far broader
grounds, as illustrated by this statement by Peirce:
The book to which, after the Bible, I owe most . . . is that incomparable
work of George Combe, On the Constitution of Man. It was to me a most
suggestive book, and I regard it as the best treatise on education and the
philosophy of man which I ever met with.
The study of “man” or the philosophy of man is a consistent theme in many
of the texts studied at the time by teachers in order to inform two crucial issues: (1)
the purposes of education, the teacher’s contribution to the destiny of his students;
and (2) the methods of educating, based on how we acquire knowledge, his
reception to influence, and the ethics of this influence. These ideas were core to
pedagogy and left for teachers to process in the thought and action of their work,
for once these explicitly philosophical questions were posed, their answers were
the resulting work of the teacher, honed through experience, and often set within a
religious (or metaphysical) framework. The purpose of education would soon be
decided outside classrooms, to be less in the control of the contemplative thought
and action of teachers. As education systems rose, it became possible to align the
aims of education in classrooms to a more explicitly political goal, as one
magnetizes a piece of iron by aligning the polarity of its atoms. As schools became
more secular, the previous religious alignments of schools which set a parochial
agenda began to be re-aligned by the early progressives who had high hopes that
“free, public schools” would promote their social agendas, especially the
opportunity to socialize the largely immigrant population, especially on the east
coast of the United States, into a national identity. This theme will be visited again
through the dissertation—if schools could be tools for central policy, teachers
would obtain a new role as instrumental in deploying this policy, and teacher
preparation would change to provide it.
Not only was it important that students in the United States and Canada,
especially those coming from a variety of different countries, receive a “common
experience” in the common schools, a further important task at this time was to
make teachers across the nation share in their own common experience, especially
to form associations to further the process of professional identity. One approach,
funded from both state and private sources, was the circulation of educational
literature, not only from the early educational journals such as the Common School
Journal, but also important pedagogical texts often adopted in the normal schools.
This literature would comprise what was known as the “teacher libraries.” The
contents of a sample of these texts as shown in Table 2 below will serve as a
source for what was recognized as pedagogy, with philosophy evident as its
guiding framework.
Teacher Education as Pedagogy
The most important aspect of teacher education at this time was the explicit
development of the person, the teacher, as an educator and moral person. Recall the
technical core of teacher education was devised to target the teacher as most
needing improvement toward the purpose of establishing the common school.
More specifically this improvement was to be found in the careful selection of
teacher candidates, at the heart of which was a teacher credentialing program. In
addition, the conditions of teaching required a dedicated and moral person, thus the
humanity of the teacher was emphasized, while teaching was still considered an art
and a rudimentary “science” at best. This perspective is also consistent with the
requirement of a letter of character signed by a minister of one’s religion to attend
the normal schools. This focus on the person would also align with the child-
centered movement born of Rousseau and more recently, Herbart, which focused
on the child and the teacher’s attitude toward what the child brings into his
education.
As an example, this focus on the person can be seen in this definition
translated from
Schmidt’s Geschichte der Erziehung published in 1860.
Pedagogics is the science and art of so developing, by means of conscious
influence on the physical, intellectual, and moral powers of man, the ideas of
truth, freedom, and love that lie at the foundation of his god-driven nature,
that he can meet independently, and spontaneously, his human
responsibilities.
Note how this German definition of pedagogy is constituted by the basic branches
of philosophy: (1) it identifies the powers of manontology; (2) our most abstract
concepts man must attempt to reach epistemology; and (3) man’s duties to live on
earth ethics. It also defines pedagogy by its roots as a science and an art. As a
science, Schmidt further defines “philosophy” as the
“science of principles” or the “study of universal and necessary principles.” As one
can see, philosophy is meant to find the patterns, the principles of the principles, or
the universals: what is true of all things. A knowledge of this, of philosophy,
means knowledge of the patterns which lie behind all things, as well as the
connections between things, their correct application leading to the “good” and the
moral. Philosophy was the first “science” of all fields of inquiry, including
education. For example, James Gall, writing in Scotland in 1840, advocated an
approach for teachers to “imitate Nature,” discovering how things work. This was
especially promoted through the naturalism of Herbert Spencer, who wrote several
works on education in the 19th century urging us, in 1861, to “systematize the
natural process.” Nature was a source of principles, and the “improvement of the
art of teaching” would come by “fair experiment or long experience” from which
can be ascertained the “principles upon which its success depends.”39 This was at
odds with the dominant idealism of American philosophy at the time, perhaps led
by Hermann Horne, which denounced human nature as something to be
transcended to seek the good, rather than embraced and aligned with the natural, as
the good. The principles of education were what was taught in the normal schools,
and if knowledge of the principles could not be found by “fair experiments,” there
being seldom any scientists in the modern sense engaged in education at the time,
then the instructors in the normal schools would depend on their empirical “long
experience.” As modern science became available, this balance would change in
the instructors of the normal schools.
For now, teaching would remain an art, described by Gall as the “system of
means, in accordance with these principles, for attaining some special end.”40 This
is similar to sociologist Emile Durkheim, who also proposed viewing art as a
system of means (“système de manières de faire”) though he adds it is adjusted for
special purposes (“ajustées à des fins spéciales”). The means would be derived
mostly from the experience of the instructors of the normal schools, who would
also reveal the principles these means depended on, as written in the texts of this
time. The principles are also linked to the outcomes desired of the education these
means were to secure, and skills in making “adjustments” based on the uncertain
environment of teaching at this time.
Many of the texts collected in the teacher libraries were selected to massage
the humanity in the teacher, to show him that he would be part of a profession
which would increasingly alter the next generation in a positive way. Pedagogy
was also fundamentally a unifying discipline— its content was a series of
demonstrations, each leading to the next, providing a synthesis of various facts and
arguments deemed valuable. The consistency bred a worldview meant to affect not
just the teacher’s thoughts and actions in the classroom, but through his very life—
no exceptions were made for different places with different rules; the classroom
was part of the world which pedagogy equally advised. The idea was that, if the
natural world was a synthesis of its laws, so must our understanding of it retain this
synthesis in order to be successfully practiced in the world. As in the case of the
most notable professions at this time—the clergy, lawyers, and physicians—it was
desirable for teachers to be the glowing exemplars of their philosophy at all times,
their heroes being Plato, Aquinas, Jesus Christ, Rousseau, Herbart, and the like.
This expectation is also shown by the fact that many responsible for the local
parish operated the local schoolroom, especially the prestigious grammar schools
offering a second level of education to a relative few, which required highly
educated (Latin) instructors who mostly came from Europe.
Pedagogy as a Discipline
What is pedagogy?
It is necessary to embark briefly on the question of the disciplinary status of
pedagogy at this time in order to inform how philosophy of education would
emerge later. The framework of Hirst differentiates three kinds of enquiry: forms
of knowledge, fields of knowledge, and practical theories. A form of knowledge
has a unique method of acquiring its facts, and regularly engages in enquiry to
expand this activity, even for its own sake, without a practical end. Examples
include the traditional subjects of philosophy, history, science, theology, art,
literature, and mathematics. A field brings together various forms of knowledge in
order to inform a subject, including research for its own sake to broaden the field.
Education would be such a field, having no unique method of enquiry, as would
the various physical sciences, and hybrid fields such as the social sciences. Hirst
describes a practical theory as a field which focuses on “understanding.”
Pedagogy, then, is a practical theory—Durkheim also made this assessment,
further suggesting pedagogy to be between an art (“practique pure sans théorie”)
and a science. His reasoning is as follows:
Mais les idées qui sont ainsi combinées ont pour objet, non d’exprimer la
nature de choses données, mais de diriger l’action . . . La pédagogie est une
théorie pratique de ce genre. Elle n’étudie pas scientifiquement les systèmes
d'éducation, mais elle y réfléchit en vue de fournir à l’activité de l’éducateur
des idées qui le dirigent.
[But the ideas which are being combined are intended, not to express the
nature of things given, but to direct the action . . . Pedagogy is a practical
theory of this kind. The teacher studies not the science of education systems,
but rather reflects with the aim of providing the activity of the educator
based on their fundamental ideas.]
Pedagogy uses the knowledge that would be found in “education” (the study of
which would not begin until the 20th century) but its purpose is never to enrich the
field itself. Rather it aids its practical ends. The name itself, “pedagogy,” from the
Greek (and “education,” from the Latin), explicitly refers to leading forth (of
youth). This is akin to seeking a “research outcome,” which would not be deemed
the dominant part of a field’s normal knowledge building, whereas resolving
unanswered questions, conflicting results, or controversy would be. Pedagogy, as
all practical theories, aims to formulate all facts or ideas into workable practice.
The 20th century’s cleavage of theory and practice displaced this idea, eventually
replacing it with the “study of education” in the universities. Overall, the relative
balance of the forms of knowledge contributing to academic fields would shift in
the next century, as well as treatment of the perennial question of the aims of
education from philosophy to science.
We can also make connections between disciplines and their accompanying
institutions, or what Swoboda called “software” and “hardware” respectively.
Forms of knowledge are the various ways we categorize our grasp of reality. These
forms are institutionalized into fields, represented by faculties and departments in
the university, and taught and advanced by the academic masses, whether
philosophers, historians, scientists, etc., as well as other public researchers and
writers. Practical theories reside in the training colleges, and increasingly the poly-
technical universities. The former tend to be staffed with its practitioners, while the
universities attempt to balance research and practice with hybrid researcher-
practitioners, who synthesize their prior experience on the job with the research of
the fields. As the disciplinary status of teacher education changed over the next
century, so would its institutional home. For now, it is pedagogy appropriately
hosted in the training colleges of the normal schools and the many occasional
seminars, but it was destined to become the “study of education,” a field,
accompanied by other fields, and residing in (or more often near) a university.
The texts found in teacher libraries provide insights into pedagogy as a
practical theory, examples that are especially pertinent as these were typically
selected as textbooks in the normal schools and as materials for the teacher
institutes. Note that while their selection established explicit standards for the time,
the selection process was ideologically narrowed by educational authorities. The
texts selected were diverse in their philosophy, as well as their topics, representing
both contemporary thought in education—sourced mostly from European
pedagogies and some of the lecture series of early chairs and professors of
education in Britain and the United States—as well as texts deemed readable by
teachers and effective in their continued learning. It also further supports the idea
of teachers themselves, with support from their local institutes, being responsible
for their development.
The case of a Canadian institute’s teacher library will serve to illustrate this.
A reading course was designed by the North Hastings Teacher Institute in 1885,
containing material on
“pedagogy, science, and literature.” Initially these readings were “cultural only,”
but by 1900, individual certificates were issued for readings completed and a
diploma issued for completion of a three-year course of readings. Note that teacher
participation in the libraries and works was low given that most teachers at the time
were transients—professional development would have had no benefit to the
temporary worker. A remedy for this perhaps can be inferred by the remarks of the
Institute’s president to members to form reading circles and meet monthly. Even
so, the funding, organization, and selection of texts by the institutes and their
approval by education authorities is evidence of what was deemed appropriate for
teachers at this time, and what was seen as contributions to their practice and
professionalization. A report of the titles has been provided in Table 2, with
discussion of the titles in the following section.
Pedagogy Examples Within Teacher Libraries.51
Texts were purchased and read by teachers participating in the institutes, and
were also used to devise tests to grant certificates. Sampling their first few pages,
one notices a very “exploratory” philosophic caliber which contrasts to present day
materials. First mentioned on the list from the North Hastings Institute of 1886 is
an early psychology text by James Sulley, who was the Grote Professor of
Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London for eleven years.
Published in 1886, Sulley’s “Teacher’s Handbook of Psychology,” was designed to
be a practical guide based on his previous more comprehensive work “Outlines of
Psychology.” As declared in the preface of the Handbook, By considerably
reducing and simplifying the statement of scientific principles there presented [in
“Outlines”], and expanding the practical applications to the art of Education,
[Sulley] hopes he may have succeeded in satisfying an increasingly felt want
among teachers, viz., of an exposition of the elements of Mental Science in their
bearing on the work of training and developing the minds of the young.
It is interesting that the need was felt to “considerably reduc[e] and simplify” early
science to aid the teacher, while, as we shall see, the philosophy was not reduced.
This balance would soon reverse in the next century, perhaps because teachers
previously held more value in the contemplative, the long-term, whereas modern
teachers are concerned more with the more myopic “but what do I do tomorrow!”
The work by Sulley spans the necessary topics of mind: the connection and
limits of psychology to education, mind and body, mental faculties and
development, epistemology of the senses and forming conceptions, memory,
reasoning, emotions, the will, and moral action. These concepts were believed at
this time to be important in the curriculum of teacher preparation— they were
thought to be important in what teachers should know. It may be surprising that
such topics as epistemology and moral action were once seen as important reading
material for beginning and in-service teachers given the somewhat esoteric view
generally taken of these concepts today. While in the next century science would
begin distributing its facts, the “facts” provided in this period were demonstrated
by the instructor. These demonstrations would be heard or read by teachers and
considered for later use in the classroom. The provisional status of knowledge at
the time required the teacher’s participation. This contrasts with later scientific
facts and professional standards which were expected to be accepted based on the
authority of the instructor or a textbook as “the latest findings,” often not
demonstrated.
The second item on the list is Hopkins’ “Outline Study of Man,” published
in 1873, and part of Applewood’s American Philosophy and Religion Series. It is a
book on ontology, the study of man’s being and his purposive existence. In this
case, the author attempts to devise a “unity” between many aspects of man, such as
his body, reasoning, consciousness and will, and the ethics of choice and moral
decisions. This work is meant for contemplation, containing no specific
procedures, perhaps used as raw material or principles for generating practice by a
process of thought. For teachers, this text illustrates how each aspect of our selves
that influences our thoughts and behavior can be unified toward good ends. Moral
decisions also presuppose what is believed to be right action, dependent on the
religious framework of teachers at this time.
This work’s inclusion was expected to exercise the teacher’s ability to apply a
philosophy of education in practice, and be able to defend this application once
appearing at the institute to earn a certificate for reading this work. This work
represents the culture of (dedicated) teaching at this time and the realm of
discussion occurring at the institutes.
The third work was written by Joseph Payne, the first professor of the art and
science of education in England, who held his post in the College of Preceptors of
London. Published posthumously, his “Lectures on the Arts and Science of
Education” include separate lectures on theory, practice, methods, and principles of
a science of education. A rationale for the work in the preface states the following:
The Art of Teaching had been learned by imitation; the teacher sought no
principles, because he never heard they existed. But great men from time to
time became teachers. Rabelais, Montaigne, Locke, the Jesuits[,]
Ro[u]sseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and many others, rolled up a rich mass of
teaching-facts, and partially arranged them in order. It needed next a
philosophic mind to deal with these discoveries, to state their value and
explain them. Joseph Payne seemed raised up for this purpose; his cast of
mind, education and experience, fitted him to investigate this field of
thought.
This introduction illustrates conditions of thought at this time and a need for study
and synthesis of its diverse empirical roots. It reveals principles via study of the
pedagogy of the Great Educators. Payne was also co-founder of the Frobel Society
in London in 1874, and lectured on the ideas of both Froebel and Pestalozzi. The
text also includes several lectures on teacher education and the importance of
standards to raise the quality of those entering teaching. One lecture in particular—
given to the National Union for the Women of All Classes—describes a profession
as implying “learned,” and requiring accredited training as in medicine, law, and
theology. Payne further remarks that because there were no standards for becoming
a teacher, anyone could compete for a teaching position, from the ignorant to the
learned; frugal trustees favoured the former. Several of these lectures fulfill a
professionalizing role by stimulating teachers to organize to become aware of the
issues in their profession, especially the dominance of transients, and the ease of
access to the occupation.
A fourth title “Talks on Teaching” by Francis W. Parker is very much a
curricular work, outlining the teaching of reading, writing, arithmetic, geography,
and history, together with other educational topics such as assessment and
punishment, but he also addresses the more philosophical topics of the aims and
purposes of education, the will, and moral and character aspects, mentioning the
ideas of Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Frobel. Even the first chapter on reading begins
with a basic epistemological position on the nature of concepts or ideas.
What is reading? . . . Reading is getting thought by means of written or
printed words arranged in sentences. Thought may be defined as ideas in
relation. Ideas are either sense products, or derivations from sense products.
The final title listed in the teacher library was Arabella B. Buckley’s “The Fairy-
Land of Science,” a student reader in science. The inclusion of a work specific to
teaching science may have been due to the lack of background knowledge among
teachers at the time, so that a written work from which the teacher could teach (or
the pupils could follow) was deemed necessary. This science-specific work
contrasts with other subjects expected to be known by the teacher, especially
literacy and arithmetic, each of which was believed to be broadly known well
enough to instruct via the blackboard. One further text I wish to include here which
is not included in the New Hastings Teacher Library is an English version of an
originally German text: Grube’s Method of Teaching Arithmetic translated and
revised by Levi Seeley in 1888. This may seem like a curricular,
methods work, however the advertisement by the American publisher encouraging
teachers to purchase this work is quite interesting. These are the first two reasons,
copied below in similar typographical form:
1. IT IS A PHILOSOPHICAL WORK.This book has a sound philosophical
basis. The child does not (as most teachers seem to think) learn addition,
then subtraction, then multiplication, then division; he learns these processes
together. Grube saw this, and founded his system on this fact.
2. IT FOLLOWS NATURE’S PLAN.Grube proceeds to develop (so to
speak) the method by which the child actually becomes (if he ever does)
acquainted with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. This is not done, as some suppose, by
writing them on a slate. Nature has her method; she begins with THINGS;61
Not only does the second reason show evidence of the influence of Spencer’s
naturalism across the Atlantic, the first reason cites philosophy as the text’s style,
yet goes on to describe the practice of teaching mathematics. This illustrates that
philosophy was a known part of the common vocabulary of the aspiring and self-
improving teacher, and likewise a “sound philosophical basis” was of importance
and contributed to the confidence of the method.
In summary, this Canadian teacher library drew from both British and
American sources, disseminating practical ideas intended to ground the teacher in
careful thought about his craft.
For example, Parker’s work specifically asks teachers to resist mimicry of both the
“stupefying” nature of tradition and the ideas he espouses in his lectures, asking the
teacher to consider them and let the best methods win in practice. In other words,
the teachers were expected to produce their methods—what worked for them in
their contexts—under the guise or direction of an approach to, or philosophy of,
teaching. This might be contrasted with the approach of “best practices” in the
modern period, a trend toward teaching as a technology to be implemented
produced by research, and away from teaching as an art or a personal craft honed
by experience.
A second conclusion that can be drawn is that the texts at the institutes were
not sourced exclusively from a specialized or technical teacher education literature,
but rather sampled new works in education, such as from Payne and Parker,
emerging scientific findings of early psychology from Sulley, but also included a
more general or liberally educating text such as that Also advertised by the
publisher is Parker’s Notes on “Talks on Teaching.”
by Hopkins. We should also keep in mind that these texts would have presumed a
normal school education, including European pedagogy, and because of this did
not include texts of this kind in the teacher libraries.
A final point which I have deferred until now is a peculiar advisement of the
New Hastings Institute. The order of the list of the texts is important—the Institute
instructed its members holding a First or Second class certificate to begin with the
Sulley text and read the rest in order. If the teacher had a Third-class certificate,
they should skip the Sulley text and instead begin with Hopkins. What may have
been the rationale for this instruction was likely to encourage further study of
psychology for those who were normal school trained rather than for the transient
“thirds” who were unlikely to participate in professional development anyway.
However, having Third-class teachers read Hopkins is just as interesting, implying
such a philosophical text, while perhaps not seen as important or “revolutionizing”
as the early psychology text, was still seen as providing the basic ingredients of
teacher education literature. If Sulley and early psychology was enriching, Hopkins
and philosophy was bread and butter.
Philosophy in Pedagogy: Precursors to the Philosophy of Education
Other than the more well-known pedagogues already mentioned, several
texts often based on these pedagogues and previous philosophers were published in
the 19th century which provided both material and sometimes textbooks for the
normal schools. The production of these texts would accelerate by the turn of the
century with the accelerating growth of normal schools. Along with constant
consolidations of teacher journals, they provided soil for “study of education”
leading to creation of educational theory and later, a narrower philosophy of
education that was to become established. The beginnings of pedagogy itself can
be related to classic literature or quality fiction in the sense of stories based on the
actions of characters within philosophic themes. These themes represent the
worldviews of the educator, and would later be carved up into research questions to
be handled by separate university fields. The content or ideas on which philosophy
of education would be based can be found in these early texts, while increasing
institutionalization of the discipline would guide development of the changing
technical core.
Early Works
Philosophy in 19th century pedagogy was based on the inspiration of the “Great
Educators,” mostly Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, the
naturalism of Spencer, and the European Romantics: Pestalozzi, Herbart, and
Froebel. Notice that none of these figures were affiliated with universities, and
cannot be considered part of later “academic” philosophy. It might be more
accurate to say it was their worldviews or demonstrations that led to their personal
vision of education. “Academic” philosophy, philosophy from the early
universities, came almost exclusively from Germany, such as the work of Kant,
Hegel, and Nietzsche (although Nietzsche was hired as a philologist). Locke,
Spencer and Mill were not university professors. Adam Smith and Hume were, but
are rarely studied for their educational views, and ironically, like Nietzsche, are
more well-known and studied today not for their primary university work—Smith
was a moral philosopher yet known today for his economics, and Hume a historian,
yet studied as a philosopher. The point is that pedagogy was never rooted in the
universities, but would be transplanted there by the turn of the century, especially
through the works of the initial occupants of the first Chairs of the science and art
of education, and the rise of John Dewey.
While most early works in pedagogy came from Germany, in terms of early
English works J. J. Chambliss in his The Origins of American Philosophy of
Education writes, The earliest work on education which may fairly be considered
to have a place among the origins of the philosophy of education as a distinct
discipline is Joseph Neef's Sketch of a Plan and Method of Education in 1808.
Neef, a Scot, was a student of Pestalozzi and has been cited as bringing
Pestalozzian education to the United States and aiding its implementation in
schools. Pestalozzi wrote in German, which few Americans could read, and the
resulting school set up in Philadelphia under Neef produced an education far
different from that in the Gradgrind-like schools typical of the times. Another
Scot, George Jardine, published his Outlines of Philosophical Education in 1818.
This text also resembles a pedagogical work with a focus on curriculum and the
practice of teaching. Note the consistent use of “philosophy” in the titles of
pedagogical works, still a practical theory, in contrast to how philosophy is
considered abstract and “ivory-tower” today. At this time in pedagogy, philosophy
lived in the practical. A further Scottish text shows this: James Gall's 1840 A
Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education. However, mid-20th century
texts with similar titles were transformed after philosophy of education became a
field institutionalized in faculties of education in the university.
Similar works were produced in Germany via the Romantics: Herbart’s
collection in the early 19th century, Froebel's The Education of Man in 1826, and
several works of Johann K. F. Rosenkranz, a Hegelian idealist. For example,
Rosenkranz’s Paedagogik als System, originally published in German, was later
translated for the United States in 1872. The translator provides this reason for
interest in the text:
too much of our teaching is simply empirical, and as Germany has, more
than any other country, endeavored to found it upon universal truths, it is to
that country that we must at present look for a remedy for this empiricism.
Based as this is upon the profoundest system of German Philosophy, no
more suggestive treatise on Education can perhaps be found.
The empirical was what was learned by experience in the field, which pedagogy
was based upon, but many interested in teacher education at this time were
inspiring in teachers a view of the principles behind their craft, sometimes referred
to as “universal truths.” Educational literature as teacher preparation textbooks or
for later professional development were also a source of these principles. As
already mentioned, John Locke was rediscovered in Germany and used toward this
goal. This influence can be found in Rosenkranz who, in a Lockean fashion,
defined education as the “conscious working of one will on another so as to
produce itself in it according to a determinate aim.”
In 1886, Rosenkranz’s Paedagogik was published with the English title The
Philosophy of Education, suggesting “systematic pedagogy” was the general area
of inquiry for the later field of philosophy of education. This work, and Frobel's
The Education of Man, were part of Appleton's International Education Series
(editor W. T. Harris) compiled in the 1880s for the proliferation of European
pedagogy (especially psychology, philosophy, curriculum, and administration of
schools) in the United States. Harris, in the editor's preface of Rosenkranz's work,
illustrates the entrepreneurial conditions of teachers in this time:
It is believed that the teacher does not need authority so much as insight in
matters of education. When he understands the theory of education and the
history of its growth, and has matured his own point of view by careful
study of the critical literature of education, then he is competent to select or
invent such practical devices as are best adapted to his own wants.
Perhaps the first English text with “philosophy of education” in the main
title was Thomas Tate's Philosophy of Education; or, The Principles and Practice
of Teaching published in England in 1857, republished and introduced to American
teachers in 1885.69 Somewhat earlier in the United States was Mark Hopkins's
Outline Study of Man, or The Body and Mind in One System published in 1873 and
available in teacher libraries such as in North Hastings listed earlier. The subtitles
of both these works reminds us of the German value of synthesis also found in the
sample teacher library described earlier, illustrating philosophy's expected synoptic
or systematic character and role in teaching, and of philosophy as the glue of
theory and practice, always kept together. The first related text in French occurred
somewhat later; according to philosopher Jacques Maritain, the first French text
with “the subject of education in its relation to philosophy” was de Hovre's
Philosophy and education, translated from Flemish in 1924. This particular work
was used as a textbook in the école normale as the subtitle stipulates.
The late Victorian era was also important to early pedagogy for the
“recovery of the history of educational ideas and philosophy”71 as exemplified in
works undertaken to revive the ideas of Plato by Nettleship in 1880, Aristotle by
Davidson in 1904, and the Renaissance by Laurie in 1903. Perhaps best known at
the time in terms of published lectures serving as normal school texts was, in
England (and, as we have seen, institute libraries in Canada at least), Joseph
Payne's Lectures on the Arts and Science of Education (published posthumously in
1880). A similar text in the United States was the previously noted Francis W.
Parker's Talks on Teaching, based on lectures given in 1882 and published shortly
after. Lectures on education by educators and philosophers, transcribed and
published as educational materials, would be common in this century and into the
next, as shown by the works of Herman Horne.
Institutionalization of Pedagogy
These lectures, sometimes first provided at teacher seminars and later
published as educational literature, would be often used as textbooks in the early
normal schools. As the institutionalization process began in the normal schools,
and later in the state regulation of their programs, it is to be expected that these
schools move away from the pedagogical-based approach to teacher education.
This is predicted by institutional theory. As described by Zucker, organizations are
influenced by normative pressures, sometimes arising from external sources such
as the state, other times arising from within the organization itself. Under some
conditions, these pressures lead the organization to be guided by legitimated
elements, from standard operating procedures to professional certification and state
requirement, which often have the effect of directing attention away from task
performance. Adoption of these legitimated elements, leading to isomorphism with
the institutional environment, increases the probability of survival.75
This process is exemplified in the initial purposes of teacher education. Consistent
with the dominant goal of the “improvement of the common schools,” the first
stage and most effective concern was undoubtedly improved selection of the
teachers, and only to a small extent changes to the normal school curricula, initially
founded on the summer seminars, especially since they shared instructors.
Gatekeeping would begin at the local level and later, become magnified through
decisions by authorities such as superintendents, trustees and legislators who
appropriated the gatekeeping function by admitting or denying passage to
prospective teachers on the basis of more exclusive criteria as specified in local
and state regulations. Normal schools and their later institutional formats would
primarily follow these changing regulations, the “legitimated elements.” While
improving teacher education always remained a value, it was never the criterion
used to judge or assess a teacher education institution—rather, into the 20th century,
institutional theory predicts the criterion would become the adoption of accrediting
standards that dictated the continued survival of a teacher education institution.
To foreshadow the next chapter, this key point, the aim of teacher education
being derived from and legitimated by the changing technical core of the
organizations pursuing that end, is further illustrated in Sarason, Davidson and
Blatt's 1962 The Preparation of Teachers: An unstudied problem in education,
The traditional ways in which teachers have been trained barely come to
grips with the question of how one maximizes the possibility that a teacher’s
practice harmonizes with principles of learning and development. A
symptom of this neglect is that educational psychology (as the psychology of
learning) is viewed as something which has to do with how children learn
and not with how teachers learn. The student in the process of becoming a
teacher is not made acutely aware of how he is learning, that is, to utilize
himself as a source of understanding of the nature of the learning process . . .
As a result, the teacher does tend to function as a technician who applies
rules.
The craft of teaching was to become a treatment administered to students—the
teacher the manager, the students the workers. For example, in the conclusion of a
study of teacher communication, the researchers reported the following,
Our data indicate that it is the everyday demands of the institution rather
than the longterm goal of socialization that receives emphasis in teacher
communication…Generally, children rated conforming to procedure as
equal in importance to doing well…The data on teacher communication
about the student role and student perceptions of the role paint a picture of
the classroom as a workplace, rather than a place designed to enhance the
intrinsically motivated pursuit of knowledge.”
These roles for student and teacher would define the technical core in later 20th
century teacher education. Student learning outcomes, the student’s work, was the
maintenance, the means, to the improvement of the common schools, and the
functioning of these schools by the compliance of students and teachers was a
means to the ends of creating and supporting public school systems.
This technical orientation contrasts with the point made earlier of pedagogy’s
focus on the teacher, and his development toward a personal approach to
schoolkeeping. The glue of philosophy within pedagogy was meant for a kind of
teacher who would be expected to devise his methods for his situation. In addition,
the forward of the text just discussed includes a remark indicative of the widening
gap between the technical cores of the 19th century and the mid-20th century:
“contents and procedures of teacher education frequently have no demonstrable
relevance to the actual teaching task” and that criticism of teachers’ college
programs from outside the “temple walls” are kept at bay by a “cordon sanitaire.”
This is not surprising if survival of teachers’ colleges hangs on satisfying the
institutional level by maintaining their state accreditation, as reviewed in the next
chapter. The theory requires that isomorphism would set in as all normal schools
and their successor teachers’ colleges, increasingly (and supinely) conform to these
standards, even if they participate (and they often do) by sending a representative
to accreditation policy review meetings. Other considerations beyond the metrics
or policies within the accreditation standards become optional as they do not
directly confer organizational survival, although metrics such as student
satisfaction or later employment success may factor into the school's reputation,
positively affecting recruitment. Reputation is a desirable metric to observe, but it
is not as crucial as following the accreditation standards, the loss of which would
literally discredit the institution, and the students’ goal of receiving a certificate to
teach would be disrupted. As normal schools expanded into teachers’ colleges,
their regulatory governance (as part of the institutional level) would rapidly
increase in scope and number, and continue to increase as they would eventually
grow into faculties and departments of education in the universities as the twentieth
century matured.
Summary
As remarked by sociologist Peter Berger, ideas “do not succeed in history by
virtue of their truth but by virtue of their relationship to specific social processes.”
While this is an ominous idea—we would like to think that the truth always wins in
the end despite any adversity or clinging to tradition—it suggests that certain ideas
become widespread or legitimated because of their endorsement by various social
and institutional structures. As these structures change, so would the relationship to
the ideas which operate the structures. Pedagogy in 19th century North America and
Britain which I characterized as schoolkeeping, is the historical lineage of modern
teacher education: it survived as the method of teacher training only while teachers
remained fairly decentralized in their practice and employment. The precarious
conditions of teaching at the time required a great deal of flexibility and judgement
in their practice. In terms of their employment, the schools would multiply and
enlarge, and so would those who governed them: from local trustees, to county
inspectors and district superintendents, and later corporate school boards governing
complex, integrated K-12 systems. The teacher institutes of the 19th century would
themselves transform into associations and unions, and educational literature
would be formalized by central authorities. As the grammar schools disappeared,
methods courses would appear in the universities designed for secondary teachers
destined for the new high schools, and while transitioning from the initial entry
requirement of a university degree with a few methods courses to specialized
subject-based preservice programs, they, too, would be institutionalized into
teachers’ colleges alongside their elementary counterparts. All these changes to the
governance and associations of teachers restructured the terms and means of their
entry into teaching with an increasingly narrow, collaborative, and sometimes
specialist role in the education of the young.
While teachers in the 20th century became responsible for the whole process
of school teaching, guided by philosophies devised to meet this synthetic and
inspirational need, there were few such official policies for nineteenth century
teachers to look to or conform to. Rather they sought out the “Great Educators,”
either through their professional literature, their meetings with colleagues at the
institutes, or instructors in the seminars or normal schools inspired by them.
Education was always part of a moral endeavor—teachers believed that with the
right early child experiences, either parochial or based on the philosophy held, they
would be contributing to a better (or less sinful) world.
During this time, governments created new educational arrangements.
Normal schools were established with the explicit purpose of supporting the still
young common schools. To this end, their first task was to guard entry to foster a
more competent and moral future teaching profession. The rising public perception
of good teachers would both increase public support and combat truancy in the
common schools. These embryonic teachers’ colleges embraced the diversity of
pedagogy promoted through the teacher seminars, institutes and libraries that had
become bases of professional learning across the land, providing teachers with
ideas and principles from which they forged their practice. This is where
philosophy of education existed in an implicit, banal state, and as part of teaching
culture it held an inescapably important place in the preparation of teachers at this
time. The later field of philosophy of education became institutionalized as a
delineated subject as the components of the culture and early education of teachers
was broken up into courses provided in the university setting. The loss of the
“glue” that is philosophy in pedagogy would have to be replaced by the rail spikes
of government policy.
The next chapter will continue the story of philosophy in pedagogy and
teacher education from the turn of the century through to the end of World War II.
The study of education would be born here, and various “educational” fields
constructed, some of them grouped as “foundations” to retain the idea of écoles
normale providing “principles.” The teachers’ colleges, often now affiliated with,
but not yet part of, universities, would split and academize the subjects within
pedagogy for study. The philosophy that was the glue of pedagogy would be
transformed and replaced, for a short time, with academic philosophy and,
likewise, the textbooks would show a clear transition from philosophy in pedagogy
to philosophy of education. John Dewey played an essential part in this process, as
well as helping to narrow philosophy in the teachers’ colleges to a new philosophy
of pragmatism which resonated well with what would become the “new teacher.”
Chapter 3 University-affiliated Teachers’ Colleges and Academic Philosophy
By the turn of the 20th century, the stabilized normal schools had spread
throughout the Commonwealth and the United States. The quest for a professional
teaching body seemed to be on the right track, initially due to gatekeeping:
changing who teachers were. Entry standards would continue to rise to eventually
mimic the nearby university, implicating secondary (grammar) school teachers as
well. The more scrupulously selected candidates were increasingly prepared to
manage a wider net of associations within larger schools, and encouraged to aspire
to professional expectations somewhat in line with the successful outcomes of the
Flexner Report, which had redesigned the medical profession, the rising legitimacy
of teachers generating claims to higher social status and living standards. It was
expected that superior remuneration would make this process come full circle by
displacing the transients and attracting a dedicated, higher class of people into
teaching, sealing the profession.
This chapter will continue the history of the institutionalization process of
teacher education, from, as previously described, seminars to normal schools and
now, to universityaffiliated teachers’ colleges. This institutionalization process
paralleled the rise of the study of education, as a field, to replace the practical
theory of pedagogy. It would begin to fragment conceptions of teaching by
infusing the new psychology and established academic subjects into ITPPs, a
process that required the introduction and socialization of new groups of academics
to replace the veteran teachers who had formed the instructional corps of normal
schools. As a result, a re-balancing of the forms of knowledge constituting this new
“study of education” would create a new science of education, in which philosophy
would never again be dominant and pedagogy was relegated to its practitioners.
The rise of John Dewey’s influence and legacy in American education is
unmistakable and profound: he would bridge the conversion of pedagogy into the
universities as the study of education, narrow the pluralism of philosophy in
pedagogy into (American) pragmatic philosophy which would dominate the new
ITPP instructors, and expand the use of psychology in teacher education curricula.
Dewey’s influence, combined with the new science of education, would antiquate
(German) pedagogy which had filled the curriculum of normal schools. Whether
this era saw the emergence of the field of philosophy of education is contentious,
but more confidently, its precursors, professors of philosophy (and early
psychology) recruited to lecture in teachers’ colleges and supervise doctoral
pedagogy students would secure philosophy of education’s clear existence in the
next institutional step, university departments, schools, and faculties of education,
the subject of the following chapter.
From Normal Schools to Teachers’ Colleges
By the end of the nineteenth century, normal schools had become a standard
part of
American, British and Canadian education for elementary teacher training. North
America (especially the eastern coast of America) was urbanizing and spreading
west beyond the frontier, and so were its schools: schoolhouses expanded to larger
schools with multiple teachers as truancy declined, which supported a strengthened
hierarchy of administration in the form of principals and local superintendents who
would replace county inspectors. Fee-based private schools lost dominance, and
their buildings and students transferred to the common schools. Expansion required
greater numbers of staff at every level of education, especially to administer the
burgeoning urban public education systems, including the instructors of these
teachers and administrators for each level. Those working at all of these levels
needed to be trained, designated, professionalized, and managed, constituting an
expanded task set for the technical core of the new teachers’ colleges which were
expected to handle the new needs of the education system which now supported
the “public” schools, and soon, the high schools, which developed from the
common and grammar schools.
Those few who did seek out further education in the normal schools in place
of the disappearing teacher seminars were part of the first steps toward this higher
educational attainment. It was believed that better teachers, trained in the normal
schools, would foster better students who would supply better future teachers.
Further education received by way of new university degree requirements for
common school teachers (soon renamed to public school teachers) would also
implicate the grammar school teachers (soon replaced by high school teachers).
These grammar school teachers would be asked to join their lower school
counterparts to create a new public school teaching profession. It is important to
therefore take a slight diversion to describe and introduce secondary school
teachers, the other half of what would comprise a future public teaching profession.
More will be said on the topic of secondary school teachers, in the context of
Ontario, in Chapter five.
Secondary School Teachers
As might be said of any product or service, grammar schools and their
teachers varied in quality, reflected in part in the wide range of fees that were
asked per pupil. Many grammar schools were glorified common schools, and
catered to parents who would not send their children to the charity “public” schools
but would patronize a cheap grammar school with the hope of raising the class and
quality of their child’s education. But those who commanded the highest fees were
the most acclaimed grammar school teachers—they were found in urban areas and
were highly educated from Europe; in a sense, their craft originated from the
sophists, tutors, and philosophers of Ancient Greece. Because of their role in early
knowledge, we now call their operative territory the “classics,” and to this day
while it is still studied in the university, instruction in Latin or Green in lower
school programs has become quite rare. This tradition throughout since ancient
times was the craft of 19th century grammar school teachers, some fluent in such
languages, by default held university degrees largely from the old world, and
operated the fee-based grammar schools. These schools were largely unregulated
until the mid19th century when some struggling grammar schools agreed to be
inspected in order to receive state grants to subsidize their operations. Many fee-
based schools, both common and grammar, accepted this arrangement and came
under the jurisdiction of Public Boards, acquiring steadier income in exchange for
conforming to inspection and regulation. As an example, in the United States by
the 1920s, most independent American grammar schools had closed and converted
to state high schools, but a few successful fee-based schools, often due to a notable
headmaster, remained.
Successful grammar school teachers also held much prestige in their cities,
deriving patronage from the upper classes. They were often priests who also ran
the local parish, or were scholars, holding the regard of college professors, with
whom some partnered in their scholarship. Part of their role was to inculcate
morals, as can be shown from an 1856 manual,
Each Head Master and Teacher of a Grammar School shall…daily exert his
best endeavors, by example and precept, to impress upon the minds of the
pupils the principles and morals of the Christian Religion, especially those
virtues of piety, truth, patriotism, and humanity, which are the basis of law
and freedom, and the cement and ornament of society.
They were relatively unregulated for almost all of their existence, and instead were
selfgoverning and judged by their prospective clientele who sought an “elite”
European-style education similar to their own for their sons. This general goal also
applied to the grant-aided grammar schools. As Day recounts,
As for the qualifications of Grammar School teachers, it was generally
assumed that their academic standing was such as to put their ability beyond
question . . . [Thus they] did not have to be examined and certified by an
intermediate authority as did common school teachers.
Surely an “intermediate authority,” such as local trustees or boards, would not be
appropriate judges of Latin or Greek proficiency, but often those patronizing this
superior education could judge, having had the same education in their youth. Such
client judgement was less available to the average Canadian or American settler
who likely could read but were less likely to write, so that judging the basic
literacy of common school teachers fell to trustees and school inspectors who were
more likely to be literate than the commoner. As noted, however, by the mid-19th
century many grammar schools accepted grants from the government, and
henceforth were inspected for adequate buildings, student complement, and
certificated instructors.
As most grammar schools became dependent on grants by the early 20th
century, their transition to public high schools began. Grammar schools were not
“public” in the sense of equal access—they were neither “free” nor “compulsory”
and state authorities planned to replace them with common high schools which
would eventually be “free and compulsory.” The adoption of public high schools
also coincided with raising the mandatory schooling age to fill them. It is perhaps
obvious to note that “teacher preparation” of grammar school teachers did not
include pedagogy or education-type courses, and were exclusively academic-
orientated, a general liberal education without consideration to practice or
application. And so even into the 20th century, the ITPPs for secondary teachers
destined for the new public high schools retained this model, siding with university
liberal arts training, with perhaps a course or two in education methods, while most
elementary ITPPs were teaching-orientated (including remedial) sourced from the
normal schools which later became teachers’ colleges. Eventually, both approaches
would be merged: the modern period requires both elementary and high school
teachers to have a university degree and attend a combined program in university
settings, with some programs being consecutive and some concurrent, the latter
often provided by liberal arts colleges which offer teacher education programs.
Overall, for most of their history, elementary teachers were trained outside the
university using a pedagogical model, akin to the education and status of early
childhood educators today, whereas the preparation of grammar and then high
school teachers had begun in the university. As a result, the former was changed
substantially while the latter’s programs, creating the high school teachers, were
only modified as the programs became merged in a single institution.
In summary, the grammar school teachers could be seen as representing an
ideal for a future merged profession of teachers. They were more likely to be
academically-oriented, more connected to and filtered by the clergy and higher
society, beyond minimum literacy skills due to a college A.B. degree, recipients of
higher pay and usually resident in urban settings, making them more reliable and
less migratory, with intrinsic prestige and access to higher society. In short, many
of the qualities sought after in fashioning a profession of teachers were already a
part, by nature, of the occupation of grammar school teachers. The challenge was
whether these qualities could be produced from the institutions and central
authorities now being developed to govern the creation of the new public schools,
and whether these qualities could be retained in the new high schools. At the same
time, the high school teacher was trained to be far more specialized than the
grammar school teacher who was historically a generalist. While this concern for
maintaining these “grammar school” qualities and strengths would, for now, be
relegated to their separate ITPPs, by the mid-20th century, many programs were
merged, offering one ITPP with both common and separate courses for elementary
and high schools governed by the requirements needed to obtain each certificate.
This particular merger also necessitated a merged institution, raising the question
of what form it should take, which will now be discussed.
The Form of the Teachers’ Colleges
Separate institutions for elementary and high school ITPPs would persist to
the mid-20th century, and in Ontario until the 1970s. Early high school ITPPs
followed a traditional liberal arts program, the host university or college tolerating
only a handful of pedagogy courses as a compromise both to the liberal arts faculty
and the various state authorities which required them.
Overall, the vast majority of course hours were spent in the standard liberal arts.
The low status of pedagogy common among American university faculty at this
time, especially its presidents, was illustrated by a remark of Charles W. Eliot,
president at Harvard: “Most teachers in England and the United States feel but
slight interest or confidence in what is ordinarily called pedagogy.” Much of
pedagogy at the time was imported from Herbart’s works—German pedagogy (as
outlined in the previous chapter) for a time was the key research center of
education, John Dewey also contributing several papers to the National Herbart
Society. Introducing ITPPs into the universities meant offering pedagogical
courses, but their inclusion was met with fierce opposition and a compromise was
needed.
This issue came to a head at the 1889 meeting of the New England
Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools in the form of a debate between a
renowned psychologist and several university presidents. The result was not
inclusion but affiliated segregation—the development of a “higher normal school,”
which later became the prototypical state teachers’ colleges in the United States.
These were initially only authorized to grant degrees in pedagogy, but soon would
be expanded to offer four year programs and grant bachelor of arts degrees against
the protests of liberal arts colleges. But crucially and definitively they were
initially restricted to offering high school teacher training only. These institutions
attracted new kinds of academics, initially traditionally trained, but later trained by
these teacher education institutions themselves to fill an expanding system of
higher education in the post-World War II period.
The fact that history and philosophy were already established as departments in
universities (with early psychology still part of philosophy at this time) became
the arts portion of the study of pedagogy, and tightly coupled to the resources
controlled by these departments, while the practical business of school teaching
remained mainly outside the universities until the mid-20th century. Overall, the
development of programs to award doctorates of pedagogy was a first
institutional step for education as a field entering the university, but Chairs with
the title of philosophy of education would not arise until the mid-20th century.
The universities would salvage what they could from pedagogy, but ultimately
pull apart its various scientific and artistic aspects for study via pre-existing
resources vested in departments of history, philosophy, and later psychology,
which was most prominent in the United States, and sociology in Britain. Indeed,
Dewey would predict this transition from pedagogy to educational theory. The
stream of European philosophical thought arose as a theory of educational
procedure. This fact is eloquent witness to the intimate connection of philosophy
and education.In the course of two or three generations [philosophy was] cut
loose from its original educational setting and became an independent branch of
inquiry into matters of theory apart from practice.
The fact of the origins of philosophy of education aside, the splitting of pedagogy
into the separate topics of educational theory and educational practice was also part
of the transition from the “schoolkeeping” curricula of the normal schools to the
“teaching” curricula of the universities. It is important to keep in mind,
nonetheless, that pedagogy was widely discussed in the 19th century among
teachers and within the normal schools in the form of teacher institutes,
associations, magazines, and through professional development activities offered
by principals or headmasters of normal or grammar schools. The universities and
state education departments would attempt to institutionalize this collaboration into
university-led fields which would impose rigor and methodology on research into
(public) education. As an example, several state teacher journals would merge to
form the (New England) Journal of Education in 1875, the oldest surviving journal
of education. The form teacher education would take was in one part its legacy as
pedagogy, and one part what is appropriate for a university setting. A research
institute can devote itself to a single philosophy’s ideas, as was the case for many
teacher associations whether for Pestalozzi or Herbart. In contrast, university
faculty are less likely to conform to the view of a single thinker, especially as a
group, approaching a topic such as education from different fields. They are
furthermore expected to provide research conducted under agreed-upon methods to
reach conclusions which can be retested or analyzed to cohere to similar work.
While the founding of university Chairs of pedagogy began the proliferation
of education and philosophy of education content in the universities, by far the
most significant step for the future development of the higher study of education
was the founding of “Teachers College” at Columbia University in 1892 . . . [I]t
took leadership at [the graduate] level in creating a research literature in the
history, philosophy, and science of education which had been so greatly lacking in
the nineteenth century.
Teachers College at Columbia led the way in terms of education research, teacher
education, and later education policy, including providing off-campus facilities and
study groups in the United States and abroad. Its journal, Teachers College Record,
established in 1900, remains a top education research journal. John Dewey would
join the College in 1904 from Chicago until his retirement in 1930. During this
time, a revised course syllabus at Teachers College used John A. MacVannel’s
Outline of a Course in the Philosophy of Education, published in 1912 as a
“pioneer” textbook for nearly a decade.
The College later produced a hefty two volume textbook for teacher
education programs across the country, entitled Readings in the Foundations of
Education edited by Harold Rugg. Volume two contains a self-contained teacher
education syllabus, likened to a course in pedagogy, with constant reference to and
introduction of academic philosophical readings. The sections of the book have
been listed in Table 3 below, and further details of Part I, entitled “World roots of
the American democratic outlook,” which is most concerned with philosophy, have
been provided in the next two columns:
The two-volume work contains key readings from Dewey and others in
philosophy of education, other fields such as sociology, psychology, school
administration, as well as a statement from the American Federation of Teachers.
There is no doubt that Teachers College made considerable efforts to monopolize
and lead the direction of education research, and provide a model for effective
programs.
The progressive and democratic outlook of Teachers College at Columbia,
including the founding of The New School for Social Research in New York by
Dewey and others at Columbia, emphasized a particular kind of philosophy of
education grounded in a clear vision for social progress. This would combat other
influences in American education, such as idealism from A. N. Whitehead and H.
H. Horne, and Herbert Spencer’s naturalism from across the
Atlantic, all for the purpose of influencing social reform through America’s
growing system of national education rooted, in large part, in Horace Mann’s early
efforts. As a result, the still young field of education developing close to the
universities had its infancy closely associated with the status of mass public
schooling, a consequence which illustrates how the field’s aims and purposes were
devoted not to education writ large, but to education as an emerging public
institution. Muir accurately captures this when he points out, “Dewey’s conception
of philosophy of education was limited to the study of contemporary schooling.”28
This would be an antiVictorian movement in the sense of turning away from the
study of the history of educational ideas often found in pedagogy in order to focus
on the future via “progressivism,” making the United States’ origins of philosophy
of education quite different from that of Britain, and wholly alien to the German
tradition. Also, the influential role of religion in many of the educational views of
the time cannot be ignored, and yet it would recede from this role at the turn of the
20th century, recoiling from both the rise of science and the secularization of public
institutions. Philosophy would only fill in for religion for a short while, having
considerable status in secular universities. It slowly displaced religion as the
implicit normative framework of education as the secularization of society
continued apace through the twentieth century.
In institutions, other than the lone teachers’ colleges, Chairs of pedagogy
were eventually enlarged and converted to departments of education, or became
subdivisions in psychology or philosophy departments in the host university,
especially as universities began to assume a greater responsibility in teacher
training. However, while most state university faculties sneered at anything related
to pedagogy (despite the most renowned philosophers of Plato, Aristotle and
Kant engaging with the topic), the “oldest private universities” in the United States
became some of the first to establish departments of education, including Harvard
(1901) and Columbia (1892), with only the public institutions at Michigan (1879)
and Iowa (1890) preceding these.
Overall, it was “early in the twentieth century educational philosophy began to find
a comfortable and conventional place in a college curriculum that was designed to
prepare teachers.”
These institutions and future ones that began to proliferate across the country
were surrounded in a web of associations, most of which were teacher associations
based on various pedagogies. Over time and especially by the first quarter of the
20th century, many of these associations would consolidate to form larger more
powerful groups, and while never holding exclusive power, these state and national
associations began to influence basic standards for the improvement of public
schooling.
The Effects of National Accreditation and Professional Agencies
Besides the starting place offered by normal school curricula for teacher
education, another part of the reason for the borrowing from normal schools to
inform the teachers’ colleges was sourced in rising accreditation and professional
agencies. The rationale for securing national standards was part of the new
“scientific management” sweeping many aspects of the expanding management of
school and teacher activities, including outcome measurements. The gathering of
data important to the monitoring of education systems for schoolboards as well as
for any existing state or national oversight or planning needs was first the
responsibility of appointed inspectors. However, by 1917 in the United States
programs were designed in teacher education institutions to train and educate
superintendents beyond their predecessor, the inspector, to forge new
administrative roles.
The most influential American professional association was the National
Education Association (NEA). Born in the mid-19th century it steadily gained
influence by consolidating smaller local teacher associations of the time and taking
on the professional affairs of the nation. It had little influence until after the Second
World War period, having only ten thousand members before World War I. Still,
as early as 1908 the NEA “encourage[d] the transformation of normal schools into
teachers colleges,” as well as advocating for the training of elementary and
secondary teachers to be combined.37 Overall, its main function other than holding
yearly conferences, was in disseminating a great deal of literature widely read by
classroom teachers, and providing data and reports to administrators on national
trends and “best practices.”
Another agency was the American Association of Teachers Colleges
(AATC) founded in 1926 by merging a department of normal schools in the NEA
and the National Council of Normal School Presidents. The AATC developed and
released standards for teachers’ colleges, including entrance requirements, program
content, proper libraries, training schools, building standards, and recommended
financial support. These agencies, and other state groups provided benchmarks for
the new teachers’ colleges. These standards would also have the side-effect of
generalizing the programs across the country through a process of coercive
isomorphism, since programs will start to become more similar across institutions
as they comply with increasing regulations and standards enforced by a state or
provincial educational body. Failure to observe these requirements, even if
divergence would improve task performance, would cause a program to suffer
“institutionally,” in that it would risk acquiring a “pariah status” by losing
legitimacy and even a loss of its accreditation with larger state or national
educational agencies. Furthermore, prospective students are likely most interested
in gaining a recognized teaching certificate in order to seek employment with a
school board. Therefore, the ITPP’s selling point becomes less their reputation as
an institution or their university affiliation, but rather their accredited status with
the state or province issuing licenses to teach. As pointed out by Max
Weber, every such system attempts to establish and to cultivate the belief in its
legitimacy. But according to the kind of legitimacy which is claimed, the
type of obedience, the kind of administrative staff developed to guarantee
it, and the mode of exercising authority, will all differ fundamentally.
This is what is meant by the kind of legitimacy: teacher education institutions’
most effective legitimacy is their accreditation and, according to Weber, this basic
fact establishes the institutions “type of obedience” and the managerial level tasked
to secure it. At the same time, while the United States has never had mandatory
national teacher education standards, institutional compliance is secured via
funding tied to meeting state or national standards, effectively making adherence
mandatory for most institutions dependent on public funding via per-student
subsidies. This framework secures the institution, maintained through funding and
recognition of their certificates, within the larger education system, which places
teacher education institutions into the role of supplying approved teachers. The
links in this system also illustrate how the original technical core of teacher
education, that of support of public schools, is secured.
Returning to the concept of isomorphism, institutional level pressure weaves
sameness across institutions because, in a way, it is part of the technical core of the
institution. Typically, identity is fashioned within the technical core, this identity
being the support of the public schools by way of providing authorized, legitimate
certificates recognized by the local school boards that employ teachers. Since the
institutional level contains an accreditation force which can strip identity, it
effectively pressures the institution to a far greater extent than any other
institutional level force can, whether a parental group or teachers’ union. In other
words, save for an elite institution such as Teachers College at Columbia, which
stands on its own by going above established standards in order to claim even
further legitimacy than the standard, the identity of nearly all teacher education
institutions is completely dependent on maintaining their accredited status.
However, the managerial level is not helpless, and can suppress or adjust these
forces somewhat by decoupling, which will be explored further in the latter parts of
this chapter. Accrediting agencies regulate teacher education curricula, and their
withdrawal of support for explicit philosophical coursework in teacher education
must, inevitably, lead to attrition of philosophy in ITPPs. Loss of philosophy
coursework lessens the need for philosophers of education—in name—in the
faculty, even if work using philosophy in teachers’ college is inalienable. Before
addressing these standards, it is necessary to review how prototype courses in
philosophy of education looked in the first university-affiliated ITPPs which came
into being before coercive standards existed.
The Curriculum of University-affiliated Teacher Education Programs
Several examples of teacher education curriculum from the United States
will be offered in an attempt to provide a general picture of how philosophy-of-
education-type content was delivered in these new institutions. Recall in the
normal schools discussed in the previous chapter, besides the remedial work,
philosophy was the guiding, animating framework of schoolkeeping, especially as
evidenced in the German pedagogy which inspired its instructors. The general
expectation of teaching throughout the 19th century was operating a rural
schoolhouse with meager resources; teachers were trained to be independent
missionaries of literacy and numeracy. Now, into the 20th century, teachers could
often expect to teach in a classroom in a school supported by colleagues and
administrators, and tasked with an expanded curricular and social mandate beyond
literacy and numeracy: this was especially so for the new high school teachers.
This kind of teacher needed a different kind of teacher education, and this is what
was to be designed and forged in the new university-affiliated teachers’ colleges.
The University of Chicago provides an important exemplar for the purposes
of presenting what this new kind of teacher education looked like in a new
institution, rather than examining grafted institutions of “higher” normal schools or
re-purposed colleges. The university was founded in 1890 and began its first
programs in 1892, which included a department of pedagogy.
Its first president, William R. Harper, held the common opinion among academics
of being “not very impressed with the utility of courses in pedagogy,” yet
established a department to attract students to the new university and appeal to
donors who at the time were highly concerned with improving the public schools
of Chicago.
John Dewey joined the university in 1894, and was to head both the
department of pedagogy and the combined department of philosophy and
psychology. For the pedagogy department’s first two years, teaching staff were
borrowed from the department of philosophy. In addition, Harper’s views of
educational reform had developed, and by Dewey’s arrival in July Harper had
already assumed a “highly prominent role in the major campaign then underway by
leading citizens and powerful civic groups to radically change public education in
Chicago.”
This thrust of activism seemed to have triggered Dewey’s own interest, particularly
given that he had few publications on education at this time. Harper would also
direct university funds to create an academic journal focused on research in
pedagogy for the public schools. When opposition mounted from trustees, Harper
radically argued that “as a university we are interested above all else in pedagogy.”
Furthermore, in line with what Dewey would later champion, Harper argued as
follows: (1) “Education is the basis of all democratic progress. The problems of
education are, therefore, the problems of democracy;” and (2) “Through the school
system, the character of which, in spite of itself, the university determines and in a
large measure controls.For from [universities] proceeds the teachers or the
teachers’ teachers.” The leadership of Harper would set the stage for Dewey’s own
work in education, and certainly initiated many of the reforms in Chicago. With
Dewey’s mounting influence in the area of education, Harper provided needed
advocacy for moving the conditions of teaching into the territory of the university,
if not yet in scholarship, certainly in the university’s expanded role contributing to
social progress within the American university-affiliated teachers’ colleges and
university departments of pedagogy.
John Dewey and Retooling Pedagogy
John Dewey’s early works are an important historical note for this thesis
because of the timing of his work, his prominence as an American philosopher, and
his influence in progressive education reform. The kind of new ITPP that was
being designed at the turn of the century is in part due to Dewey’s influence. Just
before the turn of the century, Dewey participated in the American discussion of
what was to be done with pedagogy: could it be usefully studied in the universities
on equal grounds to traditional disciplines, was pedagogy compatible with science,
and could pedagogy be adapted to the increasingly institutionalized setting of
teachers and the prominence of education policy in the 20th century? Toward the
purpose of illustrating Dewey’s influence on new ITPPs, included below is a
discussion of two of his early pertinent essays written a few years after he began at
the University of Chicago. Both essays discussed below were directed toward
advising and supporting the department of pedagogy being constructed at the
University of Chicago and the new role universities were expected to have, from an
exclusive education for the elite, to a part in the social progress of the masses.
In the first essay Dewey writes on “Pedagogy as a University Discipline,”57
aptly entitled for an introductory essay to the present question. It is split into two
parts. In the first, Dewey suggests that education must be operated, either by
voluntary agents or by government, with the “authority of science,” and because of
this, “the universities are the natural centres of educational organization.”58 He
refers to the wider academic community as being “skeptical as to claims of
pedagogy [acquiring] a position in the sisterhood of university studies.”59 Not
confident of convincing his contemporaries, he argued that universities had much
scientific work on public education to be “collected and organized,” and a
“working synthesis of this great range of scientific data”60 was an appropriate task
for the university. As I have discussed earlier, universities resisted being involved
in the “lower schools” as they did not see the university as the educational “third
tier,” the next step after high school for those so inclined and able, but rather an
exclusive place for the elite, their prestige and scholarship depending on their
distance from “public” matters.
A further caveat lay in the prospect of university research on education in
terms of how a university subject could be created out of the practical realm of
pedagogy. Generalizable research might conflict with the work of teachers—the
tradition of pedagogy has always been vocational, practical, and has provided a
complete view of the teacher in his schoolroom.
Dewey’s remedy, aligned with his pragmatic philosophy, was to restrict teacher
education content to education research which had been vetted by practice, sorting
out the ideas of academia by testing them in “a laboratory of a school of practice,
experiment and demonstration.” This approach required training new teacher
education instructors who were informed less by their classroom experience, and
more from the knowledge their colleagues in educational science had verified. The
important task of institutionalizing pedagogy lay in converting it from its empirical
base to a scientific base, from personal to generalizable, and to begin shifting what
can be gained in teacher education from purely preparatory to concrete
scientifically verified practices, or what later would be termed “best practices” or
“evidencebased practices.”
In the second part of the first essay, Dewey interestingly criticizes European
pedagogy as “lacking . . . complete organization.”63 What he meant was that
pedagogy lacked the internal structure to be studied and used for “university
purposes.” He proposed splitting pedagogy into two parts, administrative and
scholastic, each of which could be studied separately in the university research
environment. The administrative part would be tasked with how schools function
as social and political institutions. This not only includes historically in the sense
of how every people that has made a contribution to civilization has administered
its educational forces” but also studying the merits of these past and current
systems and how schools relate to other institutions, such as government, church,
family, and the like. The scholastic part concerns the ideas of education, and how
various pedagogies developed alongside philosophy and religion. Dewey compares
these two parts of pedagogy as the “record of the intellectual development of
humanity, as the other is of its institutional development”—the theory and the
reality, or using Dewey’s metaphor, the plant, past and present, and how to better
design the plant to maximize its fruit for human betterment.
This division of theory and practice, a new formulation for studying
education away from the natural synthetic nature of pedagogy, also aligned with
Dewey’s suggestion of teachers’ colleges being connected to a model school
(which Dewey termed a laboratory), creating a cycle of criticism where theory
from the research of teachers’ colleges is placed in a natural selection environment
of practice, the results of which inform future theory. Overall for the long term,
universities would be challenged to have a role in leading the public school system,
while becoming part of it as a “tertiary” step.
This rough framework is what was to become the university “study of
education,” and would eventually seed the fields, as Dewey names them in the
essay, of educational psychology, educational sociology, and educational history to
begin the scholarship needed to fill in the order as outlined above with instructors
who would teach the teacher education curriculum. Certainly all educational-typed
fields began from their respective content distilled from pedagogy, while
borrowing the current university methods used to study the respective fields: while
historians began cataloging pedagogies and connecting historical factors leading to
their creation, the more scientific fields of psychology and sociology were required
to upgrade their pedagogical predecessors with dedicated researchers in the
universities by extracting and filtering the empirical claims of pedagogy and
producing verified scientific accounts. The fate of philosophy in pedagogy would
be the field of “educational philosophy,” limited in scope from its lost territory
ceded to the other fields mentioned, each field having its boundaries explicitly
defined. Even so, Dewey believed philosophy had an inalienable role in education,
famously calling it the
“general theory” of education, which in my interpretation, is the glue of pedagogy I
have referenced previously, and still could be the necessary glue (if less explicit) of
the study of education. This point is developed in Dewey’s second article.
John Dewey’s Example Teacher Curriculum
This next document was in fact an 1897 letter to President W. R. Harper of
the University of Chicago who consulted with Dewey regarding course
composition for the department of pedagogy. Dewey included the following “main
heads:” educational physiology (school operation and student health), educational
sociology (the school as a social institution), educational psychology (adaptation of
curriculum to the child), general pedagogy (theory of educational aims,
organization of curriculum, and methods to obtain ends), educational history
(education in other countries and historically, and the development of education
theory).
Philosophy of education might seem oddly absent, but is included in the ideas
explored in educational history and, more importantly, philosophy makes up most
of “general pedagogy.” As Dewey explains:
General pedagogy is the head which receives most attention, and in some
cases, exclusive attention, in the existing status of Pedagogy in colleges. It
deals with the philosophy of education as such and the question of
educational aims and means.
Dewey termed this part the “general work” which, once completed, would allow
the student to move on to “more special and detailed study of the school
curriculum.” Dewey certainly provided philosophy a central place in the new
teacher education, surrounding a core of pedagogy with the science of education as
composed by the new educational fields mentioned. This central place is consistent
with the view of institutional theory in which a technical core, in this case the
successful operation of the public schools, originally the subject of pedagogy, is
maintained yet modified to make room for new university subjects in the new
teacher education institutions. The core of philosophy remains, at least for now, in
devising the new study of education.
Delving further, several of Dewey’s “lecture-study” course syllabuses used
at the University of Chicago further illustrate the concentration of philosophy still
to be found in early teacher education during its transition into the
university.Reprinted in The Early Works, Volume 5 are courses in Educational
Ethics, Educational Psychology, and “Pedagogy 1B – Philosophy of Education.”
Each syllabus is quite comprehensive and contains a synthesis of practical
pedagogical topics with academic philosophy. Below in Table 4 is a summary of
the first course, along with its lecture topics and several sample questions given to
the students. The details of the Educational Psychology course has been omitted
here. Table 5 summarizes the third course, which includes extensive reference lists
of academic philosophical sources for each topic. The numbering in each table
connects the lectures, topics, and questions or readings.
From this outline of a department of pedagogy as designed by Dewey it is
clear that philosophy remained the undifferentiated starting place (or general work)
for teacher education, and the organizing framework from which the various new
sciences (psychology, sociology) would be positioned. Curriculum is also wedded
to philosophy and the two likewise studied together.
John Dewey and the New Science of Teacher Education
Around the same time of John Dewey’s move to the University of Chicago,
science or scientia, “correct knowledge,” began to be enthroned as the new
authority, creating a demand for a unified body of (professional) teachers to
implement this new doctrine. This also required the university to become more
closely part of public education, including bringing teacher education into a more
institutionalized setting, with prescribed delivery and outcomes for each
prospective student to further a single educational aim, in this case Dewey’s
democratic pedagogy.
This change would attempt to standardize pedagogy, which previously had
no prescribed outcomes, instructors forging their practice in their diverse
classrooms. Philosophy in pedagogy provided many inspiring avenues, but the role
of philosophy in teacher education would change to its method and away from the
diversity of its conclusions. Dewey advocated this transition in an 1893 essay
entitled “The relation of philosophy to theology,” writing “the value of philosophy
lies in its method, not in what it arrives at.” Rather than borrowing from the
diversity of demonstrations inhering in normal school style pedagogy, the method
of demonstration was to be retained as “inquiry,” very much akin to the method of
science, which was to fuel the new work being done under the narrower science of
education beginning to colonize teacher education. Anticipation of the rich fruits of
science at the turn of the century cannot be overemphasized;
Dewey in the same essay identified that philosophy is the “standpoint of science
extended to all life.” This point contributes to the idea of philosophy having a role
as a frontier or parent field, periodically giving up territory as areas of inquiry
mature into a science. Certainly new sciences were a kind of progress, and
psychology at this time was an emerging scientific field extracted from its home in
philosophy and into the hands of a new brand of specialized researchers. This
expanded delegation of “science-informed” education studies would occur again
for educational policy and curriculum, outsourcing the content of these areas away
from teachers’ own creations via philosophy coincident with the move of teachers
from secluded schoolhouses to large schools which were part of complex,
articulated education systems. Given this arrangement, did teachers still need to
learn what philosophy could provide in their teacher education? Were principles of
education-type courses still necessary, or was the new division of labour one in
which the goals and direction of public education was the domain of administrators
with the means of carrying them out simply delegated to teachers as technicians?
This problem directly relates to the creation of the teaching profession, a
conscious issue of educational authorities at this time. Professions are often
acknowledged for the consistency of their outcomes—no matter who you enlist,
you can expect a good quality product from a professional. Yet given equal
outcomes, this expectation does not necessarily suggest the methods employed are
equally consistent across professionals, save for desisting from unethical methods.
Professionals who agree only on outcomes, of course can diverge in method
through traditional pedagogy. However, such divergence would not contribute to
an education system seeking legitimacy through equal, predictable, outcomes via
unified practitioners, requiring standardization of both method and aim through
science of education and education policy. And yet, Dewey’s remark that
philosophy was the “general theory of education” presumably implies philosophy
ought to have a stake in the education and the profession of educators. And while
philosophy has a stake, such as in providing teachers with the “general theory,”
i.e., abstract themes, ideas, and exploring questions pertinent to their practice,
education and its practitioners are incompatible with being institutionalized.
Instead, over the 20th century, the diversity and heroes of pedagogy would be
replaced by a profession of teachers inducted into official state education policies
where philosophy was already done, and teachers needed only to receive
conclusions from such state-sanctioned philosophy and put them into practice. This
state of affairs was described by Adler:
The study of social phenomena became scientific when research divorced
itself entirely from normative considerations, when economists and students
of politics no longer asked about the justice of social arrangements, but only
who gets what, when, and how.” Indeed, the use of the scientific method left
a gap in these starting points previously derived from the a priori or the
presumptions dictated in the worldviews of religion or philosophy. Mortimer
J. Adler, a philosopher who taught graduate education students, wrote a
considerable number of publications defending traditional philosophy and
reform in education in his time. He recalls that science in 1940 was taught in
the colleges as “the way” and philosophy was no longer convincing, perhaps
because science was anticipated to be a superior method. He continues,
The general achievement of the modern era is not simply the accumulation
of scientific knowledge, but, more radically, the recognition of the scientific
method (of research and experimentation) as the only dependable way to
solve problems . . . Hence philosophy, at its best, can be nothing more than a
sort of commentary on the findings of science.
Traditional discussion using the age-old problems of philosophy and particularly
their normative aspects, became less interesting and less needed by the new
teacher. Topics often found in pedagogy such as (1) inferences concerning the
capacities or destiny of man (ontology), (2) what knowledge is, and what
knowledge is most important (epistemology), and (3) character and moral
education (ethics), would recede from the common texts of teacher education. In
modern texts many such questions are no longer treated as issues but accepted as
conclusions enshrined in official policies or given in professional codes of conduct.
Still, as strong as the wave of science was, it could not dominate fully the
inquiry of the universities. Famously at the University of Chicago, long after
Dewey had left and retired from Columbia, President Hutchins during a
convocation speech at Chicago in 1933 clearly reacted to the previous influences
over the university: “We have confused science with information . . . ideas with
facts, and knowledge with miscellaneous data . . . we are [now] rich in facts and
poor in principles.” The new methods of science awaited these principles, goals or
aims of education before it could begin its work. Philosophy would necessarily be
pushed out, since after these goals were decided, science could then take over and
discover the best methods to reach these goals, delivering a certain result rather
than the tentativeness of “demonstrations” based on perspectives. No longer would
the art of teaching be solely subject to how it ought to be done, for the moral
imperative changed from the careful treatment of intentions of the teacher through
his application of philosophy—his purity—to the consequences of means and
results, and the demand that those results take precedence over any good intention.
Science was expected to rid knowledge and action of perspectives and
provide a reliable method of discovering true answers. While certain schools of
philosophy, especially positivism, pragmatism, and linguistic analysis, already
aligned quite well with these desires, many reacted negatively, declaring “the
doctrine of scientism is certainly the dominant dogma of American philosophy
today.” American pragmatism and the British philosophy of positivism would each
emerge as allies and receive prominence in the wake of the ascendency of science,
each arguing in common that knowledge was solely provided by the methods of
science, and public policy determined by the metrics which track the
implementation of scientific conclusions.78
Even though it seems that traditional philosophy’s role would be deported
to criticism and commentary on the findings of science, education could never be
rid of its normative aspect since it depended on action. Reaction ensued: writing
in the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) yearbook, one of the
longest surviving journals of education, in an issue of the journal devoted to
philosophy of education, this distinction was made again by Adler. He pointed out
that all scientific knowledge was theoretical, and education was a practical matter
since it dealt with (moral) action. Greenfield also made this point, is and ought are
intimately joined in human action. At least in explorations of social reality, one
can look exclusively at is in action only by holding the ought constant.
Thus, whoever was to convert theoretical to practical knowledge would seem to
require an unending need for philosophy, and where teachers and their associations
had accomplished this with pluralistic pedagogy in the past, the trend over the 20th
century was to delegate this task to the new researchers and policy makers
involved in public education, which philosophers of education would join for a
time. In a sense, philosophy was being extracted from the technical core of ITPPs
and delegated to groups in its institutional level to then transfer their conclusions as
prepackaged normative claims and practices (fixing the ought to study the is,
narrowed to state education in the early 20th century) to be used in their future
classrooms. The new institutions of ITPPs were fixing these environmental factors
(such as the rise of science) into their programs, teachers, and future policy-
makers.
Meanwhile, the trend to a reduced role for philosophy in teacher education is
further evident in the gradual change of philosophy of education coursework in
teacher education programs, starting in pedagogy, moving to principles of
education-type coursework (which I review next), and discussed in the next
chapter, before the move to omnibus “social foundations of education”-type
coursework in which philosophy has been presently marginalized.
The Principles of Education Course
In the United States of 1920, 46 teachers’ colleges were operational, and
nearly all
“liberal arts colleges and universities had divisions of education complete with full
professional chairs.” Many of the courses found in the normal schools would find a
temporary home in the university-affiliated teachers’ colleges, including a
“principles of education” course. In this section I will review exemplars to better
gauge the contents of these courses, and other courses that formed the technical
core of the new teachers’ colleges.
Table 6 is based on a survey conducted by Rowley of 152 college of
education-type institutions in the southern United States in the late 1940s. In
“Table 23 Part A” Rowley reports data on terms used in course descriptions most
frequently denoting a “philosophy of education” type course, according to the
respondent at the various institutions. I have consolidated these data in the table
below, combining entries which were very similar. This inventory can speak to
what universities at the time believed the role of philosophy to be in teacher
education.
Entry #2, “aims of education,” should not be a surprise. It is a routine
philosophical question which sets the direction and destination of the educational
process, such as may be captured in the question, “what is education for?” This
question always requires an answer from whoever is the source of the educational
process, whether a teacher, or those designing an education system. More
surprising may be entry #1, which expects philosophy of education-type courses to
be the vetting grounds for controversy and difference of outlook on educational
issues. No other courses in education are likely to advertise any kind of disputation
—psychology, curriculum, and administration of schools tending to be more
monolithic in their prescriptions for teachers and less likely to invite debate. Over
time, as policy would set answers to the aims of education and other controversies,
the value of these debates diminish, or at the very least, are less valuable than other
courses which offer content believed to be either: (1) “cutting-edge” and thus
scientific; (2) immediately practical—this content particularly desired by students;
or (3) content that must be taught, such as new laws, policies, and professional
standards enforced either through accreditation of teacher education programs, or
mandatory professional bodies. If philosophy-type coursework had no “of
necessity” about it, eventually it would recede its place in teacher education
programs, crowded out especially by new findings of science, the practical
application of that science, or new laws, policies, and standards created to govern
the profession.
This process is part of the institutional survival of teacher education institutions.
This “competing” or comparable aspect expected of philosophy of education
is due to its history in pedagogy which was, by nature, pluralistic, beginning from
diverse principles, attitudes, and goals, and through demonstration, ending with
diverse practices and outcomes. As I have described, there is a sense in which
controversy in education would aid individuals who were expected to make a life
for themselves operating a schoolhouse, but would not aid a profession, fashioned
to operate an education system according to centralized policy, consolidation being
a necessity when establishing a unified education system and teaching profession.
Furthermore, the entry for history of education also provides for differences
of educational purpose but may or may not reveal the philosophy which would
generate these purposes. History and philosophy of education throughout the 20th
century would suffer similar fates of marginalization and were commonly grouped
together in order to save both, often labeled as “History and Philosophy of
Education” coursework and programs. The entry for curriculum is also surprisingly
low on the list, meaning the respondents rarely associated curriculum with a
philosophy of education course. This may simply be asserting a separation of
coursework in philosophy and curriculum, and would not suggest curriculum, at
least at this point, lacks philosophical content.
Rowley also provides an outline of the teacher education curriculum at the
University of Kentucky in 1907. The following courses, grouped by type, are
listed: (1) psychology-type courses such as elementary, adolescence, and/or
advanced psychology; (2) philosophy-type courses of “educational theory,” and
“history of philosophy;” (3) history-type courses such as history of education, and
“educational classics;” (4) other courses such as “principles of education,”
“method in education,” English literature, “seminary in education,” school
systems, and aesthetics. Note that “educational classics” provided a dual role for
both the history of educational ideas and the philosophy of those ideas, its course
description stating that it explored a variety of thinkers from Plato to Rousseau.
The “History of Philosophy” course dealt with the relation between philosophic
movements and education and, while peculiar, it is this course that later became a
Philosophy of Education course in 1911 at the University of Kentucky. It should
not be so surprising, however, since in many institutions the history and philosophy
faculty were combined into one department.
Also of note is the development of psychology courses to provide relevant
psychological content for different grade levels, as well as the academic
philosophy likely found in a history of philosophy course. These early educational
psychology courses were likely far more inviting and seemingly applicable to the
students than the history of philosophy-type coursework which was likely more
imposing and demanding. From one perspective, academic philosophy and, to a
lesser extent, history of education was “sent in” as a mercenary to impose academic
standards on teacher education programs, whereas psychology was likely viewed
as more naturally relevant to teachers, and “their professional subject,” as
medicine to a physician, or law to a lawyer. However, universities were working
with the tools they had at the time, and in cross-appointing faculty to the teachers’
college, willing candidates readily came from philosophy departments who taught
what they knew best with the intentions of liberally-educating the students in the
tradition of grammar school teachers of the previous era.
It may come as a surprise to see how quickly this would change. After
several decades of philosophy-type courses in teacher education, by the 1930s “no
special course in philosophy of education is offered to undergraduates in most
teacher-training institutions;” most philosophical content now being packaged
within “conglomeration” courses, most popularly a “principles of education”
course. Rowley’s surveys of southern American teacher education institutions also
confirmed this trend of decline, reporting in 1950 that a third of responding
institutions no longer offered philosophy or related courses. This was contributing
to the
“weakness of philosophy” because the philosophical content was presented in a
dilute form to preservice students. This trend was seen in Rugg’s “Foundations of
education” textbook produced from the central hub of Teachers College, Columbia,
and would return in the late 20th century where philosophy of education would
again bunk with more undesirables in “social foundation”-type coursework.
Early Teacher Education and Institutional Theory
The final section of the chapter analyzes the above history using several key
concepts that serve to explain the form and behavior of organizations and that
intentionally and inadvertently affect their operations as they respond to political
and social forces. The historical development of teacher education is linked to its
host institutions, and these institutions are a product of a variety of factors that
guide the grafting of future changes onto its past. As prominent teacher education
researcher Linda Darling-Hammond remarked, “of all programs in higher
education, teacher education is among the most heavily affected by outside agents
and policies . . .[and] feels the greatest impact of government regulation.” These
agents are the various stakeholders in education which rose in influence and
number throughout the 20th century, including the emerging state and provincial
regulatory bodies, ad hoc government commissions and inquires, the host
universities, teacher associations (which eventually formed teacher labor unions),
an educational research industry that often (ironically) points to teacher education
as most needing reform, and various other (somewhat reactionary and often
temporary) public interest groups.
These stakeholders attempt to influence how teacher education operates both
in its methods and its goals, comprising what has previously been labeled the
“institutional level.” Suggestions or commands from this level are received by the
“managerial level,” which tries to compromise with these demands to disrupt as
little as possible the “technical core,” where the institution’s function resides,
where its product is manifested, its employees engage in their work, and its identity
is sustained. Thus each of these three levels are in a kind of relation, although the
best metaphor might be the concept of pressure sourced from the institutional level,
softened by the insulating managerial level, which attempts to protect the
vulnerable technical core. The core provides the life of the institution without
whose continued functioning the managerial level would not exist. Change in the
core does happen, and indeed must happen, but it is minimized where possible to
maintain the stability of the institution.
The loose or tight-coupling of elements and actions within institutions
provides the “mechanisms for controlling the behavior of participants” in the
organization, most being usually directed at those working within the technical
core. Heavily routinized and divided labor organized to produce products or
services tends to operate with tight coupling between management and workers,
whereas work which requires more flexibility, or which requires special skills or
knowledge not possessed by those in the managerial level will tend to favor a
loosely-coupled arrangement. For example, general labor tends to be tightly
coupled such as in a factory with multiple product lines where workers can be
shifted to various roles and supervisors remain in close proximity, often working
alongside them. In the same factory might be scientists engaged in research and
development, who will meet with administrators regarding product design goals,
but who will be left to their scientific work in the implementation of these goals,
including using their expertise to determine feasibility, costs, and methods. This is
an example of a more loosely-coupled arrangement necessitated by the nature of
the work, and also fits more closely to the situation for teacher education and in
school systems.
Assessing the coupling of teacher education institutions (and, related, the
workplace of teachers) is a matter of setting a reference point. If the organization of
work within a routinized factory is considered a typical tightly-coupled
organization, and the peacetime military typically a tightly-coupled public
institution, teaching organizations and teacher education both lean to being more
loosely-coupled institutions—both are not strictly managed and routinized down to
the day-by-day lessons in their respective courses, at least by the mid-20th century.
Variations in coupling exist between various state systems, and certainly one can
point to the tight coupling found in historic examples of Prussian and Napoleonian-
era state schools. I have shown that the early pedagogy and education departments
designed their own programs largely autonomously, as was the case at the
University of Chicago. This would change with the empowering of state regulatory
bodies such as the AATC and later with the far more influential National Council
for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) founded in 1954. The AATC
and later the NCATE began establishing voluntary national standards for teacher
education programs in the United States, the essence of which leaked across the
northern border into Canadian provinces. These requirements lead to isomorphism,
the normalization of institutional behavior as adoption of external standards and
compliance with official regulations becomes their single (or most important)
metric of survival via legitimacy, as was previously discussed.
An interesting parallel to the building of an education system along with the
professionalization of its members is found in the similar process undertaken in the
medical profession via the Flexner Report. The Report was also nearly a model for
American teacher professionalization, and provides further insight into the
competing forces involved in establishing governance institutions.
The Flexner Report and Professionalizing Teachers
An important and historically relevant development which parallels many of
the changes to teacher education, especially the culling of diverse pedagogy and
indeed was considered but eventually rejected as a model for professionalizing
teachers, was the professionalization of medicine through the adoption of a report
entitled “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” better known as the
Flexner Report. This Report and its recommendations provide an excellent
comparison to what could have been requisite for teachers: both sought university
settings, professionalization, and centralization of standards under the authority of
a national accrediting board.
The Report institutionalized modern medical education in both Canada and
the United States. Flexner recommended a variety of changes to institutionalize
training, the most important of which were creation of national accreditation
standards for medical schools, licensing of physicians, and adoption of scientific
standards in medicine. I will discuss some of the changes relevant to teacher
education, notably the move to scientific methods, and the need for appropriate
standards in the university.
Already discussed in several areas was the rise of science and its new
mandate to filter diversity and “upgrade” the empirical nature of pedagogy. These
mandates would also curb medical science: many medical schools were closed and
programs which offered what Flexner called “medical sects” were discontinued.
The operative change was to build a medical system by instituting what was to
count as “conventional” medicine, and to bar and de-list nonconforming practices,
effectively banishing them to survive or fail outside of the profession, as shown in
this excerpt from the Report:
Scientific medicine therefore brushes aside all historical dogma. It gets down
to details immediately. No man is asked [in] whose name he comes—
whether that of Hahnemann, Rush, or of some more recent prophet . . . There
is no need . . . for the segregation from the larger body of established truth of
any particular set of truths . . . The tendency to build a system out of a few
partially apprehended facts, deductive inference filling in the rest, has not
indeed been limited to medicine, but it has nowhere had more calamitous
consequences.
Many educators at this time adhered to names such as Herbart, Pestalozzi, and
soon Dewey, yet the need for a system to establish singular methods and goals
requires its members to pledge allegiance to only one master—not a person, but a
system; not a set of ideas, but “established” truth authorized by a profession within
a gated institution. The legitimacy of the system was eventually to come most
strongly not from the use of science, the application of which was not well
understood by the public, but from the perception of a confident, stable, unified
body of members fueled with “professional patriotism.” This perception of the
unification of professional knowledge and practice was secured by adopting one
method of inquiry, that of modern science, dedicated to results-orientated ends, and
prescribing policies that detailed the expected behavior of all its members to gain
support from a public who could be confident in the wise and sensible use of their
tax dollars. This unification contributes precisely to explaining the decline of
philosophy, by fixing a particular philosophy, and packaging it in professional
standards over the 20th century in the form of prescriptions now dispensed in
ITPPs.
A similar criticism was launched by Raymond Callahan in his 1962 work
Education and the Cult of Efficiency which details the use of the “scientific
management” in schools in the 1930s and 1940s. School administrators took for
granted established institutions and devoted most of their work to their
maintenance and operation, the means and their costs, and largely ignored the
product, the experience and quality of education for the students. Meanwhile,
teacher education was much slower to professionalize, and this “scientism,”
perhaps most pronounced during B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism, certainly initiated its
own reaction as articulated by the so-called education “radicals” and the later de-
schooling movement.
Raising the standards of medical schools came with closing many schools
and limiting the oversupply of physicians. This particular change was not possible
in teacher education, for at the time teachers were under-supplied and schools were
expanding to meet the needs of a lengthened compulsory attendance age, reduced
truancy and mass immigration. In a further parallel to problems in teacher
education, Flexner found some medical schools admitted applicants who “could
barely read and write” and, in some cases, were “open to casual strollers from the
highway,” all of which can be likened to the transients of teaching.
After the Report, an “educational Flexner Report” was advocated and
considered by the Fund for the Advancement of Education. This ultimately failed
with consolation from Abraham Flexner. The decision cites infeasibility, especially
a level of resistance from teachers and educational organizations not encountered
by Flexner from medical licensing boards and the profession—another
manifestation of institutional organization theory in action. A unified power
structure governed by teachers (or doctors) provides a way of clarifying and
managing sources of influence at the institutional level. The Flexner Report
essentially led to tighter “coupling” of institutional forces to link together the
various levels of an organization. This concept will now be discussed in terms of
ITPPs.
Coupling and Teacher Education
Some discussion of coupling has already taken place, but little has been
discussed regarding the concept of decoupling. Recall tightened coupling, in the
worst case forming
Weber’s iron cage, often reduces task performance which leads to decoupling,
described as occurring when the “organization conforms closely to the ritually
defined meanings and categories supplied by the environment but does not attempt
seriously to implement them at the operational level.”110 This is often the
organizational response to dysfunctional tightening, where the organization
bargains with and appears to fulfill the requirements of regulation in order to
maintain a functioning technical core. Those in the core may dissent from
institutional requirements, and the managerial level tries to negotiate between the
other two levels to meet the needs of both—a kind of undisclosed compromise. In
other words, these kind of changes are driven by responses to the changing metrics
of institutional survival—in the case of teacher education, the quest for survival
was and is driven by aggressive changes in education policy created at the
institutional level and implemented both in the organizational structure of teacher
education and a redefined curriculum, which substantially modifies the technical
core of the enterprise.
The history so far reviewed in the current and preceding chapter shows a
trend toward tightening relationships within teacher education organizations and
their curricula with the emergence and expansion of dedicated institutional and
managerial levels. Where philosophy survived as the explicit framework guiding
teachers and teacher education, one possible question is whether the tightening of
relationships within the institution was connected to, or merely coincidental with,
the decline of philosophy as the guiding framework for teacher education, i.e.,
philosophy as an integral part of the technical core. Institutional theory would
predict that a further evolution of university-affiliated teachers’ colleges to
faculties of education must also increase this coupling, which must also further
erode explicit philosophy in the technical core unless, of course, philosophy was
somehow protected in the new order.
The counter force expected to defend philosophy was the university. As
noted earlier, several subjects were added to teacher education imported from the
normal schools to improve the academic rigor of the programs, and to make use of
already established academic faculty. The universities, as the governors of degree
programs, were expected to enforce academic standards for teacher education
equivalent to those in liberal arts programs by holding the line on these newly
introduced subjects. However, some teachers’ colleges preferred to offer their own
kind of degrees, such as bachelors of pedagogy, or bachelors of education, to elide
the requirements of a nearby university. This was not viewed as a problem to the
public school teachers, as the specific degree was all that was necessary to receive
a certificate granting them access to the public and high schools, and the new
degree would not interfere with or was expected to be equivalent to a bachelor of
arts or science.
A similar effect can be seen in the curriculum of teacher education itself.
Liberal arts program curricula are typically created in-house to serve as a general
education. In teacher education curricula, the minimum requirements are set by
state or provincial accreditation standards, and courses beyond this serve graduate
programs. As recounted by Woodring, During the first half of the [20th] century,
while many liberal arts colleges turned their backs on the problems of teacher
education, legal requirements for certification were established in nearly all states.
In general, the trend was away from certification on the basis of examination and
toward . . . completion of course requirements in colleges and universities . . .
Many states specify certain courses which must be taken in professional fields so
that the responsibility for curriculum making has, in part, been taken away from
the colleges.
This is the dominant process of what was proposed before as a way of
manipulating the technical core of institutions through accreditation rather than by
way of external examinations intended to secure quality output standards, which is
more likely to be part of a tightly-coupled institution than a loosely-coupled one.
Establishing course requirements influences courses not named in accreditation
standards which, as Woodring reports, effectively sets the curriculum of
conforming institutions.
This grounding of certification in course requirements elicits the question of
why the focus is placed on courses in accreditation standards and, furthermore, why
certain courses are named over others? Viewed within institutional organizational
theory, a large part of the answer is that such grounding focuses attention on the
technical core of the organization and, as a result, the organizational components
and dynamics located in the core which fashion the intended product. In essence,
the “task performance” required to maintain the organization’s survival is not the
product, but the components and dynamics that compose the technical core. This
was a part of Flexner’s reforms through the emphasis placed on ensuring the
assignment of properly qualified instructors and demanding more mundane but
crucial standards for laboratories and modern medical equipment in the process of
medical education. In the case of institutionalized teacher education, whatever has
been deemed important to secure the improvement of publicly funded and
governed schools as the times have changed, from graded schools through written
lesson plans to the use of white boards and so forth, will become a candidate for
authoritative inclusion in the technical core through changing regulatory or
accreditation standards emanating from the institutional level. While over time the
number of the sources for change has increased, these and other demands for
changes in the preparation of teachers are mediated by the managerial level
resulting in modifications to the components and processes within the technical
core. A dominant consequence as approaches to teacher preparation have evolved
over the past two centuries has been a decline in the variety of inspiring
philosophical pedagogies informing work undertaken in the technical core.
Summary and Interlude to Chapter 4
In the 19th century teacher education institutions were forming, their identity
and work grafted onto previous forms of teacher education. Their main task was to
assist in the proliferation of “free, common schools” by gatekeeping the teachers
and sealing off transients through a vetting process by an approved governor,
whether a headmaster or an inspector. The existence of the institution and the new
teachers processed and produced by the institution was enough to meet these early
goals, and thus little was done to change the work undertaken in their technical
core. Pedagogy was largely left alone, for it was viewed as the educational
conversation at the time, the very culture of teaching. The most important
institutional step at this stage was the concentration of teacher education in
designated, organized and specialized places behind a guarded door.
By the beginning of the 20th century, with the dam largely intact and holding
relatively well, specific recommendations for the curriculum of teacher education
began. Pedagogy was modified by the displacement of its “popular” education
literature by “academic” education literature produced by the early academics
holding Chairs of pedagogy in the universities. The dissemination of this new
knowledge was hampered by a lack of appropriate preparation among teacher
candidates and practicing teachers, necessitating much remedial work and the
establishment of new credentials. Relatively speaking, this was not hugely
disruptive to the technical core, since the same faculty who taught pedagogy were
also, somewhat by definition, capable of judging basic literacy. Secondary teachers
were far less of a problem given the established traditions reinforcing many of the
qualities desired of a profession. Mediocre grammar schools were closed and new
high schools demanded further specialization of teachers into specific subjects. The
transition of teacher education into the universities was less of a challenge for these
teachers, given an established tradition of being liberally-educated with B. A.
degrees. Even so, the emerging coursework in university-affiliated teacher
education colleges prefigured a splitting of pedagogy into differentiated fields for
study, which would come to define the new study of education.
By the Second World War the story becomes more complex. The
philosophers of education would continue to grow, being seeded by the PhDs
graduating from Teachers College, Columbia and other prominent teacher
education institutions, less so due to control over teacher education exercised by
growing regulatory bodies, and more due to the explosion of higher education in
the post-war period. Just before the Second World War, philosophy of education
emerges as a distinct discipline, which would later flower and stabilize through, in
part, the creation of the American Philosophy of Education Society in 1941 and, a
decade later, the still prominent journal Educational Theory, with more to come in
the late 1960s as the legacy of Dewey faded and Britain emerges on the scene with
Richard S. Peters. The competing force to this benevolent history was the new
research university, in which, by the early twentieth century, liberal education all
but succumbed to the scholarly intellectualism of the new research-orientated
academic disciplines, especially of the sciences flowing in from the German
universities, or to the narrow specialization increasingly required for professional
or graduate study.
These trends would become problems for philosophy of education to
navigate as they developed over the 20th century. And while philosophy of
education was losing ground in the teacher education curriculum, many
philosophers of education expected to reclaim its lost territory in the technical core
and reclaim its connection and function as nutrition for a new generation of
teachers. These philosophers, such as John Goodlad, joined the timely area of
educational administration, and interacted and wrote for wider policy-makers in the
institutional level; they tried to match the academic respectability sourced from
scientific methods in new analytical methods; and they tried to claim philosophy
was a requirement for education policy to be effective. The predictable effect of
these new strategies during a further entrenching of technical and vocational
education and the pressure of immediacy upon teacher education was the
assignment of philosophy of education faculty to graduate programs, where they
existed for several more decades before losing even this ground. As is shown in the
case of medical education and the Flexner Report, if philosophy of education is
ever to recover its strength, it would need to depend on the university.
Chapter 4 Philosophy of Education in the Post-War Period to the 1970s
Recall that the purpose of early teacher education formed in loose
associations and seminars, and later centralized into normal schools, was focused
on the teacher to provide him with the skills and inspiration of a pedagogy to
operate, initially at least, a rural schoolhouse. Teachers, in a context of relatively
few regulations or rules, were thought to need some grasp of the (philosophic)
principles which would guide them in sorting out their unpredictable work
environment.
Initially university-affiliated teachers’ colleges trained only secondary
school teachers, and made few changes to their education: they were still mostly
educated in a traditional university arts program with the addition of one or two
teaching methods courses. As specialized ITPPs were devised in later schools and
faculties of education, the trend would be to alter their purpose and therefore their
organizational structure away from initial focus on the teacher as a settler or
entrepreneur, toward a program informed by an university standard of research that
would support an expanding public school system.
Studies in institutional theory have tracked changes to and co-optation of the
goals of various organizations, such as Selznick’s classic study of the Tennessee
Valley Authority, as outlined in the first chapter. A parallel account for teacher
education, and resulting adjustments to philosophy of education, will continue in
this chapter with some specific attention to developments in Britain.
The first section of this chapter will close the American story for the time
being with the cooling of the progressive movement, the consequences of
pragmatism for philosophy of education, and the swiftness of the rise of alternative
philosophies of education as science was accused of failing in its task. This will be
followed by consideration of what became the “London Line,” a new analytical
philosophy of education movement led by Richard S. Peters, a psychologist-
philosopher who promoted both educational psychology and philosophy of
education, whose credentials and leadership were quite similar to Dewey’s. The
final section will discuss this new rise of philosophy of education around the
institutions in Britain, and show the compatibility of analytical philosophy of
education with education policy.
The Close of Dewey’s Golden Age
By the close of the Second World War, ITPPs were widespread in rural
normal schools along the American frontier and, particularly on the east coast, in
urban liberal arts colleges, teachers’ colleges, and universities. According to a
significant study of these institutions in 1933, while philosophy remained strong
among the faculty within these institutions, students were split between a desire for
philosophy on the one hand, and for the new sciences on the other in their
coursework. This split in the demands placed on aspirant teachers may mark a
transitionary period. One group desired traditional teacher education for a role in a
traditional schoolhouse, comparable to a quasi-religious calling often characterized
by the normal school. Another group was seeking a place in the larger schools on
the east coast, not as a calling but as part of a new professionalism. Further
interesting results from Peterson’s surveys are, in the words of responding faculty,
as follows:
•Students “lack a unified point of view. That is, they have not formulated
a wellordered, thought-out philosophic outlook in terms of which to
judge problems and issues.”4
•Students “tend too much to see each issue singly; . . . they do not
sufficiently recognize how very intimately one problem is related
inevitably to many other problems.”
•“That teachers are not generally aware of what lies behind the issues on
which they were surveyed is probably the most significant single
conclusion from the study.”
These results are troubling as one would have thought the rise of Dewey
which maintained (pragmatic) philosophy within teacher education, especially his
promotion of democratic pedagogy, would have sustained teachers with (at least) a
monolithic “philosophic outlook” on issues in education, if not a pluralistic
outlook, and provide a banner of a sound philosophy for their practice. Likewise,
the culture of college education at the time infused a particular moral outlook,
many college programs requiring an ethics or moral philosophy course in their
final year, sometimes taught by the president of the college! Instead, philosophy
was not taking hold, not even at the school board level. A 1965 study found school
board philosophy of education statements were “haphazard, cliché-ridden
mythology that passes for philosophy.” These results can only mean that even in
these somewhat early stages, philosophy was losing the attention of students who
sought not to be Herbartians, Pestalozzians, or other educational heroes of old
knowledge, but rather expected much from new speculations of science, especially
(experimental) psychology, which the new teacher education institutions were
gearing-up to provide. This was also accomplished with new credentials which
sealed off previous pedagogical influences on education in their recognition of the
new methods and thinking promoted by the new institutions of university teacher
education. The delivery and authority of teaching methods supporting an
increasingly bureaucratic education system gained legitimacy by normalizing the
noise of pedagogy and forming “official sources” of expertise, themselves
legitimized by credentials such as degrees and certificates. Development of a
burgeoning public school system acquired public support by substantiating the
authority of its components with teachers, newly credentialed and university-
affiliated, steeped in the fruits of research from new sciences. And it was not
simply the “academic” gifts of the university, but also its social status. As Clifford
and Guthrie point out, it is a myth that, colleges, and even universities, were once
in some golden age purely academic places. This fiction ignores the historic
function of formal education in maintaining or enhancing the social status of
individuals or groups.
A cogent example of this credentialism and the manner in which it sealed off
pedagogy was the treatment of Maria Montessori by the growing educational
establishment. Her approach represented a resurgence of interest in “pedagogy,”
though she more accurately labeled her work “scientific pedagogy,” fostering a
significant following within the early kindergarten movement and among teachers
of the early grades. A contemporary of John Dewey, Montessori founded a unique
philosophy of education. Nevertheless, while Montessori toured the world and
gave speeches mostly to parents and teachers regarding her famous Montessori
Method, Dewey and his disciple William H. Kilpatrick, also from Teachers
College, Columbia, thought her ideas important and influential enough to voice
opposition and disapproval. In 1914 Kilpatrick published a pamphlet entitled The
Montessori system examined, the tone of which is suspicious and clearly treats her
ideas as a “rival.” In the introduction, he uses tactics of peer pressure and ostracism
by declaring his account dedicated to “the relatively large group of public-school
teachers and superintendents” while he characterizes those following Montessori to
be a “smaller class of heroic enthusiasts” who are “more or less partisan leaders
and followers of a new propaganda.” He suggests that while the newness of the
ideas may be enough for her followers,
Not so with the leaders and teachers of the rank and file! To them the detail
is the thing! Upon the soundness of special theories and the effectiveness of
particular practices, the strength of an institutional scheme depends. They
want to know how far the theory of Madam Montessori departs from the
best philosophy of education that the American profession knows . . . [and
whether her methods] may be reproduced under the conditions of American
life.
Temporarily abated in the United States, the Montessori movement spread in
Europe.
Allegations of being “outdated” made by Kilpatrick were, in fairness, tempered by
praise of her scientific approach which was “too seldom found in the teaching
world.” Still, although she shared many views with Dewey, being outside the
universities her decidedly realist epistemology was viewed as a setback which
offended the prevailing dominant pragmatic views of American philosophers of
education, as did her intrusion onto the education stage. Her individualist approach
to learning was also at odds with the more socially situated approaches to learning
of the progressives. Rather than being welcomed as an enriching source of new
pedagogical ideas for education, Dewey and to a greater extent Kilpatrick, wrote
and provided speeches to discredit her Method. In some ways she was viewed as a
living artifact, a pedagogue from the past who could not find a place within
modern institutions of education research which had left pedagogy behind to
educational historians. Today, Montessori is still a widely popular choice among
private schools for the early grades, viewed as providing a traditional, smaller-
scale and thus perhaps more authentic education than the mass produced “free”
public schools, avoiding the zoo of interest groups, failed reforms, and shifting
policies that plague public education.
Having no room for Montessori is unsurprising given how the modern
education institutions were modeled after the leadership of the more prestigious
among them, creating a “monolithic status system.” This factor of isomorphism,
discussed in previous chapters, reinforces institutional survival by reducing
institutional diversity and increasing the tightness of internal coupling—a
seemingly necessary policy for organizations or professional bodies in their
infancy, lacking the strength to benefit from pluralism. As human service
organizations they are routinely interested in legitimacy-building with the public
by way of the perception of a united and standardized front, yielding a profession.
This strategy was similar to the account given by the Flexner Report to create a
medical profession, stamping out various competing medical theories and their
associated practices.
Montessori’s ostracism can also be seen as an example of an institutional
response to an emergent threat to the legitimacy of a unified school system of like-
minded professional teachers. As such, the goals of the institution of teacher
education would not permit this intrusion which would require adding new,
implicitly challenging, credentials to those on whom the legitimacy of the
institution was being built. Teacher education was beginning a process of
domesticating the values and philosophies of education with which their candidates
arrived, as well as domesticating the “wild” pedagogical landscape to prepare the
ground for programs of education research. While American pragmatism was
favoured, as Labaree notes, Dewey’s inroads into school systems were in
difficulty, making it necessary to distinguish between the
“pedagogical progressives” and the “administrative progressives.” The former
characterized the new intellectual movements in education, such as Dewey and,
although not sanctified, Montessori, both of whom advocated child-centered views,
self-directed learning, and related curricular reform. The latter, in contrast,
eventually dominating the former, were more concerned with utility, efficiency and
vocationalism, a trilogy that received a significant boost during the post-World
War II Red Scare and was fully enthroned with Sputnik.
Nevertheless, outside of the central urban cores American public schools
have remained to this day quite decentralized and, in many instances, resistant to
federalization, allowing varied amounts of state and local control which permit,
even foster, relatively “wild” diversities of education philosophy among parents,
schools, and teachers. While sustaining rotating summer seminars and pedagogical
plurality, this diversity has not managed to sustain philosophy of education as a
field in teacher education institutions; its survival has been tied to its ability to
support not groups of schools which follow a certain philosophy, but the larger
education system and its state mandated policies which, among so many other
effects, reify the credentials needed to participate in the system, and thus the
courses and textbooks which support them. This expectation is the “rent” paid by
all boarders in the technical core of teacher education institutions, the details of
which shift as the declared needs of the public schools change and the
specifications for teachers are recalibrated to better meet expectations, just as
production lines are reconfigured to create other new products.
Some things, however, do not change, and Dewey’s pragmatism and
influence, immortalized with the creation of the John Dewey Society in 1933,
reinforced the practical mindset of teachers required to follow new rules in the
larger schools. The pragmatic philosophical stance on questions such as the
validation of knowledge lying in its successful implementation—no certainty or
prediction, always experiment—and that the future “working” of a procedure could
not be induced but must be tested again with its success being its truth, contributed
to this anti-intellectualism. Also contributing to this was the rejection of perennial
philosophical problems of metaphysics with acceptance of attempts to “answer”
them by being “pragmatic,” meaning to give up on the question, reconcile what we
can, and believe and do what seems “practical.” Since pragmatists and later
neopragmatist Richard Rorty rejected any foundations in philosophy (such as
rejecting “essentialism”), in attempts to settle questions of value in policy, the
“pragmatic” solution was to find guiding, foundational, values in the aggregate
desires of the masses as manifest in the democratic preferences of the people, or in
the informed views of experts, such as in professional organizations or
governments.
There is no surprise, then, in how pragmatism, initially, was favored by
policy makers and was eagerly invited into building an education system where
Montessori was absent. Pragmatism supported their efforts to organize national
groups from which to derive policy and practices. At the same time, it is intuitive
that philosophically-novice teachers learning a “pragmatic” mindset can stifle
thinking on important philosophical problems, moving largely unnoticed from
“what ought or can be done?” to the results-orientated “what is practical?” Further
evidence lies in the survey referenced earlier which found teachers lacking a wider
view on educational problems, tending to each problem in an isolated manner.
Education researchers who were more used to theoretical and philosophical work
were also feeling the need to satisfy the immediacy demanded of practice and
policy. According to Kerlinger, “practicality” became a “social norm, a rule of
proper educational research behavior.” This desire began tying down flights into
high-minded theory, and encouraging preferred bottom-up thinking in education.27
It is also intuitive how pragmatism would soon lead to interest in the French
deconstructionists in the mid-20th century, as even the tentative threadbare state of
truth in pragmatism was problematized, leading to a philosophy seemingly
designed as undefinable, except to say its main use has been criticism of any
assertions of truth founded in metaphysics or democratic aggregates, careful to not
provide any solutions of its own! Some suggested that postmodernism argues the
impossibility of “justification, both in and of education,” that it dispenses with
learning to promote Nietzschean “ways of knowing that escape normativity” and
“some educators have therefore concluded that postmodernism is the proclaimed
end of education.” The schism in philosophy circles, the divide between the
orthodox (idealists, realists), and the Heraclitean new pragmatists and
postmodernists was adequately summed up by Blanshard as follows:
One party believes that intellect has an end of its own, which is theoretical
understanding, and that this understanding can be achieved only by
following the lines of an independent order of nature. The other believes that
intellect has no end, and truth no meaning, apart from the process of human
growth and adjustment.
The democratic ends of the new tide in philosophy within the John Dewey Society
became a new point of leadership for philosophers of education. However,
academics within the Society became increasingly worried about the Society’s
explicit political agenda. As Kaminsky notes,
the new discipline’s modern institutional form [required it to] abandon its
social reform stance and adopt a standard of professional practice that was
thoroughly academic and socially disinterested.
While the John Dewey Society was the first professional group of
philosophers of education, soon a branch of the Society would break to form the
(American) Philosophy of Education Society in 1941 as the proper institutional
body of the field, distancing potentially hazardous political goals of those meeting
in the John Dewey Society. A decade later, the creation of the journal Educational
Theory would be the “last element needed to realize a thoroughly professional
version of philosophy of education.”
Under these conditions, and without the post-war higher education boom,
philosophy of education may have declined much earlier. The field needed to adapt
to the needs of a much altered set of occupational duties assigned to then current
teachers if they were to continue to be seen as relevant. The response was a
philosophy as flexible as possible, a philosophy of pragmatism and, soon,
deconstruction, which doubled-down on philosophy of education’s forced exodus
from any serious role in policy development and formation in faculties of
education.
These developments in the United States would have little similarity to the
very different philosophical current that flowed through education in England.
American pragmatic philosophy of education gave up on metaphysics and declared
all things provisional, and it would target the practical needs of the teacher and
further solidarity among teaching associations, creating not a bottom-up system but
just a bottom. Meanwhile, in Britain, neither pluralism nor decentralism were
nearly as pronounced, the country being of much smaller size and the nation being
more unified culturally than the American melting pot and its historical revolution
against centralism, especially in the aftermath of the solidarity required to defeat
Nazism. These reasons contributed to Britain having a different educational history
from that of the USA and, in turn, a different environment for the rise of British
philosophy of education within its teacher education institutions. English Canada,
particularly delayed in the formation of its institutions, would receive a mix of
philosophic and educational influence: its heritage from Britain, and in the 20th
century, some copying of model ITPPs in the US due to its proximity and renown.
Though
English Canada would lean more to Britain’s traditional essentialist philosophy,
and pragmatism was clearly an American-style of philosophy, the recovery of
British institutions after the Second World War would eventually yield its own
flavour, analytical philosophy of education, which was decidedly British: being
more traditional, top-down, paternalistic over teachers, yet as I will explain, still an
ally to the needs of education policy.
Rule, Britannia
The College of Preceptors
The beginnings of education as a field of study, including establishing
Chairs of education in universities, have a similar origin in Britain and the United
States—the first Chairs in the “Art and Science of Education” being established in
1873 and 1879 respectably. The first holder of such a chair in Britain, Joseph
Payne, was part of the newly established College of Preceptors which, while
chartered, was independent, and launched a professional teaching and educational
standards movement in Britain. It began by serving only secondary education and
competed for most of its history with British educational authorities. Its voluntary
exams, diplomas and certificates began as an alternative to state certificates and for
teachers “was to provide for anyone who had no professional training a
coordinated course in the principles of education and the methods of teaching.”41
The College began as a unifying force directed to the needs of the teacher and has
remained so for its history. Its inclusion here is an illustration of what a long-
standing organization committed to teachers, governed by no state education
system, and serving teachers all over the world looks like.
The College (1) set its own examinations, not only for prospective secondary
teachers but also younger pupils, including exams in subjects such as Latin,
bookkeeping, natural sciences, and many others, (2) provided professional
development to teachers, including the Joseph Payne Memorial lectures, and (3)
recognized successful students via qualifications which competed with university
teaching certificates such as the University of London External
Diploma in Education and the Cambridge Teachers’ Certificate, and the later
Bachelor of
Education degree first offered in the 1960s. For example, one of its early
“induction” programs from 1968 provided the following curriculum:
Section A—Aims and organization of education;
Section B—Principles and methods of teaching (part 1, general; part 2,
special); Section C—Teaching Practice;
Philosophy of education was part of the initial exams of the College. One
particular judge noted that some of the “successful scripts in the principles of
education, in history of education and educational method by graduates [of
departments of education] would have been failed by the College.” One particular
qualification, the Licentiate of the College of Preceptors
(LCP), required “test[ing] knowledge over a relatively wide field, including
applied philosophy, institutional studies, experimental psychology, and the
problems of educational method” and the assessor “was very impressed by the
standards of those candidates who had sat for the LCP.” The LCP at this time (now
called the LCoT) was designed for “non-graduate teachers in stateaided schools
who wished to obtain some qualification beyond the bare minimum which enabled
them to be recognized as qualified teachers.” The papers were quite difficult, and
“would be a challenge to any seasoned teacher.” It consisted of three parts: (1)
“compulsory subjects” in “philosophical, sociological and psychological bases of
education” and “educational systems” selected from the countries in the United
Kingdom. The “optional” subjects were “educational psychology,” and “history of
education.” The second part tested teaching methods, and the final part tested
subject proficiency, whether science, English literature, or the like.
The Educational Research Context of Britain
Returning to the situation of state schools in Britain, just as in the United
States the study of education was no less influenced by science beginning, in
Britain, with the founding of “arts and sciences” Chairs in education at universities
across the country. Just as in the United States, science was believed to hold
unlimited potential. In fact, Karl Marx, influential in Britain, rejected philosophy
and believed its “speculations” would be replaced by positive science, or
positivism, despite his own use of Hegelian metaphysical descriptions in his own
“science” of history. Positivism was shared by logic and mathematic foundations in
the thought of Bertrand
Russell. In step with this, a distinctly British philosophy of education “followed
philosophy’s obsessive positivist concern for logic, epistemology, clarity, and
precision.” Although the first Chairs of education resided among the Arts faculty,
the title of “arts and sciences” nevertheless acknowledged the anticipation and
authority that science might provide, and was the correct institutional response to
build legitimacy, allowing early education research to “breach the academic walls”
of the university. Academic dignity was promised by the use of science (namely
early psychology), history and philosophy to make pedagogy more academic than
the anecdotal nature of the “scholarship” coming out of the normal schools in
Europe and North America. For, the twentieth century has seen considerable
progress in education. It has also witnessed the birth of research in education, and
has watched the delicate infant grow into a fairsized, rather noisy and undisciplined
child . . . [R]esearch in education has achieved very little up to the present, and it is
fairly true to say it is taken seriously mainly by those who are engaged in it.
These remarks, written in 1965, spell the slow respect rendered to (and difficulty of
conducting) education research as compared with traditional university subjects,
especially in Britain. This is because education is usually viewed not as a discipline
but as subordinate to the disciplines and thus “must draw on such well-established
disciplines as psychology, history, philosophy, and sociology . . . [having] no
unique content or method of its own.” Moreover, scholars toiling in established
academic fields tend to look on education not as a field, but as a subject for study
—a separate department or other institutional body with a set of specialist
researchers is thus unnecessary. Even more difficult, for philosophy of education to
become an academic field in Britain required the impossible task of marrying a
new frontier of education research, starting almost from nothing, to a highly
regarded history of British philosophical thought. The resulting progeny,
philosophy of education, would necessarily have a difficult relationship with its
parent disciplines, as do all “educational” variants of traditional university fields.
Where they publish is also a factor, since philosophers of education have the goal
(reinforced by their institutional affiliation with Schools of Education and their
involvement in the initial training of teachers) of contributing not to philosophy but
to educational policy and practice. This shapes not only their selection of topics,
but also the manner in which the discussion is pursued; and this orientation also
explains why philosophers of education—to a far greater degree, it is to be
suspected, than their “pure” cousins—publish not primarily in philosophy journals
but in a wide range of professionally-oriented journals.
These journals include, for example in the United States, Teachers College Record
or Harvard Educational Review, and in Britain, the Cambridge Journal of
Education and the British Journal of Educational Studies. Institutionalizing
philosophy of education as a field would force an unsteady relationship between its
parent discipline, philosophy, and its environment, education, with professional
and career incentives offered for publishing in the latter group.
The history of pedagogy has been introduced previously in Chapter two. One
important point regarding the British context and pedagogy was education’s much
lower standing as compared to nearby Germany; John Locke’s own educational
writing had gone out of print in his native land but was discovered and revitalized
in Germany. Early 20th century principles of education courses reigned in early
British teacher education institutions. One prominent philosopher of education
characterized its instructors as generalists, visionaries, even “oracles,” evidence of
their synthetic function, perhaps, but emblems which would not be welcomed in
the 20th century research university. These comments could also refer to the fairly
wild state of teacher education in Britain, frequently referred to in the literature as
a “swinging pendulum,” describing the “dominance at different times of a school-
based/apprenticeship or a college- or university-based model of training.” The 19th
century was particularly school-based, but by the mid-20th century, the university
model began taking hold.
For most of the 19th century, teacher training took on an apprenticeship
model, or a “pupil-teacher system.”59 The 1888 Cross Commission was the first
explicit step toward planning the hosting of teacher training in the universities and
encouraging faculties to begin education research. Several years later, the 1902
Education Act formalized the authority regulating these institutions to Local
Educational Authorities (LEAs), effectively signaling the intentions of a transition
to a university-training model. In this year, what would become an important
central institution was also created, the London Day Training College. By 1909 it
would be formally incorporated into the University of London, and henceforth
known as the London Institute of Education which, as I will describe later, would
be a central force in providing education research and a model for teacher training
for the country, akin to Teachers College at Columbia in the United States.
The study of education as a field entering the British university was far more
onerous than in the less entrenched and expansionist universities in the United
States and Canada. Hosting consistent giants in philosophy such as John Locke,
David Hume in Scotland, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and now Bertrand
Russell, made academic philosophy in Britain important and institutionally
entrenched. For instance, in 1912, some colleges in Britain created Masters of Arts
programs in education to attempt to make education of “equal rank with any other
branch of speculative philosophy.” This pride in the English philosophical tradition
was less so in the younger, more practical, United States, her institutions less
developed and still importing most of her degrees from abroad. The 1960s and
1970s also was the time of the British
Black Papers, a reactionary series of criticisms of British higher and lower
education resisting American progressive influences, arguing against importing
political or social goals into education policy, and arguing for maintaining
“meritocracy” and liberal education in the universities.
The distinctly British nationalism in high education standards argued in the
Black Papers, as well as the British tradition in philosophy boosted the
philosophical grounding received by Britain’s teachers as teacher education moved
into universities and colleges, which caused early British ITPPs to struggle with an
overemphasis on the theory of education apart from its practice.
This led to the Board of Education delegating its examination of teachers to these
institutions.62 The intention of this move was to tighten the coupling of the
preparation of teachers, or technical core, to their students’ later official accrediting
via the exams, or what was previously an institutional level force now
incorporated. As also might be expected, the universities initially tended to host
only secondary teacher training, their established B. A. degrees requiring little
modification, and elementary training was provided in the training colleges
operated by the LEAs, or long established chartered institutions, such as the
Church of England. In the universities, the institutionalization of educational fields,
in effect, created teacher education institutions as mini-universities, each of which,
if of sufficient size, would create internal departments to house the immigrating
university disciplines of psychology, philosophy, history and the like.
Unsurprisingly these programs lacked a practice component, for in Britain
secondary teachers still did not require such until after the Robbins Report of 1963.
While the earlier McNair report of 1944 established schools of education and
expected universities to accept the responsibility of educating teachers, some
universities formed only “institutes,” such as at Cambridge, which were inferior
departments “down the road” from the main campus (in the case of Cambridge,
remaining so until 2005). Acceptance of the tradition of university degrees
constituting a sufficient qualification for secondary (subject) teaching was
prolonged in Britain. While many university students directly entered teaching
with only an undergraduate degree and no specialized teacher training into the
1970s, this practice would soon end as the James Report of 1972 was implemented,
recommending teaching to be an all-graduate occupation. While the earlier
Robbins Report sought to reassert the intentions of the previous McNair Report by
upgrading all “LEA colleges of education” and university departments and
institutes of education into “schools of education” offering four year B.Ed. degrees,
the James Report would formalize the use of these institutions as Britain’s ITPPs.
The borrowing of faculty and material from traditional university subjects
would last until new PhDs produced from faculty in the traditional branches of the
university started producing their own materials and courses. For example, one of
the first professors of philosophy writing on education in Canada was Rupert C.
Lodge. Born and educated in Britain, he wrote one of the earliest textbooks in
philosophy of education in 1937, with a revised edition published a decade later.
He noted various pressures on philosophy for teachers in the early
1950s,Administrators do not want young teachers inoculated with academic
philosophy: tormented (and perhaps unsettled in their minds) by being made to
face difficult and fundamental questions to which there do not appear to be any
agreed-upon answer.
This was one of the first notices from philosophers of the impracticality of
teaching academic philosophy to teachers. Institutional organizational theory,
however, holds that this was inevitable as organizations “are constituted by
elements drawn from their institutional environments” and “great efforts are made
to ensure their visibility to outsiders.” Feedback mechanisms were not in place to
detect and signal concern about the applicability of the teacher education
curriculum, except for what was imposed by the regulatory forces of official
education policy. For example, the Robbins Report notes under item 315, that the
“Minister of Education is responsible for securing an adequate supply of teachers;
in this he is assisted by the National Advisory Council on the Training and Supply
of Teachers.” This is an example of a regulatory check on the number of teacher
graduates from the nation’s colleges, which could intervene in the setting (or
disregarding) of enrolment standards of the colleges. But such a policy item leaves
the content of ITPPs wide open, and universities were left to devise programs
based on their own institutional resources and structure.
Lodge further comments that this led to the “Philosophy of Education
Society’s perennial concern with suitable content for a course on Philosophy of
Education.” The new education fields, such as philosophy of education, were
expected to somehow span the gap between nascent education research, balancing
theory and practice which provide for teaching as a craft, and maintaining respect
to their academic parent. The new academics developing these fields could not
simply plunge into education research and abandon philosophy entirely. Rather, a
more gradual process unfolded as the new philosophers of education sought to
secure their own legitimacy by extracting what was found to be serviceable from
philosophy, which is rich in educational writings, and fashioning this material into
thought-provoking, inspiring, and actionable theories to arm teachers in their craft.
This seemed to be the value of synthesis from pedagogy. The only thing that was
needed was to insert “upgraded” content from modern educational research—both
philosophy and science were legitimacy-building assets to the new study of
education, however the pluralist systems provided by pedagogy and academic
philosophy would not fit into the modern university study of education, as has been
discussed.
British philosophy, having a substantial history, would affect philosophy of
education strongly. Pragmatism, while strongly within the American academic
tradition, especially in the work of William James and John Dewey, was
considered “soft” and “something to be transcended” in British academic circles
and would not make strong inroads in Britain. While both had similar beginnings
in terms of pedagogy in early teacher education, and both sought to transcend it,
the two countries would take two different philosophic paths to accomplish this.
America’s path was decidedly social and pragmatic in approach (inductive), while
Britain’s was founded on a metaphysical view of analysis via logic and ontology
(deductive). While Dewey would work backwards from a democratic ideal,
anticipating what kind of society and thus what kind of education would be needed
to secure this end, Britain would take a bottom-up approach that formulates the
best foundations of thought, carefully honing their concepts and other metaphysical
premonitions, before applying them to everyday experience. Or, on Power’s
account, as idealism, realism . . . and pragmatism declined in significance and the
influence of systematic philosophy waned, analytical philosophy . . . began to
assert itself as a method of inquiry for unraveling difficult educational riddles
rather than a code of answers to questions that might be asked about education.
Borrowing the system building of philosophy would not work well for
philosophers of education gripped by education practice by its students and
policies by education policy-makers seeking to fill the operational needs of a
growing public education system. There needed to be philosophy of education
which was academically respectable to the university, yet institutionally supportive
of the changing needs of an already complex yet still developing education system.
British Philosophy of Education
The first members of the field of philosophy of education for Britain, aside
from the rare writings of a few academic philosophers such as Alfred N.
Whitehead, might begin, institutionally-speaking, with Lawrence A. Reid’s
appointment to the first Chair of philosophy of education in Britain, established at
the London Institute of Education in 1947. Reid was tasked with starting the
discipline for Britain. He was specifically selected because of his interest in
education, having published several works on the topic, and for being a
philosopher; these attributes were seen as an appropriate academic guide for
education departments focused on pedagogy and practice—education, at this point,
still undifferentiated into disciplines for study. As an illustration, the launching of
the new British Journal of Educational Studies in 1952 would include Reid in the
first issue, as well as (somewhat ominously) an obituary of John Dewey. The close
of Dewey’s American empire of philosophy of education left a vacuum which was
filled by British analytical philosophy of education during the next two decades.
Recall this strategy to bring in academic philosophers into education
departments was similar to that adopted in the United States. Reid’s main legacy
from an institutional point of view was the establishment of an Easter conference
of philosophy for teachers at the London Institute. The very existence of a routine
conference for teachers would have added institutional strength and provided a
recurrent platform for Reid and his colleagues to sell and repackage as necessary
their intellectual product, even if at the time philosophy was still considered an
“intrusion.” This was because education researchers at the time thought their best
path to academic respectability and legitimacy was by becoming more scientific
and au courant. It therefore resisted influence from established university fields
such as philosophy and, in doing so, likely contributed to the formation of modern
(scientific) psychology. During the rebuilding after the Second World War,
newness was the thing, and the trend for philosophy was slow withdrawal from
“giving directive assistance in education.”
At the same time, philosophy of education in Britain began to emerge as a
consistent theme emphasizing a paternal role of philosophy over education. The
discipline of philosophy was recognized as having conclusions, methods, and ideas
which education research must consider or incorporate to upgrade its then meager
status. Other emergent fields of education, having little philosophical training to
translate the work of philosophers, found this approach fairly useless, allowing the
work of philosophy of education to build a distinctive, if rancorous, identity. Reid
complained about this in his first major work, Philosophy and Education in 1962,
the “and” distinctly written and perhaps the first prominent work entitled as such to
regret the opportunities for partnership the new field was missing. Drawing on an
earlier observation in the 1955 (American) NSSE issue, he pointed to how
“modern philosophies of education” were acquiring an “artificial air” as a result of
philosophers of education choosing to remain
“spectators from the outside” rather than building from “the experience of
education and teaching.”
Reid went on to point out that the very “raison d’étre, its justification” lies in
how philosophers of education engage with questions of education practice. That
this should be the case should not surprise us, as most educational philosophers had
been trained as philosophers and, having taken a post in the new and expanding
schools of education, and likely having little to no teaching experience, their skill
set prepared them to lecture and write on philosophy. A 1956 survey of philosophy
of education courses in 26 departments of education in the United
Kingdom found a diversity of methods and purposes for teaching the subject. The
study noted “in some cases the immediate aim is thought to be of value in itself, as
part of the general education of a graduate who intends to teach.”81 Although most
of the time it was taught as a “principles of education” course, the survey also
noted diversity in the delivery of the philosophy content. This varied from an
exclusive study of Plato to education seen through philosophical schools, and this
suggests philosophy of education had a liberal role to foster a
“philosophic outlook” and was yet to be institutionalized. At the time, this was
likely seen as a virtue; academic university subjects with long histories of prestige
constituted the education of grammar school teachers, and this model teacher, as in
the United States, was, at least initially, the expected standard for anyone expecting
an occupation in the civil service. This was even more the case for Britain, and
instructors in the early schools of education were even more encouraged to come
bearing high university standards of excellence, rather than experience in the lower
schools.
A similar point was later made by Clifford and Guthrie, who noted that
American education faculties seldom hired superintendents or renowned
headmasters, as the normal schools had done. The faculty complement was thus
alien to the previous cycle of expertise and experience evident in the rural and
small-town schoolhouses and the normal schools, including the culture of
educational heroes such as Parker in the United States, where no such heroes came
out of the universities. Making oneself distinctive also no longer required great and
recognized efforts but, in its place, an association with an exclusive professional
group. This would cut off the previous generation of educators, and attempt to
create a new breed of teacher, armed with new methods and branded with new
certificates from universities and colleges.
Hostility to the growing numbers of philosophers within British schools of
education was likely deflected by the philosophers themselves through their very
preoccupation with mining the philosophic literature for educational ideas. This
can be seen in the bibliographies of the first generation of philosophers working in
education departments in the early to mid 20th century. For example, many
concentrated on separating and translating the long tradition of educational ideas
from luminaries such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Comenius, Rousseau, Locke,
Dewey, and others. Therefore, and as also reported by Reid, the initial field of
philosophers working on education resulted in “no universally agreed field, or
subject matter or method, in philosophy.”84 This state of affairs would soon change,
and new philosophers of education would organize and seek their own philosophic
distinction and “newness” in the analytical school.
While a few early works in analytical philosophy of education did appear
before the first Chair, the field would not accelerate in Britain until a more
institutional catalyst emerged. This came with the 1962 succession of Richard S.
Peters. His recruiter, Lionel Elvin, was the writer of the teacher education portion
of the Robbins Report, and part of the reason to maintain the philosophy of
education Chair at the London Institute was because he believed “philosophy was
the keystone of a liberal education and it was the keystone of teacher education.”
Peters, at that time, had the only Chair in philosophy of education in all of
England. Trained in philosophical psychology, he had a vision different from that
of Reid, and was far more successful in promoting the field. Combining the Oxford
school of philosophy and the Wittgensteinean analytical approach, it was Peters,
the second professor of educational philosophy at the London Institute of
Education, who spoke to Britain’s academic establishment, the profession, and the
public. It was Peters who maintained the image of a unified and scholarly
community.
His claim to leadership also came at an opportune time, with the influential
Robbins Report being published and implemented a year after Peters’ appointment.
Peters’ legacy can be compared with Dewey’s in the United States: both were
incredibly successful because of their ability to satisfy a variety of groups
interested in education becoming a respectable field of study in the universities.
Peters was an “academic politician” and the conditions of education which Dewey
improved were similar to those in which Peters worked. Overall, his influence can
be summarized as follows:
Richard took his duties very seriously: building up the department; creating
a worldleading set of masters and doctoral programmes in his subject; taking
a leading part in committees of the Institute and more widely of the
University (at one stage he was a member of some 35 of them); extending
the reach and complexity of the subject’s standing and advancement
overseas; and all the while assiduously working away at a personal
publishing programme, resulting in a string of books and articles, that would
have been the envy of many colleagues with only half the weight of
administration, representation and consultancy that he was carrying.
His landmark text, Ethics in Education, would set the agenda for research and
courses in philosophy of education for decades to come. He trained and spread the
London Institute’s brand of doing philosophy of education across the country,
adding further Chairs in several institutions.
Peters would begin to professionalize the field in Britain similarly to the way
in which the field of education was distanced from pedagogy by: (1) setting
boundaries and methods for the field and (2) gatekeeping entry. He would curb the
cottage industries of education and the scholasticism perpetuated in academic
circles through study of the Great Educators and other pedagogical remnants and
aphorisms of the normal school era. Interest in these became historical, not current,
including pontification on education typical from “autodidacts, philosophical
tourists [and] quasi-professionals of previous generations.” None of these
characters would be henceforth permitted to contribute to the emergent field of
philosophy of education, for a new regime at the London Institute was taking over,
and much new work was needed analyzing the concepts of education to clear up
the language used to devise policy.
Crucial to these initiatives was for Peters to “dominate” both educational
philosophy’s
“intellectual initiatives [and] its institutional initiatives.” Contributing only to one,
either the intellectual or the institutional, would not be enough to provide for an
academic field. Both the ideas, the soil, were combined with lobbying for more
Chairs of philosophy of education, including training those to fill them, in order to
create a stable field. In order to do this, over the
1960s, Peters and his colleagues, especially P. H. Hirst at King’s College and later
the University of Cambridge, “monopolized the discipline’s literary technology
effectively making Peters. The major editor of educational philosophy in Great
Britain.” The word “editor” is operative here: Peters would not only change the
discourse concerning philosophy of education and what counted as contributions to
the field, he would also begin recruiting and training new academics who would
emigrate to other areas of the Anglosphere and spread the “London School.”
As it spread, the London School began to challenge the status of the field of
education as a plurality of ideologies. The dominance of the Great Educator
approach perpetuated diverse “systems” or “ideologies” of teaching and
educational aims, each self-contained and each seen as necessary and fundamental
to educating prospective educators. In contrast, analytical philosophy was geared
towards providing its own kind of ideology, with a common set of tools in
commonsense linguistic analysis from which any philosopher of education could
develop a shared answer to any educational question. This answer did not depend
on the axioms and slogans derived from the pluralist Great Educators; it was
produced by using a common analytical workbench akin to a standard method for
achieving results similar to the sciences. This powerful transition would make
philosophy of education the most respected it ever would be in the university, as
shown, in part, by the publication of a variety of book series in philosophy, as well
as the creation the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain in 1964.
The Fall of the Analytical Philosophy School
The analytical approach disrupted the previously all-pervasive slogans in
education by focussing on the problems of philosophy as problems of conveying
the truth by taking the virtues of mathematics and logic and strictness in definitions
of concepts and applying them to other academic areas. The belief at the time was
that no more fields could be plowed and we can only carefully prune what was to
grow; that problems of philosophy and the existence of the “isms” of philosophy
were the result of philosophers accepting the presumptions of metaphysics, and
using different tools (especially, according to Wittgenstein, the meanings of words)
to create their own gardens, rather than using the same tools in order to contribute
to a common field to make communal progress. The slogan might be “common
methods, common concepts, common suggestions” which, in practice, was meant
to safeguard philosophy’s role in education policy.
Still, philosophy of education would have mixed success, and failed to retain
influence in education policy. A typical analytical strategy for policy development
in 1969 was outlined by Taylor in Towards a Policy for the Education of Teachers,
If the education and training of teachers is something in relation to which
government, the universities, local authorities, teachers and the training institutions
themselves all have a legitimate interest and concern . . . then the first steps
towards the evolution of a workable policy must be to expose the differences and
misunderstandings, and to explore the possibilities that exist for agreement . . .
there might one day hopefully emerge some strategy for action which enjoys a
substantial measure of consensus.
Philosophy among non-philosophers has a difficult time finding a
“consensus” that does not simply degrade the conversation to an unphilosophical
level as illustrated in a subsequent quotation from Wilson offered below. Where
the other disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, and history, offer points of
fact that must be considered, philosophy is wholly different, and while it can
contribute to the analysis of ideas and conclusions it cannot, by itself, possibly
synthesize actionable conclusions. Analytical philosophy of education was a test to
take on this role of contributor by judging the consistent use of concepts in
education policy. But its preference for clarifying concepts neutrally while refusing
to engage in moral questions contributed to its exclusion from primary policy
writing. As Wilson put it in respect to the work of Taylor quoted earlier, there is a
bland assumption that research into teacher-training must necessarily follow the
orthodox empirical lines; in a 40-page section on research no serious philosophical
studies are quoted and discussed, and questions about basic aims are treated in a
strictly sociological manner.
The absence of explicit philosophy from education policy is clearly a signal
of a lack of engagement and importance of philosophy in the technical core of
teacher education. If philosophy is not writing policy, using its expertise in
philosophically framing concepts and problems and drawing on the relevant
empirical disciplines,98 then it can only criticize the policy work of others. Even so,
by choosing a life of criticism, philosophy would have a difficult time warring with
its institutional level. Success in this latter position would come from finding
effective philosophies of criticism, and re-engaging with the moral content that was
lost in the analytical school. By the late 1970s such philosophic critique also led to
the later burst of pluralism in British philosophy of education after the end of
Peters’ reign. In a way, this decline may have returned the organization of teacher
education to a former state, and the loss of the temporary informal organizational
policing of those in the “London Line” may have “let in” others from different
schools of thought. Whereas the organization would prefer roles filled and tasks
delegated, individuals fill those roles and tend to assert distinctiveness whether it
serves the organization or not.
The 1970s was a period of transition, the analytical movement losing steam
and eventually falling prey to a new generation of philosophers of education, some
having written their dissertation criticizing current habituated techniques of
conceptual analysis as their rite of passage into the field. Also by this time, many
philosophers of education seriously doubted the life of the field and were upset
with the failed project of the “London Line.” Lucas claiming in
1971 “educational philosophy as a discipline has not simply declined in influence;
it has died.” Not only does he report that the boundaries and purpose of the field
had not held together, he argues courses in philosophy of education have suffered
from a bad reputation of being poorly taught.
These problems could have been predicted by the structure of teacher
education and its accrediting agencies. The first sign of decline for the field of
philosophy of education came from American educational psychologist Paul
Woodring. First writing in 1957 to warn of problems in teacher education, in the
following year he was the first to note decline in the field. He identified the
institutional problem as follows:
During the first half of the present century, while many liberal arts colleges
turned their backs on the problems of teacher education, legal requirements
for certification were established in nearly all states. In general the trend was
away from certification on the basis of examination and toward . . .
completion of course requirements in colleges and universities . . . Many
states specify certain courses which must be taken in professional fields so
that the responsibility for curriculum making has, in part, been taken away
from the colleges.
Note that this problem was insulated from the College of Preceptors in Britain,
which maintains examinations as its test for awards rather than course titles. These
policies can dictate the technical core of teacher education, providing clear
requirements that must be offered. The needs of teacher education become part of
state policy with an eye to the functioning of the education system, with
accreditation a method of “delegation” of organizational resources and faculty.
Summary
The trend of empirical research governing education remained consistent
over the 20th century in both Britain and the United States, most recently under the
label of “evidence-based.” Science has retained a substantial role in legitimizing
both teacher education institutions and the teaching profession. Philosophy’s initial
presence in these institutions is best seen only as an envoy of traditional university
disciplines. It was an initial expedition, and another was never sent. These initial
settlers survived as they could but eventually died out not before producing
progeny which to a greater extent lived with the educational natives. These
progeny, the fields of educational psychology, educational sociology, educational
history, educational administration, and educational philosophy co-existed together
to make up what is known as the study of educational theory. Unsurprisingly, the
parent discipline of philosophy recoiled at the “work” being done in educational
philosophy. However, the climate of expectations for scientific work still reigned,
and those fields which provided it survived and prospered better than those in the
humanities.
Philosophy of education needed to retool once more. Rather than starting
from abstract “schools” or “isms” of philosophy and determining educational aims
and practices that students were expected to implement, philosophers of education
began starting from classroom issues and concerns over grading, indoctrination,
and the like. This was an important and effective change, for while it required only
a slight shift of method from “pure” analytical philosophy of education, it both met
students where they were and maintained their interest in criticism of education
policy. The method born from this approach was the “issues” model of teaching
and doing philosophy of education. It was increasingly favoured by students, but
also institutionally, as the issues to be raised could be sourced in problems of the
day. The change was necessary; as Christian Weber remarked in 1960, reality is
too complex to be captured by a single “ism,” and where pedagogy and the
simplicity of the schoolhouse had been superseded by ever more complex state
educational policy, school classroom policy, and evolving professional standards,
teachers would lack the autonomy to design classrooms to fit a preconceived “ism”
in the first place.
The control of teacher education programs, in part, led to the decline of the
most vulnerable programs in the scientific wave. This hostile environment, along
with the needs of education policy, may have led to an isomorphic process within
education research. These institutions, formalizing ITPPs and their faculty, all had
a similar purpose, and “once disparate organizations in the same line of business
are structured into an actual field . . . powerful forces emerge that lead them to
become more similar to one another.”112 This would also explain the later creation
of “policy departments” and, most recently in the late 20th century, “educational
leadership departments,” which seems to have followed coursework consolidation
changes, such as “social foundations”-type courses. These groupings were created
to improve the task performance of teacher education institutions in responding to
their institutional level, and the faculty hired prior to these groupings were blended
as well as possible, even though they were experts in disparate (more traditional)
university fields. As philosophy of education researchers failed in the competition
to have an inalienable role in directing policy, their move from a single approach
of analytical philosophy to criticism from a plurality of perspectives may, itself,
have been a formalism. As DiMaggio and Powell explain, “as an innovation
spreads, a threshold is reached beyond which adoption provides legitimacy rather
than improves performance.” This suggests a practice may continue to occur
despite having no effect on performance, yet still is viewed as “doing something”
or contributing to informal or personal goals (such as publishing in non-
professional education journals). The more loosely-coupled the organization, the
more this practice would seem to be inevitable.
Furthermore, formal organizations under the restraints of coercive
institutional environments tend to adopt expedient responses, adopting the
minimum changes needed to (or to appear to) meet a new policy directive. In this
fashion, state policy dictating course offerings to qualify a program to award
sanctioned teaching certificates or degrees will expediently be complied with by
teacher education institutions. This compliance often results in the isomorphism of
sharing a course syllabus with a nearby institution, and the assignment of the
course to an instructor only vaguely familiar with the content so as to avoid hiring
a new, more qualified faculty member. Since this instructor would also “examine”
or “test” his own students, no routine method of detecting poor instruction or
course delivery exists, besides student, or perhaps peer, complaints. Nevertheless,
such complaints would not change the institutional procedure for expediently
replacing the instructor in a similar fashion. External exams help prevent this
process, providing tighter coupling between programs and expected results.
Perhaps the most welcome change would be a field’s Society setting national
exams for its courses. This process would immediately standardize course material
for those institutions adopting these exams.
In the next chapter, I will review some of the details of Canada’s own
struggle with forming teacher education institutions. The flavour of philosophy of
education among these institutions also depended on philosophy inspired by its
traditional lineage to Britain and its proximity to the United States. The main
section is a case study of one particular teachers’ college, built in 1961, within
which my own PhD studies reside. This institution, somewhat coincidently, has
followed the path just outlined of philosophy of education’s rise and decline in its
faculty complement over the span of its just over half century existence.
Chapter 5 The Case of the J. G. Althouse Faculty of Education
A general history of teacher education in the institutions of the United States
and Britain has been covered, and likewise of philosophy of education as it was
transformed in those institutions. We now turn to an individual case of these
complex relations. The case study of the J. G. Althouse Faculty of Education,
Western University, and known just after its founding as the Althouse College of
Education (ACE) in London, Ontario, Canada, will serve as a particularly apt
exhibit of how philosophy of education began in a new institution with faculty and
courses and, over time, declined to zero faculty and a bare presence in an
educational foundations course in its teacher education program. Before exploring
this case, a brief history of Ontario will build the context leading up to and
situating the 1962 founding of ACE affiliated with the nearby University of
Western Ontario. This historical summary will be followed by a brief discussion of
the role of case studies in institutional organizational theory, and how this case
serves to illustrate the general theory. The latter portion of the chapter, while
continuing the Ontario history as a background, will provide an in-depth look at the
developments within ACE. Of central interest is the fate of philosophy of
education in this ITPP, and how its courses and faculty were affected by
institutional and managerial level developments. The case provides an exemplar of
particular (micro) manifestations of the (macro) forces operative on the field of
philosophy of education as discussed in previous chapters.
Ontario – Delayed Developments of a Mix of Visions
In its early colonial days Canada was made up of mostly British and French
subjects, and native peoples. As in the history of education in every country,
education was valued in accordance with the little advantage it afforded for the
poor and rural majority. These services were provided in the common schools, and
common school teacher training mostly resided in rural model schools and urban
normal schools, providing First, Second, and Third-class certificates. The selection
of candidates was poor and most non-grammar school teachers, up to the turn of
the 20th century, and with the exception of some highly qualified teachers in urban
areas, were “transients” holding Third-class certificates. This was encouraged by
rural school boards which were unwilling to pay a premium for normal-trained
teachers, and were content to entrust temporary “Thirds” to staff common schools.
Families, often during seasons when less work was required, sent their children to
local common schools to comply with any truancy laws operating at the time.
The creation of a mass “free and compulsory” school system, as envisioned
by Ryerson for Canada in the mid-19th century and as was already operating in the
United States due to the initial efforts of Horace Mann, followed a slower process
in Canada. Eventually the schools of the 19th century, gradually ceased to be
subordinate to churches and families and were now the creatures of local and
provincial governments. The grammar school, with its distinctive purpose and its
all-male student body, had become a multi-purpose secondary school serving
teenage boys and girls alike, while the common school had been reduced to an
elementary school. Together, these various changes, accomplished between the
1840s and the 1880s, established the fundamental shape and character of Ontario’s
modern system of public education.5
Various tactics were used to encourage “Thirds” to upgrade to higher
certificates. A hierarchy of institutions was created: First class certificates were
provided solely in The Provincial School of Pedagogy which opened in 1890,
Second class by the normal schools, and Thirds by the model schools. At the turn
of the 20th century, while the model schools still trained most teachers, not
everyone assessed this fact as causing a negative impact on the teaching
profession. Ross, writing in 1896 and quoted at length by me below,
comprehensively sums up the teacher training provisions for most (rural) Ontario
teachers:
After eighteen years’ experience of the working of county model schools, it
is the universal opinion of the profession in Ontario that the training, even
elementary and limited as it is, is invaluable to the young teacher. His
knowledge of the philosophy of education may not be very extensive; he
may not even have acquired sufficient knowledge of school organization to
classify properly a large ungraded school; but he has, however, learned the
necessity of teaching according to some preconceived design or lesson plan,
of guarding against all unprofessional peculiarities which might mar his
usefulness, of practicing self-control and personal dignity before a class, of
cultivating the attentive interest of his pupils, and of presenting his own
thoughts with clearness, fluency, and animation. When he takes charge of a
school for the first time, he knows what to do, and within certain limitations
how to do it, and consequently avoids the mistake of a teacher wholly
inexperienced. He has also become acquainted with a wider field of
professional literature, and is impressed with the necessity of higher
educational attainment.
This account, while perhaps a rosy picture, nevertheless describes the early,
perhaps limited expectations in teacher preparation. Eventually Thirds issuance
was terminated by making them temporary certificates which would expire unless
upgraded.
At the secondary level, in contrast to the American system, Ontario would
delay the high school’s role in mass education, sustaining its British roots with the
grammar schools maintaining high standards and exclusive entry by examinations.
Its certificate, even into the early 20th century, would provide access to many
skilled vocations, including law, engineering, and others, as well as elementary
teacher training. In this case, the new high schools which evolved from the 19th
century grammar schools and their teachers had a particular role as a competitive
terminal education which offered particular career paths, in contrast to the new
elementary schools whose role became the first and lower part in mass education—
compulsory and thus, expected and neither distinctive nor valued by employers.
Pedagogical texts, as reviewed from an exemplar Canadian teacher library in
Chapter 2, illustrate the philosophic culture of ITPPs of the time; philosophy was
the synthetic inspiration and framework of its teacher instructors, further
formalized and spread in teacher associations and literature. Pedagogy had far
more room to reign in elementary teacher training since the instructors providing
the training were closer to the practice and culture of teaching, that of
schoolkeeping. The training of secondary teachers began much later and only
amended the grammar school teaching route, adding but a few education courses
(and thus, limited contact between students and instructors) alongside the more
dominant traditional bachelor of arts in the universities. Thus, while elementary
teachers early on were offered year-long programs for training, secondary teachers
were offered one or two courses. Even so, philosophy existed in both groups but in
different ways. Pedagogy was the vehicle for philosophy in the former group: it
constituted teaching culture (often child-centered and religious), while the
traditional university program was the vehicle for the latter group, academic
culture, such as in studying philosophy explicitly, or in classics and ecclesiastical
studies, instilling a kind of (religious) pedagogy. Science in the early 20th century
would also take hold. Elementary training added coursework in psychology,
particularly psychology of the child, which was consistent with the aims of already
acculturated child-centered educational philosophy. As secondary schools became
part of mass schooling, they expanded their aims of education beyond traditional
knowledge-centered aims from the grammar schools to include national social and
political aims already active in the elementary schools.
Progressivism in Ontario would be delayed nearly a half century from its
American formulations via Francis Parker and John Dewey. However, American
influences were to accelerate over the early 20th century both in progressive
philosophy of social aims, and in the promise of a professionalizing subject for
teachers, psychology. In fact, both influences were sourced in nearby Teachers
College of Columbia, the latter from Thorndike. For example, this remark of
transition was made in 1926 by Peter Sandiford, Professor of Education, University
of Toronto:
Dear old Pestalozzi! Dear old Spencer! Yet though we smile patronizingly
upon them today, they in their time played their parts and played them well.
If it were not for the scientific scepticism of a Thorndike we should still be
dictating their laws as the last words in educational wisdom. . .[W]e cannot
but believe that we are on more solid ground than were our forebears.
Nevertheless, these influences took considerable time to mature within
teaching. As Gidney and Millar find, any student who passed through the
system before the 1960s will testify to the fact that progressivism had not yet
run rampant in Ontario’s secondary schools. Indeed, in many respects the
schools of the 1880s would not have seemed alien to the student of the
1950s.
At this time, Ontario had but one secondary teacher training institution, the
Ontario College of Education located in Toronto, and founded in 1920. With so
little changing philosophically-speaking in Ontario’s schools until the 1960s,
Ontario would remain decidedly British, especially as the Great War and Second
World War would call its subjects to defend the homeland. John G. Althouse was
directing education in Ontario during the 1940s and 1950s and was particularly
active in writing and safeguarding the history of education and teacher training in
Ontario. In a 1947 address to the Toronto Normal School entitled “100 years of
Teacher Training,” he asks the audience how the “normal-school type” has
survived a century in Ontario. He answers, it “endured because it was able to adapt
itself to changing conditions and expanding concepts of public education.” This
connection between the education system and teacher training has been
consistently re-affirmed through this thesis, and it continued as teacher training
moved into the universities.
The post-war boom, followed by the tensions of the Cold War and Korean
War in some ways accelerated the development of Canada’s institutions. The
single month of December, 1920 saw publication of a number of committee reports
that targeted needed improvements to elementary teacher training. The Bowers
Report, produced by the Ontario Normal Schools, recommended a two-year
program for those entering ITPPs with grade 13 only; the program’s second year
was to be particularly designed to instil new educational science, with the intention
that “a large proportion of the student’s time would be spent on educational
psychology, including child study and mental hygiene.” The Report also
recommended reducing traditional subject courses in curriculum which dominated
elementary ITPPs to make room for new general teaching methods, and
psychology. Another report completed in the same month by the Hope Royal
Commission provided interim reports over the five years of its investigation to deal
with “emergency” measures to staff schools during post-war influxes of elementary
students.
Consequently, the Commission did what they could to temper the influx of a
new kind of “Third” into the still undeveloped teaching profession in Ontario, such
as by instituting panels to interview and select candidates in grade 13 who were
interested in elementary teaching. Mandatory emergency summer courses were
offered in the 1950s, and delayed further the raising of standards for elementary
teachers. However, while the Report bemoaned this taxing situation on the
profession, it called for future, calmer times to produce teachers, prepared for his
profession by a broad education which gives him the resources of educational
philosophy and psychology and of much general knowledge and experience, and so
enables him to understand the newer methods and to devise procedures suitable for
particular purposes and circumstances.
A further issue raised in the reports of this time was the central authority of
the Minister. While the Bowers Report criticized the lack of flexibility possible in
normal school programs, the Department of Education asserted it must hold central
authority, especially with regards to entrance requirements and certification, as
they were the link to the people of the province. Not until the early 1970s would
university-governed elementary teacher education be realized, and the university’s
own protectiveness of their autonomy revive this issue of control.
During this turbulent time in the 1950s, a number of changes were made and
formalized in new nomenclature: (1) the normal schools were hereafter renamed to
teachers’ colleges in 1953; and (2) the First, Second, and Third-class certificates
were replaced by a single Elementary School Teachers’ Certificate in 1956. Also
of note is the dispute initiated in 1950 by the Ontario Public School Men’s
Teachers’ Federation. In brief, as a result of the profession suffering from the
influx of lower standard teachers because of emergency measures, they proposed a
leveling of the power the Department of Education had over admission to ITPPs.
They advocated teacher education be moved into the universities and henceforth
governed by a number of groups: the Department, the host university, the
Federation, and other related groups such as the Public School Inspectors
Association. Academic training was to be delivered by a faculty of education in a
host university, and professional training provided by a panel of the other groups,
including the Department. This change would take time, but by 1971 admission to
an elementary ITPP required a university degree, and subsequent merging of
elementary and high school training would require drafting of agreements to detail
the proposed proportional governance structure.
The 1960s was another period of substantial change for Ontario schools. As
an illustration of the prevailing philosophic conversation in the culture of teaching
which would ramp up and support changes in the schools, the Philosophy of
Education Committee of the Ontario Teachers’ Federation published a pamphlet in
1960 which endorsed long-standing traditions. The development of a philosophy of
education has become a matter of increasing concern to a great number of Ontario
teachers. . .[While science of education is important], [h]owever, in the
contemporary situation there is still greater need for an understanding and
interpretation of man and reality. An adequate philosophy of education demands a
clear conception of the nature of the teaching function, a comprehensive
understanding of the essentials required to be a well-qualified, successful teacher,
and a guiding realization of the rights and responsibilities of teachers in constant
search for the ultimate.
Changes would soon come to further open up the high schools to assist with
demographic changes. Where previously a common school assimilation of pupils
of mostly English-descent was possible, the post-war baby boom and now
increased immigration from mainland Europe and East Asia required a system,
with a system-wide increase in the duration of compulsory education and a smooth
transition from its elementary to its secondary schools. For this purpose, in 1949,
high school entrance examinations were discontinued, and in 1954, an amendment
to the School Administration Act raised the compulsory attendance age to 16 for
all children in Ontario. The high schools had now become part of mass public
education, following the vision of Ryerson a century ago, and shared more in the
tendencies of the American system, abandoning the old British model. As a
consequence of losing the selectivity provided by entrance exams, high school
certificates lost value in the marketplace; careers in law, engineering, etc.,
including elementary teaching, were placed on a higher shelf to be reached through
preparation in the colleges and universities. With the opening up of the high
schools and the expected longer stay of more diverse students, a greater supply of
modified secondary teachers was needed. This transformation led to the
establishment of two new high school teacher training institutions beyond the sole
Ontario College of Education in Toronto. The second secondary training institution
built in Ontario was located in London, soon renamed as the Althouse College of
Education and affiliated with the University of Western Ontario. It began its first
full year of operations in 1965.
In 1966 the Macleod Report investigation of the status of elementary teacher
training reasserted some of the recommendations of the reports from 1950. The
objective of ITPP policy was to merge them into the universities, and so the Report
recommended again making a university degree a necessary requirement for entry
into an elementary ITPP. Asserted again were the main reasons for raising the
reputation and legitimacy of elementary teachers—the university requirement
would not only raise their academic standing, select from a wealthier class and
filter out less capable candidates, it would also raise the age at which students
became teachers. No longer would teachers be in some cases only one year older
than their students, both in age and in competency.
With this background in mind, highlighting the changes made to teachers
and schools in Ontario, the trend, as was the case in the United States and Britain,
was to fashion a free and compulsory education system, and secure the training of
staff with the skills and legitimacy to sustain it. The older professions of medicine,
law, and theology were a model for the teaching profession; each of these had a
professionalizing subject, and teaching, during the wave of the new sciences,
looked to psychology to fill this role. As the lower schools crystalized into the
mass education system, the universities were narrowed in role with new research
mandates. The soon-to-emerge faculties of education were expected to take
advantage of university-level research while maintaining professional practice,
institutionalizing “educational” varieties of relevant fields such as philosophy of
education, educational psychology, educational history, and later, educational
administration and policy studies.
This transition will be illustrated in one ITPP, but before moving to the case
study of ACE, some further preparatory discussion is needed to provide the
rationale and benefits of reviewing changes at a particular teachers’ college to
illustrate (and in some sense “test”) the general account of the fate of philosophy of
education developed in previous chapters.
Case Study and Institutional Organizational Theory (IOT)
Chapter one has already discussed some aspects of general case study within
IOT. This short section will particularize these earlier remarks toward the actual
case study soon to be presented.
A particularly good model for IOT case study work is Selznick’s 1949 study
of the Tennessee Valley Authority, recently cited as “set[ting] the standard for case
study research in organizational theory.” This impact is twofold: Selznick
demonstrated the “need for comprehensive data collection and the importance of
rich and detailed attention to context” and “second, the TVA stands as an exemplar
for how a researcher can move fluidly between a single case study and general
theory.” In this thesis, substantial attention has been paid to context, the first four
chapters and the earlier part of this chapter providing an account of this. While
philosophy of education grew and transformed, various other relevant groups also
went through transitions: teacher education institutions, the growing school system
and its administration, the rise of science and the research university, and the
teacher, especially with regard to the conditions of the occupation, the attributes of
the membership, and the professionalization process. These complex and inter-
related changes make the causal relations impossible to sort out, but must
nevertheless be identified as a “core tenet of institutional theory, which holds that
organizations are influenced, if not fully determined, by the social conditions in
which they are embedded.”
Another important point in preparation for the case is that not all aspects of
the general trend will be part of each particular case—other factors not shared by
faculties of education in general might sustain philosophy of education in specific
cases. All that needs to be shown is, under common or predictable circumstances,
the trend holds. In other words, a case must share in the environment or general
forces as described in the macro-level theory, and differences of outcome between
cases must be explained by mitigating factors, otherwise there must be missing
pieces to the general theory.
All of these factors, while more easily viewed from afar, can be found in
decisions made in faculties of education and relevant groups. However, the
perspectives from inside the institution in which the retired philosophers of
education interviewed for this study once worked might not align with an outside
and institutional view of the events. This point was made by Clark in a similar case
study of a junior college:
it must be assumed at the outset of an institutional study that some of the
major internal changes and external adaptations of an organization may be
beyond the awareness of all participants, that latent tendencies and functions
may be identified by the outsider who comes at the organization with a
particular analytical point of view. The hope of saying something new and
useful rests on such an assumption.
This would explain why philosophers of education may find, from their point of
view, that philosophy in teacher education institutions is adapting, as they have
adapted as faculty members, while the view from IOT is that philosophy as an
explicit subject is declining and returning to an implicit state in conformity with an
inescapable marginalizing process in teacher education institutions. This point by
Clark also notes that a study of this kind goes beyond a simple retelling of the
history of ACE as a series of autobiographies might by linking together these
biographies in the form of interviews, considering founding documents, and using
an analytical theory, all of which produce a very different account of the
institutional life of ACE, an account greater than the sum of its parts, as it were.
We also must keep in mind what the following study cannot and has not done.
Epistemologically, a case must always be a slice of reality—we cannot have total
knowledge in any matter; instead we build and improve upon previous knowledge.
However, the researcher also intentionally must do the slicing because of practical
limitations of time, and writing space—we necessarily stake out and limit the area
under study, in this case, to the fate of philosophy of education at ACE.
Researchers minimize outside forces which might impact the designated inquiry,
and strive to produce a well-documented account of the case by way of its sources
of influence and its effects. In a case study, this occurs through paying attention to
official documentation, and verifying, where possible, interview data with
documentation. Defining the “case” and setting the boundaries, as Yin points out,
continues to “plague” researchers.One last point considering the importance of
case studies in IOT is that “crisis” periods in the operation of institutions are very
important “revealing” events. This is because, institutional processes tend to be
invisible, masked by habit and ritualistic reproduction. The micro-processes that
underpin institutions are often observable only in instances of extreme change
when the institutional fabric is torn and the inner activities used to maintain and
reproduce institutions are exposed; thus, case studies are often the best way to
capture such natural experiments. Several of these crisis periods did occur at ACE,
and each represented turning points in the departmental structure of the institution,
which had wide-ranging consequences for courses and future faculty hiring. These
institutional restructurings were adjustments to the technical core, the “fabric” of
the institution.
Data Collection. Building on the discussion of method from Chapter 1, I
made use of two types of sources to unearth the history of philosophy of education
at ACE, (1) official documentation, such as university senate minutes and
university calendars, provided by Western University Archives, and (2) retired
faculty members and visiting professors of ACE. Data from (1) primarily took the
form of digitally scanned senate minutes which pertained to the founding of ACE
and other institutional changes, as well as notes based on Western University
course calendars which included ACE data. Data from (2) included interviews of
faculty and syllabi from courses they taught at ACE. Access to these data was
authorized through a research ethics proposal approved by the university; the
approval record is included in Appendix 4. Most participants chose to identify
themselves by name in the study, rather than remain anonymous. I also promised
the participants that any attribution of statements to them would be subject to their
explicit approval of the proposed quotation and the context in which it would
appear. Each participant was interviewed once. Interviews were planned for one
hour, though all exceeded this somewhat; most conversations lasted an hour and a
half, and the longest was three hours. The names of participants were already
known to me, nearly all having served in faculty positions at ACE, and were
initially contacted in March of 2014 with recruitment letters via email or mail.
Interested participants received Letters of Information which detailed the purpose
of the study. Signed return of these Letters signaled agreement to participate. Most
recruitment was narrowed to retired philosophers of education of ACE, though
several others were also contacted who were either visiting professors of ACE,
retired faculty at ACE in another field (psychology and history), or previously a
dean of the Faculty. Most who were contacted agreed to participate. Six interviews
were conducted, four at ACE, one over the phone, and another at the participant’s
home in London. Interviews were recorded, and notes were made both during the
interview and afterward when listening again to the tape. An interview protocol
was used which contained questions on the history of ACE, such as changes in
courses, faculty, and departments, as well as changes to the field of philosophy of
education over the course of the participant’s career, although sessions were semi-
structured to allow for interesting leads to be pursued when they arose.
Having covered preliminary remarks regarding the context of Ontario, the
use of case studies in IOT, and how data was collected, I can now turn to the case
of philosophy of education at ACE, beginning with the institution’s founding
documents, where agreements were made regarding its governance between the
Minister of Education, the host university, and other related groups. Faculties of
education are a unique kind of faculty in the university setting since their
governance and creation do not flow from the university alone, but from shared
governance with the Ministry of Education. Compared to the faculties created at
Toronto and Queen’s, a previous dean of ACE observed, “Western’s agreement
was the worst of the three from the point of view of the University.” These
consequences will serve as the opening of the case of Althouse College.
Philosophy at the J. G. Althouse Faculty of Education – A Case Study
This case of the fate of philosophy of education at the Althouse College of
Education draws on a variety of information sources. Senate documents established
the legal agreement between Western University and the Department of Education
over the governance of ACE. Interviews with retired philosophers of education and
other faculty members also provided an internal view of the changes.
I urge the reader, before continuing, to browse through Table 8, found in
Appendix 1, and refer to it as the need arises. It is an advanced organizer,
summarizes the fine details of the case presented in detail below, especially
tracking changes in faculty, by name, and philosophy of education-type courses at
ACE.
Founding, Structure and Early Years, 1965-1969
On April 16, 1963, the university board of governors in conjunction with
Minister of
Education William G. Davis, completed the establishment agreement for the
second Ontario College of Education to operate in affiliation with The University
of Western Ontario, London, later named the Althouse College of Education when
it opened officially with full-year programs in 1965. There are two important
points made in this initial “establishment agreement” which would colour the
institutional position of ACE and institutions with similar agreements to the
present day.
First, the Minister delegated to ACE the authority to offer “courses leading
to” the various certificates current for teaching in the high schools; therefore, the
university and ACE would provide the program and upon its successful
completion, a student would be recommended to the Minister. Issuance of
applicable certificates—the goal of any student in an ITPP—was held exclusively
by the Minister and the Ministry would be in the superior position to set the
requirements to achieve it. Graduate programs, however, were solely under the
discretion of the university, and hence the faculty of ACE. This is perhaps why
later on philosophy of education, when marginalized from teacher education,
escaped to the graduate level for a short time before being eliminated.
Second, as per the earlier proposal by the Ontario Public School Men’s
Teachers’ Federation for a balanced power structure, an “advisory council” was
established. Of 12 total seats, 1/3 were to be appointed by the Minister, 1/3 by the
university and, of the remaining third, one seat was appointed by the inspector’s
association, and the remainder by the Ontario Teachers’ Federation. The duties of
this council were to “make recommendations in matters concerning admission
requirements, curriculum, examinations and other matters affecting the College.”
While those involved in deciding these issues were broadened, notice that the real
power, the requirements to receive teaching certificates, remained in the hands of
the Minister. The Minister also held the power to “approve” faculty and the dean of
ACE from those recommended by the university.
Thus, one can see, even in this initial agreement, a lending of power to
various groups associated with teaching, and a sharing of decision-making powers
between the Ministry of Education and the university. The university would
manage academic faculty members who would provide a university standard to
education research and teaching, but unlike other university faculties, the Minister
would remain a joint partner in the governance of ACE. The key feature of this
arrangement, the issuance of certificates, was kept in the hands of the Minister in
order to keep control of the technical core of ACE by way of securing the ultimate
product expected by their students—entry to the occupation of teaching in Ontario.
In order to maintain its identity and legitimacy, ACE’s programs were to be
acceptable to the Minister, and further confidence in this is shown by requiring
equal representation from the Ministry and the university on the advisory council.
A further result of maintaining a single source of certificates was safeguarding of a
single profession, the programs of which could be moulded as needs arose to
support the public high schools. This single source arrangement would promote
isomorphism across the new secondary teacher training institutions, as their
programs more or less adapted to the program already operating in Toronto for
nearly a half century, and would prevent “Toronto teachers,” “Althouse teachers,”
and “MacArthur teachers” from competing, let alone graduates of any private
facility.
ACE began its first full year program for prospective secondary teachers in
1965, the same year the Ontario Institute of Education (OISE) was authorized by
legislation. The program consisted of 20 weeks of lectures and seminars, 9 weeks
of practice teaching, and 1 final week of exams. At this time, the departmental
structure of ACE was close to a typical American liberal arts college providing
teacher training. Departmental structure is important as departments can serve as
decision-making units—mini institutions surviving in the environment of the larger
college. Existence of departments also embodies and empowers the makeup of the
technical core of the institution in terms of the working parts required in order to
sustain the work of the organization. These parts could not be internally tinkered
with, for any changes required authorization through a resolution of the university
Senate, revealing their importance.
The changing size and names of departments at ACE have been graphed for
its first three decades, from 1965 to 1995. These will be shown in three different
data displays placed in the ACE case corresponding to the year being discussed.
Figure 1A below displays the first 11 years. Many departments were initially
created to handle the variety of courses offered, including approximately 20
departments devoted to methods. This group subsumed the many subjects in the
secondary school curriculum (maths, Latin, geography, etc.), as well as practice
teaching, teaching aids, and librarianship. There were also four “educational
foundations” departments: history of education, philosophy, professional practice
and administration (PPA), and psychology and sociology.42 PPA was a single
course with initially a single faculty member who taught lesson planning,
questioning, discipline and classroom management, professional obligations, and
the organization and administration of secondary schools in Ontario. Guest lectures
are also noted. Looking back, it is surprising how all these topics, today much
more central in teacher education, were packed into a single course with a single
instructor. Certainly, this initial arrangement of the foundations departments
reveals the proportions that went into making a secondary school teacher at this
time. In other words, it seems plain that the founders of ACE’s teacher education
curriculum created a balance of liberal arts subjects important for the educational
foundations of the teacher: 1-part history, 1-part philosophy, and 1-part science.
According to the 1967-1968 ACE Calendar, each foundations department
had four faculty members, except PPA which had one. The “methods” faculty,
dominating ACE perhaps by 3/4, had a particular role, and the foundations
departments had another role. The former delivered professional courses, mostly in
teaching methods and, while the faculty had lowerschool experience, they were
also less likely to be educated beyond a Bachelor’s degree. The latter delivered
liberal arts-type courses to foster a general education (history, philosophy, and
science), and were more likely to have PhDs but usually lacked school teaching
experience. Jim Sanders, a psychologist hired at ACE in 1967, recounts the
characteristics of the initial faculty at ACE, Most of the people at Althouse when I
arrived were ex-school teachers. I thought it was a small liberal arts college I was
coming to. So the people I tended to relate to were the philosophers together, we
were a younger age-cohort. The faculty in methods tended to be advanced in their
careers, [they were] department heads, exprincipals, and the like. They constituted
an older age demographic than the philosophers. In some ways, they focused more
on schoolmanship than their various subject specialties. My own department of
educational psychology was made up of older types as well, but they all had PhDs
often from Toronto. And in certain ways, they were connected to the psychology
department on main campus. For example, as a courtesy, all the people we hired
were to be approved by the main campus department. And I think they were also
perceived by the rest of the faculty as being especially qualified academically. As a
consequence, they wielded considerable political power in ACE. For example,
some were often nominated as acting deans.
As this institution developed, a key question was whether the different roles
of the methods and foundations departments could function and cooperate, or
would one eventually dominate the other. This question would have to be answered
by the time of the merging of elementary and secondary teacher training, but I will
return to this in the coming pages.
It is important to point out that the philosophy department was not named
“philosophy of education,” nor did it offer philosophy of education courses. ACE’s
first philosophy instructors were nearly all American. The department’s first
chairman was Vernon Howard, hired from Indiana University. The other initial
members were Paul T. O’Leary, Barbara E. Houston, David R. Burke, with John
McPeck joining a year later. At this time, ACE students were required to take one
course in philosophy, one in history, and one in psychology from among the
foundations subjects (along with the sole PPA course), in addition to curriculum
courses and others. Each department designed and delivered its own courses, and
students enrolled in and completed at least one course from each foundations
department to satisfy requirements. These courses offered from history,
philosophy, and psychology were “leveled” and depending on the number of
courses a student had taken in these three areas in their undergraduate degree, a
level one, two, or three course (introductory, intermediate, and advanced) from that
foundation area was selected. For example, a student who had not previously
completed a course in Canadian history would select a level 1 course offered by the
history of education department. The same student having already taken a course in
philosophy, could select “Logic and Philosophy of Science” or “Phenomenology
and Existential Philosophy” or others at level two.
Academic philosophy, even though promised to the initial faculty as the
content to be taught and not philosophy of education, quickly became reviled
by the students.51 As one philosophy faculty member recounts, I think we did
some Plato, the early dialogues, the Republic. We were doing straight
philosophy, and that was a problem. We actually didn’t know what to do the
first year.It was more academic because we didn’t know anything about the
philosophy of education. It was a slow introduction to it, and the most
productive at it was the Brits: Hirst, Peters. We found them slowly and we
started buying their books and using them more in our courses.We just did
what we knew how to do [at the start].
Plato and other academic philosophy content would not have been a problem for
previous generations of grammar school teachers, who wrote entrance exams to
enroll in the grammar and early high schools, and learned Latin and Greek. But the
tables would turn: while these grammar school teachers dodged education courses,
as I will describe, a half century later at ACE and similar institutions, it was
philosophy courses that were “dodged.” This earlier population was assumed to be
attending ACE, and thus a liberal arts teacher preparation was devised of which
philosophy courses would be an appropriate part. The philosophy instructors hired
at ACE also expected it: as O’Leary recounted in his memoire: “while those
teaching history and psychology were more than willing to teach the history and
psychology of education, the four of us teaching philosophy had no inclination to
engage in the philosophy of education.” This was a contentious issue in designing
ITPPs:
Professional educational programs have got themselves into trouble in
universities by offering their own versions of traditional disciplines such as
history of education and philosophy of education. While there is little
argument that these disciplines have important implications for teachers,
serious scholars have been irritated at the assumption that they can be
adequately taught by instructors with a superficial background of formal
study in the discipline, or even none at all.55
The design of courses was torn between traditional academics and teaching
methods courses, with the middle-ground impressing neither side—philosophy and
psychology of education courses were condemned for being “survey courses” and
committing to poor intellectual culture. To complicate matters further, around the
time elementary and secondary training merged into one institution, ITPP
administrators would desire most, if not every, instructor to have some lower-
school experience, which made finding qualified and experienced foundations
faculty much more difficult. However, secondary teachers had historically been
educated by university faculty who lacked experience in the lower-schools and this
was the case among the initial (and subsequent) faculty of the philosophy
department at ACE. As part of the foundations of education, they were not
expected to have this experience; rather their role at this time was academic (as
was the other foundation departments). Fleming notes one of the purposes of
academics in ITPPs was “that teachers should have a sound cultural and
intellectual background in order to be suitable bearers of the traditions, knowledge,
and attitudes of Western civilization.” Similar to the MacLeod report, the 1962
Patten Report on secondary teacher training in Ontario added that a liberal or
“general course” would foster a “breadth of interest and flexibility which will
contribute to the well-being of the teaching profession.” Small class sizes was also
part of the design at ACE (and not the other sites at Toronto or Queen’s) to permit
seminars for better discussion in foundations courses and closer, mentoring
relationships in methods courses. As both elementary and secondary teachers
required university degrees, this role would be transferred to their prior degree and
assumed to have been fulfilled so that faculties of education could focus on
“education studies” from lower-school experienced faculty and not on liberal
studies.
For now, while philosophy was part of teaching culture, it was usually
confined to conversations about the Great Educators, or religious beliefs from
which derived a philosophy of education. This culture was illustrated in the
previously noted OTF statement—as an additional local exemplar, the 1967
yearbook of the nearby London Teachers’ College (LTC) at Elborn College called
the Spectrum, noted a joint event organized by student committees of ACE,
LTC, and the university. It was a “Teach-in Weekend,” entitled “Conflicting
Philosophies of
Education.” Not only was this topic typical of the issues in teaching attracting
attention at the time, it was made more urgent by the substantial social and political
turmoil to the south. As A.
F. Skinner noted, “in a time of rapid and manifold change, thinking and discussion
about aims become ever more relevant and urgent.”
Ontario education was about to be thrown into turmoil over exactly this—its
traditional British academic curriculum would be challenged by the most
progressive educational philosophy document produced in Ontario: “Living and
Learning,” more often referred to as the Hall-Dennis report of 1968. This
document, written in the style of a pedagogical creed and containing colour
pictures of children’s art, was substantially different from more typical lengthy, dry
government reports. Its creation illustrates a sign of these times, where a document
resembling a text from a teacher library, was believed to be an effective means of
persuasion to begin changing Ontario teachers’ approach to education. Its first
several pages contain a great deal of philosophical premises: in the report’s first
line, education is declared to “further the search for truth.”
Overall, the “report fell almost exclusively on education for personal
fulfillment reflecting the anti-technocratic, anti-traditionalist, romantic impulses of
the 1960s.”66 The committee that devised the report had been tasked with “setting
forth the aims of education” for K through grade 6 to update the previous 1937
curriculum, but they quickly discovered it was difficult to set these aims without
considering the higher grades and setting aims for the education system as a whole.
The education system had been expanding in Ontario during the previous two
decades, both in students and their teachers, bringing forth discussions of new
directions for the province. The Hall-Dennis report also had recommendations for
teacher education, re-asserting the need to merge elementary and secondary teacher
training into the university environment.
Around the time of the Hall-Dennis report, R. S. Peters visited Ontario in the
1967-1968 school year, spending time at OISE and ACE. The ACE Lecture Series
Committee, with Paul O’Leary as Chairman, hosted R. S. Peters who provided
guest lectures and met with students. As Paul O’Leary recounts, Peters’ motivation
for the visit was to, “Spread the word” . . . He talked about philosophy of education
in the big auditorium for a big crowd. He said to me later on, “My god I didn’t
realize I would have that kind of crowd.” He thought he would talk to people
already engaged in philosophy of education, but we weren’t!
The philosophers at ACE were still teaching academic philosophy, but after
his visit and his consultations with faculty, he sent materials and syllabi from the
London Institute of Education to share his new philosophy of education
coursework with the Althouse faculty. Academic philosophy was not eliminated
and still existed for more advanced philosophy students entering teaching, such as
the Phenomenology and Seminar courses, but many new courses pertaining to the
philosophy of teaching subjects (or “philosophy of X”) began to be offered, such as
philosophy of social science, math, history, science, and religion. The purpose of
these courses, as had been the initial intent with the previous courses they
displaced, clung to the idea of philosophy as enlightening, as providing the
underlying philosophic base of the subjects to help teachers understand them
better, and to teach them with this superior knowledge in mind.70 I asked one
philosophy faculty member about the students and the lack of relevance they saw
in the philosophy courses:
Yes, it was a constant problem. And even if people found it fun and
interesting, there was a big herd of people who said, “what relevance does
this have for my teaching?” . . . [And yet] there is a snag but true remark you
could make, but it wouldn’t satisfy. You could ask that question [of
relevance] about your whole education. You as a person are going to be a
teacher, and you will be a better teacher for having been educated. And so
your education . . . is going to affect the way you approach teaching in
general. A person uneducated would approach it entirely different . . . Even
just the original philosophy we taught, in some sense that is enlightening and
it makes them more educated . . . but that isn’t good enough, and even we
started to think it wasn’t good enough, and we could do better to make
teachers see its relevance.
Offering these “philosophy of X” courses was also aligned with the idea of
teachers knowing more than what they are required to teach, of being inducted into
thinking about their subjects from a philosophical point of view to yield future
insights while practising in the classroom. However, as one philosophy faculty
member recounts, even these courses were still difficult for the students:
It took us a while to [begin offering “philosophy of X” courses]. And, after
all, that literature was new to us too. See, what we found out later, to
develop that, and to move more closely to [philosophy of education], it isn’t
just that there’s a philosophy of maths you can teach to maths students. That
at least grabs their interest. But it in itself is not a contribution to their
understanding of teaching math. Because the philosophy of math is really
abstract, even more abstract than math, and nothing could be further from
the application in the classroom than that. So the philosophy of
curriculum . . . was a step in the right direction . . . but to take that course
and do a lot of reading [a student might still say] “So what? What does this
have to do with going into a classroom on Monday morning?”
This result was also unsurprising since teachers’ colleges were dominated by
“methods” and curriculum instructors, perhaps two-thirds of the staff, and the
small number of “foundations” instructors, more likely to have PhDs,
academically-educated, desired to instruct in their academic backgrounds, just as
the methods instructors were teaching from their experiences in schools. In other
words, there was a difference in the approach of the faculty areas, some taught to
educate, providing “background” or foundations, and others taught to prepare
students for the “day 1” or the immediate problems of the classroom. As this
institution developed, a key question was whether different roles for the methods
and foundations departments could function and cooperate, or would one end up
dominating the other? Soon, however, ACE would be required to re-structure,
complete a new agreement with the university, and merge with the less
academically-orientated London Teachers’ College that prepared elementary level
teachers.
Designing and Creating the New Faculty of Education – 1969-1979
In 1969, the University Senate established an ad-hoc committee to discuss
merging ACE and LTC. Its purpose was to plan
[the] incorporation of London Teachers’ College into the University
structure according to the guidelines suggested by the Deutsch Report
approved by the Department of Education and University Affairs, and by the
Committee of Presidents of Universities of Ontario.
The Deutsch report provided a blueprint for the merger of local teachers’ colleges
and Ontario Colleges of Education. For ACE, the ad-hoc committee was tasked to
prepare the merger by reviewing the Deutsch report and taking care of any unique
circumstances appropriate to this particular merger. The committee was chaired by
the then dean of ACE, W. S. Turner. Before getting into the details, it is worth
summarizing a study funded by dean Turner before he left ACE.
This study, authored by Burke and Howard75 and published in British
Journal of Education Studies, surveyed both the methods of teaching philosophy of
education and the field’s general health in Canada and abroad. It is very likely the
motivation for this study came from the resistance philosophers at ACE were
finding from their students. Burke and Howard found that teaching philosophy of
education in ITPPs had been relegated, for reasons of
“pedagogical, educational and administrative components” of ITPPs, into what
they called the “I-O package deal.” By this they meant instruction would start from
educational issues “in” the classroom and be abstracted “out” to philosophy. The
“package-deal” referred to the near isomorphic conditions of teaching philosophy
found in the teacher education institutions they surveyed or visited for the study.
They detail three findings: (1) “diluted coursework” as compared to philosophy
courses found in the main university; (2) “narrow criteria” used to judge the
competence of instructors, with preference often being accorded to educational
rather than philosophic credentials; and (3) “remarkable lack of curricular
diversity” of courses across institutions, with only a few courses being offered by
philosophy of education departments, and “virtually the same introductory course”
given to both undergraduate and graduate students at many institutions. These
conditions should not be surprising to a reader having surveyed the previous
chapters of this dissertation; it reveals a field lacking the resources to generate a
range of varied courses and produce new courses highlighting emergent thinkers
and topics. Rather, the conditions are closer to scarcity or bare-bones, where
minimal course content and scarcely suited instructors were all too common. Burke
and Howard did not stay at ACE much longer, perhaps in part due to their analysis
of the situation from the results of the study. The idea of ACE as a liberal arts
college, subscribed to by many of the then faculty, was fading, and philosophy
would have to adapt or decline. The “philosophy of X” courses birthed by R. S.
Peters’ visit was the road to this adaptation, but it also meant concessions at odds
with some faculty’s initial expectations of teaching philosophy at ACE.
Returning to the merger, ACE would undergo more changes as the details of
the merger proposal unfolded. The main guidance was from a 1970 Senate Report,
which was substantially a copy of the Deutsch Report with added comments by the
ad-hoc committee under certain items of interest. In brief, many of the Deutsch
Report’s recommendations proposed increased university representation on the
council governing the soon-to-be faculty of education and included attempts to
usurp the Ministry’s control over admissions and the granting of certificates. The
Deutsch Report stated there was no need for the province to have a “uniform
organizational structure” to their teacher education programs, and the type of
program offered could be left up to the University and its Faculty of Education, in
consultation with the Department of Education. The Ministry would continue to
grant certificates and set the conditions for certification. The adhoc committee
preferred this be changed to the “minimum conditions requisite for certification,”
which would prevent the Ministry from having total, prescriptive control over the
Faculty’s programs and, instead, set only a minimum bar. Lastly, during the
merging years, starting in 1970, ACE would be authorized by Senate to award
diplomas in education and, by the first completed school year of the merged
institution, award bachelor of education degrees beginning in 1975.
By 1973, most of the proposed changes required by the merger were
proceeding. In the June 22nd, 1973 minutes of the university Board of Governors,
Appendix P recorded that in the “main” the integration procedure had been
reached, save for several “problems” related to the LTC. Two important changes
over governance of the institution occurred. A new “Teacher Education Advisory
Committee” that shifted power toward the university was formed to replace ACE’s
oversight committee. It contained 16 members, half of whom were appointed by
the university Senate, and the other half by a mix of agencies involved with public
schools and teacher education. Furthermore, Faculty Council was revised to
include university administrators, one member from each university-level faculty
(faculty of arts, faculty of science, etc.), all faculty members of the new Faculty of
Education, several students, and the chairman of a committee from the Ontario
Teachers’ Federation. It is clear from the compositions that Ministry oversight was
reduced considerably, and much power was transferred to the university, especially
across the university faculties. One would think this arrangement might insulate the
Faculty of Education from the culture and politics of public education and
encourage education faculty members to find greater affinity with the university
rather than the Ministry and the lower schools. For instance, the advisory
committee, half with senate appointments, in addition to the dean and the one
faculty member, could easily compile votes in order to maintain university
interests, such as high standards, in the ITPPs of the Faculty of Education. This
preponderantly university voice might have taken the form of defending traditional
academic subjects and resisting “educational” varieties which have never had a
place in the main university. As shown throughout this study and illustrated by the
Burke and Howard travel-study, the university did not perform in this way. In the
Western case, the host university has never, that I have discovered, had a strong
academic influence over, nor even interest in, ITPPs.
The other major change in transitioning to the combined Faculty of
Education was the institution of a new departmental structure which eliminated
many subject departments. A hint of the problem took place at a faculty
conference, held in Stratford in October of 1973. Those attending discussed the
“radical” changes to “departmental structure” proposed and concluded they would
not be advisable. Department changes were detailed in the final proposal, released
in January of 1974. As an introductory note, it states, the Faculty of Education
must evolve as individual and institutional needs change. In this respect our
recommendations should be regarded as an initial institutional structure and
program organization which will change over time.
The position of “program coordinators” was invented to oversee the various
ITPPs which would be offered, each reporting to the dean(s). In addition to the
(head) dean, two associate deans were created, one administrative, and one
academic. The departments were to be less formalized than those in other faculties,
led but not operated by a “department coordinator.” This is how they were defined:
A department is not to be construed in the same sense as a Department in the
Faculties of Arts, Science and Social Science, but is defined as a group of
professors with common intellectual interests, training or experience.
This amounts to an informal group or an association rather than a distinct
administrative unit. Appointments were to be made by an Appointments Standing
Committee, composed of at least the relevant department coordinator and program
coordinator, the dean, and elected faculty members. A number of “one person”
subject departments were to be closed, reducing the original 22 departments to 16,
and none of the new departments were to have a chairman, anything more than a
trivial budget or, more crucially, authority over appointments. The technical core
of the organization was structured by its teacher preparation programs, which drew
from the departments as required to staff and operate the courses leading to
teaching qualifications. This ultimately meant that the departments or academic
subjects which no longer had a place in programs would be deleted, and the faculty
assigned to teach in other courses until their retirement. The new ITPPs of the new
faculty of education would also combine elementary and high school training; their
teaching subjects would remain somewhat distinct, but “foundations” courses
would be combined. If the secondary students, with their history of university
courses, had reviled philosophy, surely the elementary students would continue the
distaste.
Howard and Burke had left ACE just before the merger. Both their posts
were promptly filled: Goldwin Emerson came over from the LTC merger in 1973,
upgrading to a PhD soon after to secure his standing at the new faculty of
education; and Maryann Ayim was hired externally a year later. At this point the
philosophy faculty count still remained at the original five, yet with an enlarged
student population of around 1200, more faculty should have been hired.
Emerson at the LTC taught a course most closely associated with philosophy
in their elementary training program. He recounts the following, It was called
History of Educational Thought; it was history with a little touch of philosophy.
We used a book by Margaret Gillett, from McGill, as a textbook, and she had a
philosophical bent on things and she not only described what was going on in
education but also was saying: “But why, why do we do this and why should we do
that” which I thought was very good. They found it interesting, but not as
important to them as practical subjects they were going to have to teach when they
go out to the schools.When I came to Althouse, to be frank about it, the people
who were in the philosophy department didn’t know very much about the regular
classroom.I think that gave me an advantage with the students at Althouse . . . I
don’t think what they were doing in philosophy was very practical, but it could be
if the professor could relate it to actual classroom situations.
The struggle for the philosophy coursework to become more practical was
echoed by all the philosophy faculty that participated in this study. Soon the mix of
“philosophy of X” courses would be consolidated into a new, single “philosophy of
education” course for teachers. Part of the movement toward consolidations of
courses, leaving the liberal arts structure of ACE, was consolidation of
departments.
Implementing these changes to the internal structure of the new faculty of
education, including the merger of elementary and secondary ITPPs, would be the
task of the soon-to-be appointed dean, Bernard J. Shapiro (1976-1978). Figure 1B
below provides the department structure and complement of ACE in 1978 and
1979. The context at this time was an oversupply of teachers and, as Shapiro
declared in his first address to the faculty, “we have decided to allocate increasing
resources to the development of our continuing education and graduate programs.”
This change was intended to appeal to in-service teachers, especially those from
the 1950s and 1960s, who had been trained only in emergency summer sessions.
None of the various graduate and continuing education programs listed in the
newsletter communicating Shapiro’s address were in philosophy of education (nor
history), though it is likely a course or two would have been part of the variety of
those programs in which teachers enrolled. Certainly because of the demands at
this time for these in-service programs, pre-service programs (ITPPs) would be
somewhat reduced in prominence as the faculty became more diversified to be able
to react to the various maintenance demands required of the staff in the education
system.
Departmental changes from the merger were still underway, including for
philosophy. After Shapiro, PPA and History of Education reorganized to form two
new groups, History and Comparative Education, and Educational Administration.
Psychology also became Educational Psychology. These occurred just after the
merging of teacher training, since combining secondary and elementary training
would better support the establishment of a continuous K-13 curriculum in the
lower schools. In his brief stay, Shapiro enforced the departmental reorganization
as a way of centralizing program decisions, a step that eventually culminated in the
creation of three divisions (policy, curriculum, and psychology) by 1980 shortly
after Shapiro’s time as dean.
These can be seen in Figure 1C below. In the meantime, as programs became
the locus of control, the original foundations departments lost the control needed to
contribute relatively independently to each program. No longer would
requirements be “choose any one philosophy course,” but rather the program itself
would suggest courses which various departments would be asked to supply. As a
result, students had less choice in their program as the variety of courses declined
and department offerings became more centrally planned.
A department of educational administration was formed by 1978 which
began accumulating members, especially to staff programs for school
administrators for instance, in 1977 this department recommended Derek J. Allison
to dean Shapiro to be hired, initially, on a three-year contract. Departments now
became increasingly informal associations without the autonomy provided by a
chairman, budgets, hiring or course control, decision-making powers having been
effectively moved to a higher hierarchical level; this redistribution of power was
formalized to create a new institution based on these new divisions. For example,
psychology retained its identity by becoming a division, adapting to the new
departmental structure.
For the fate of the other foundations subjects, an apt metaphor may be the
fate of the Ancient Greek city-states. Traditionally the departments had relative
independence, and contributed to “Hellas” in their own way to collaborate on
“world projects,” as the departments had provided different courses year by year in
which students were to enroll. By the 1970s and the imposition of a new
hierarchical power structure can be likened to the Roman Empire’s conquest of
these states, operating the region’s resources from the goals of a central authority.
The policy empire was created as a way of consolidating the interests of the non-
philosophy foundations faculty around the “school and society” course (composed
of history of education developed by Gidney, and educational administration
developed by Allison), which also built a base for expanded graduate involvement.
The philosophers were reluctant to join policy, but it was the nearest thing to an
organizational home and they were promised control of their own course. Overall,
the main driving force was an administrative desire to rationalize the new division
structure regime.
According to Jim Sanders, getting rid of departments “gave him [the dean]
flexibility to hire,” with the informal associations within larger divisions allowing
more selective hiring when vacancies occurred. The divisions became the operative
selection criteria; philosophy would become part of the policy division, and future
hiring would be to fill divisional, not legacy departmental needs. This connection
between departments and courses can be demonstrated in how “curriculum” faculty
and courses are organized in teachers’ colleges. Elementary and secondary
curricular and methods courses keep their subject faculty distinct by way of their
contribution to specific “teachables” (for example, secondary English, secondary
technical education, elementary music, etc.) demanded by elementary and
secondary teaching certificates. Subject and methods courses are also differentiated
by growing specialties sought by teachers, whether writing specialists, special
education and, much later, by Ed.D. programs. This advantage was not available to
“foundations” groups, such as at ACE, and thus their courses lost specificity
(philosophy of X), and were required to cater to all. However, the larger point is
that philosophy of X could have been a part of subject teachables, or specialists, if
treated as dispensing “advanced” understanding, but they were not.94
These changes were important for establishing a Faculty of Education.
Departmental changes contributed to a change in the delivery of the instructional
program the loss of small seminars and the use of lectures to larger groups. Faculty
were also far more likely to have PhDs, research being now favoured and expected.
The previous structure of ACE as a liberal-arts college required reformation,
institutionalizing each traditional subject to meet the demands of the new research-
based faculty of education. Education policy would be the new centre in which the
traditional foundation subjects were framed, except for psychology which
remained mostly emancipated as the “science of education,” this being the mark of
a faculty of education. This new survival environment curbed philosophy, as it
harkened back to the anarchic and personal teacher education days of Great
Educators—education as a craft formed by the individual teacher, not a science
formed by the needs of a system. Graduate programs were also a pillar of faculties
of education, which were, as was happening to teacher education, framed
completely by the faculty of education research environment. One attempt was
made to cope95—the brand and method of analytical philosophy of education
buzzing in Britain and the United States was meant to serve as the proper
institutionalized form of philosophy conducive to the new goals of faculties of
education—which would have kept philosophy in the technical core—but this
battle was lost as science won its place as the proper branding for teachers:
psychology became the professional subject aligning with the basic framing of
teacher education within the (scientific) research institutions of the new faculties of
education.
Steady as She Goes - Philosophy of Education at the Faculty, 1979-90
By the end of Shapiro’s appointment, undergraduate philosophy of education
courses were to be consolidated into a single course taught mostly in large lectures,
with somewhat larger seminars than the previous “philosophy of X” courses. The
new division structure of the Faculty would reveal what fields would be targets for
growth and whatever was inside them would become a means to this end. On this
point, Robin Barrow makes a related remark in a book he wrote while a visiting
professor at ACE from 1977-1978.9697 Barrow reflected on the change philosophy
was undertaking: “It has been said many times that we should hope for the day
when there are no books on philosophy, but all books are philosophical.”98 This
point seems to have been a further consequence of the consolidations of
coursework, especially of those subjects which traditionally contributed to the
liberal education of a teacher in earlier times; a preparation in general education
useful for his later near solitary function as a schoolkeeper. Rather, the evolving
role of the modern public school teacher required philosophical issues to be in as
small a dosage as possible for students and the largely non-philosophy-trained
faculty. Fundamentally, the questions did not matter as much to teachers trained to
function in an education system where fundamental questions were already
answered and active in policy, and where a professional was one who observed
policy, and thus philosophy! The institution forging this new kind of teacher would
have preferred new instructors but, having to follow university rules of tenure,
necessarily compromised and relegated its faculty into areas half providing value
to its institutional goals and half making use of their academically trained areas.
This pressure, diverting philosophy somewhat into the graduate level, would
eventually rid the institution of its “inefficient” parts as faculty not fitting into its
plans were not replaced.
A further factor which altered the technical core of faculties of education at
this time lay in the lack of already established models for the newly consolidated
elementary and secondary ITPPs to emulate. This lack of models to draw on
directly affected the foundations fields of history and philosophy, the traditionally
liberalizing subjects which had once helped filter out the Thirds, and had injected
the humanities and encouraged contemplative aspects to better foster the
professional quality desired for teachers. Other educational fields had the
specificity of age (psychology) or subject (curriculum) and were less affected. In
contrast, foundations subjects were required to appeal to and teach elementary and
secondary teachers together who, historically, had been educated separately. This
“merger” was especially difficult since historically elementary sided with practice,
a trade, and secondary sided with academic, a degree-holding profession. The
driving force behind this forced merger was the laws and regulations which only
recently had been applied to both levels of the lower schools and, later,
professional standards, in an attempt to foster a unified profession. Overall, the
institutional goals were changing and programs struggled to adapt with the faculty
they had. These changes, in part, can be seen in the new three-group model of
ACE, as shown in Figure 1C below.
Beginning in 1979, philosophy of education was taught as one official
course with a standard textbook. Instructors lectured and produced chapters for the
textbook on the topics with which they were most comfortable, and still had their
own seminar sections to discuss the lectures with their students. The philosophy
“department” also joined the policy division, which at this time also contained
educational administration, history and comparative education (H&C). Philosophy
was reluctant to join with the policy division but had nowhere else to go, having
equally low affinity for the psychology division or the curriculum division. The
closest division they could fathom which somewhat shared philosophy’s goal of
revealing what was “behind the scenes,” was educational policy studies, which
lumped them in with administration, school law, policy, and professional practice.
As a result, by the beginning of 1980s, the policy division contributed two
compulsory courses to the B.Ed. program, School and Society and Philosophy of
Education.
The 4th edition of the philosophy of education textbook, in its preface,
provides a note on the then current scene for philosophy:
Since philosophy is over 2000 years old, it sounds strange to say that 20th
century philosophy is suffering from growing pains . . . The pains are brought
about by its attempt to grow in two directions at once. One force is trying to
understand discrete problems or pieces of knowledge, and the other is trying
to capture a fleeting picture of the whole in some pattern . . . [T]here are
philosophical analysts (or specialists) who struggle with one problem, or
piece of knowledge, at a time; and there are also synthesizers (or
systematizers) who attempt to organize knowledge into a coherent picture of
the whole.
Recall the goal of Peters’ revolution in philosophy of education was to
establish experts in analytical philosophy of education, trained ideally at the
London Institute or its progeny, in order to provide the “analysts” or “specialists”
described in the above quotation. The understandable strategy of Peters was that
this kind of professor of education, using the methods of analytical philosophy,
would be an inalienable member of education studies and actively involved in the
writing of education policy, anywhere. It was to be a kind of profession in itself—
organized, well connected with others in the field, their inclusion in any faculty of
education assumed and valued. However, the other side, which also lent to the idea
of teachers’ colleges as liberal arts colleges, was this idea of philosophers as
generalists, and teachers as generalists, as they were in the past. Unfortunately for
philosophy of education, neither of these two anticipations would provide a
sufficient institutional lifeline to survive, the strongest being the former approach,
which the philosophy faculty at Althouse had attempted to emulate. And if one
could not be on the policy-writing group to devise sound educational concepts, one
became a “barbarian at the gate,” and turned to criticism of policy as the last straw
and an ultimatum.
During the 1960s and 1970s, school boards in Ontario had been
consolidated, from thousands to a few hundred, centralizing administration of
schools into larger administrative units requiring more office staff and teachers
who could navigate the increasing complexity of larger school boards and the laws
and regulations which bound them. This type of content ballooned in the
curriculum of teacher education over the decades as “professional knowledge,” and
became an important theme in the policy division, crowding out more academic
subjects of the university less directly attached to public school teaching. For now,
however, the “school and society” course would take care of this growing need,
and provide the rear guard to allow philosophy of education to remain a philosophy
course.
And under these conditions, philosophy at ACE was stable, especially when
viewed in historical context. The decade following 1967 was recalled by O’Leary
as a “halcyon period for philosophers in Western’s Faculty of Education” with
secure provincial funding, and vacancies promptly filled. A blip occurred in 1971
when philosophy became a foundations option, students being allowed to choose
either history or philosophy as a required course, yet at the time of the consolidated
course in 1979, philosophy regained its required status and the philosophy faculty
was still fully staffed with a full-time faculty complement of six.
This positive bill of health for philosophy was recognized in a national
survey, in 1977 reporting philosophy of education to be “alive and well in Canada
today.” The study found philosophy of education was a required course in 18
institutions across the country (as it was at
ACE in 1979), part of a general foundations course in 9, a foundations option in 15
(as it used to
be at ACE), and a free elective in 2. Unsurprisingly, instructors reported it to be
very important, and students reported it was irrelevant. In the final pages of the
article commenting on the future of the field, one memorable respondent reported
that philosophy of education should not be begging for relevance and
acknowledgment from the other educational fields, but rather asked whether those
other fields are relevant without philosophy. Unfortunately, this view was too far
lost by the mid-20th century. The problem was that, to nearly all stakeholders in
education, the inclusion of the study of philosophy of education was not at all
obvious not to parents, teachers, policy-makers and politicians in government, nor
even fellow teacher education faculty. But at the same time, philosophy is always
there, in policy, curriculum, professional ethics, etc.; however, it tends to be
hidden, buried perhaps even denied and requires some philosophical training to be
able to expose it for analysis and scrutiny. The need for this unveiling, and the
changing teacher of Ontario, would seriously question, for ITPPs, whether
philosophy was still part of the technical core of faculties of education. And when
budgets become an issue, what remains essential and what is cut or consolidated
would further reveal the current needs of institutional survival.
Over the course of the 1980s with dean Paul Park (1979-1987) at the helm
and then several acting deans in the latter part of the decade, philosophy of
education would remain a stable and compulsory part of the B.Ed. program at the
Faculty. A 1991 study similar to McKenna found that “despite the general cutbacks
which occurred in the 1980s, philosophy of education [in Canada] is holding its
own.” In 1987 Paul O’Leary became the first editor of the philosophy of education
academic journal Paideusis, which was to be the Canadian Philosophy of
Education Society (CPES) journal. As O’Leary recounts, “when I was editor, I
wrote to a series of [Canadian] universities for seed money, and it came. People
were willing to give us a good deal of money.” Around this time, another (part-
time) faculty member was added, Andy Bjerring who stayed until the middle of the
decade; Emerson retired at this time. Both faculty members were not replaced;
Fred Ellett joined the faculty in 1988 and, while having a philosophy background,
was not selected for this reason but for joint responsibilities in the policy division.
This action would reflect the future, as the policy division did not have any
institutional need to fill itself with specialists in its constituent fields, but rather
anyone who could broadly fit under policy, allowing flexibility in appointments to
pursue other institutional goals, such as graduate programs or, more specifically,
faculty with research dollars, or political recognition, areas in which philosophers
of education were at a disadvantage.
A New Crisis—A New Normal, 1990-2016
Leading up to the end of the 1980s and a series of acting deans, ACE had
become a hotbed of internal conflict due to “warring departments” as one interview
participant put it. This time also saw a provincial review of education (the
Radwanski Report), consolidation of teaching certificates, and introduction of
Additional Qualification (AQ) courses, which began in 1979. Many of these
changes were in play, and the curriculum, policy, and psychology divisions were in
dispute over control, direction, and hiring in the Faculty, with particular tension
between the curriculum division led by Robert J. Clark and the policy division led
by R. D. Gidney. Even worse, and perhaps as a result, the selection committee
would not agree on a new dean of the Faculty. The Provost at the time sent in
Harry K. Fisher to serve as dean in 1989, who ended up resigning after not quite a
year. Another issue was the supervision of practice teaching. Traditionally the
curriculum division was responsible for visiting and observing students’ teaching
on practicum; however, they wanted to be awarded career credit for this
responsibility, since non-curriculum faculty used practicum time when the students
were away to write and research. If career credit was not possible, curriculum
faculty wanted the practicum to be a shared responsibility to make equitable the
competition for faculty promotion. Involvement with practicum was especially
disagreeable to those members of the policy division who lacked teaching
experience in the lower schools, mostly the philosophers. Due to this intolerable
situation—a kind of institutional crisis—in 1990 the university appointed Bohuslav
B.
Kymlicka, a previous dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, to put out the fires
and return the institution and its divisions to the alliance crucially needed to fulfill
its programs and objectives, including preparing the Faculty to launch a PhD
program. Forgoing many desperate details, this crisis in the institution finds a clear
parallel in Selznick’s previously noted analysis of the TVA. He writes,
The breakdown of real unity will be reflected in administrative coordination
becoming no longer a mechanism for the resolution of technical and
transitory maladjustments but rather a vehicle and an instrument in the
unacknowledged struggle over a primary prize: the evolving character of the
organization as a whole.
The various crisis periods at the Faculty, according to institutional
organizational theory, are periods of conflict which reveal threats to the technical
core of the institution. The faculty involved fight with one another in various ways,
often over territory124 for their own survival, but the institution’s survival always
takes precedence over maintaining functionality. Ellett recounts an apt example of
faculty covetousness,
To actually hire a lawyer—to have someone to come in and do law and
education was thought to be a really amazing idea. [John] Goodlad was in
favor of it and just got it through [at the UCLA Graduate School of
Education] but most faculty would have thought: “What has education have
to do with law?” . . . Here [at ACE] we had Greg Dickinson really early on
[but] they are not replacing him, he’s the top 3 in Canada, and has the law
journal here . . . But you see what’s happened . . . They never allowed Greg
to teach a course aimed at educational psychology or special education.
[Psychology] always did those courses, but they have no one over there in
law . . . That’s the territorial thing.
While these disputes over territory can breed crisis periods, sometimes the host
university will send in interim deans in order to resolve problems, while at the
same time enforcing changes which ensured the institution continued to meet its
primary purpose, support of the public schools. However, as institutions are
“recalcitrant tools,” they resist our desires, and the diverse, sometimes
contradictory demands from a crowded institutional level makes crisis periods
inevitable. Indeed, Scott and others call these periods “organized anarchies” and
some researchers believe these are not crises or transitionary periods at all, but
rather the result of a chaos of “problems, solutions, participants, and choice
opportunities” all part of the “decision arena” or what Cohen, March, and Olsen
called the “garbage can model” of organizations. This state of affairs seems to be
caused by the unsolvable polarities that make up faculties of education—to name
only two, the combined program of elementary and secondary; the academic
university vs. the practical profession and teachers’ federations; each of these, and
other polarities, provide endless fuel waiting for the spark of an external
institutional level demand, the conflagration creating not a phoenix but a new
house of cards.
The decade of the 1990s would be the last decade for the philosophy of
education course in the ITPP at the Faculty. All the philosophers hired to teach
philosophy retired in this decade. O’Leary, retiring in 1996 having been part of the
original faculty and having served 31 years at the Faculty, remarks that no one was
replaced due to “money and indifference.” He went on to say that “there’s been a
drift toward commercial interests, and technocratic interests, and philosophy
doesn’t fit into there.” During this decade, declining student enrolments had been
costly to faculties. Another consolidation was expected, this time for the “school
and society” course and philosophy of education, creating the omnibus “Social
Foundations of Education course” in 1999. This new course became the sole
compulsory course in the ITPP provided by the policy division. As we saw before
with previous consolidations in which Howard and Burke left as academic
philosophy courses were to be discontinued, in the 1990s all but one of the
philosophy of education faculty left or retired as philosophy of education was
discontinued.
Allen Pearson, a philosopher of education from the University of Alberta,
was dean of the Faculty from 1995-2007. This was approximately the beginning of
the “equity and social justice” movement, and eventually the policy division would
be replaced shortly after Pearson’s appointment: all three divisions were dissolved
and the faculty restructured into the pre-service and graduate units which prevailed
until recently. At this time, much of the policy faculty were mobilized to supply the
graduate programs. After the current appointment of dean Schwean in 2011, the
faculty were re-organized into “academic research clusters,” placing policy faculty
into the “Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership Studies” cluster, which continued
to largely provide graduate programs. Teacher education is managed by the
Teacher Education Office, headed by an associate dean, wherein Social
Foundations of Education resides. This organization has changed over the decades,
the first several decades of the B.Ed. program constituted by many independent
parts, from the outside in, to one of centralized delegation, or inside out.
The modern equity movement and social foundations had been connected
before—the course’s founding at Teachers College of Columbia began in 1929 in
the United States where “reconstruction” influenced the course’s first purpose
toward fostering a more “just social order” to temper the effects of the Great
Depression. Along with this vision for the schools and its teachers, several faculty
members were hired into the policy area. As Ellett recounts,
During that period the equity movement was going on, we got very top
heavy with equity people. I think [Pearson] felt comfortable with that, he
may have even thought it was philosophy . . . And he hired a lot of these
people during that period . . . [But] we hadn’t hired philosophers, we hired
people who . . . look like they can do social foundations, and they are really
different.
These faculty did not come from a philosophy background, and more likely were
engaging with current educational issues as “equity” advocates or ideologues rather
than philosophers of education who are predisposed to be suspicious of fads. This
is especially true as
“methodology and politics are closely intertwined in fields like education.” Some
of the new hires were to teach in the new Social Foundations of Education course
which began in 1999; without new faculty, the end of philosophy of education in
the B.Ed. program was signalled at the end of the decade with Ellett and McPeck
saddled to teach the last philosophy of education course to around 600 students.
The situation became impossible, but inevitable; philosophers were not being hired
at the Faculty—not even for graduate programs—as other interests had displaced
them. Ellett sums up the transition into Social Foundations in this way, Part of it
was that people were retiring, and as [departments] were fighting for positions, the
arguments were not being made for [keeping a philosophy of education course] . . .
[It ended] around the time McPeck retired, because I couldn’t [teach] it myself.
Around that time I got absorbed into Social Foundations. It wasn’t an unhappy
place to be because I do value the legal stuff, [which] at that point in time this
Faculty of Education was pretty unique in doing. Nevertheless, in offering social
foundations the new policy group tried to maintain the discussion format which
was so important to teaching philosophy. Returning to Ellett, [Philosophy of
Education was] meant to be [taught in] discussion groups, and that’s a big thing
that changed over time too . . . As the [problem] with funding gets going, Derek
[Allison] recognized early on that . . . the structure of social foundations was really
very economical for the department because it allowed a lot of people [to be
served] with the lectures . . . The way philosophy went, you’d have these sections,
but no lectures . . . and small, 20-25. That was a big deal, that these sections should
be small for discussion. That was thought to be essential for philosophy. Social
Foundations had a similar thing, the case study approach, so they made the same
argument [for small class sizes for discussion] . . . And we were fighting; Pearson
protected us, he tried to hold that line [of keeping class size of Social Foundations
20-25], while very early on educational psychology went to big sections.
This change was emboldened at the Ministry level as well. Regulations on
teacher qualifications under the 1996 Ontario College of Teachers Act listed the
following requirements for an ITPP: (1) “studies in education, including learning
and [child] development” specific to age-group (2) teaching methods; (3) “acts and
regulations;” (4) curriculum; and (5) 40 days of practicum. The new Social
Foundations of Education course, a modified version of the “school and society”
course which had come out of the original history, professional practices and
“teachers and the law” courses, was designed primarily to satisfy (3) above, as was
required for all Ontario ITPPs. Social Foundations was instructed by some policy
faculty, including Fred Ellett who lectured and led seminars in it until 2013, though
he retired in 2011 along with Pearson. The course covered all aspects of what
policy was responsible for, including philosophy, which held explicit content in
two or three of the weeks. These weeks Ellett lectured, delivering for example in
the first year of the course, a lecture on democracy and education, and another on
morality and teaching as represented by Kohlberg. Students also attended seminars,
each group of students led in discussion by one of the various instructors who were
part of the course (not all of whom provided lectures). While the lectures were
delivered by an expert, such as Greg Dickinson, a renowned Canadian education
law professor, the seminars were led, in most cases, by a non-expert, since the
topics changed week by week and only by chance would a particular seminar be
led by the expert in that area.
After just over a decade of the course, further change was to occur which in
part led to many policy faculty retiring. Starting in 2010, the provincial
government cut the education student subsidy received by faculties over the next
three years. In 2013, lectures were discontinued, the social foundations course
became seminars only, and while their length increased to 90 minutes from 60, so
did their size. At the time of this change was the last year Ellett and Pearson were
seminar leaders with the course. One policy faculty member noted to me, “I am no
longer a philosopher [of education]. Philosophy doesn’t sell” in faculties of
education.
For the 2014-2015 school year, as an eager graduate student who had taught
in Social Foundations, I put this idea to the test. I taught two sections of an elective
ITPP course I designed entitled “Developing your Philosophy of Education.” With
only a nine week, twohours-per-week seminar-style class, it was impossible to
“bring philosophy back” to the Faculty.
I knew the course must have a practical end, and so the writing of one’s philosophy
of teaching statement became the goal, and the content in the class was the raw
material the students would consider and integrate into a statement of their
attitudes and approaches to education and teaching. I had thought such an
assignment should be a kind of ultimate examination for an ITPP, somewhat like a
written “oral” of past university examinations. Devising a (good) statement
requires deep consideration of and reflection on the entire curriculum of a teacher
education program in order to fashion together both educational philosophy and
one’s own life philosophy; when taken seriously, the process and the end product I
believed was a very practical project. While the course received good comments
and reviews by students, it was not offered again, even while ITPPs across Ontario
expanded to two years during the 2015-2016 school year.
Summary
This chapter has primarily explored the fate of philosophy of education in
the initial teacher preparation program at a single institution, the J. G. Althouse
Faculty of Education, previously called the Althouse College of Education. The
chapter took the form of a case study reviewing the general history of philosophy
in ITPPs in the broad sense. ACE went through a series of organizational crises,
each one, as viewed from the perspectives of IOT, resulting in a reorganization of
the purposes of the institution, and a refashioning its technical core as it sought to
forge new teachers ready for the changing world. The technical core was organized
and reorganized into successive groupings, their official names marking a fortified
place in which its inhabitants were sustained, some subgroups being better
protected than others.
The institutional and managerial environments proved less than supportive to
philosophy, with new policy directions and research mandates encouraging the
formation of research teams and emphases in the technical core, attracting research
grants to match. This would change hiring policy, from a policy of providing a
well-rounded faculty of a liberal arts college in the beginning, filling gaps when
retirements occurred, to a policy of specialization, which amasses faculty in similar
pockets of interest in order to create small research centres better able to compete
in winning research funding and scholarly recognition. The former suggests a
concern for students and teaching, the latter for research and careerism. The final
chapter will provide a more contemporary view of philosophy of education, as well
as some final remarks and my suggestions for the future.
To complement the above descriptions, two data displays have been
constructed. As noted at the beginning of the case account, a large table
summarizing the history of the philosophy of education faculty at ACE, from 1965
to 2016, including changing organizational structures and delivery of philosophy of
education courses appears in Appendix 1. The reader is urged to review this
tabulated history of philosophy at ACE. The final small chart in Figure 2 below
compares variations in four different indicators over the course of ACE’s history.
By tracking the various courses offered by philosophy of education including the
component in the Social Foundations course, the chart compares the number of
philosophy of education faculty, class sizes, and estimated hours of philosophy
instruction to offer a quantitative summary of the trends described and discussed in
this chapter.
The case study shows that the internal organizational structures in which the
philosophy of education faculty had their institutional home had considerable
impact on the other variables considered, including course-type offered, class sizes,
etc. Also, looking at the faculty as a whole, my analysis suggests the internal
organizational component of ACE, especially the three divisions which dominated
life and work in the institution in and around the 1980s (policy, curriculum, and
psychology) were often working as if they are in a different kind of institution—
the curriculum and methods faculty were working as if they were in a teachers’
college, the philosophers and historians in a liberal arts college, and the
psychologists and modern policy faculty, a faculty of education. The environment
and certain deans triggered crisis periods which morphed the overall institution’s
climate, causing survival conditions to change, allowing certain plants to flourish
and others to wither.
Chapter 6 Conclusions and Implications
In this final chapter, I will conclude this work by way of reviewing the
journey thus far taken, drawing conclusions, considering implications, and
reflecting on meanings. I will restate and reflect on the initial raison d’étre of the
study, the research questions, and review the approach and strategy taken to shed
light on the inquiry. Collecting the findings detailed throughout the work, I will
next attempt to answer the questions, discuss the efficacy of the theory used, and
the difficulties encountered in the research. Finally, implications from these
findings will be given directed to the theory used, directions for future research,
and thoughts on the practical consequences going forward.
Research Question and Approach
The present study was undertaken to examine what I had initially assumed to
be a healthy philosophical component in initial teacher preparation programs
(ITPPs) as I had experienced in my own teacher education in the United States. In
my B.Ed. program, this component was expected to provide the basis on which
educational theory and practice is formulated, this being the tradition of
philosophical thinking on matters of the aims of education, and other such topics.
Instead, I discovered the existence of philosophy of education across institutions is
unreliable— precarious even—for it assumes no condition of required status in
courses comprising teacher education programs, nor in the expertise of faculty
comprising these institutions. An extensive literature search discovered that over a
half century of consistent remarks in articles and books describing this state of
affairs, most authors viewed philosophy of education as being in decline in various
ways and degrees, including up to the present day.
To explain this situation, the guiding research question formulated was,
How has philosophy of education, as a field, changed over time, why has it
changed, and the consequences for teacher preparation.
Note that this question, while selecting the general territory and direction of the
study, needed to be sharpened to be appropriately practical for a dissertation. This
was done in the following ways:
Time period: A wide net was cast for the study, from the 19th century to the
present—I believed it was necessary to review the very first teacher
education programs and observe how philosophy fared therein. I had
suspected the changing nature of ITPPs affected the fate of philosophy, and
thus seeing them both in their infancy was the correct starting place for this
inquiry.
Geography: The study surveys the major English-speaking countries where
universities and academic fields are most developed. The United States was
the focus, with an important part of Britain also covered. These motherlands
which developed their own kinds of teacher education and philosophy of
education influenced in a somewhat cosmopolitan way the academic
institutions of the satellite nation of Canada.
Construct: Philosophy of education as a field of study was the target, but it
needed to be narrowed further to its manifestations in publications,
professional organizations, and its coursework and faculty in teacher
education institutions. These manifestations were studied alongside teacher
education institutions, but the particular focus was teacher education
programs, not other programs such as graduate and continuing education
programs. Of particular interest were the origins of the field, its form in
early teacher education, and how this component changed as teacher
education and the role of the teacher changed, especially as mass education
systems developed.
Within these delimitations, the question of the relationship between
philosophy of education and the establishment and development of teacher
education institutions proceeded as the broad, historical task of the study. Chapters
were designed to cover time periods, each of which contained a particular form of
philosophy of education which survived within a particular form of teacher
education. In particular, the fifth chapter presented a case study of how philosophy
of education fared at one teacher education institution, involving specific data in
terms of course calendars, and interviewing mostly retired philosophers of
education who served in the institution. Further details of the chapters, and the
theory used to interpret the data, will be covered next.
Approach to the Study
The basic task of the study was the presentation of two seemingly separate
developments, namely teacher education and philosophy of education, and, using a
theory, show how they are connected. During the last 150 years, while it is plain to
observe that teacher education institutions have risen and become numerous and
complex, from summer sessions and normal schools, to teachers’ colleges, and in
the modern period, faculties of education, over the same time-period, philosophy of
education as a field has risen in these institutions, but appears to suffer a variable
and uncertain status in varying degrees in modern faculties of education, as
reported in the last 50 years of relevant academic literature. Key to understanding
the decline of philosophy of education is in its changing “survival environments,”
mostly teacher education institutions, and how philosophy attempted to survive as
these institutions changed to survive in their own environments.
Attempting to understand these “survival environments” requires a
theoretical frame, the success of which depends on its overlay of both histories.
The particular frame chosen was institutional organizational theory (IOT). This
theory pays attention to how institutions change, and how those things dependent
on these institutions—in the case of educational institutions, faculty and fields—
alter to better survive during institutional change. The source of change is often
from the outside environment when particular forces, such as Ministries of
Education, coerce teacher education institutions through various acts and
regulations. At the same time, institutions naturally form a barrier to better resist
and soften change, over time becoming considerably recalcitrant and periodically
resistant as viewed by agents in the outside environment who seek to control it. A
particularly important reason for these barriers is to keep its contents, its purpose
and identity, stable, and to resist and minimize alterations to the
“technical core,” the center of the institution. The core is the institution’s “factory
floor,” where the work of the institution is undertaken, and all its tools used in the
process are laid out. Administering these processes, serving as a middleman
between the core and the outside world, is the managerial level, which buffers
change and provides not only a time delay for change, but softens change by way
of diplomacy. As teacher education institutions are public entities, “change”
actions are necessarily initiated by democratic government and other forces, such
as to alter or add new functions that might come from election of new political
forces.
At the same time, it seems to be a tacit assumption that public institutions
can be controlled so as to always serve public interests, and never private interests.
As F. A. Hayek famously pointed out in 1977, what has governed thinking since
the 18th century, is the idea that we can make everything to our pleasure, that we
can design social institutions in their working. Now that is basically mistaken.
Social institutions have never been designed, and they do much more than we
know.
This point is consistent with the idea from IOT evoked throughout this
dissertation of institutions being “recalcitrant.” As I will review from the chapters,
an example of this recalcitrance is the transformation of the technical core of
teacher education institutions into favoring the more institutionally rewarding
graduate education programs. Along the way, dysfunction is inevitable, and
various crisis periods, as shown in the ACE case, are periods where dysfunctions
are “corrected” or, perhaps better put, are part of a “tripartite compromise”
between the current demands of the different institutional levels, the technical
core’s flexibility for change, and the managerial levels efforts at diplomacy among
institutional forces, such as the government, and interests from within the core.
The efficacy of this theoretical frame will be considered by reviewing the
focus and main finding of each chapter of this dissertation, beginning with chapter
two where the research begins. Each chapter also provides an answer to the
research question, revealing how philosophy of education has been changed over
time due to its institutional environment.
Chapter 2. This chapter presented an account of the status of education in
the 19th century. Common schools dotted the landscape, most of which were one-
room schoolhouses, especially in rural areas, which dominated. Teacher
preparation, as undeveloped as the publicschool systems it was meant to serve, was
known as “pedagogy,” a quite basic though synthetic, personal, and philosophic
approach in the craft of schoolkeeping. In some cases, these programs were quite
short, sometimes a month or two in length in the summer, and instructors tended to
be headmasters from prominent grammar schools or local school inspectors. They
were tasked with fostering a professional responsible for the complete education
process, who could work alone, and under precarious conditions for the rural or
frontier settings in which they were likely to work. The glue of pedagogy was
philosophy, and while the university provided traditional philosophy for those
destined to teach in and operate grammar schools, the few but growing normal
schools in urban areas provided the “Great Educators” in courses and texts for
common school teachers. Evidence of their importance can be seen in inclusion of
these courses and texts as philosophic sources in “teacher libraries.” These texts
were meant to pass down pedagogy, the wisdom of the teaching craft, termed a
philosophy, a synthetic account not yet differentiated into theory and practice as it
is in the modern period. These texts were selected as appropriate material for many
purposes, such as for teacher education by headmasters in the normal schools,
professional development by teacher institutes and associations, and as part of
certificate requirements by local or state governments. Secondary teachers were
educated in the university in traditional Arts programs and took posts as assistants
and headmasters of “elite” and selective grammar schools.
Overall Chapter two uncovered the origins of both teacher education and
philosophy in their original non-institutional forms, save for grammar school
teacher preparation in the university which followed traditional Arts programs
containing components of philosophy, history, and other humanities. While both
common and grammar school teachers had different preparation, the shared
element was the importance of the person’s moral character, and in part, his
training was meant to encourage a desire for future learning and development. The
next chapter continued the story up until the Second World War.
Chapter 3. This chapter, covering the turn of the 20th century and ending
after the Second World War, reviews a great deal of change which altered the
situation substantially for the study of education and its delivery. Public education
systems are forming, institutionalizing common schools into standardized, state-
funded elementary schools, while the process for the establishment of public
secondary schools was still underway. The rise of science was mobilized in every
area of society, including education, and profoundly in the universities, which
boomed in the post-war period, tending to become research institutions. Both the
growth of the education system and the rise of science provided impetus for
centralizing decision-making in now larger, centrally administered systems of
schools, altering the occupation of teaching and thus ITPPs. Increasingly teachers
were expected to work in the growing urban settings in multi- and differentiated-
staff schools, and because of this, were trained in more institutional and stable
normal schools.
It was not elementary teacher training but the growth of secondary, already
receiving one or two courses from university Chairs in pedagogy, which seeded
larger departments of education as secondary teacher training programs were added
to the responsibilities of universities. These departments needed to “upgrade” the
low academic standing attributed to pedagogy by the rest of the university; they
had to be institutionalized and split into smaller pieces and divided into theory and
practice. Likewise, courses and faculty were no longer likely to be generalist, but
specifically expert in a piece of the education process; the result was a
compartmentalization of subjects, each subordinated to a role in the makeup of
education and teacher training. In normal schools, philosophers of education often
claimed a place in generalist “introduction to education” or “principles of
education” courses, and sometimes formed specific philosophy of education
courses when in larger teachers’ colleges near universities. At the same time, with
science as the new way, early psychology was given a new lifeline, injected in
digestform into ITPPs, and eventually crowding out humanities-type coursework
by the late 20th century. As the old grammar schools were replaced by the new high
schools, their teachers began being certificated to work in public high schools, yet
their educational backgrounds were relatively unchanged, resting on possession of
a university Arts degree with the addition of one or two required education
“methods” courses.
Overall the time-period covered in this chapter notes considerable
institutional building in the education system, and the beginnings of new teacher
methods and subject matter entering the ITPP curriculum. Pedagogy still hung on
in smaller normal schools as compulsory introductory material in “principles of
education”-type courses, and philosophy of education, for a time, rode the tide of
the post-war boom, expanding in faculty and courses, generating textbooks, and
building the field with the various “isms” it could muster from its parent discipline,
philosophy. Teacher professionalism and remuneration was a high concern, and
much hope was invested in the university study of education, and a university-
branded lower school teaching staff. The impact of the new wave of science,
especially as fueled by the war efforts, cannot be overemphasized. New
institutions, the teachers’ colleges, would clean the slate to allow new “science-
based” programs to take hold and attempt to recreate the technical core of teacher
education institutions, without objection from hangers on like philosophy. This, in
part, was due to the fragmentation of education for study purposes, which forced
philosophy into a role of a contributor, rather than its previous role as a framer.
These new institutions, which John Dewey supported, proposed to “upgrade”
pedagogy to a science of education as closer ties to universities were encouraged.
This science-driven upgrade process meant the Great Educators and teaching as a
craft could not be seen as compatible with scientific methods of behaviorist
psychological techniques which were now the “light and the way” of education.
This new survival environment which favored scientific findings and “answers”
would require philosophy to adapt or decline. At the same time, greater
institutionalization meant a more complex institutional environment, with more
forces at play attempting to gain control of these institutions. Likewise, as the
education system expanded the occupation of teachers, their preparation was
redesigned to match, and new specialties were certified with new credentials.
Chapter 4. This chapter picked up the story after the Second World War and
ended in the 1970s. The most important part of this era for philosophy of education
was the rise of the analytical school of philosophy of education in Britain by R. S.
Peters and Israel Scheffler in the United States. At the same time, teacher training
of both elementary and high school teachers was largely merged into new faculties
of education, research arms of the provincial and state ministries or departments of
education, and programs jointly staffed and managed by local universities. The
perspectives of science would continue to be demanded from education programs,
and “evidence-based” research and practice would be encouraged from all
education faculty members. Educational policy studies also rose at this time, based
in the need to study large and complex education systems and train those who were
to manage them. It is here where some philosophers of education, led by Peters in
Britain and Scheffler in the United States, tried for a coup to recover the lost
ground of philosophy, but re-situate its soil and life into graduate programs. As
research became the purpose of modern universities, and faculties of education
their foster child, graduate programs became the center. As a result, ITPPs were
somewhat displaced at the technical core of faculties of education, a natural
development as academic prestige and dollars became more abundant in the former
than the latter. This turning of the technical core to graduate programs occurred at
the same time that accreditation organizations became more strict in their
requirements over ITPPs, and more or less began arms-length governance over
these programs, faculties complacently yielding and happily providing the
isomorphic minimum while they were developing the more rewarding graduate
program frontier. This transformation, in part, led to the bunking of philosophy and
other humanities subjects into omnibus “foundations of education” courses, by this
time a widely-practiced consolidation, the specific topics contained within it
destined to decline as instructors could not be an expert in all foundations areas.
Unfortunately for the analytical philosophers of education, while the tactic
seemed to have been the right one—policy at the graduate level and educational
issues at the ITPP level— analytical methods failed to become a dominant and
defining mode in either, and while the first batch of newly minted philosophers of
education coming out of the London Institute was received by surrounding
institutions in Britain, the tradition never gained any entrenched status in faculties
of education. Contemporaneous with the rise of the analytical school was the rise
of philosophers of education bemoaning the decline of the field, a view apparently
shared by authors in both the earlier population of philosophers and by the newer
analytical philosophers, spanning the 1950s and intensified into the modern and
“postmodern” period. A review of the last several decades of this literature, which
continues up to the present, can be found in Appendix 2. Despite various efforts,
something else was causing philosophy of education to decline inevitably.
Chapter 5. In this chapter, the story-method of revealing the trials and
tribulations of philosophy of education as shown in the academic literature is
halted in order to observe its rise and fate in a single institution. This was the
Althouse College of Education (ACE), located in London, Ontario, Canada, which
was to become the Faculty of Education of the University of Western Ontario.
Research for this case study included reviews of official and university course
calendars. Retired philosophers of education and other faculty were also
interviewed to provide insight to the just over half century life of the institution.
Overall the fate of philosophy of education went through the steps seen in the
larger field, except that it was perhaps more severe at ACE as the last philosophy
faculty had retired in 2011.
ACE was founded as a secondary teacher training institution in 1965. At this
time, there were separate “foundations” departments for philosophy, history of
education, psychology and sociology, and professional practice and administration,
each of which had some autonomy in their course offerings. This initial setup was
akin to a liberal arts college, providing founding disciplines which operated as
independent partitions, their courses informing teaching as a tradition and a
profession. Academic philosophy was the initial subject matter, not philosophy of
education, but by the 1970s, and with aid from R. S. Peters who visited the Faculty,
philosophy coursework added “philosophy of X” courses, the “X” being various
subjects taught by secondary teachers. This new coursework remained consistent
with the original liberal purpose of philosophy, providing a deeper understanding
of subject matter, including some insight into how students might correctly or
incorrectly come to understandings of various subjects.
Other factors, but primarily changes in departmental structures in the late
1970s, led to a consolidation of philosophy courses into a single, compulsory
philosophy of education course and accompanying textbook. All instructors, rather
than teaching their strengths, taught all the areas of this course. In 1980, the
foundations departments were consolidated into “education policy studies.” This
new formulation remained relatively stable until the late 1990s when another
institutional crisis led to further changes. Philosophy of education was ended as a
separate course, and a “social foundations of education” course began. A
consolidated course and a consolidated department provided no justification for
specific subject or disciplinary expertise among its faculty. After 1988, no
philosophers of education were hired at the faculty, and even this last hire in 1988
was not primarily intended for the teacher education program, but the graduate
program.
Overall, the story of philosophy at ACE remains fairly consistent with the
story given in the last three chapters. A combination of factors led to a decline of
philosophy of education, especially due to the structure of its home institution, and
its changing technical core. The various “institutional forces” which are cited in the
“decline literature,” as well as the general history of teacher education’s
institutionalization, seem to be a fairly robust predictor of the fall of philosophy of
education. These transformations and decline do not appear in university
philosophy departments; they have tended to have a much more stable institutional
history than philosophy in teacher education institutions, and relatively more stable
health, even while suffering from periodic decline in the humanities. While it
would be strange for a university, as a higher education institution, not to have a
philosophy department, no such expectation exists for modern teacher education
institutions. Though both institutions tend to be established with one, only one of
them tends to keep it.
An Answer to the Inquiry – The Proper Place of Philosophy
The narrowed research question sought an understanding of how and why
philosophy of education in ITPPs has changed. How philosophy of education has
transformed during different time periods due to its institutional habitat have been
broadly summarized in the preceding review of the chapters. I will now turn to
implications and attempt a solution or perhaps a treatment to the institutionalism
that preys upon philosophy and teacher education. The fate of the field of
philosophy of education, everything else being equal, is vested in three important
parts of teacher education: (1) its institutions; (2) its programs; and (3) the teaching
profession. Teacher education is affected by external, often coercive measures to
regulate its programming, and this mechanism has, in part, led to the decline of
philosophy of education. Therefore, a possible remedy would be to counter this
“coupling” or outside-in influence by an internal normative influence, empowering
a source of institutional organization from the inside, the technical core, that
radiates out. In theory, the result would be slower dysfunction, and a resistance to
institutional level “co-optation.”
Place in Teacher Education Institutions. Philosophy of education began as
part of the liberal arts method of teacher education, and has struggled to survive in
later scientific researchfocused faculties of education, smothered by systematic,
institutional forces. A reorganization of the technical core of teacher preparation
institutions is needed, and we must rediscover philosophy’s unique role in the
technical core. This will locate the proper place for philosophy in institutions of
teacher preparation, not as a component, but as its soul. Philosophy is the starting
place, the foundation, of all educational institutions, for their justification depends
on defending the idea of education, that it is possible, and that it is worthwhile.
Toward this end, universities and professors often have written statements
declaring their philosophy of education, and the mark of the Ph.D. designates a
reminder that “philosophy,” not science, is the explicit institutional signet of our
intellectual and scientific work.
Over time, this soul has been forgotten as the technical core was tunneled by
outside, institutional forces into teacher preparation. Philosophy has created all our
fields of inquiry. Each new field goes through a maturing process, which distances
it from its parent, but in the modern era with the prospect of survival in modern
universities, the pressure to be “cutting edge” tends not to include value in a
“sound philosophical basis” as it once did; indeed, emancipation from philosophy
mistakenly seems to be part of a field’s maturity. Once “education” entered the
university, this process began and philosophy was brought in temporarily to
support the maturing of the “study of education.” Over the time of this maturing
and the explosion of research produced from educational fields, philosophy was
less able to hold its curricular ground.
However, since philosophy is inalienable and thus it is impossible to
“mature” out of philosophy, it was moved, or hidden. As it was institutionalized, it
slowly receded in explicit courses, often placed within larger social foundations
courses, and became part of the unquestioned intrinsic framework for both
education research and teacher education. Pragmatism was this default philosophy
for educators, being an expedient philosophy that supported ongoing school system
construction and maintenance. And yet, Dewey declared philosophy the
“general theory” of education, as having a unique role in the intellectual structure
in whatever form the “study of education” might take. I suggest the form of
knowledge of the field of education must be found in the structure of the
institutions designed to partake in revealing its secrets and inducing its teachings to
its prospective practitioners. Therefore, putting philosophy back into its proper
place requires all other educational fields being put into their proper places. While
the first teacher preparation institutions seemed promising, institutions break down
and need to be periodically renewed, re-established, and re-constituted.
Institutional organizational theory predicts eventual institutional dysfunction,
such as the displacement of institutional goals as institutions react to their
environment, become recalcitrant, and begin taking on a life of their own to sustain
their survival and resist alteration. However, institutions, especially public
institutions, have no right to this maturation—they are not founded to be an end in
themselves—they are chartered to serve a specific public good, and once enough
dysfunction has altered the course of institutions beyond their purpose, they must
be renewed. A reconstruction process could return philosophy to its unique, central
place in teacher education institutions, released from being stowed away, becoming
“post-institutional.” With this reorganization of the technical core, not only could
these institutions combat being “vulnerable to fads and frills” that come from the
wider political landscape, and return a “curriculum conscience” to educators,
renewed faculties of education could abort the gradual narrowing of their research
focus on (public) schools and serve the public better by providing research in
education as it occurs outside schools in the wider world, including the university
itself. If philosophy is the soul of the institution, its heart is its life and it must
“survive” by radiating its life, from inside-out, rather than the current model of
institutional survival, from outside-in. Therefore, what was long buried must be
revealed again; to honour this soul braves the perennial question of “what is it to be
educated?” A possible solution to de-institutionalize faculties of education would
be supporting the creation of a philosophy of education for teacher education
institutions, an animating document to be widely circulated, thought upon,
compared with other institutions, and cherished as the institution’s academic
charter. The construction and renewal of this charter would begin a post-
institutional life for philosophy of education and in some ways a new lifeline for
faculties of education. The charter provides a normative, internal source of
institutional life and development apart from long-standing, competing, and often
coercive, environmental sources.
Place in Teacher Education. This charter could reasonably be the starting
place for teacher education. Defending the charter would require the faculty of the
institution, especially its philosophers of education, to construct a program of study
to explain every point and define every important word of the charter.16 The tactics
of this defense would unearth the entire business of educating, and provide a
curricular map to guide the analysis of specific concepts in education, and thus
deploying educational fields to inform concepts such as the learning process,
informed by psychology, or school as a social institution, informed by sociology
and history. As these paths are explored, philosophy performs its proper role, as it
did in pedagogy, in synthesizing these isolated curricular paths back into a
philosophy of education, where the “is” and “ought” are together again, the
synthetic form providing the coherence required so the knowledge gathered from a
teacher education program may be practiced in the classroom. Having experienced
this kind of deductive-inductive teacher education, students will mimic this method
of education and craft their own philosophy of education statement, guided by an
expert who will avoid clichés and truisms, combining the framework of the
program with their own philosophy of life, their values, and other aspects that
contribute to a creative view of the education and teaching process.
Note how this approach to teacher preparation de-emphasizes fitting teachers
into the roles required of school systems, constructing its programs on the basis of
the requirements of a credential sought by teachers, all of which seem to narrow
the meaning of a professional. In the same way, the more philosophical term
“moral” can be rescued from being replaced by “social” or just “good” when
discussing ethical issues in teaching. The overall problem has been the cooptation
of external, coercive standards over teacher education, creating a piecemeal
program of vocational components, each of which seeks to satisfy these
institutional level demands. Instead, for teacher preparation to find internal order, it
must start from the beginning, primarily providing a foundation in education, and
secondarily unraveling and scrutinizing how education is practiced by teachers,
schools, and school systems in the present. The most difficult questions facing
philosophers of education must be faced by teachers; their professional
understanding of education depends on it. This place of philosophy of education
depends on this approach to teacher education. That which would save ITPPs and
enliven them again into a proper education also saves philosophy of education. In
other words, philosophy of education will return to life in a different kind of ITPP
with a more hospitable “survival environment,” but this is contingent on teacher
education institutions also achieving a more cooperative relationship with its
institutional environment.
Place in Teacher Professionalism. The most important aspect of a
profession is ownership of its intellectual tradition; its history and literature that
sustains a culture of conversation in education, past and present. Maintaining this
tradition is contingent on the preparation of teachers previously described, and
institutions with a stake in this tradition. The current situation is quite different,
with professional development almost solely delivered by administration, and the
occupation of teaching battles blue-collar (unionization) and white-collar
(association) influences. It has been a Sisyphean task, for self-governance has in
most cases been imposed via institutionalism and rule formalism, rather than from
a natural process of a mature teaching culture of pedagogy, with self-governance
formed democratically. The needs of the education system have taken precedence,
which is why ITPPs have transformed in the way they have, at the expense of
philosophy, modern ITPPs fostering technicians over teacher professionalism.
Technicians lack a personal philosophy of education, and are fixed by training to
the tasks of a rule- and policy-bound occupation. They are also less concerned with
the moral dimensions of the tasks, assuming those are officially sanctioned by their
employer. On the other hand, a professional ought to be educated in such a way as
to gain the judgement and knowledge needed to operate independently, without the
administrative oversight needed by technicians to function. They are concerned
about the moral results of their practice, and willing to dissent from malignant
standards when the professional deems them in conflict with their ethical
principles.
With this contrast, one can see how educational psychology, as a practical
science with useful knowledge of how to accomplish certain ends, was
overemphasised and relatively stable in ITPPs that sided with training; educational
psychology has been healthy and has not suffered through the institutional changes
other fields have in education. Furthermore, psychology was pushed as the
professionalizing subject of teachers—can psychology properly arrange the “study
of education,” putting other fields in their proper place? —as medicine is for
physicians, and has discounted practical wisdom and a synthetic outlook as
traditionally provided by pedagogy and the Great Educators. If the practice of
education is itself a synthetic practice, and while it is valuable to analyze the
aspects and parts of education, the delivery of education must be returned to its
original synthetic form to be put into practice. This is a further place for
philosophy of education, as the glue of pedagogy, of practice. If we are to avoid
creating technicians, as might be produced in a devolved faculty of education
which fosters teachers as state actors who are
“professional” in their efficient carrying-out of the orders of state authorities,
philosophy must return to its proper place in any profession and a balanced teacher
education must be created. To be clear, separate professional ethics courses are not
enough and themselves an institutionalized form of philosophy of education.
Philosophy cannot and should not be confined to one course; it has a greater role
than the actions of teachers, or the conflicts of policy as might be covered in a
professional ethics course. Philosophy has a part in every field, for it governs them
all, and governs the approach teachers take in the classroom via their approach,
understanding, and values in and of education. This sort of teacher education also
fuels the intellectual tradition of a profession, for it is often the philosophical
aspects of various subjects, policies, and practices that are most debated and
discussed.
Further implications are provided below on the use of IOT, remarks toward
what future research could be conducted based on the findings of this study, and
for the practice of education going forward.
Implications: Theory
Institutional organizational theory treats formal organizations as
environments that are both influenced from the outside, and have internal motives.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that the situation and fate of philosophy of education
in normal schools, teachers’ colleges, and faculties of education, examined through
IOT, would depend substantially on environmental conditions. As I have
described, structural changes to teacher education institutions, especially those that
affect departments and coursework, unavoidably alter the status of philosophy of
education, and other subject areas.
IOT predicts that in a relatively undeveloped state, the institution will be
designed in its natural, non-institutionalized form. This was the case in normal
schools for the common school teachers wherein philosophy was found in
education—philosophy as education’s intrinsic framework, enlivening and
inspiring teaching culture.
In the next stage of university-affiliated teachers’ colleges, philosophy in
education becomes institutionalized into philosophy of education. This is necessary
to foster a “study of education” which breaks apart this research area into parts for
study, dividing theory from practice, for example. This results in specialization of
departments, faculty, and courses, each of which survives only while holding a
secure place in programs, as primarily guaranteed by being designated a
compulsory part of a certificating program. At this stage also, faculty are
encouraged to “upgrade” academically to Ph.D.’s, and graduate programs begin to
be planned as Ph.D. faculty concentrate.
In the final stage, university-integrated faculties of education further
intensify the research orientation of the institution, the members of which
ultimately crave the greatest rewards in research dollars and scholarship, that of
scientific work and graduate programs. To begin this process, the institution is re-
organized via changes to departments and coursework. As ITPPs become
subordinate in the technical core or the changing institution, the managerial level
retools the technical core to better meet graduate program demands. The
institutional level, exemplified by Ministries or Departments of Education and
teacher organizations, having little influence over graduate programs, increases its
influence over ITPP standards, which increasingly come to favor practical,
vocational, components. These isomorphic conditions tend to hamper task
performance of the fragmented ITPP, which further entrenches institutional level
command through tightened coupling as the institution re-tools to provide
expanded graduate and in-service programs. Inside the institution, attrition sets in
for faculty and fields which do not supply the new technical core, for modern
faculties of education are no longer built primarily on their ITPP, and some exist
without it. The rise of “educational policy” departments can be seen as evidence of
institutional level influence (especially as Ministries offer research projects to
faculty), and further doom the traditional though now less institutionally-rewarding
areas, such as history and philosophy. These areas, while useful for schoolkeeping,
are relegated to providing impotent, valueless, obsolete criticism in the face of a
fully operational juggernaut of a school system which needs only maintenance
from its policy-fasteners.
Despite these grim developments, IOT would also predict an institutional
solution that seems to have worked for some pockets of philosophy of education in
faculties of education. Save for a return to teachers’ colleges unattached to
universities, which some have advocated, if separate funding lines can be secured,
research institutes set up inside faculties of education provide the shielding that
previous departments of philosophy have done in teachers’ colleges. Put another
way, research institutes or research centers provide a kind of managerial level,
fulfilling what faculties of education demand: research dollars and institutional
reputation, which explains why lone teachers’ college philosophers writing their
books became “dinosaurs.”
In using IOT to examine the predicament of philosophy of education, I was
surprised to find how absent institutional explanations were in the decline
literature. Most contributors to the decline literature blamed themselves for their
own decline, especially pointing to the lack of purity of their Ph.D. progeny or, if
from analytical philosophers of education, the lack of training and rigor in
analytical methods, rather than looking to the changing nature of the institutions
they were attempting to inhabit. I also learned that department structures matter a
great deal to the inner-workings of institutions, especially when those components
are meant to concentrate and have a particular role in a communal product. Put
another way, walls matter, and when they are broken down, the contents mix,
becoming diffuse and ineffective.
Implications for Future Research
There are many other avenues which could be taken to research the topic of
how the field of philosophy of education has fared. This particular research
focused on the history of the increasing institutionalization of teacher education
institutions, especially teacher education programs.
1. A parallel study could have examined only the field itself, providing an
inventory of the topics of the field over its existence, searching for
paradigms that could be related to broader themes in the environment
(social, economical, etc.).
2. Graduate programs, rather than ITPPs, could have been the focus. It
appears to be an important factor in faculties of education; why
(analytical) philosophy of education could not find a niche here, but other
forms of philosophy of education could in early programs in teacher
preparation. The impact of graduate programs could be studied.
3. Another study could test the hypothesis often found in the decline
literature of the problem of poorly trained faculty. This would track
faculty members, graduate students in philosophy of education and their
academic backgrounds and research interests, and statistically cross-
examine their futures in publishing and posts secured.
4. History of Education has suffered a similar fate to philosophy of
education, and it would be of interest as a complement to the current
study to trace and test the fate of this sister field and look for similar and
different reasons which explain their common fate.
5. Further case studies of other teacher education institutions, such as a
positive case where philosophy of education still holds on in its ITPP,
would be of interest. Perhaps the case of ACE was a worst case scenario,
but given the decline literature, some of which is reviewed up to the
present day in Appendix 2, it would seem to be indisputable that
increasing institutionalization is indeed taxing on philosophy of
education. For it to survive, its peculiar health must be explained by a
kind of oasis, whether due to a celebrity faculty member, or a sheltering
research center.
Implications for Practice
This final section discusses implications from the study for the field of
philosophy of education going forward, and for teacher education.
Faculties of education are currently ruled by their graduate programs, in
addition to Ministry or continuing education courses. Whether the Masters of
Teaching programs, AQ courses in Ontario (in-service training which expand
teachers’ certificates, whether in subjects they may teach or special training), or the
more recent Ed.D. programs, these programs are more or less vocational, tending
to focus on the “political economy” of the school system, to use an old term. While
these graduate programs might “accidentally,” as it were, describe the history of
education, question the nature and purpose of the schools, the aims of education, or
the philosophies of education operating currently or possibly in some future time,
these topics are rarely the purpose of these programs, and likewise the instructors’
ability to discuss these areas effectively from a thorough philosophic background
would probably not be the reason they were hired. Instead, these programs tend to
hire non-academic instructors for their experience in the field—their (often
uncritical) practical knowledge—which institutionally hemorrhages philosophy of
education and cycles teachers and their education through the merry-go-round of
what Dewey called the “routine empirical affair.”29 The overall problem of
faculties of education today, shared by other university-invested professions, is the
institutionalization of knowledge production, by way of governance over faculty
and fields, and knowledge implementation, via programs and a selected student
body.30
This state of affairs is not perfectly accomplished, for institutions primarily
safeguard their survival while providing services of knowledge production and
delivery. The tendency to favor the expedient and the status-quo serves to protect
the institution from attacks from its environment, by reducing pariahs, such as by
pushing research into centers with multiple faculty to sanitize the work, and
insulating change when it unavoidably occurs. The typically solitary work of
philosophers of education is disfavored by this condition, as well as by the need to
acquire external, preferably large grants conducive to research centers.
Furthermore, the deleterious effects of practical specialization are evident in
liberalizing subjects such as philosophy, but a further nail in the coffin was the lost
opportunity for analytical philosophy to flourish as the unavoidable research arm
of every faculty, a development which theoretically could have provided the
cutting-edge of education policy31 construction. It seems evident that a purely
academic form of such a center would be impossible, and even intolerable while
education in a society dominated by Ministries of Education looms large, as the
legislated kingmaker of a complex, bureaucratic system. In other words,
“academic” work in education would tend not to be financially supported unless it
is practical, appealing to the needs of the present school system, and to education
research committees which tend to value practically orientated projects—this is
consistent with the non-existence of “theoretical” or speculative education
departments in faculties of education, while they do exist elsewhere in the
university, including philosophy departments! And this situation also seems to
explain the difficulty of administrators who maintain it.
Alternatively, one could look at the changing approach of teacher education
from an ethical theory point of view. In the 19th century, teacher education was
more concerned with the person compared to modern times; this is the focus of
virtue (aretaic) ethics, which argues that fostering a good person would create a
professional able to deal with contingencies. With the hopeful expectations of the
rise of science in the first half of the 20th century came more utilitarian ethics
(actions, results), using education to fulfill national goals, serving institution
building on success (and failure, which just needs more resources, or so it goes).
What seems to be settling in the modern period is deontological ethics (rules,
duty), having some grasp of educational results from the prior experiments, and
serves bureaucratic and technical establishment.
While government properly sets the boundaries of social activities that may
endanger others, to dictate and institutionalize what manifests within those
boundaries is—or should be— intolerable in a free Western society. Likewise in
teaching, while a gatekeeping entity empowered by the legislature may set certain
boundaries in the practice of teaching, what manifests within is a matter of the
philosophies of education of the teachers. Today, as the decline literature
continues, teachers are becoming institutionalized, or as Walker bluntly states,
teachers are being subject to a “narrow deprofessionalising training agenda [in]
teacher education.” Teacher education needs to aspire once again to construct a
philosophy of education for its programs which will empower teachers to engage in
the professionalizing conversation of this design, and the design they would make
their own. As this freedom of delivery of education has been narrowed through
policy, so has declined philosophy.
Envoi
Our civilization has long believed that wise laws and policies makes our society
better, but modern times have seen an explosion of legislation and accompanying
regulations that compound to tighten the ropes of the rack placed on human
freedom and ingenuity. Hayek’s indictment of the “fatal conceit” of our central
planning builds on the tightening institutional grip of Weber’s iron cage in
seemingly all walks of life but, as shown in the preceding pages, certainly in the
occupation and education of teachers. Among several tragic consequences, this
“conceit” has reduced the dream of teacher professionalism to sets of bureaucratic
prescriptions which add more bars to the iron cage rather than inducting teachers
into an enlightened awareness of their obligations to their pupils and themselves
within the sacred traditions of their craft. Then again, when would we know we
have gone too far? What does an overbearing institutionalism mean, what would it
look like? Perhaps the health of philosophy is that indicator.
Perhaps without it, there is nothing to stop the iron cage from turning into an iron
maiden. Instead, we could resolve to admit not everything can be designed, and
that in education, our institutions should provide philosophy a space where
timeless issues are accorded the gravity they deserve, and not elided or replaced
with forests of rules.
