Education, Persons and Society

Abstract

The approach to the philosophy of education adopted in Chapter 1 took the idea of teaching rather than that of education as its central concern, and teaching in turn was thought of as a social practice carried on by teachers in accordance with a social tradition. A tradition provides those engaged in a social practice with a way of seeing and doing which lays down how that practice is to be carried out. It does so by providing an overall purpose which tells them what to do and by providing the knowledge and skills which make it possible for them to do it. Attention has been drawn to many sorts of social practice besides teaching, including painting and medicine, and to theoretical enquiries such as science and history, which vary from one another in seeing things from a separate point of view and having a different overall purpose. It is the overall purpose of a practice which provides its principle of unity, allowing otherwise unconnected actions, for example all of the very varied things which teachers do, to be seen as part of the same practice. This is possible because what a person is doing may be described either from a very limited perspective or from a broader point of view.