EDUCATION, PERSONS AND

SCHOOLING
David Carr
 THE CONCEPT OF EDUCATION

Main Thesis:
The concept of education is essentially
contested; exploration of its reasons
indicates groundfloor conceptual
considerations and distinctions
underlying all coherent conceptions of
educational practice.
 THE CONCEPT OF EDUCATION

Sub Thesis 1: Key task of professional education and

training is to shake the established educational prejudices
of trainee teachers;
Sub Thesis 2: Real educational progress depends upon
recognising that coherent practice and is ultimately
answerable to certain rational criteria of professional
practioners;
Sub Thesis 3: Any sensible account of education needs to
steer a course between reasonable pluralism and
indiscriminate relativism.
 NATURE/CHARACTER OF
EDUCATION

First, there is a clear enough relationship

between education and learning;
Second, any learning surely presupposes learners;
Third, there are apparent links between
education, learning and teaching;
Fourth, common association between education
and schooling.
 EDUCATION AND PERSONS

1. Learner as the subject or recipient of

education.
2. Distinction between human beings and
persons.
3. The trouble with Decartes’s mind-body
dualism.
4. Consequences of conceptual relationship
between education and person.
 EDUCATION, CULTURE AND
VALUE

1. Reasonable aims and content of

education and schooling.
2. Diverse human significance and
value of the standard of school
curriculum.
 PURPOSES OF EDUCATION AND
LEARNING

1. Confusion over meaning of the simple proposition

‘for’ – of what might be called instrumental and
non-instrumental or teleological senses of ‘for.’
2. Distinction of the analytical educational
philosophy between intrinsic and extrinsic value.
3. Education concerns the pursuit for thier own sake
of a range of personally formative modes of
knowledge, understanding and skill.
 EDUCATION, SCHOOLING AND
CURRICULUM

1. Rarified concept of education of early postwar

analytical philosophy.
2. Modern form of educational non-instrumentalism
is more radical non-instrumentalism than its
precedent.
3. New educational non-instrumentalism come under
attack from different educational theoretical
directions.
4. The confusion between education and schooling.
 EDUCATION, THEORY AND
PRACTICE

1. Distinction between education and schooling would not be

warmly received in many contempory educational
philosophical quarters.
2. Three manoevres of early postwar educational philosophical
analyses have attracted persistent criticism.
3. Any conclusion to jettison all outdated distinctions and
simply regard education as pursuit of a person’s purposes or
projects are premature conlusions.
4. Architects of modern liberal traditionalist non-
instrumentalism show that there is a cultural inheritance to
which all young people are entitled.