what is criticism in education

School's out

A critical take on education and schooling

Let’s stop trying to teach students critical thinking

Professor of Education, University of Derby

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Many teachers say they strive to teach their students to be critical thinkers. They even pride themselves on it; after all, who wants children to just take in knowledge passively?

But there is a problem with this widespread belief. The truth is that you can’t teach people to be critical unless you are critical yourself. This involves more than asking young people to “look critically” at something, as if criticism was a mechanical task.

As a teacher, you have to have a critical spirit. This does not mean moaning endlessly about education policies you dislike or telling students what they should think. It means first and foremost that you are capable of engaging in deep conversation. This means debate and discussion based on considerable knowledge – something that is almost entirely absent in the educational world. It also has to take place in public, with parents and others who are not teachers, not just in the classroom or staffroom.

The need for teachers to engage in this kind of deep conversation has been forgotten, because they think that being critical is a skill. But the Australian philosopher John Passmore criticised this idea nearly half a century ago:

If being critical consisted simply in the application of a skill then it could in principle be taught by teachers who never engaged in it except as a game or defensive device, somewhat as a crack rifle shot who happened to be a pacifist might nevertheless be able to teach rifle-shooting to soldiers. But in fact being critical can be taught only by men who can themselves freely partake in critical discussion.

The misuses of ‘criticism’

The misuse of the idea of “criticism” first became clear to me when I gave a talk about critical thinking to a large group of first-year students. One student said that the lecturers she most disliked were the ones who banged on about the importance of being critical. She longed for one of them to assert or say something, so she could learn from them and perhaps challenge what they say.

The idea that critical thinking is a skill is the first of three popular, but false views that all do disservice to the idea of being critical. They also allow many teachers to believe they are critical thinkers when they are the opposite:

“Critical thinking” is a skill. No it is not. At best this view reduces criticism to second-rate or elementary instruction in informal and some formal logic. It is usually second-rate logic and poor philosophy offered in bite-sized nuggets. Seen as a skill, critical thinking can also mean subjection to the conformism of an ideological yoke. If a feminist or Marxist teacher demands a certain perspective be adopted this may seem like it is “criticism” or acquiring a “critical perspective”, but it is actually a training in feminism or Marxism which could be done through tick box techniques. It almost acquires the character of a mental drill.

“Critical thinking” means indoctrination. When teachers talk about the need to be “critical” they often mean instead that students must “conform”. It is often actually teaching students to be “critical” of their unacceptable ideas and adopt the right ones. Having to support multiculturalism and diversity are the most common of the “correct ideas” that everyone has to adopt. Professional programmes in education, nursing, social work and others often promote this sort of “criticism”. It used to be called “indoctrination”.

“Critical theories” are “uncritical theories”. When some theory has the prefix “critical” it requires the uncritical acceptance of a certain political perspective. Critical theory, critical race theory, critical race philosophy, critical realism, critical reflective practice all explicitly have political aims.

What is criticism?

Criticism, according to Victorian cultural critic Matthew Arnold , is a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. We should all be as “bound” by that definition as he was. We need only to teach the best that is known and thought and “criticism” will take care of itself. That is a lesson from 150 years ago that every teacher should learn.

Critical thinking seen as Arnold defined it is more like a character trait – like having “a critical spirit”, or a willingness to engage in the “give and take of critical discussion”. Criticism is always about the world and not about you.

The philosopher most associated with the critical spirit is Socrates. In the 1930s, another Australian philosopher John Anderson put the Socratic view of education most clearly when he wrote: “The Socratic education begins … with the awakening of the mind to the need for criticism, to the uncertainty of the principles by which it supposed itself to be guided.”

But when I discuss Socratic criticism with teachers and teacher trainers I miss out Anderson’s mention of the word “uncertainty”. This is because many teachers will assume that this “uncertainty” means questioning those bad ideas you have and conforming to an agreed version of events, or an agreed theory.

Becoming a truly critical thinker is more difficult today because so many people want to be a Socrates. But Socrates only sought knowledge and to be a Socrates today means putting knowledge first.

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Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

How Should Educators Respond to Parents Who Criticize What’s Being Taught?

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The new question of the week is:

How should educators respond to parents who criticize curriculum content that is being taught to their children?

Right-wing activists have ginned up the false narrative about critical race theory being taught in our schools and fanned the flames of LGBTQ+ bigotry.

As a result, many teachers and administrators are under attack from parents and others. What are the best ways to respond to these criticisms when we hear them from parents of our students?

Today, Erica Buchanan-Rivera, Jen Schwanke, Naomi Simmons-Thorne, Michael Gaskell, and Angela M. Ward, Ph.D., offer possible answers.

Erica, Jen, Naomi, and Michael were also guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show . You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

‘Affirming School Environments Will Come With Risks’

Erica Buchanan-Rivera is an educational equity scholar, consultant, community organizer, and author of the newly released book, Identity Affirming Classrooms: Spaces that Center Humanity . She has served in education as a teacher, principal, director of curriculum, adjunct professor, and is currently a director of equity and inclusion in a P-12 public school district in Indiana:

When parents or caregivers raise concerns pertaining to curriculum, I strive to understand the critique and offer reflective questions to seek clarification. It is important to determine whether the concern is about the curricular content or the delivery of instruction (e.g., lack of front-loading, methods that yield to curriculum violence , etc.). Through clarifying questions, I have learned that some families are not concerned about the content— despite categorizing the complaint as a content issue —but may want educators to be more equipped and intentional in their approaches or implementation. Therefore, as an initial response, I advise educators to unpack what parents or caregivers perceive as a problem and serve in a listening role.

We also exist in a sociopolitical climate where ideological, predominantly white groups are strategically organizing to censor conversations about race or eliminate curricular content that does not align with their beliefs or worldview. As an educator in Indiana, I am cognizant of organizations that purposefully target and subject teachers to harassment by posting their instructional lessons and work location online. These strategic efforts to censor curriculum are challenging for an educator to confront in isolation. Leadership matters.

Teachers need the support of educational leaders (e.g., principals, directors, superintendents, board members, etc.) who are committed to centering the diverse cognitive needs and well-being of children, not the bigotry of adults. As educators who work with culturally, linguistically, and racially diverse youth, it is our role to create learning experiences that are relevant and meaningful in the lives of children. Culturally responsive practitioners acknowledge the identities and histories of students, recognizing that schools can be brave spaces where youth can discuss the injustices that are glaringly visible in society. We cannot use hope as a strategy to eliminate disparities, including inequities in education, health care, housing, employment, and legal systems. However, we can teach the truth about the complexities of our world, help youth develop critical thinking skills, and empower students to think about how they show up for humanity.

Most school districts from my professional and consultation experiences have core values or missions that speak to the value of diversity, inclusive environments, and meeting the needs of the whole child. You can leverage an institution’s core values or beliefs in responses to curricular critiques. One’s effort to protect their child should not be rooted in the dehumanization or erasure of someone else’s child.

As educators, we must be clear that creating an affirming, inclusive environment means that we do not discard the voices and narratives of people who have been deliberately marginalized throughout history. We do not convey that only some stories matter and that certain identity groups (*whispers white, cisgender children*) are worth protecting.

The work of creating responsive, affirming school environments will come with risks. We may have to experience uncomfortable conversations and choose courage over comfort. There may also be times when we need to unlearn practices and remain open to criticism, while knowing that good intentions can still yield harm. Yet, through it all educators should feel the support and visibility of leaders, knowing that they are not alone while working through curricular critiques and opposition from political movements.

Jen Schwanke has been an educator for 24 years, teaching or leading at all levels. She is the author of three books published by ASCD, the most recent of which is titled The Teacher’s Principal . She currently serves as a deputy superintendent in Ohio:

Twenty years ago, I was challenged about curriculum content by a parent who felt a particular resource was “against the principles of our Founding Fathers.” If I continued with it, she said, she would contact the board of education. As many new teachers would, I feared for my job, my teaching certificate, and my reputation. I backtracked, changed my plans, and never used that particular resource again. I’ve felt a low-grade guilt ever since. Why hadn’t I been stronger? I should have explained my rationale and defended what was an excellent and appropriate choice of materials.

With time and confidence—and a strong belief in the teacher’s role in academic decisionmaking—I no longer feel anxious when challenged about curriculum content. On the contrary, I welcome it as a chance to engage in an open dialogue with parents. Disagreement can lead to compromise. My guiding principle: A parent can opt their child out of a curricular resource, but they do not have the right to make decisions about other parents’ children.

These days, teachers are at the receiving end of intense questions about curriculum and resources. This criticism feels like a personal betrayal of the trust we need to have with our parents and students. Public education is about teaching to all children. It’s about upholding the democratic principles of a nation. It’s about having an educated public who thinks critically about issues facing our world. Curriculum should help us meet those goals.

When teaching graduate students about curriculum, I tell them there are five types: The written curriculum, the taught curriculum, the assessed curriculum, the learned curriculum, and the absent curriculum. There are many other related tributaries of these, but knowing these five can help a teacher recognize where the parent’s resistance lies. Is it how the curricular standards are written or how the teacher is teaching the curriculum? Is it a problem with assessment data? It might be a child’s perception and reporting of what they have learned or not learned. Identifying the specific problem helps the solution fall into place. Here are a few additional considerations when working with parents who have challenged:

Keep it close. Curricular challenges are best handled at the classroom level, because teachers have the best chance at a trusting and productive conversation with the parent. If it escalates higher, it becomes less about one parent’s perspective and more about an entire school, district, or community—which diminishes the chances of a satisfactory outcome.

Know policy and guidelines . A district’s policies and guidelines are written to be clear and understandable, and they offer guidance on how challenges should be handled. We can’t lead through challenges unless we know the rules and how they apply to the curriculum.

Figure out the scope . Is the parent upset at one part of the curriculum or mad at the entire political atmosphere present in our world? Or is it somewhere in between? Once the scope of the criticism is determined, it’s possible to consider alternatives and solutions.

Listen. When meeting with a parent, it’s best to listen to understand rather than to respond. I’ve seen teachers struggle with a parent’s challenge when their mindset is “this parent is wrong, and it’s my job to change their mind.” It’s more helpful if the mindset is “this parent has a different perspective than I do. How can we better understand one another, and what outcomes would work for us both?”

It’s not an easy time to be an educator. With scrutiny and distrust added to our other responsibilities, it feels we will never find our balance again. I find great comfort in reminding myself that parent challenges are not, in fact, new. In fact, in the first part of the 20th century—and still today, in some cases—the question of evolution caused fury and mistrust from parents, which was projected onto teachers and school leaders. We’ve been through this before and we’ll go through it again. If we stick with what is best for our students, our schools, our communities, and our world, we’ll get through it—together.

‘Framing Is Paramount’

Naomi Simmons-Thorne is an educator and graduate student at the University of South Carolina. She studies teacher ed. and educational foundations:

The data is in. Despite the mongering, parents are not objecting to JEDI ( J ustice- E quity- D iversity-& I nclusion) lesson planning at a scale commensurate to the national hype. Fast-tracked under the pretense of “divisive concepts” and the notorious “critical race theory,” at least 42 states have witnessed legislative efforts to curb anti-bias and prejudice-reduction teaching and school policies since 2021, with at least 19 states succeeding by the closing of the 2021-22 school year.

Nationwide and locally, however, surveys continue to point to parent-pundit discrepancies on these hot-button issues. Findings suggest that parents simply do not feel as strongly as the pundits and lawmakers claiming to represent them. A national poll by NPR saw less than 20 percent of parents report unfavorably to their schools’ curricula on racism, gender, and sexuality.

Local data undercuts the demagoguery even further if the Albemarle County public school district is any indication. The district adopted a visionary yet controversial a nti- r acist p olicy in response to local grassroots advocacy. With the policy, school officials sought to foster districtwide commitments to addressing bias and racial disparities.

At the school level, the policy introduced curricular resources aimed to guide teachers in prejudice-reduction lesson planning and educating on systemic injustices. Citing the JEDI initiative as “critical race theory,” a now dismissed lawsuit condemning the measure was filed on behalf of five families who decried the initiative. Their legal filings recall the translucent sheets once ubiquitous on our classroom overheads, Xeroxed and see-through.

The filings were hollow mimics of the bad-faith arguments pundits have mainstreamed about JEDI school efforts. When weighed against the local data, the top-down nature of the vitriol was clear. Despite the ludicrous legal accusations of fostering “racial division, racial stereotyping, and racial hostility,” a parent survey reported fewer than 10 percent disagreeing with the question: “I support an increased focus on programs that identify and prioritize equity among all students, such as the division’s Anti-Racism Policy.”

For educators who incorporate JEDI principles, we must be mindful of both the data and the national climate. The former is a tailwind. The latter is a pendulum swinging at the whims of authorities. While most parents are unlikely to harangue hard-working educators with top-down accusations of reverse racism and indoctrination, a vocal minority is unfortunately so inclined.

Our society is sympathetic to conservative grievance. Therefore, many teachers—perhaps with the exception of those teaching in the most liberal of schools and districts—must meet these accusations with good-faith engagement. Many do not have the liberty of brazenly dismissing parents—however bad faith their behavior—and must develop practical strategies for addressing them head on.

In light of these circumstances, here are some tips teachers might look to integrate into their self-advocacy.

Unraveling Pundit Talking Points

Framing is paramount. When asking surveyees about teaching “the history of racism,” a Monmouth University Polling Institute survey saw a 75 percent approval rating. But when the same poll asked about the teaching of “critical race theory,” that rating plummeted down to 43 percent.

Parents must know that our JEDI lessons do not incite “reverse racism,” they expose the injustice of systemic racism. They do not posit whites as inherent oppressors, they expose supremacy as bad for all. Inviting students to consider another lens does not equate to indoctrination. It’s education.

Reminding Parents About the Ideals of Education

Education inheres that gift of change. A child who gleams “lights in the sky” sees stars after astronomy. We cannot be afraid of students leaving the classroom with new leases. Above all else, the classroom is the location where this change must be welcomed and nurtured.

Encouraging Parents to Tune in to Students and not Pundits

Unlike teachers, pundits are married to their talking points. When it comes to JEDI school initiatives, it is incumbent we do as education reporter Beth Hawkins says and “show the kids-eye view.”

Have concerned parents read student voices from the Durham Youth Project on why culturally relevant teaching is so vital? Have they listened to students share with Congress how JEDI initiatives enhance their school lives and those of their peers?

If contacted in good faith, these tips can all go a long way in mending some of our growing educational divides.

Administrators Need to Support Teachers

Michael Gaskell is a veteran middle school principal in New Jersey, having served as a special education teacher and administrator over the past 25 years. He has authored dozens of articles, is working on a third book, and engages educators and other experts on his podcast, “Big Ideas in Small Windows":

When we engage in direct and informal dialogue, we open doors not previously available. We should have an open mindset to parents, be it curricular disagreements or other issues, even if we do not agree with them. Returning to interactions that are live, and offline is the best way to resolve these issues, even including hotly contested political ones, like curricular content. It is up to boards of education to determine if the parents’ concern has merit, not a teacher or building administrator. We simply work toward engaging parents because we both share one common interest, the welfare of their child

This is such a hot topic, because there are such polarizing views being voiced among families, and this is expanding. These are not just blue and red disputes, either, as these issues run much deeper. Consider how one teacher engaged in a reading activity with a district-approved passage that included discussion about how Black girls are historically underrepresented in the literature.

While this is not even something that could be objectively debated—it seems obvious enough and there is evidence to prove it —a parent of a child in this class objected. What surprised me wasn’t that the parent was debating this topic. Rather, it was their outright refusal to engage the teacher. As her principal, I felt compelled to redirect the parent back to the teacher and was prepared to support her, while allowing the parent the opportunity to express their point. Before I knew it, this parent had ratcheted up their complaint beyond the district, and an “investigation” was initiated, at a governing body, never having engaged the teacher!

Teaching is harder than ever, and when outstanding teachers are subject to this kind of politicization and challenge, it can unsettle the strongest among them. In fact, excellent teachers tend to take a hit like this even harder, because they are so effective. They are not accustomed to harsh criticisms and rarely if ever face questions or challenges about their ability to teach and connect with children.

I felt compelled to defend this teacher and to stick by our school’s convictions about professionalism. Part of that professionalism is something I am concerned about: a fading art among parents and educators to talk. In our hyperactive world, talking directly with someone you disagree with appears to have been tossed out the window. Why? What happened?

It seems we have lost the appreciation or willingness to hear each other’s opposing views. This is bad news for everyone. Consider Adam Grant’s point that when we open our minds to alternative solutions, we can expand our own repertoire, even if we do not agree with differing viewpoints. At the very least, understanding the rationale of an opposing view helps us to recognize why someone may have come to that conclusion and opens the door to problem-solving dialogue.

I explained this to my wonderful teacher. She seemed so beaten down, and that worried me. I did not want her to become jaded by jarring negative external forces. The shelter of her classroom was a happy, learner friendly, robust and energetic place. The past couple years have been like no other, and teachers have been on the front lines. Her vibrant class community had to be protected.

Educators have a responsibility to model ethical behavior, and I reminded my teacher about this important role. It starts with me, as her building leader. This includes the expectation that we talk through our disagreements. That remains uncompromising in our school. Most parents get this, and therefore, overwhelmingly, issues are resolved when we redirect back to this most effective method of sorting out issues. In this case, the parent ignored my expectation, but what the teacher needed was for her leader to stand by her. She deserved that level of professionalism, but so did the child, and yes, this parent, too.

While most issues are resolved when parents and educators come together to engage in dialogue, there are those occasions less frequently when this does not work. The odds remain pretty strong when we can get people to the same table of discussion. I would bet on those odds. Interacting in this way humanizes both the parent and the educator and allows for an open lens for both to be able to see through.

We cannot fix every problem in education, and sometimes, issues remain unsettled. That is hard for great teachers, who aspire for the best, because they have high expectations for students and even higher expectations for themselves. As a school leader, it is my responsibility to point out patterns of success, not absolute and unrealistically flawless odds but darn good ones. This gives back perspective and control to those working so hard in the trenches, with children.

‘Be Proactive’

Angela M. Ward, Ph.D. is an anti-racist educator with over 25 years of experience in education. She is focused on creating identity-safe schools and workplaces. Follow her @2WardEquity on Twitter & Instagram and visit http://2wardequity.com/blog/ to subscribe to the 2Ward Equity newsletter:

As a teacher, I taught in a neighborhood like the ones around the country fighting their school boards on curricular and pedagogical decisions. I saw then and understood the rhetoric for what is was: fear that you will teach my child to think in a way that is counter to my values as a parent. As a parent, I can relate.

As a professional, accountable to support the academic identity development of the students in your care, you are duty bound to teach the curriculum adopted by the school board and written into district policy.

Here are some steps I take to work with parents:

Be proactive : Proactively, I shared an overarching theme and sequence of topics for the year. I let parents know that our major approach to learning would be reading, writing, and thinking.

Share your philosophy of teaching :

I shared that my role is to meet their children where they are and support their academic social, emotional, and cognitive growth.

Inquire about their goals :

I asked each parent to share with me in written form what their goals were for their children as learners.

Be available : I also invited them all to schedule time to meet with me and shared times I was available to meet with them to discuss their concerns face to face. It was in those face-to-face meetings where I established, month one, who would require extra attention from me.

And because of this permanent tan the good Lord has blessed me with, I did my due diligence to understand the history white teachers had with these families. I learned which parents I could meet alone with and those I needed a teacher or the principal to sit in with me. Yep, I requested a chaperone for parent meetings once or twice in my teaching career.

Build a reciprocal relationship with your principal : As an educational leader, I take personally the mental and physical safety of the students and staff in my care. A principal is your best advocate when you are faced with parents who are more focused on making you do what they want rather than working with you, the credentialed professional, to meet the goals and objectives and content you are required to teach.

Thanks to Erica, Jen, Naomi, Michael, and Angela for contributing their thoughts!

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching .

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• How to Make Parent Engagement Meaningful
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• How to Help Students Embrace Reading. Educators Weigh In
• 10 Strategies for Reaching English-Learners
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• Give Students a Role in Their Education
• Are There Better Ways Than Standardized Tests to Assess Students? Educators Think So
• How to Meet the Challenges of Teaching Science
• If I’d Only Known. Veteran Teachers Offer Advice for Beginners
• Writing Well Means Rewriting, Rewriting, Rewriting
• Christopher Emdin, Gholdy Muhammad, and More Education Authors Offer Insights to the Field
• How to Build Inclusive Classrooms
• What Science Can Teach Us About Learning
• The Best Ways for Administrators to Demonstrate Leadership
• Listen Up: Give Teachers a Voice in What Happens in Their Schools
• 10 Ways to Build a Healthier Classroom
• Educators Weigh In on Implementing the Common Core, Even Now
• What’s the Best Professional-Development Advice? Teachers and Students Have Their Say
• Plenty of Instructional Strategies Are Out There. Here’s What Works Best for Your Students
• How to Avoid Making Mistakes in the Classroom
• Looking for Ways to Organize Your Classroom? Try Out These Tips
• Want Insight Into Schooling? Here’s Advice From Some Top Experts

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column .

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Behaviorism, Key Terms, History, Theorists, Criticisms and Implications for Teaching

Behaviorism is a psychological theory based around understanding observable behavior. The theory posits that adjusting or manipulating the environment of the subject will cause them to react in observable ways. Behaviorists consider the subject to be passive, and learning being something that happens to them, rather than an active participant in learning. Behaviorism has a role in teaching in aiding teachers to understand how the environment affects learners’ behavior as well as a behavior management tool ( 1 ).

Key terms and definitions

• Classical conditioning : Learning through associating environmental stimuli with a particular behavior. This type of conditioning causes behavior to occur when the associated stimulus is present, regardless of if the original stimulus is or not. For example, a child might associate the word test with an unpleasant experience and exhibit avoidance behavior. Or the word chocolate with excited behavior like smiling and bouncing. In these cases, the word is the associated stimulus that produces an observable behavioral response, not the actual stimulus itself. Classical conditioning associates an undesired or desired outcome with a particular stimulus, which is usually neutral.
• Operant conditioning : Learning from the consequences of behavior. The addition or removal of stimuli will result in either a desired or undesired outcome for the subject. The outcome for the subject is called reinforcement or punishment, which can happen through either positive or negative means. The subject adjusts their behavior to either avoid the undesired outcome or bring about the desired outcome. Operant conditioning needs to be repetitive to be effective, as without reminders of the consequences for behavior, the behavior and related associations will go extinct. There are several examples of this in the next few sections.
• Punishment vs Reinforcement : These two terms are part of operant conditioning. They refer to the outcome for the subject of the process of conditioning. Reinforcement is a desired outcome for the subject, while punishment is an undesired outcome. Subsequently, reinforcement will usually encourage behavior by providing the desired outcome, while punishment will usually discourage behavior by providing an undesired outcome. For example, reinforcement can encourage behavior such as sitting nicely, because you will get told “well done” (desired outcome) while punishment might discourage behavior such as playing up because you will get told to sit at the teacher’s feet (undesired outcome).
• Negative vs Positive : In the context of behaviorism, negative means the removal of stimuli, and positive means the addition of stimuli. Because negative is often associated with “bad” and positive is often associated with “good” these terms are frequently misunderstood when used for behaviorist principles. Thinking of the terms as addition (positive) and subtraction (negative) symbols can help.
• Positive Reinforcement : Taking into account the previous discussion of these terms, positive reinforcement is the addition of stimuli to create a desired outcome for the subject. An example of positive reinforcement is praise or stickers. The stimuli of praise or stickers are introduced producing a desired outcome for the subject (they feel good). The result is that the behavior that caused the desired outcome of the introduction of stimulus increases.
• Positive Punishment : This refers to the addition of stimuli to create an undesired outcome for the subject. An example might be to write lines, the introduction of the stimuli of writing lines creates an undesired outcome of boredom and annoyance. The result might be that the learner no longer engages in the behavior that resulted in the undesired outcome.
• Negative reinforcement : The most frequently misunderstood concept in behaviorist theory, negative reinforcement does not refer to undesirable stimuli, but rather the removal of stimuli. Stimuli may be viewed as either good or bad by the subject. Negative reinforcement often comes as a response to undesired behavior in a subject, that inadvertently reinforces the behavior. An example might be the child throws the chair across the room and is sent to the principal’s office. Being removed from the classroom means the student does not have to complete a test. This is a desired outcome for the student, resulting in them repeating the behavior of chair-throwing next time there is work they do not wish to do. In this example, the stimulus is undesired work, and being sent to the principal removed that stimulus, creating negative reinforcement( 6 ).
• Negative Punishment : The term negative, as mentioned, refers to the subtraction or removal of stimuli, while punishment refers to an undesired outcome. Therefore negative punishment refers to the subtraction of stimuli to create an undesired outcome. An example might be being kept in at recess, the removal of the stimuli of playing outside with friends creates an undesired outcome. This should discourage the behavior that caused them to be kept inside such as not completing work or disrupting other class members.
• Radical Behaviorism : A development of behaviorism created by Skinner to attempt to bring the concept of internal processes to the theory. Early psychologists did not believe that internal processes influenced learning and that all learning occurred because of how the environment around the subject was controlled, which could be measured in observable behavior. However, radical behaviorism suggests that internal processes are important and can also be measured by observable behavior.
• Continuous Reinforcement : Earning the same reinforcement after every same action performed, such as a sticker on every correct answer.
• Fixed Interval Reinforcement : Receiving the reinforcement at the same time, every time. This might be a game every Friday for the learners who have consistently completed a particular task all week.
• Variable Interval Reinforcement : Reinforcement occurs at intermittent times at random. Such as praise and a sticker when a student sits quietly every 3-7 days, and at least once every week.
• Fixed Ratio Reinforcement : Learners get reinforcement when they engage in the behavior a set number of times. Such as when a learner receives a sticker for behaving a particular way during each learning session of the day.
• Variable Ratio Reinforcement : Learners receive reinforcement occurs when the learner engages in behavior a random number of times. For example, a learner may get the answer correct and receive a sticker every 3-7 times.

Skinner’s work can help educators to know the best times to give reinforcement to best avoid extinction. His experiments have revealed which of the reinforcement schedules are most effective. Continuousness is good when setting up habits, then retreating to other schedules is best. Both variable and ratio were revealed to be stronger than fixed or continuous, with variable ratio reinforcement being the least likely to result in the extinction of the desired behavior.

History and key psychologists in the evolution of behaviorism

Behaviorism as a fledgling concept first appeared in 1887, when Ivan Pavlov performed his famous experiment with dogs. The actual term Behaviorism was coined by John Watson in 1913 when he presented a paper that combined his own work with that of other psychologists to create a cohesive theory. There have been four major psychologists who were fundamental in the development of the theory, each building on each other’s work. Behaviorism dominated psychological thinking for several decades. While behaviorism is no longer as widely cited and used, it remains a dominant theory that underpins much of psychological thinking.

Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov ’s work was concerned with understanding classical conditioning. He completed a series of experiments to understand how environmental stimuli could be manipulated to adjust behavior. He came to conclusions about how the brain learns in relation to his observations.

In his most famous experiments, he used a bell to let dogs know they were about to receive a treat. His research was originally concerned with the production of saliva to aid digestion, but he noticed the dogs salivating in anticipation of their feeding schedule and became interested in what was happening. He began to measure the volume of saliva the dogs produced when an aural stimulus – a bell – was presented. He then measured the saliva produced with the addition of food. Within a few repetitions, the dogs associated the bell with the expectation of food and would produce saliva whether the food was present or not. Pavlov concluded that you could pair neutral stimuli with desired stimuli to create a particular outcome of observable behavior. Pavlov called this association of stimuli to a particular behavior conditional reflexes. He created the stimulus-response model, concluding that the brain learned in response to stimuli, by creating associations between those stimuli and particular behaviors.

Pavlov went on to see how adjusting the parameters of the study, such as length of time between the bell and the treat, or how randomization of whether the food was offered, affected the response to stimuli.

Pavlov’s work contributed the following influences to the theory of behaviorism:

• Behavior change stems from environmental influence
• Learning will be exhibited in an observable behavior change.
• All behavior comes from the formula stimulus-response.

Edward Thorndike

Edward Lee Thorndike was another important part of the development of this theory. His research formed the basis of understanding operant conditioning. He also created a learning model called the Law of Effect.

Thorndike performed experiments on animals to measure how long it took them to learn to solve a puzzle ie: press a button or pull a lever, to produce the desired outcome – getting to food. Thorndike observed that through practice the animal learned which behavior caused the desired outcome and so performed such behaviors more quickly.

From his experiments, he concluded that behavior that produces desired outcomes is likely to be repeated, while behavior that produces undesired outcomes will decrease over time and even go extinct. Thorndike called this the Law of Effect. His work is still influential in understanding behavior and learning today.

Thorndike also founded the field of Educational Psychology, publishing a book on it in 1903. He worked to apply his research to the field of teaching and was influential in reexamining the way that learning and punishment were viewed in the classroom setting.

Thorndike’s work contributed the following influences to the theory of behaviorism:

• Specific behavior will form as a result of consistent reinforcement.
• Both negative and positive outcomes can be influenced by changes in the environment.
• Behavior that consistently results in an undesired outcome for the subject will go extinct, while behavior that consistently results in the desired outcome will increase.

John B. Watson

John Broadus Watson is credited with collecting the work of other psychologists and creating the term behaviorism. Watson was focused on applying scientific foundations to the field of psychology, stating that behavior had to be both observable and measurable. The internal world of humans cannot be observed or measured, and therefore must not be used to understand behavior. He believed that psychology should focus on controllable and observable behavior to be taken seriously as a scientific field. While Watson’s conclusions about internal processes being irrelevant are now widely disregarded, his efforts are considered to be instrumental in the movement towards psychology being taken seriously within scientific academia.

Watson was the first psychologist to use a human subject to test ideas of classical conditioning. Little Albert, a 9 month old infant, was subjected to loud noises in association with animal stimuli until he produced a fear response to the animal whether the loud noise was present or not. His work with Little Albert is ethically questionable by today’s standards. The work would also not be considered scientifically viable as the conditions of the experiment did not meet modern expectations of a laboratory setting.

Watson contributed the following to the theory of behaviorism:

• Brought the work of other important psychologists together under an umbrella theory of Behaviorism.
• Further understanding on how the theory would bring psychology closer to being a scientific field.
• Learning must be observable and measurable, internal processes were irrelevant as they are impossible to measure or observe.

B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner ’s work continued to develop the field of behaviorism and attempted to broaden the definition of the theory. He created the concept of radical behaviorism and defined reinforcement principles, creating the model reinforcement schedules.

B.F. Skinner is considered the father of Radical Behaviorism. According to Skinner radical behaviorism is “the philosophy of a science of behavior treated as a subject matter in its own right apart from internal explanations, mental or physiological” (1989, p. 122 2 ).

Skinner rejected the notion that internal processes were irrelevant to learning, and examined how thoughts and feelings might be analyzed scientifically. His conclusions were that behavior was a reflection of internal processes and therefore could be analyzed. The effort to consider internal thoughts and feelings became known as radical behaviorism, and the application of these ideas is widely used today in applied behavior analysis.

Skinner worked to understand better the underlying reinforcement patterns that influenced behavior. He identified different kinds of reinforcement as mentioned in the definitions section of this essay.

Skinner was also passionate about education and believed that teachers needed to have a good understanding of how learning works. He believed learners needed to be viewed as active participants in learning instead of passive.

Skinner’s contributions to behaviorism continue to be the most widely used today:

• A better understanding of how internal processes contributed to the theory.
• Greater understanding of operant conditioning, including reinforcement schedules.
• Practical application of behaviorist theory to classroom and education settings.

Criticisms of behaviorism

There are several criticisms and observed limitations of behaviorism theory. While these concepts and principles predict observable behavioral responses in humans, internal cognitive processes are largely discounted. Further, behaviorism defines learning as observable behavior and only values learning resulting in modified behavior, which is only one aspect of learning. Learning takes place within a complex set of criteria and behaviorism reduces these processes to observable cause and effect.

Behaviorists theorize that learners are passive and that the teacher is in total control of the learning that occurs based on the environment they create, however, this removes the agency of the learner to engage meaningfully in their own learning. The expectation is that the learner will behave in an expected way in response to particular stimuli created by the teacher, and they are simply vessels into which learning is poured ( 4 ).

While Skinner attempted to remedy some of the issues above with his radical behaviorism theory, his attempts to place concepts like emotion, thoughts and conscious state into measurable criteria falls woefully short. The lack of account for internal processes means that reasons behind particular behavior are at best oversimplified and at worst overlooked. Unfortunately, trying to measure behavior without accounting for underlying reasons will not adequately aid the understanding of human behavior.

However, while behaviorism is now considered to be largely outdated, many aspects of the theory are still in active use or underpin current psychological concepts and beliefs.

Motivation, learning, and other implications for teaching

Behaviorism believes providing the correct environment, coupled with repetition of skills and knowledge tasks will cause learning to happen, and this is how education was managed for decades. While this is now less prevalent in the classroom setting, applying behaviorism in the classroom is still relevant from several perspectives. The teacher has the role of filling the learner with knowledge, behaviorism helps with this in different ways.

Creating an environment that has the correct stimuli to condition a state of learning is the behaviorist’s goal. Positive reinforcement is useful to modify behavior, and becoming familiar with Skinner’s reinforcement schedules so you can utilize the best methods in any given scenario is useful. Teachers can use this understanding to create an environment in which reinforcement works to the teacher’s and learner’s best advantage ( 7 ).

Educators can use behaviorist theory to improve student motivation. All learners want to feel good, and so using reinforcement schedules to provide those experiences will motivate students to adjust their behavior. As a behavioral management tool, behaviorism is still very relevant. Using positive reinforcement and reinforcement schedules to motivate children to try hard and do their best is one of the most useful concepts from the theory.

Using the methods outlined by behaviorists tends to be more useful for learning that can be easily assessed or monitored through observing learner behavior. Route learning or “skill and drill” memorisation style learning is a common learning style best suited to this theory. The emphasis on prizes, good grades and praise are useful for these units of learning. Using behaviorism in the classroom as a learning tool is good for scientific or formulaic learning such as times tables and languages that rely on being able to memorize a lot of information ( 3 ).

Useful tools and systems outlined by skinner include:

• Provide opportunities for students to understand the task expected of them
• Start at the bottom of the ladder – break the learning into easily achievable stages that learners can achieve more easily.
• Use repetition to help the learner build on previous learning and scaffold them to the next level.
• Use reinforcement schedules to help learners know they are on the right path.
• Start with continuous reinforcement, then as learner mastery improves, move towards other schedules to help the learner maintain the learning.

It is worth noting that the lessons that need more comprehension and deeper learning are less suited to these methods. For this kind of learning, behaviorism theory is best for use in motivating students to engage with their learning, rather than as a learning method, for which other learning theories such as social cognitive theory and constructionism are worth exploring ( 5 ).

Teaching Strategies that support Behaviorist Learning Theory:

• Gang-based learning.
• Question and answer.
• Positive reinforcement.
• Competency-based instruction.
• Gamification.
• Direct instruction.

While many aspects of behaviorism are now widely discredited, the underlying principles and observations of learning are still in wide use today. The concept of reinforcement schedules are used in many learning and teaching models , and understanding how students react and respond to environmental stimuli and how that might impact future learning and behavior is still valuable. Understanding the development of the theory and how thinking around these ideas evolved is useful to understanding the theory’s usefulness in a classroom setting, but it must be remembered that as a learning system, the theory is best suited to learning that requires memorization of facts rather than deep comprehension learning. As a behavior management technique, much of the theory is still useful to educators in the modern classroom.

References:

• Watson, J. B., & Kimble, G. A. (2017). Behaviorism. Routledge.
• Skinner, B. F. (1989). Recent issues in the analysis of behavior. Columbus, OH: Merrill.
• Moore, J. (2011). Behaviorism. The Psychological Record, 61(3), 449-463.
• Staddon, J. (2014). The new behaviorism. Psychology Press.
• Bargh, J. A., & Ferguson, M. J. (2000). Beyond behaviorism: on the automaticity of higher mental processes. Psychological bulletin, 126(6), 925.
• Baum, W. M. (2017). Understanding behaviorism: Behavior, culture, and evolution. John Wiley & Sons.
• Holland, J. G. (1978). BEHAVIORISM: PART OF THE PROBLEM OR PART OF THE SOLUTION? 1. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 11(1), 163-174.

Constructivist Learning Theory

• Theory of Moral Development – Piaget

Social Learning Theory: Albert Bandura

I am a professor of Educational Technology. I have worked at several elite universities. I hold a PhD degree from the University of Illinois and a master's degree from Purdue University.

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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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autonomy: personal | Dewey, John | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | Foucault, Michel | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | liberalism | Locke, John | Lyotard, Jean François | -->ordinary language --> | Plato | postmodernism | Rawls, John | rights: of children | Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Acknowledgments

The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

Copyright © 2018 by Harvey Siegel D.C. Phillips Eamonn Callan

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18 Pros and Cons of the Classical Education Model and Curriculum

The classical model of education could be compared to a large museum. You can see numerous rooms that are filled with exhibits, artifacts, and untold wonders about our past. Studying these items can then lead to new insights for the individual that encourages them to retain the information they’ve just learned.

The educational system emphasizes truth, goodness, and essentials like grammar, logic, and arithmetic. You would include items like music, geometry rhetoric, and astronomy into the curriculum as well. Using the classic education model also means that students would study Latin.

When examining the pros and cons of the classical education model and curriculum, it is evident immediately to see what it is such an effective approach. Children learn in three different stages regardless of their personal style in a method called “trivium.” The processes lead to a lifetime of learning where wisdom and knowledge come together harmoniously.

List of the Pros of the Classical Education Model and Curriculum

1. It encourages every student to engage with the learning process. The classical education model reaches children in unique ways based on their physical development. Students in the K-6 grades learn more about grammar here because they find it easy to memorize rhymes, songs, and chants to retain information. Kids who can remember specific tunes can remember lessons for a lifetime. Moving into grades 7-9, the logic stage occurs because this time is when children typically challenge facts and the authority of others.

When the rhetoric stage occurs in grades 10-12, the classical education model encourages students to become independent thinkers. The emphasis shifts to their ability to study, practice, and communicate with others. This skill allows them to understand the art of effective writing and persuasive speaking.

2. This approach offers centuries of results to study. The classical education model is as ancient as our recorded human history. Many of its core elements, including honesty, integrity, and courage work to encourage deeper thinking processes. The goal of this approach is to provide students more than an option to memorize algebraic formulas or remember specific dates from history. It is an educational system that works to explain the “why” component of learning.

Students who graduate from a classical educational curriculum are adept in numerous subjects. Math, science, reading, writing, the fine arts, and Latin are all part of their being. This combination of factors creates people who are thoughtful, gracious, and knowledgeable in their reasoning and logic.

3. Students receive a foundation of usable information. Despite there being a lack of specialization in this curriculum, students who go through the classical education model have a foundation of usable information. They can take the lessons learned and apply them in a variety of ways. It is not unusual for kids to grow up being artists, musicians, or writers because of the heavy emphasis on logic, rhetoric, and grammar that you see in this system.

Some students might struggle to memorize facts, but kids with dyslexia or other learning disabilities can work on memorizing core information. When they do, then that data becomes an asset that is usable in other areas of life.

4. It passes down our knowledge to the next generation. The first (and arguably most important) objective of a classical education is to pass along knowledge to the next generation. This process is how humans can preserve their traditions and culture. It’s a system of progressive education that focuses on the flaws of the past so that they can be corrected in the present or the future. Although some might argue that this system ignores the progress made by our forefathers, we get the chance to create a family tree that lets everyone feel connected to those who came before – or those that will come after.

5. The classical education curriculum is a broad-based system. When there is excessive specialization in the educational system, then you create people who have knowledge and wisdom for one field only. If asked what they could do in other areas of life, these graduates would be largely ignorant of their new expectations. That’s why there is such an emphasis on retraining when layoffs occur or industries fold. The classical education model suggests that by offering a well-rounded curriculum from the start, it is possible for people to transition between opportunities with greater ease because their knowledge has less fragmentation.

It’s the difference between mastering principles or acquiring skills.

6. The classical education model affirms an overarching goal. The center of the educational process must have a specific outcome in mind for the learning process to be beneficial to the student. This advantage gets to the heart of what makes schools like this unique. Even though there are debates and disagreements about how to implement this component of the curriculum, virtually every provider agrees with the idea that a child’s education is about human formation and transformation. Instead of trying to develop clones that turn into adults who lose their critical thinking processes, this approach sees the idea of making an informed choice as one of the most vital skills that anyone can develop.

7. There are opportunities for personalization. The classical education model might focus on facts and figures, but there is still a lot of room for personalization. You will find many families taking this approach while reading books from C.S. Lewis, Douglas Bond, or J.R.R. Tolkien. Families can have conversations about politics, theology, and other topics because this approach encourages everyone to share ideas in a safe environment. When parents have a healthy, respectful debate when differences are present in their lives, then their children can see and apply the concepts learned so that they can do the same thing in their lives one day.

8. The classical education model requires more accountability. You will not find students earning grades that they did not achieve simply because no child gets left behind. Students earn their education when this curriculum is the foundation of their learning. You must prove that you have the facts straight, language memorized, and debate ready before you get to proceed to the next lesson. If you’re unable to prove that you’ve retained the knowledge, then you stay put until you have the ability to create that outcome. This process is why many argue that the classical approach is the best one. There is no room for objectivity because everyone must pass the same set of standards to make progress.

9. It is an entertaining approach to learning. Alex Ross and Brigit Katz offer a lighter advantage to consider when looking at the pros and cons of the classical education model and curriculum. “There’s a reason why so many movies and TV shows are based on events of the ancient world,” the pair writes. “The history of Greece and Rome can be very entertaining.”

When students engage with the materials they need to learn, then it is easier to retain the information needed for a successful outcome. There are some incredible stories from the past, including the times when Emperor Nero would force people to sit through musicals for so long that their only recourse was to pretend to be dead. By remembering who we are and where we’ve been, it is a lot easier to see where we need to go.

10. The goal of each subject is to foster the humanity of the students. The classical education curriculum removes the factory approach. It attempts to show students the reasoning behind each action that we take. That process makes it easier to understand why specific reactions occur with our choices. Even though some students can struggle here because it requires them to truly reason instead of memorizing theorems and application steps for some subjects. You’re not jumping through hoops as some critics might suggest. The goal is to have a grasp on the lessons learned by our forefathers so that there is active wonderment about the rest of the world.

List of the Cons of the Classical Education Model and Curriculum

1. This approach creates division when paired with the modern educational system. The classical education model is not what most schools offer to their communities. Some administrators might even say that it goes against the agenda of the public educational system. As Liberty Classical Academy puts it, “This [statement] is accurate as it cultivates excellence rather than conformity, seeking not to conform, but rather reform the way education is practiced.”

The classical education model challenges children to leverage their natural abilities at each physical developmental stage of childhood. Students who come from this setting can be better equipped to manage a variety of challenges, but they also might not have the skills needed to get into a new job right away.

2. It is an approach that does not offer specialization. You will not see any standardized tests in the classical education model. There are no ways to specialize in this system to pursue a specific career. The goal of this approach is to teach students how to think, which encourages them how to live a good life. Anyone can take a certification class after graduation to create new job opportunities for themselves. This curriculum believes that you must know how to engage your logic and creative centers with your reading and writing before you’re an effective communicator.

3. This curriculum can change how students approach their first language. Students who go through the classical education model often experience difficulties when using their first language. This disadvantage is especially prevalent when it is English. Learning Latin or Greek reduces the clarity of other languages because the structures are so different. Why use two words when only one will do?

You will find long sentences where every adjective or adverb possible is used. The goal is to leave nothing to the imagination. Although this issue is not universal, it can be problematic for those who grow up with aspirations for writing.

4. There can be deficiencies in mathematics and science. When schools take the classical education model and curriculum over a modern approach, then there can be deficiencies in math and science. The ancient approach skips over these subjects because they were in their infancy during the stages of development. Even today, the idea is that you can become a great thinker and figure out the concepts after graduation because you’ve got a strong foundation to build upon for that work. If you are passionate about these subjects, then your experience in school might not be as beneficial as expected.

The quadrivium has four “liberal arts” elements that fall outside of the trivium in this approach. That means some schools might see problems in their music, astronomy, and geometry classes as well. There are some ways to fix this approach so that the rules of the mathematics language are learned, but there is a prevalence of students to lag behind after graduation from this curriculum.

5. The curriculum is very rigid in its approach. There is little room for flexibility if the classical education model is the preferred approach to learning. Some kids need legitimate accommodations because of learning disabilities, physical challenges, or other individualistic requirements. The classical approach is a tightly-controlled process that might offer some accountability, but it also has the power to stifle chances for some children to learn. Some kids learn better by going down rabbit trails than they do learning a series of rote facts that require memorization until they reach the seventh grade.

6. There is a performance element to the classical educational model. Proponents of the classical education model talk about the benefits of not going through standardized tests, but that doesn’t eliminate the requirement for specific performance. Kids learn through songs, chants, and rhyme using this method – and some children do not like that kind of attention. It makes them feel embarrassed, especially if they can’t remember something and the rest of their friends do.

Sallie Borrink talks about her hesitation in embracing this model because her daughter “does not like to perform in any way, shape, or form.” The little girl backed out of being in a wedding because she didn’t want people looking at her. If a child isn’t interested in singing or chanting, then this curriculum has no way to help.

7. Perfection is the standard for children in this system. The goal of the classical education model is to teach specific facts to students in a way that helps them to recall the information later in life. That means the only standard for success with this approach is perfection. Kids that are gifted and talented today often struggle with the idea of perfectionism as it is. Telling them that they’re failures because they forgot one fact can have a tremendous influence on their self-esteem throughout life. If you judge kids equally without taking into account the possibility of learning differences, then only a handful of children will ever meet that standard.

Think about the people through history that you can name as being the greatest philosophers, artists, thinkers, and scientists. That’s the result of the classical educational model. Everyone who doesn’t achieve success gets forgotten.

8. There are religious elements heavily influencing the educational process. The classical education developed during the time when Christianity was conquering Europe. The Medieval thinkers began to refine it to create the three paths that we use today. That’s why you will find most private providers of this curriculum coming from religious institutions. Although you don’t need to follow the spiritual guidelines often outlined in this approach, there are influences that could be bothersome to individuals that come from a different faith.

Bradley Green exemplifies this disadvantage with a post titled “How Classical Education Shapes Us as God Intended” for The Gospel Coalition. “One of the tragedies of much of contemporary education is a failure to retain the importance of language,” he writes. “Classical schools are trying to recover the centrality of the trivium as essential to true education.

When we examine the pros and cons of using the classical education model and curriculum, the emphasis on facts and didactic instruction can lead some students toward success.

Charles Sykes, author of Dumbing Down Our Kids, tells the story of an eighth-grade student named Andrea. She was eager to learn about science, but her school emphasized creativity over fact-based learning. Her goal was to learn real concepts instead of drawing pictures of scientists and picking up cereal with tongue depressors. When she wrote a letter to the school to complain, the district expelled her for being disrespectful.

Supporters also look to E.D. Hirsch and his book Cultural Literacy. He cites an article from the Washington Post where only two students could identify Thomas Jefferson and one could place the date of the Declaration of Independence. No one knew when the U.S. Civil War was fought.

The danger in using this approach is in the assumptions that get made. Those who provide this curriculum often see themselves as rebels. The reality is that a fusion of concepts is often necessary for students to receive a diverse, well-rounded education.

clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions

How politics and the pandemic put schools in the line of fire.

A previous version of this story incorrectly said that 39 percent of American children were on track in math. That is the percentage performing below grade level.

Test scores are down, and violence is up . Parents are screaming at school boards , and children are crying on the couches of social workers. Anger is rising. Patience is falling.

For public schools, the numbers are all going in the wrong direction. Enrollment is down. Absenteeism is up. There aren’t enough teachers, substitutes or bus drivers. Each phase of the pandemic brings new logistics to manage, and Republicans are planning political campaigns this year aimed squarely at failings of public schools.

Public education is facing a crisis unlike anything in decades, and it reaches into almost everything that educators do: from teaching math, to counseling anxious children, to managing the building.

Political battles are now a central feature of education, leaving school boards, educators and students in the crosshairs of culture warriors. Schools are on the defensive about their pandemic decision-making, their curriculums, their policies regarding race and racial equity and even the contents of their libraries. Republicans — who see education as a winning political issue — are pressing their case for more “parental control,” or the right to second-guess educators’ choices. Meanwhile, an energized school choice movement has capitalized on the pandemic to promote alternatives to traditional public schools.

“The temperature is way up to a boiling point,” said Nat Malkus, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “If it isn’t a crisis now, you never get to crisis.”

Experts reach for comparisons. The best they can find is the earthquake following Brown v. Board of Education , when the Supreme Court ordered districts to desegregate and White parents fled from their cities’ schools. That was decades ago.

Today, the cascading problems are felt acutely by the administrators, teachers and students who walk the hallways of public schools across the country. Many say they feel unprecedented levels of stress in their daily lives.

Remote learning, the toll of illness and death, and disruptions to a dependable routine have left students academically behind — particularly students of color and those from poor families. Behavior problems ranging from inability to focus in class all the way to deadly gun violence have gripped campuses. Many students and teachers say they are emotionally drained, and experts predict schools will be struggling with the fallout for years to come.

Teresa Rennie, an eighth-grade math and science teacher in Philadelphia, said in 11 years of teaching, she has never referred this many children to counseling.

“So many students are needy. They have deficits academically. They have deficits socially,” she said. Rennie said that she’s drained, too. “I get 45 minutes of a prep most days, and a lot of times during that time I’m helping a student with an assignment, or a child is crying and I need to comfort them and get them the help they need. Or there’s a problem between two students that I need to work with. There’s just not enough time.”

Many wonder: How deep is the damage?

Learning lost

At the start of the pandemic, experts predicted that students forced into remote school would pay an academic price. They were right.

“The learning losses have been significant thus far and frankly I’m worried that we haven’t stopped sinking,” said Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research.

Some of the best data come from the nationally administered assessment called i-Ready, which tests students three times a year in reading and math, allowing researchers to compare performance of millions of students against what would be expected absent the pandemic. It found significant declines, especially among the youngest students and particularly in math.

The low point was fall 2020, when all students were coming off a spring of chaotic, universal remote classes. By fall 2021 there were some improvements, but even then, academic performance remained below historic norms.

Take third grade, a pivotal year for learning and one that predicts success going forward. In fall 2021, 38 percent of third-graders were below grade level in reading, compared with 31 percent historically. In math, 39 percent of students were below grade level, vs. 29 percent historically.

Damage was most severe for students from the lowest-income families, who were already performing at lower levels.

A McKinsey & Co. study found schools with majority-Black populations were five months behind pre-pandemic levels, compared with majority-White schools, which were two months behind. Emma Dorn, a researcher at McKinsey, describes a “K-shaped” recovery, where kids from wealthier families are rebounding and those in low-income homes continue to decline.

“Some students are recovering and doing just fine. Other people are not,” she said. “I’m particularly worried there may be a whole cohort of students who are disengaged altogether from the education system.”

A hunt for teachers, and bus drivers

Schools, short-staffed on a good day, had little margin for error as the omicron variant of the coronavirus swept over the country this winter and sidelined many teachers. With a severe shortage of substitutes, teachers had to cover other classes during their planning periods, pushing prep work to the evenings. San Francisco schools were so strapped that the superintendent returned to the classroom on four days this school year to cover middle school math and science classes. Classes were sometimes left unmonitored or combined with others into large groups of unglorified study halls.

“The pandemic made an already dire reality even more devastating,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, referring to the shortages.

In 2016, there were 1.06 people hired for every job listing. That figure has steadily dropped, reaching 0.59 hires for each opening last year, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. In 2013, there were 557,320 substitute teachers, the BLS reported. In 2020, the number had fallen to 415,510. Virtually every district cites a need for more subs.

It’s led to burnout as teachers try to fill in the gaps.

“The overall feelings of teachers right now are ones of just being exhausted, beaten down and defeated, and just out of gas. Expectations have been piled on educators, even before the pandemic, but nothing is ever removed,” said Jennifer Schlicht, a high school teacher in Olathe, Kan., outside Kansas City.

Research shows the gaps in the number of available educators are most acute in areas including special education and educators who teach English language learners, as well as substitutes. And all school year, districts have been short on bus drivers , who have been doubling up routes, and forcing late school starts and sometimes cancellations for lack of transportation.

Many educators predict that fed-up teachers will probably quit, exacerbating the problem. And they say political attacks add to the burnout. Teachers are under scrutiny over lesson plans, and critics have gone after teachers unions, which for much of the pandemic demanded remote learning.

“It’s just created an environment that people don’t want to be part of anymore,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association. “People want to take care of kids, not to be accused and punished and criticized.”

Falling enrollment

Traditional public schools educate the vast majority of American children, but enrollment has fallen, a worrisome trend that could have lasting repercussions. Enrollment in traditional public schools fell to less than 49.4 million students in fall 2020 , a 2.7 percent drop from a year earlier .

National data for the current school year is not yet available. But if the trend continues, that will mean less money for public schools as federal and state funding are both contingent on the number of students enrolled. For now, schools have an infusion of federal rescue money that must be spent by 2024.

Some students have shifted to private or charter schools. A rising number , especially Black families , opted for home schooling. And many young children who should have been enrolling in kindergarten delayed school altogether. The question has been: will these students come back?

Some may not. Preliminary data for 19 states compiled by Nat Malkus, of the American Enterprise Institute, found seven states where enrollment dropped in fall 2020 and then dropped even further in 2021. His data show 12 states that saw declines in 2020 but some rebounding in 2021 — though not one of them was back to 2019 enrollment levels.

Joshua Goodman, associate professor of education and economics at Boston University, studied enrollment in Michigan schools and found high-income, White families moved to private schools to get in-person school. Far more common, though, were lower-income Black families shifting to home schooling or other remote options because they were uncomfortable with the health risks of in person.

“Schools were damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t,” Goodman said.

At the same time, charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded, saw enrollment increase by 7 percent, or nearly 240,000 students, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. There’s also been a surge in home schooling. Private schools saw enrollment drop slightly in 2020-21 but then rebound this academic year, for a net growth of 1.7 percent over two years, according to the National Association of Independent Schools, which represents 1,600 U.S. schools.

Absenteeism on the rise

Even if students are enrolled, they won’t get much schooling if they don’t show up.

Last school year, the number of students who were chronically absent — meaning they have missed more than 10 percent of school days — nearly doubled from before the pandemic, according to data from a variety of states and districts studied by EveryDay Labs, a company that works with districts to improve attendance.

This school year, the numbers got even worse.

In Connecticut, for instance, the number of chronically absent students soared from 12 percent in 2019-20 to 20 percent the next year to 24 percent this year, said Emily Bailard, chief executive of the company. In Oakland, Calif., they went from 17.3 percent pre-pandemic to 19.8 percent last school year to 43 percent this year. In Pittsburgh, chronic absences stayed where they were last school year at about 25 percent, then shot up to 45 percent this year.

“We all expected that this year would look much better,” Bailard said. One explanation for the rise may be that schools did not keep careful track of remote attendance last year and the numbers understated the absences then, she said.

The numbers were the worst for the most vulnerable students. This school year in Connecticut, for instance, 24 percent of all students were chronically absent, but the figure topped 30 percent for English-learners, students with disabilities and those poor enough to qualify for free lunch. Among students experiencing homelessness, 56 percent were chronically absent.

Fights and guns

Schools are open for in-person learning almost everywhere, but students returned emotionally unsettled and unable to conform to normally accepted behavior. At its most benign, teachers are seeing kids who cannot focus in class, can’t stop looking at their phones, and can’t figure out how to interact with other students in all the normal ways. Many teachers say they seem younger than normal.

Amy Johnson, a veteran teacher in rural Randolph, Vt., said her fifth-graders had so much trouble being together that the school brought in a behavioral specialist to work with them three hours each week.

“My students are not acclimated to being in the same room together,” she said. “They don’t listen to each other. They cannot interact with each other in productive ways. When I’m teaching I might have three or five kids yelling at me all at the same time.”

That loss of interpersonal skills has also led to more fighting in hallways and after school. Teachers and principals say many incidents escalate from small disputes because students lack the habit of remaining calm. Many say the social isolation wrought during remote school left them with lower capacity to manage human conflict.

Just last week, a high-schooler in Los Angeles was accused of stabbing another student in a school hallway, police on the big island of Hawaii arrested seven students after an argument escalated into a fight, and a Baltimore County, Md., school resource officer was injured after intervening in a fight during the transition between classes.

There’s also been a steep rise in gun violence. In 2021, there were at least 42 acts of gun violence on K-12 campuses during regular hours, the most during any year since at least 1999, according to a Washington Post database . The most striking of 2021 incidents was the shooting in Oxford, Mich., that killed four. There have been already at least three shootings in 2022.

Back to school has brought guns, fighting and acting out

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security, which maintains its own database of K-12 school shootings using a different methodology, totaled nine active shooter incidents in schools in 2021, in addition to 240 other incidents of gunfire on school grounds. So far in 2022, it has recorded 12 incidents. The previous high, in 2019, was 119 total incidents.

David Riedman, lead researcher on the K-12 School Shooting Database, points to four shootings on Jan. 19 alone, including at Anacostia High School in D.C., where gunshots struck the front door of the school as a teen sprinted onto the campus, fleeing a gunman.

Seeing opportunity

Fueling the pressure on public schools is an ascendant school-choice movement that promotes taxpayer subsidies for students to attend private and religious schools, as well as publicly funded charter schools, which are privately run. Advocates of these programs have seen the public system’s woes as an excellent opportunity to push their priorities.

EdChoice, a group that promotes these programs, tallies seven states that created new school choice programs last year. Some are voucher-type programs where students take some of their tax dollars with them to private schools. Others offer tax credits for donating to nonprofit organizations, which give scholarships for school expenses. Another 15 states expanded existing programs, EdChoice says.

The troubles traditional schools have had managing the pandemic has been key to the lobbying, said Michael McShane, director of national research for EdChoice. “That is absolutely an argument that school choice advocates make, for sure.”

If those new programs wind up moving more students from public to private systems, that could further weaken traditional schools, even as they continue to educate the vast majority of students.

Kevin G. Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, who opposes school choice programs, sees the surge of interest as the culmination of years of work to undermine public education. He is both impressed by the organization and horrified by the results.

“I wish that organizations supporting public education had the level of funding and coordination that I’ve seen in these groups dedicated to its privatization,” he said.

A final complication: Politics

Rarely has education been such a polarizing political topic.

Republicans, fresh off Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia governor’s race, have concluded that key to victory is a push for parental control and “parents rights.” That’s a nod to two separate topics.

First, they are capitalizing on parent frustrations over pandemic policies, including school closures and mandatory mask policies. The mask debate, which raged at the start of the school year, got new life this month after Youngkin ordered Virginia schools to allow students to attend without face coverings.

The notion of parental control also extends to race, and objections over how American history is taught. Many Republicans also object to school districts’ work aimed at racial equity in their systems, a basket of policies they have dubbed critical race theory. Critics have balked at changes in admissions to elite school in the name of racial diversity, as was done in Fairfax, Va. , and San Francisco ; discussion of White privilege in class ; and use of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which suggests slavery and racism are at the core of American history.

“Everything has been politicized,” said Domenech, of AASA. “You’re beside yourself saying, ‘How did we ever get to this point?’”

Part of the challenge going forward is that the pandemic is not over. Each time it seems to be easing, it returns with a variant vengeance, forcing schools to make politically and educationally sensitive decisions about the balance between safety and normalcy all over again.

At the same time, many of the problems facing public schools feed on one another. Students who are absent will probably fall behind in learning, and those who fall behind are likely to act out.

A similar backlash exists regarding race. For years, schools have been under pressure to address racism in their systems and to teach it in their curriculums, pressure that intensified after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Many districts responded, and that opened them up to countervailing pressures from those who find schools overly focused on race.

Some high-profile boosters of public education are optimistic that schools can move past this moment. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona last week promised, “It will get better.” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “If we can rebuild community-education relations, if we can rebuild trust, public education will not only survive but has a real chance to thrive.”

But the path back is steep, and if history is a guide, the wealthiest schools will come through reasonably well, while those serving low-income communities will struggle. Steve Matthews, superintendent of the 6,900-student Novi Community School District in Michigan, just northwest of Detroit, said his district will probably face a tougher road back than wealthier nearby districts that are, for instance, able to pay teachers more.

“Resource issues. Trust issues. De-professionalization of teaching is making it harder to recruit teachers,” he said. “A big part of me believes schools are in a long-term crisis.”

Valerie Strauss contributed to this report.

The pandemic’s impact on education

The latest: Updated coronavirus booster shots are now available for children as young as 5 . To date, more than 10.5 million children have lost one or both parents or caregivers during the coronavirus pandemic.

In the classroom: Amid a teacher shortage, states desperate to fill teaching jobs have relaxed job requirements as staffing crises rise in many schools . American students’ test scores have even plummeted to levels unseen for decades. One D.C. school is using COVID relief funds to target students on the verge of failure .

Higher education: College and university enrollment is nowhere near pandemic level, experts worry. ACT and SAT testing have rebounded modestly since the massive disruptions early in the coronavirus pandemic, and many colleges are also easing mask rules .

DMV news: Most of Prince George’s students are scoring below grade level on district tests. D.C. Public School’s new reading curriculum is designed to help improve literacy among the city’s youngest readers.

Functionalist Perspective on Education

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

Functionalists view education as a system that fulfills crucial societal needs. It transmits cultural values and knowledge (socialization), prepares individuals for various roles (social integration), promotes order and stability (social control), and equips individuals with workforce skills (economic development).

Key Takeaways

• Functionalism contends that all of the roles and institutions in a society are essential to its function. Although functionalist ideas have circulated since antiquity, Durkheim was the first to formalize a functionalist perspective on sociology.
• Durkheim considered education to reflect the needs and customs and beliefs of the society providing it. To him, it served an essential function in instilling societal values and socializing children. He also considered education to teach skills essential for establishing the division of labor in society.
• Schultz, another functionalist, considered education to be an investment that people made in themselves in order to gain access to higher-paying and higher-status jobs.

The Functionalist View of Society

Functionalism is what sociologists call a structural-consensus theory. By structural, sociologists mean that functionalists argue that there exists a social structure that shapes individual behavior through the process of socialization.

Functionalists believe that all of the institutions, roles, norms, and so on of a society serve a purpose beneficial, if not indispensable for, the long-term survival of the society.

The theory rose to prominence in the works of 19th-century sociologists who viewed societies as organisms.

Emile Durkheim, for instance, argued that it was necessary to understand the needs of the social organism to which social phenomena correspond (Pope, 1975).

1. Socialization and Social Solidarity (Durkheim)

Emile Durkheim believed that schools are essential for imprinting shared social values into children. The education system meets a functional pre-request of society by passing on the culture and values of society.

This is achieved through the hidden curriculum and PSHE lessons. This helps to build social solidarity as it teaches students the core values of society.

Durkheim discussed the phenomenon of education as a social fact. He considered education social in nature, origins, and functions. He opposed the idea of one perfect educational system for all societies.

Instead, Durkheim argues that education varied in each stage of human civilization because each society must have a system of education corresponding to its own needs and reflecting the customs and beliefs of day-to-day life. Thus, education can be studied through the lens of sociology (Durkheim, 1956).

Durkheim defined education as the influence exercised by adult generations on those that are not yet ready for social life, intended to arouse and develop in children a number of physical, intellectual, and moral states demanded of them by both the political society as a whole and the special niche of society that he is destined to occupy (Durkheim, 1956).

By this definition, Durkheim believed that education methodologically socialized the younger generation. It did so by performing two major functions in advanced industrial societies – transmitting the shared values of society and teaching the specialized skills for an economy based on a division of labor (Durkheim, 1956).

Education, in Durkheim’s view, created a sufficient amount of homogeneity for society to survive through instilling a sense of social solidarity in the individual. This involves instilling a sense of belonging to wider society, a sense of commitment to the importance of working toward society’s goals, and a feeling that the

Durkheim argued that, to become attached to society, children must feel intimately connected  and committed to the society. He believed that teaching history in particular accomplished this (Durkheim, 1956).

Teaching Social Roles

Durkheim also argued that schools in complex societies teach how people can cooperate with people who are neither their kin nor friends in a way that neither the family or friendship can.

Thus, school is the only institution that can prepare children for membership in wider society by enforcing a set of rules applied to all children.

2. The Division of Labor

Durkheim argued that education’s crucial function in an advanced industrial economy is the teaching of specialized skills required for a complex division of labor .

In traditional, pre-industrialised societies, skills could be passed on through family or direct apprenticeships. This means that formal education in school was not necessary.

However, because factory-based production involves the application of advanced scientific knowledge, years of formal education in schools became more necessary.

Education was also essential to modern societies in Durkheim’s view because social solidarity is largely based on the interdependence of specialized skills.

Just as social solidarity is based on cooperation between people with different skill sets, school serves as an ideal environment for children to learn to work and socialize with people from different backgrounds.

3. Developing Human Capital (Schultz)

Another functionalist perspective on education is that of T.W. Schultz. Schultz viewed the function of education as the development of human capital.

Investment in education benefits the wider economy, as education can provide properly trained, qualified and flexible workforce.

To Schultz, human capital was the acquisition of all of the useful skills and knowledge needed for a deliberate investment. Schultz considered much of the investment that people do to be for human capital.

For example, direct expenditures on education and health, as well as earnings foregone by mature students attending school and workers doing training on-the-job are all examples of human capitals.

In this view, education is an investment in human capital that people make in order to have access to better paying jobs, spend less time in the unemployment market, and make speedier transitions to their desired careers (Wahrenburg & Weldi, 2007).

4. Role Allocation (Davis and Moore)

The education system provides a means to selecting and sifting people into the social hierarchy. In a meritocratic society access to jobs and power, wealth and status are directly linked to educational achievement.

Davis and Moore examined education through the lens of role allocation. They believed that education selects talented individuals and allocates them to the most important roles in society.

For example, the higher monetary and status rewards for those who have the jobs of, say, a doctor or a pilot encourage competition.

Accordingly, Davis and Moore believed that education sifts and sorts people according to their ability (Grandjean & Bean, 1975).

5. Bridge between Family and Society

Parsons believed that schools provide a link between the family and wider society which allows students to move from the ascribed status and particularistic values of the home to the meritocratic and universalistic values of wider society.

Parsons viewed education as being part of meritocracy . In a meritocratic system, everyone has equality of opportunity. Achievements and rewards are based on effort and ability — achieved status — over the situations of how someone was born and raised — acquired status.

Consequently, education instills values of competition, equality, and individualism.

In this view, education is a secondary agent of socialization, creating a bridge between family and society. Within the family, children are judged by the standards of their parents.

However, in wider society, the individual is treated and judged in terms of universal standards that are applied to everyone, regardless of their kinship ties (Parsons, 1937).

Similarly, the child’s status is ascribed, or fixed by birth, in the family.

Meanwhile, status in adult life is, in some part, achieved. Individuals, for instance, achieve their occupational skills. In both cases, it is necessary for children to move from the standards and status of their family to the universal standards and achieve status in society (Parsons, 1937).

School, Parsons argued, prepares children for this transition, representing society in a microcosm. According to Parsons, schools also install the values of achievement and equality of opportunity.

These values have important functions in advanced industrialized societies, which require a motivated and highly skilled workforce.

Both low and high achievers in the school system will see the system as just and fair because status is achieved in a situation where everyone has an equal chance of success (Parsons, 1937).

Criticisms of the Functionalist Perspective on Education

Functionalist perspectives on education have been criticized for several reasons:

General Criticism

Firstly, functionalists ignore dysfunctional aspects of education, such as negative conflict.  Sociologists have also noted that the functionalist view is more applicable in societies with a single dominant and shared culture.

In multicultural societies with, say, different ethnic groups with different cultures and values, it may be difficult to reconcile differences through education.

Furthermore, functionalists tend to assume that education successfully socializes individuals. However, numerous studies suggest that not all pupils conform to the values taught by school.

Marxists have put forth a notable critique of functionalism. Bowles and Gintis (1976), for example, argued that education perpetuated a meritocracy myth — that one’s educational achievements and failures are solely one’s fault and based on the quality of one’s efforts — when, in reality, factors such as race and class heavily influence one’s opportunities and achievement.

Feminists have taken another Marxist idea: that of the hidden curriculum — the idea that schools indoctrinate values not only by what is taught explicitly, but what is taught by the structure of the school itself. They have argued that this hidden curriculum maintains and reinforces patriarchy , not meritocracy (Acker, 1987).

Outside of Marxism, the sociologist Wong criticized functionalism for seeing children as passive puppets of socialization when the process is much more complex and involves teacher-pupil relationships.

There is also, ultimately, a weak link between educational achievement and economic success (Wahrenburg & Weldi, 2007).

Criticism of Durkheim

There are several reasons why scholars have criticized Durkheim’s functionalist perspective on education. For example, postmodernists may criticize Durkheim for his assumption that society needs shared values.

For example, in many countries, such as the United States, it is debatable as to whether or not there is single culture, and there are communities that are largely cut off from the mainstream.

Marxists, meanwhile, have criticized the relationship between school and work. #

While Durkheim sees school as a fundamentally neutral institution that transmits values and skills to individuals in a way that enables economies to function, Marxists have argued that schools teach proletariat children to be passive and submit to authority, making them easier to exploit later in life (Bowles & Gintis, 2011).

Criticism of Parsons

The main criticisms of Parsons’ view on education come from Marxism , and particularly the idea that schools are meritocratic. In reality, even in situations where schools may treat pupils the same way, inequalities within the class structure result in unequal opportunities.

For example, a working-class child may have lesser access to quality education than the child of upper-class parents, especially when the latter provide their kin with services such as tutoring and enrollment in elite educational institutions and preparatory schools.

Ultimately, this results in a widening of pre-existing class inequality, with the parents of the bourgeoisie being able to maintain their hold over intergenerational wealth by giving their children access to stronger economic opportunities through higher educational achievement (Morrow & Tours, 1995).

Acker, S. (1987). Feminist theory and the study of gender and education. International review of education, 33 (4), 419-435.

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life . Haymarket Books.

Davis, K., & Moore, W. E. (1945). Pp. 47-53 in Class, Status and Power, edited by R. Bendix and SM Lipset.

Durkheim, E. (1956). Education and sociology . Simon and Schuster.

Grandjean, B. D., & Bean, F. D. (1975). The Davis-Moore theory and perceptions of stratification: some relevant evidence. Social Forces, 54 (1), 166-180.

Morrow, R. A., & Torres, C. A. (1995). Social theory and education: A critique of theories of social and cultural reproduction . SUNY Press.

Parsons, T. (1937). Remarks on Education and the Professions. The International Journal of Ethics, 47 (3), 365-369.

Pope, W. (1975). Durkheim as a Functionalist. Sociological Quarterly, 16 (3), 361-379.

Wahrenburg, M., & Weldi, M. (2007). Return on investment in higher education: Evidence for different subjects, degrees and gender in Germany . Johann Wolfgang Goethe Univ., Chair of Banking and Finance.

Read our research on: Gun Policy | International Conflict | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

6. teachers’ views on the state of public k-12 education.

Overall, teachers have a negative view of the U.S. K-12 education system – both the path it’s been on in recent years and what its future might hold.

The vast majority of teachers (82%) say that the overall state of public K-12 education has gotten worse in the last five years. Only 5% say it’s gotten better, and 11% say it has gotten neither better nor worse.

Looking to the future, 53% of teachers expect the state of public K-12 education to be worse five years from now. One-in-five say it will get better, and 16% expect it to be neither better nor worse.

We asked teachers who say the state of public K-12 education is worse now than it was five years ago how much each of the following has contributed:

• The current political climate (60% of teachers say this is a major reason that the state of K-12 education has gotten worse)
• The lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic (57%)
• Changes in the availability of funding and resources (46%)

Elementary school teachers are especially likely to point to resource issues – 54% say changes in the availability of funding and resources is a major reason the K-12 education system is worse now. By comparison, 41% of middle school and 39% of high school teachers say the same.

Differences by party

Overall, teachers who are Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are as likely as Republican and Republican-leaning teachers to say that the state of public K-12 education is worse than it was five years ago.

But Democratic teachers are more likely than Republican teachers to point to the current political climate (65% vs. 54%) and changes in the availability of funding and resources (50% vs. 40%) as major reasons.

Democratic and Republican teachers are equally likely to say that lasting effects of the pandemic are a major reason that the public K-12 education is worse than it was five years ago (57% each).

K-12 education and political parties

We asked teachers which political party they trust to do a better job on various aspects of public K-12 education.

Across each of the issues we asked about, roughly a third or more of teachers say they don’t trust either party to do a better job. In particular, a sizable share (42%) trust neither party when it comes to shaping the school curriculum.

On balance, more teachers say they trust the Democratic Party to do a better job handling the things we asked about than say they trust the Republican Party.

About a third of teachers say they trust the Democratic Party to do a better job in ensuring adequate funding for schools, adequate pay and benefits for teachers, and equal access to high quality K-12 education for students. Only about one-in-ten teachers say they trust the Republican Party to do a better job in these areas.

A quarter of teachers say they trust the Democratic Party to do a better job in shaping the school curriculum and making schools safer; 11% and 16% of teachers, respectively, say they trust the Republican Party in these areas.

Across all the items we asked about, shares ranging from 15% to 17% say they are not sure which party they trust more, and shares ranging from 4% to 7% say they trust both parties equally.

A majority of public K-12 teachers (58%) identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party. About a third (35%) identify with or lean toward the GOP.

For each aspect of the education system we asked about, both Democratic and Republican teachers are more likely to say they trust their own party to do a better job than to say they trust the other party.

However, across most of these areas, Republican teachers are more likely to say they trust neither party than to say they trust their own party.

For example, about four-in-ten Republican teachers say they trust neither party when it comes to ensuring adequate funding for schools and equal access to high quality K-12 education for students. Only about a quarter of Republican teachers say they trust their own party on these issues.

The noteworthy exception is making schools safer, where similar shares of Republican teachers trust their own party (41%) and neither party (35%) to do a better job.

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Report Materials

Table of contents, ‘back to school’ means anytime from late july to after labor day, depending on where in the u.s. you live, among many u.s. children, reading for fun has become less common, federal data shows, most european students learn english in school, for u.s. teens today, summer means more schooling and less leisure time than in the past, about one-in-six u.s. teachers work second jobs – and not just in the summer, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Michigan's Jim Harbaugh was threatened with suspension by NCAA last fall for lawyer's social media criticism

The ncaa told tom mars, harbaugh's attorney, if he didn't stop criticizing the organization, harbaugh could be suspended.

The NCAA threatened to suspend former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh last fall if his attorney did not halt his satirical social media comments of the association's ongoing investigation of the Wolverines football program. 

In a "letter of admonition" to attorney Thomas Mars obtained by CBS Sports, current NCAA Committee on Infractions chair Dave Roberts wrote in October 2023 that if Mars didn't halt his posts criticizing the NCAA's investigative process "the COI will consider appropriate penalties, including immediate suspension of your client."

Roberts cited NCAA bylaw 19.4.6-(i) which gives the COI authority to " … sanction parties and/or their representative(s) for behaviors that inhibit the committee's ability to effectively manage the docket, ensure a professional and civil decorum in all proceedings or otherwise efficiently solve infractions cases."

The letter ends with seemingly a final warning from Roberts that read, "There will not be any further admonitions …" 

Mars did not respond to the NCAA and continued his critical posts but it seems Roberts took no further action. 

https://t.co/owLMMmwhue pic.twitter.com/x7OSF266wR — Tom Mars (@TomMarsLaw) October 21, 2023

The letter came during dual investigations of Michigan for NCAA recruiting violations during the COVID-19 dead period and sign stealing. In a Tuesday release, the NCAA said a negotiated resolution had been reached in the first case . "One former coach," – supposedly Harbaugh – "did not participate in the agreement, and that portion of the case will be considered separately by the Committee on Infractions …" the statement said. 

Roberts' letter was dated Oct. 26, 2023, the week the sign-stealing scandal broke. That came during a bye week in Michigan's national championship season. 

Harbaugh was suspended twice last season – first by Michigan for the first three games of the season as a way to mitigate penalties in the first case. He was then suspended by the Big Ten in the final three regular-season games following the sign-stealing scandal. 

That investigation remains ongoing. Harbaugh's level of complicity in the case was announced Tuesday after allegations he misled NCAA investigators. Harbaugh has said he did not lie to the NCAA. Since Harbaugh is gone to the NFL and a negotiated settlement was reached, Michigan isn't expected to suffer major sanctions. 

However, Mars said neither he nor Harbaugh were contacted by Michigan or the NCAA regarding a negotiated resolution in this case.  

"They've obviously changed their position to get this resolved and it doesn't surprise me. I can almost hear the wheels of the bus going, 'whomp, whomp [over Harbaugh],' " Mars said. 

NCAA focused on top priority recruiting issues. 🚫🍪 https://t.co/3h0brJluUs pic.twitter.com/LIeA0rCmF0 — Tom Mars (@TomMarsLaw) February 23, 2024

Mars also said at one point the NCAA demanded all of Harbaugh's texts and emails for the last 2 ½ years. That request included all personal emails, Mars said. He requested the NCAA limit the scope of the request to Michigan athletics but was told no. The NCAA wanted in 24 hours what Mars said were 6,199 emails and at least that number of texts. 

"At which point I said, 'OK, you're not getting any of them … ,' " Mars told CBS Sports. "It's an invasion not even the Justice Department is allowed to do." 

That situation arose before Harbaugh left for the Los Angeles Chargers in January. Mars estimated such a search would have taken weeks and $38,000 in legal fees.

Harbaugh is no longer compelled to cooperate with the NCAA in either Michigan case since he left for the Chargers. He could still suffer a show-cause penalty the first case that could hinder his return to college coaching. Harbaugh's status is similar to that of Las Vegas Raiders coach Antonio Pierce . 

Roberts has a distinguished legal and compliance background. His third term as infractions committee chair expires in August. He is a special advisor to USC president Carol Folt. He was the school's interim AD when Lynn Swann resigned in 2019. He joined USC in 2010 as vice president of athletics compliance. In 2017, he was recognized with an award from the National Association for Athletics Compliance. 

At one point, Mars pointed out what he said was a conflict of interest regarding Roberts. USC is joining the Big Ten on July 1. He did not receive a response. 

Neither USC nor the NCAA immediately responded to requests for comment. 

The letter to Mars was copied to Michigan AD Warde Manuel, Michigan president Santa Ono, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and Kyle Skillman, the attorney from Bond, Schoeneck and King assisting Michigan in the investigation. The law firm is one of the industry leaders in guiding schools through NCAA inquiries. 

Mars was at one time one of the NCAA's star additions to the newly formed Independent Accountability Resolution Panel in 2019. Mars was on the Complex Case Unit within the IARP for 12 months before resigning. The IARP was disbanded earlier this year essentially for its inability to handle complex cases.

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NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism

Updated April 16, 2024 at 11:27 AM ET

NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.

Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.

Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press . It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is among those now targeting NPR's new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network. Among others, those posts include a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist and another that appeared to minimize rioting during social justice protests that year. Maher took the job at NPR last month — her first at a news organization .

In a statement Monday about the messages she had posted, Maher praised the integrity of NPR's journalists and underscored the independence of their reporting.

"In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen," she said. "What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests."

The network noted that "the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions."

In an interview with me later on Monday, Berliner said the social media posts demonstrated Maher was all but incapable of being the person best poised to direct the organization.

"We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner said. "And this seems to be the opposite of that."

He said that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR's coverage known to news leaders and to Maher's predecessor as chief executive before publishing his essay.

Berliner has singled out coverage of several issues dominating the 2020s for criticism, including trans rights, the Israel-Hamas war and COVID. Berliner says he sees the same problems at other news organizations, but argues NPR, as a mission-driven institution, has a greater obligation to fairness.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

A "final warning"

The circumstances surrounding the interview were singular.

Berliner provided me with a copy of the formal rebuke to review. NPR did not confirm or comment upon his suspension for this article.

In presenting Berliner's suspension Thursday afternoon, the organization told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists. It called the letter a "final warning," saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR's policy again. Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union but says he is not appealing the punishment.

The Free Press is a site that has become a haven for journalists who believe that mainstream media outlets have become too liberal. In addition to his essay, Berliner appeared in an episode of its podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss.

A few hours after the essay appeared online, NPR chief business editor Pallavi Gogoi reminded Berliner of the requirement that he secure approval before appearing in outside press, according to a copy of the note provided by Berliner.

In its formal rebuke, NPR did not cite Berliner's appearance on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation program last Tuesday night, for which NPR gave him the green light. (NPR's chief communications officer told Berliner to focus on his own experience and not share proprietary information.) The NPR letter also did not cite his remarks to The New York Times , which ran its article mid-afternoon Thursday, shortly before the reprimand was sent. Berliner says he did not seek approval before talking with the Times .

Berliner says he did not get permission from NPR to speak with me for this story but that he was not worried about the consequences: "Talking to an NPR journalist and being fired for that would be extraordinary, I think."

Berliner is a member of NPR's business desk, as am I, and he has helped to edit many of my stories. He had no involvement in the preparation of this article and did not see it before it was posted publicly.

In rebuking Berliner, NPR said he had also publicly released proprietary information about audience demographics, which it considers confidential. He said those figures "were essentially marketing material. If they had been really good, they probably would have distributed them and sent them out to the world."

Feelings of anger and betrayal inside the newsroom

His essay and subsequent public remarks stirred deep anger and dismay within NPR. Colleagues contend Berliner cherry-picked examples to fit his arguments and challenge the accuracy of his accounts. They also note he did not seek comment from the journalists involved in the work he cited.

Morning Edition host Michel Martin told me some colleagues at the network share Berliner's concerns that coverage is frequently presented through an ideological or idealistic prism that can alienate listeners.

"The way to address that is through training and mentorship," says Martin, herself a veteran of nearly two decades at the network who has also reported for The Wall Street Journal and ABC News. "It's not by blowing the place up, by trashing your colleagues, in full view of people who don't really care about it anyway."

Several NPR journalists told me they are no longer willing to work with Berliner as they no longer have confidence that he will keep private their internal musings about stories as they work through coverage.

"Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben tweeted last week, without mentioning Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and sh--ing on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now."

Berliner rejected that critique, saying nothing in his essay or subsequent remarks betrayed private observations or arguments about coverage.

Other newsrooms are also grappling with questions over news judgment and confidentiality. On Monday, New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn announced to his staff that the newspaper's inquiry into who leaked internal dissent over a planned episode of its podcast The Daily to another news outlet proved inconclusive. The episode was to focus on a December report on the use of sexual assault as part of the Hamas attack on Israel in October. Audio staffers aired doubts over how well the reporting stood up to scrutiny.

"We work together with trust and collegiality everyday on everything we produce, and I have every expectation that this incident will prove to be a singular exception to an important rule," Kahn wrote to Times staffers.

At NPR, some of Berliner's colleagues have weighed in online against his claim that the network has focused on diversifying its workforce without a concomitant commitment to diversity of viewpoint. Recently retired Chief Executive John Lansing has referred to this pursuit of diversity within NPR's workforce as its " North Star ," a moral imperative and chief business strategy.

In his essay, Berliner tagged the strategy as a failure, citing the drop in NPR's broadcast audiences and its struggle to attract more Black and Latino listeners in particular.

"During most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding," Berliner writes. "In recent years, however, that has changed."

Berliner writes, "For NPR, which purports to consider all things, it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model."

NPR investigative reporter Chiara Eisner wrote in a comment for this story: "Minorities do not all think the same and do not report the same. Good reporters and editors should know that by now. It's embarrassing to me as a reporter at NPR that a senior editor here missed that point in 2024."

Some colleagues drafted a letter to Maher and NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, seeking greater clarity on NPR's standards for its coverage and the behavior of its journalists — clearly pointed at Berliner.

A plan for "healthy discussion"

On Friday, CEO Maher stood up for the network's mission and the journalism, taking issue with Berliner's critique, though never mentioning him by name. Among her chief issues, she said Berliner's essay offered "a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are."

Berliner took great exception to that, saying she had denigrated him. He said that he supported diversifying NPR's workforce to look more like the U.S. population at large. She did not address that in a subsequent private exchange he shared with me for this story. (An NPR spokesperson declined further comment.)

Late Monday afternoon, Chapin announced to the newsroom that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

"Among the questions we'll ask of ourselves each month: Did we capture the diversity of this country — racial, ethnic, religious, economic, political geographic, etc — in all of its complexity and in a way that helped listeners and readers recognize themselves and their communities?" Chapin wrote in the memo. "Did we offer coverage that helped them understand — even if just a bit better — those neighbors with whom they share little in common?"

Berliner said he welcomed the announcement but would withhold judgment until those meetings played out.

In a text for this story, Chapin said such sessions had been discussed since Lansing unified the news and programming divisions under her acting leadership last year.

"Now seemed [the] time to deliver if we were going to do it," Chapin said. "Healthy discussion is something we need more of."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoes school cellphone ban, prompting criticism from schools chief

Gov. Katie Hobbs has vetoed a bill intended to limit students' cellphone use during the school day, prompting criticism from State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne.

House Bill 2793, introduced by Rep. Beverly Pingerelli, R-Peoria, would have directed school districts and charter schools to develop and enforce policies that "limit the use of wireless communication devices by students during the school day" and restrict student access to social media platforms while on school internet.

The bill made exceptions for students to use cellphones for educational purposes and during emergencies. It passed both the House and Senate along party lines, with Democrats opposed.

"Too many students are spending far too much time plugged into their phones and not engaged in school," Pingerelli said during a House Education Committee meeting in February. During that meeting, Rep. Laura Terech, D-Phoenix, noted that a law already exists directing schools to adopt policies "regarding the use of technology and the internet while at school."

Hobbs vetoed Pingerelli's bill on April 8, saying it would have established an "unnecessary mandate for an issue schools are already addressing."

On Friday, Horne criticized Hobbs' decision, saying that educators should not have to tolerate students scrolling on their cellphones while trying to teach. "Every instructional minute is precious," Horne said in a news release.

He also said that cellphone use during the school day increases instances of bullying.

Some Arizona school districts have already taken it upon themselves to limit cellphone use during school hours.

This school year, the Scottsdale Unified School District implemented an "away for the day" policy for its elementary and middle schoolers, requiring them to turn off and store cellphones during the school day. Arlington Elementary School, a small school west of Buckeye, purchased cellphone lockers for students after its governing board voted in March to prohibit cellphone use during school hours. The Buckeye Union High School District recently purchased lockable cellphone pouches from a brand called Yondr for the rooms used for in-school suspensions at its three high schools and for its alternative school.

School districts across Arizona have also joined schools nationwide in suing the owners of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, alleging the social media giants have knowingly contributed to a mental health crisis among their students and forced them to divert resources to address it.

According to a 2022 survey from the National Center for Education Statistics, 76% of schools nationwide said they prohibited non-academic cellphone use during the school day.

Bills similar to the one introduced by Pingerelli have seen success in other states. In 2023, Florida's governor signed a bill directing teachers to designate areas for cellphones during class and prohibiting TikTok on district-owned devices and through school internet. Last month, Indiana's governor signed a law directing schools to limit cellphone use during the school day. That law received broad bipartisan support.

Arizona Democrats: Want explanation from Tom Horne on withheld poverty funds

Reach the reporter at [email protected] .

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Multi-academy trusts have higher secondary-level teacher turnover than local authority schools

Teacher retention problems particularly acute in larger Mats, analysis finds

Multi-academy trusts (Mats) in England have significantly higher annual turnover of classroom teachers at secondary level than schools maintained by local authorities, analysis has found.

Teacher recruitment and retention is a challenge facing all schools but the problem is particularly acute in larger Mats where annual teacher turnover stands at 19.5% on average compared with just 14.4% at the median local authority, the research showed.

Larger Mats, with 10 or more schools, also have higher rates of persistent pupil absence, suspension and unexplained departures than smaller Mats and local authority schools on average, according to the Education Policy Institute (EPI) analysis.

The findings are the result of a tool developed by the EPI to compare the performance of academy trusts, local authorities, federations and dioceses across a range of performance indicators.

The school system in England has undergone rapid and far-reaching change since Labour introduced academies in 2002 as a means of raising educational standards in disadvantaged communities and areas of low performance.

Academies are state schools that are not controlled by the local authority, but are usually in Mats, which are not-for-profit companies that run more than one academy.

The rollout of the academies programme has escalated under the Conservatives and now eight out of 10 state-funded secondary schools are academies or free schools, while two out of five primary schools have converted to academies.

While the EPI research is cautious about suggesting causality, on teacher retention it says that at secondary level, high teacher turnover is negatively correlated with overall attainment and post-16 destinations.

It adds: “Some staff turnover is … necessary and desirable, but excessively high turnover can be disruptive to learning and may imply staff are unhappy with the working conditions in their current role.”

On persistent pupil absence, suspensions and unexplained exits, the EPI notes by way of context that larger Mats admit greater rates of disadvantaged pupils and help them to make greater progress.

Another significant area the EPI has investigated is the financial health of different groups of schools. It found in the case of secondary schools, Mats are almost three times as likely to have positive in-year balances than other school groups. At primary level, Mats are twice as likely.

The EPI does not reach a conclusion about which school structure is best. It says: “This report shows there is no identifiable general optimal organisational structure for school groups. We cannot conclude that, based on performance alone, the Mat structure should be preferred to the local authority model, or vice versa.”

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said it was commonplace for students to be taught by three different, often non-specialist teachers in a given subject within a year.

“That is why the recruitment and retention crisis is such an urgent issue for the present and any future government,” he said.

“The EPI highlights that this problem is even greater within multi-academy trusts, which is yet further evidence that the obsession with forcing schools into trusts has nothing to do with what is best for education.

“There has been a fundamental failure by successive Conservative governments to make teaching attractive and paid well enough for people to stay. The expansion of academies has been at the heart of this failure.”

Louis Hodge, associate director for school system and performance at the EPI, said: “With large increases in academisation over the last decade, an increasing number of schools are now working as part of wider groups and networks.

“Yet our understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of different groups has, to date, been patchy and inconclusive.

“This new research provides a strong foundation on which to build a more rounded understanding of how school groups in England are performing.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Education said: “As the report highlights, there are also positive drivers to teacher turnover. Many teachers leave their current roles due to promotion and move between schools within the same trust.”

“We now have more teachers than ever before, with over 468,000 teachers in the workforce, a 27,000 increase on 2010.”

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Council-maintained schools in England outperforming academies in Ofsted ratings

Push for ‘kinder’ Ofsted in doubt as boss of strict academy chain tipped for top job

Teachers at ex-Tory minister’s academy chain set to strike

‘Parents are frightened for themselves and for their children’: an inspirational school in impossible times

Education of children in care in England held back by ‘system failings’

Nadhim Zahawi makes U-turn on schools bill after criticism

Council-maintained schools outperform academies in England, study shows

Teachers’ union NEU warns of classroom culture wars

West Midlands primary school wins appeal against academy status

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‘There is enormous damage being done’: Social media firms grilled at Oireachtas committee

Legislators should be ‘much more aggressive’ in holding technology firms to account, oireachtas committee told.

Social media firms are causing 'unquantifiable damage' by promoting inappropriate and dangerous content to young people, an Oireachtas committee has heard. Photograph: iStock

Social media firms are causing “unquantifiable damage” by promoting inappropriate and dangerous content to young people, an Oireachtas committee has heard.

The Oireachtas committee on children, attended by representatives of Meta , TikTok and X , came days after a warning by Tánaiste Micheál Martin to tech firms to “get underage children off your apps” .

Michael Creed , Fine Gael TD for Cork North West, said presentations from representatives of social media firms “ticked all the boxes” that a media adviser would want, with references to “trust, transparency, empowerment and content moderation”.

“The truth is that the jury is in: there is enormous, quantifiable damage being done, and a widespread concern of unquantifiable damage being done in terms of cognitive impairment,” he said, adding that it was not unusual for young people to be on social media platform for “six, seven or eight hours a day”, which was “corrosive” to their health.

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“As legislators, and for our regulators, I think we need to be much, much more aggressive.”

[  No smartphones before 14: Is this the prescription for a happy childhood?  ]

Mr Creed asked why young people could open accounts on TikTok or Snapchat at 13, while the age of digital consent was set at 16. He said while social media firms were seeking credit for taking millions of underage accounts offline, nobody underage should be have access to social media in the first place.

“The State doesn’t give driving licences to 12- or 13-year-olds,” he said. “Why should we accept a situation where a social media company can say, ‘Oh, well, they told us they were 13 or 16′. There are ways and means. If social media companies were serious, they could verify and validate applications.”

Fianna Fáil’s Senator Malcolm Byrne said he was not convinced that use of artificial intelligence to flag inappropriate content, such as extreme or violent material, was effective.

“No matter what you’re doing, you’re not succeeding,” he said.

He said misinformation around riots in Sydney recently had included content from Ireland, which prompted a strong response from the Australian social media commissioner.

“Online content, once seen, cannot be unseen,” he said. “Teenagers and indeed the wider population are being exposed to serious misinformation, disinformation... and extreme and gratuitously violent material.”

Fianna Fáil’s Senator Erin McGreehan said much of social media was a “cesspit”, and was not a safe place for children given the proliferation of content on issues such as self-harm and suicide. “It is absolutely frightening.”

Fine Gael’s Senator Mary Seery-Kearney said it was “unforgivable” that WhatsApp had recently reduced its age limit to 13, and said the mental health of young people was being affected by the addictive nature of social media. She said evidence of heightened levels of anxiety among teenagers had much to do with how they were increasingly communicating through devices and not directly with each other.

“What can you do to address the mental health element, when you have a business model which runs counter to that?”

[  ‘It was carnage’: Why schools are powering off students’ smartphones  ]

Sinn Féin TD Kathleen Funchion said it was clear there was an “underlying negativity” around the way recommender algorithms work, and that more robust age verification could tackle issues around fake or bot accounts.

Susan Moss of TikTok said safety was a core priority which defines the company, which now has more than 40,000 “trust and safety” professionals working to protect online users.

“For our part, we will strive to continuously improve our efforts to address harms facing young people online through dedicated policies, 24/7 monitoring and the use of innovative technology, and significant ongoing investments in trust and safety to achieve this goal.”

Dualta Ó́ Broin, head of public policy for Meta in Ireland, said the company wanted Facebook and Instagram to be safe places where young people do not have to see content meant to intimidate, exclude or silence them. He said the most efficient and effective way to tackle underage access was to have an age-verification system at the operating system or app store level.

“This would not remove responsibility from every app to have processes in place to manage age effectively,” he said.

Claire Dilé, director of government affairs for Europe at X – formerly Twitter, said the platform was “not the platform of choice for children and teens” and it did not have a line of business dedicated to children.

“According to our data, in the first three months of 2024, 13- to 17-year-olds accounted for less than 1 per cent of X’s active account holders in Ireland,” she said.

Follow The Irish Times education section on Facebook and X (Twitter) and stay up to date

Carl O'Brien

Carl O'Brien is Education Editor of The Irish Times. He was previously chief reporter and social affairs correspondent

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