Richard Pring has made a useful and important contribution to the discussion on the relationship between political policy and philosophical development in relation to education in his new book, Education, Social Reform and Philosophical Development. In terms of structure, the book is divided into two parts. The first part explores the historical trends in educational policy and political reform in England from the nineteenth century to the present, and takes a thematic approach by exploring the different phases of education and other key themes (such as assessment) and how these have been affected by important legislation, key contributions from thinkers (Matthew Arnold, for example) and the evolution of the political landscape. The second part looks at the philosophical developments that have run alongside the politics and policy of education with a particular focus on the utilitarianism of Bentham and J S Mill; the idealism of Coleridge and, in its socialist guise, R H Tawney; the logical positivism of A J Ayer and postmodernist responses from Lyotard and others; the pragmatism of John Dewey; and, finally, the move towards a market view of the economy and public services in the writings of Hayek and Friedman.
Pring’s central concern is the shifting and often vague ‘meaning of education’ and how debate on the history and philosophy of education have often been dealt with separately. He says in the Introduction:
philosophers of education continue to redefine what is meant by ‘education’ as though achievable in isolation from broader historical contexts and philosophical assumptions in which those definitions are established (p. 1)
Pring wants to offer the book as a possible way forward towards rectifying such an imbalance – otherwise politicians, teachers and academics will continue to talk over one another without engaging in shared, interdisciplinary dialogue.
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A central tenet of Part 1 is the legacy of social class in the creation and maintenance of a state education system in England. Pring contends that ‘[t]he concept of “social class” … was central to the understanding of education, that is, of what it meant to be an “educated person”’ (p. 10). Pring has written cogently in the past over his concerns regarding what could be termed ‘the English disease’ in education – the division of educational aims and students expectations into ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ camps. According to the author, ‘[o]ne result from such a separation is to extol theoretical knowledge and reasoning, and to degrade the practical within the educational system’ (p. 22). The book is particularly good at bringing in the thoughts of Ruskin and Morris at this point, especially Morris’s views on art, socialism and education and the value of hard-earned craftmanship and aesthetic appreciation as part of our national heritage and the birthright of every child as part of their education. Pring refers to Morris’s important lecture on ‘Art and Socialism’ to reinforce the point: ‘The dignity and satisfaction of labour can be gained, at least in part, through acquaintance with and enjoyment of the arts’ (p. 25). There is a sense throughout Education, Social Reform and Philosophical Development that the distinction and ranking of ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ in the English education system has exacerbated social divisions and stifled the application of theory to practice in many curriculum areas (in spite of some noble attempts to counteract the trend). Matthew Arnold also looms large in Part 1, especially his seminal text Culture and Anarchy. Arnold’s legacy is an ambiguous one – in some respects, his vision is progressive where all children are deemed worthy of exposure to Arnold’s famous maxim of ‘the best in all that has been thought and said’ but there is a downside in terms of an elitist approach to culture and what is seen as important. Pring is good at capturing the influence Arnold had on the Establishment (educational and otherwise) but more could have been said, in my view, on Arnold’s impact on what constitutes being ‘well educated’ and the detrimental aspects of adopting such a rarefied notion of culture to the exclusion of more ‘popular’ works or activities.
The rest of Part 1 is an exploration of the various education acts and commissions (from the Newcastle Commission of 1858-61 onwards) and the influence these have had on educational practice going forward. Detailed discussion is given over to the 1944 Education Act and the creation of tripartite schooling and local education authority control and how the earlier development of grammar schools and technical education influenced this legislation. It is pleasing to see a whole chapter devoted to further education and youth work (pp. 46-56) as these are important areas of educational provision that are often neglected in general surveys of educational systems. Pring uses this particular chapter to emphasise his philosophy of the mental and the practical working in tandem by offering short case studies of apprentices describing their modes of learning (pp. 48-49). The often convoluted arrangement of vocational qualifications (due to further education being seen as a useful test laboratory for each Secretary of State’s emerging ideas) comes over strongly – as does the neglected but often powerful effect good youth work has on young people’s sense of confidence and motivation, especially amongst those who have had negative experiences in mainstream schooling.
James Callaghan’s Ruskin speech in 1976 acts as a hinge point in the first part of the book and in English education generally. Pring notes that Callaghan’s speech was the culmination of the first phase of centralisation and greater government sway over education:
[F]rom the 1960s onwards, there was a gradual diminishing of the powers and authority of the teachers over what should be taught and how, followed in later decades by a shift in power from local to the central control of education (p. 88).
Prior to then, teacher autonomy, epitomised in the so-called ‘secret garden of the curriculum’, was often paramount. Anthony Crosland, when Secretary of State, announced: ‘The nearer one comes to the professional content of education, the more indirect the Minister’s influence is, and I’m sure that’s right’ (p. 89, emphasis in the original). These views from a government minister will appear almost quaint in the intervening decades. Pring charts the ever-increasing movement towards centralisation, whether it is the adoption of the General Certificate of Secondary Education or the formulation of a National Curriculum in the mid-to-late 1980s. The paradox is that these measures were put in place by an administration (Margaret Thatcher’s) that espoused radical market views on the reform of public services influenced by Hayek, Friedman and others in the Chicago school of economics. The tension between centralisation and choice in the English education system is a constant from this time onwards – the language of choice interlaced (often awkwardly) with the rhetoric of standards within the guise of ‘market forces’ and ‘value for money’. Pring is very effective in pinpointing ‘the increasing dominance of the language of management’ (p. 95) and there is wry humour in the way he describes the career of Micheal Barber and the associated creation of the neologism ‘deliverology’ as a symbol for the focus on hard data and performance targets as the drivers in education policy. The erosion of local accountability in education reached its zenith in 2010 when Cameron and Gove took the academisation begun under New Labour and applied it to the school system generally. The author also laments Gove’s introduction of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and the removal of Design & Technology as a subject counting towards such a qualification – more evidence of the ‘English disease’ discussed earlier. If there is one criticism to be made of the chapter on the market and education, I would suggest that more could have been made of the contradictions at the heart of so-called ‘neoliberalism’ in education. As I said above, neoliberalism (or the marketisation of public services) has always contained within it the inherent difficulties of marrying state control and the ‘free market’ – Pring, perhaps, could have drawn out the potential for conflict between these two forces that have plagued English education for almost half a century now.
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Part 2 of Pring’s book investigates the trends and developments in academic philosophy that run parallel (in terms of timeframe) to the discussion on the history of educational policy. He
seeks to make explicit [the] philosophical underpinnings [of what constitutes an ‘educated person’], shedding light on what is meant by education progression (or ‘regression’, depending on one’s philosophical position) (p. 101).
Pring highlights his chosen schools of philosophical thought through a variety of lenses including the growing consciousness of the working class, the importance of culture, preparation for citizenship, equal opportunities, preparation for work, and personal development. What is particularly effective in the succeeding chapters, where Pring brings together the different philosophical schools, is that he follows through on his claims made at the beginning of the book on drawing together the strands of philosophical development and how they relate to current or later policy in the educational field. We are able to see, for instance, how Hegel’s own version of idealism influenced the thinking of Green, Bryce and Morant who were themselves highly influential on educational commissions and the implementation of key educational legislation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (p. 112).
The chapters themselves are arranged under the following titles: ‘Utilitarianism, Idealism and Socialism’, ‘Positivism, Post-Modernism, wisdom of the market’, a chapter on ‘Pragmatism’ that mainly focuses on the work of John Dewey, and a chapter that looks at the nature of political discourse in relation to education. These connections can be illuminating – a good example is how idealism informed the work of RH Tawney in his key work Equality; Pring argues that Tawney’s socialist vision ‘emerged from the idealist conception of a society by which all are shaped, and thereby empowered to shape, in the pursuit of the public good’ (p. 114, emphasis in the original). Pring expands this point later on in the chapter with a more detailed analysis of Tawney’s perspectives on equality. Where the connections between philosophical schools are weaker is in the following chapter where positivism is contrasted with postmodernist tendencies within philosophy. There is a sound case for the importance of Ayer’s version of logical positivism in Language, Truth and Logic and how this has influenced the contemporary trend in education towards measurable targets rather than the more expansive notions associated with educational aims. However, Pring only devotes a page to the ‘Post-Modernist response’, with a very brief description of the work of Lyotard and Kuhn, before veering to more neoliberal trends in education through the thoughts of Sir Keith Joseph and the Centre for Policy Studies (influenced by the Chicago school of economists mentioned earlier). Granted, the book does not set out to explore these philosophical schools in detail but in this chapter the sense of philosophy-policy coherence is somewhat lost.
Pring is on stronger ground with his analysis of Dewey’s pragmatism – he is himself a Dewey scholar as evidenced in his recent book, John Dewey (Bloomsbury, 2014). The author describes how Dewey’s reputation regarding his writings on education (especially in right-wing policy circles) is often marked by fierce over-reaction. Chapter 12 is a lucid and cogent case for Dewey’s defence – Pring reminds us that Dewey is not guilty for the pedagogical excesses that have sometimes been carried out in his name and that Dewey applied philosophical rigour to his educational texts. Pring reminds us of Dewey’s advocacy of the powerful social role that the education system plays in the modern world:
One purpose of the school … is to help develop such community well-being through itself creating shared understandings, through ways of reconciling differences constructively, through openness to alternative views (p. 138).
Allied to this is Dewey’s concern with dualism and the mind-body distinction that has vexed Western philosophy since Plato. Pring provides context by relating the line of enquiry to the teaching of evolution:
Dewey [sees] the theory of evolution as having a radical effect on how we should conceptualise the relation between mind and body, thereby overcoming the dualism which, in permeating philosophical theories of knowledge, permeated also our theories of education (p. 139).
This example is itself a neat encapsulation of Dewey’s methodology by providing a practical example of pragmatism’s line of thought in looking at the dynamic between theory and application.
The final two chapters are an exploration of political discourse and a renewed appeal to philosophers and policy makers to reconnect with the aims of education (as a conclusion and coda for the book). Pring is very concerned with the trend that has led to the politicisation of education policy, a situation where ‘too much power [is placed] into the hands of politicians – such power not arising, or accountable to, a wider and expert audience’ (p. 144). Indeed, in what has sometimes now been termed as a ‘post-truth’ society, the very notion of expertise (educational or otherwise) has proved controversial and Pring is not frightened of taking issue with this development. He also makes a strong case for a movement away from discourse that only allows for empirical and logical enquiry towards including aspects of the moral, historical and the spiritual. There are a set of aims that Pring wishes us to consider at the end of the book to facilitate a more rounded and holistic view of what education should entail. Interestingly, he includes ‘Appreciating religious understanding’ as one of the aims – Pring’s own justification is interesting enough to quote in detail:
Many will find it odd that, within an increasingly secular society, understanding and appreciation of religious life should be seen as an aim of education. How can that be if one does not believe? The response must be, however, that (believing or not) understanding and appreciating experience from a religious perspective must be a distinctive element of what it has meant to be human, and thus in the aims of education (p. 159).
Thus is the ‘humanness’ of Pring’s vision and aims of education encapsulated.
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I think the book would have benefitted from the publisher carrying out a more careful proofread before going to print. To see a passage where Donald Trump is described as starting his presidency in 2019 or Friedrich Hayek referred to as ‘Hayet’ more than once on a page is unfortunate. Dewey’s Laboratory School is probably more associated with his time in Chicago rather than New York as indicated in several passages. But these are minor quibbles when compared to the book’s overall effect, and I want the reader to finish this review feeling inspired to investigate Education, Social Reform and Philosophical Development further. What Richard Pring has accomplished is an important contribution to the field of philosophy of education. As he states early on, there is little in the literature that analyses the relationships between educational policy and schools of philosophical thought from an historical perspective. Pring has been able to take this multi-disciplinary approach and guide the reader through the key documents and aspects of thought that have informed state education in England over the past 150 years. What comes over particularly clearly is Pring’s advocacy of a form of education that values craft and ingenuity from both the hand and the head and the need to have a much wider sense of what education means and the different discourses that can inform this without retreating into social media silos. Pring’s aims at the end of the book are, in a sense, a synopsis for the whole – in his own historically- and philosophically-informed words ‘a broader sense of education which respects development as persons, and in which … their humanity and self-respect are enabled to flourish’ (p. 161).
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*Richard Pring’s Education, Social Reform and Philosophical Development is available from Routledge. He has written an overview of his book for the PESGB Blog.
