Toward a Re-Evaluation of the Role of Educational Epistemology in the
Professional Education of Teachers
THE POST-WAR RISE OF EDUCATIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY
The rise and fall of epistemological theorizing as a central concern of educational philosophy - and thereby as a key constituent of the theoretical education of professional educationalists - is a striking feature of postwar educational philosophy and theory. There are, I believe, several different, albeit related, reasons for the demonstrable falling from previous grace of educational epistemology: On the one hand, the decline of interest in formal reflection upon questions of knowledge and truth has generally mirrored the checkered fortunes of philosophical reflection as a significant component of the theoretical apparatus of professional educationalists. On the other hand, however, there cannot be much doubt that contemporary philosophy has itself been a principal source of some of the pressures which have contributed to the undermining of the educational-theoretical status of epistemology.
In the interests of reestablishing the educational significance of epistemological reflection, I want to argue here for two main claims. First, that while the contemporary arguments which have served to undermine latter day confidence in epistemological theorizing may well dispose of a certain traditional conception of inquiry into knowledge and truth, they certainly fail to show that we can get along, in the interests of making s无忧论文 【http://www.uklunwen.com】ense of inquiry or learning as such, without any such inquiry. Second, that while in disposing of a specific traditional conception of epistemological reflection, they also undermine a particular postwar conception of the role of such reflection in educational theory. They do not serve to diminish the significance of reflection about the nature of knowledge and truth in the professional lives of teachers - since such reflection cannot but be, when properly understood, a sine qua non of the theoretical lives of educational practitioners. Prefatory to this, however, I shall offer some brief observations on postwar developments in educational epistemology.
Nothing speaks more eloquently for the centrality of epistemological theorizing in postwar educational philosophy than the enormous literature on knowledge and the curriculum which mushroomed in the 1960s and 1970s - much of which followed in the wake of the high profile given to epistemological theorizing by the principal architects of the analytical revolution in philosophy of education. Of these, Israel Scheffler is justly renowned for his own significant epistemological contribution, and Richard Peters - though his own work focused mainly on the normative framework of educational reflection - certainly regarded epistemology as the key to understanding what he took to be the basic knowledge transmission role of education.1 Moreover, it is now common knowledge that the main epistemological burden of Peters's program was ca |
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