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Knowledge, Values, and Educational History: “Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Douglas Sloan*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University

Extract

The gap that for many seems to separate modern knowledge from human values has become by now a rather well-worn topic. Let us leave aside, for the moment, the question to what extent this is an actual or only a seeming gap. The more immediate question is whether there remains anything of worth to be said about the subject, which has not already been said and scrutinized in myriad form by countless observers. And what might the historian of education in particular stand to gain by staring once more into this yawning abyss? My contention in this talk will be that as educators, and as historians of education, we have yet to engage fully some of the major issues in the relation between knowledge and values, and that to do so holds promise for us, whether our interest is that of the historian only, or of the historian also concerned with present educational understanding and endeavor.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

1. Rieff, Philip, Fellow Teachers (New York, 1973), p. 7.Google Scholar

2. In a full analysis, two other fundamental assumptions of the dominant, modern conception of knowledge would also have to be dealt with: the assumption of uniformitarianism and the assumption that the purpose of knowledge is control. Space and time constraints preclude this more complete analysis here.Google Scholar

3. Kolakowski, Lesek, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought (Garden City, N.Y., 1968); Bullock, Allan, “The Future of Humanistic Studies,” Teachers College Record, Vol. 82 (Winter 1980): 173–190.Google Scholar

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8. “One of the things I have particularly noticed in the course of my life,” writes Owen Barfield, “is the ever-increasing vogue of the word value, and especially its plural, values, as well as of relatively modern concepts like value judgments and value free, in philosophy, psychology, sociology, journalism and elsewhere.” “People used to talk.” he observes, “about the beautiful and ugly, noble and beastly, right and wrong; but that could only go on as long as there was confidence that qualities are objectively real. The current preference for ‘values’ has come about because the term is one that neatly avoids any such ontological commitment.” Barfield, Owen, “Language, Evolution of Consciousness, and the Recovery of Human Meaning,” Teachers College Record, Vol. 82 (Spring 1981):428, 430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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13. See MacIntyre, , After Virtue, p. 8ff.Google Scholar

14. See, Ibid., pp. 2234, 70–75, 101–102.Google Scholar

15. Laurence Veysey documents the intellectual fragmentation of these subjects during the last hundred years, and he also attributes it to the influence of the dominant scientific conception of knowledge. “Those who reject the dominant scientific conception of knowledge,” Veysey writes, “can only wander off in a score of mutually unrelated directions.” And those who accept it, he does not add, must by definition commit intellectual suicide. Is there another possibility? See, Veysey, Laurence, “The Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities,” in Oleson, Alexandra and Voss, John, editors, The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1960–1920 (Baltimore and London, 1979), p. 57.Google Scholar

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17. Green, Thomas F., “Schools and Communities: A Look Forward,” Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 39 (Spring 1969):221252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Cf., for example, Tyack, David and Hansot, Elizabeth, “Conflict and Consensus in American Public Education,” Daedalus, Vol. 110 (Summer 1981): 126; Grant, Gerald, “The Character of Education and the Education of Character,” Ibid., pp. 135–150; for an important, related analysis, see, Kaestle, Carl F., “Moral Education and Common Schools in America: a Historian's View,” Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 13 (May 1984):101–111.Google Scholar

19. Holland, R.F., Against Empiricism: On Education, Epistemology and Values (Totowa, N.J., 1980).Google Scholar

20. See, for example, Cox, Harvey, Religion in the Secular City: Towards a Postmodern Theology (New York, 1984); Polanyi, Michael called attention some years ago to the propensity of the fundamentalist mentality to join readily with the technological mentality. See, Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago, 1958), p. 216.Google Scholar

21. See, for example, Brereton, Virginia, “Protestant Fundamentalist Bible Schools, 1882–1940,” Unpublished Ed.D. dissertation. Teachers College, Columbia University, 1981.Google Scholar

22. Barfield, , Saving the Appearances, p. 165.Google Scholar

23. Lears, Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981).Google Scholar

24. Kolakowski, Leszek, Religion (New York and Oxford, 1982), p. 132. Among the most radical historical and sociological analyses of science, including so-called “hard science,” as a social institution and cultural product, and, hence, as demanding ideological analysis in all its particulars, is to be found in the work of David Bloor and his Edinburgh colleagues. See, for example, Bloor, David, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London, 1976), Barnes, B., Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (London, 1974); and Interests and the Growth of Knowledge (London, 1977); and Barnes, B. and Shapiro, S., eds., Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (Beverly Hills and London, 1979).Google Scholar

25. See, Ermarth, Michael, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago and London, 1978).Google Scholar

26. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 2nd edition (Chicago, 1962, 1970).Google Scholar

27. Polanyi, Michael, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, N.Y., 1966).Google Scholar

28. Polanyi, , Personal Knowledge.Google Scholar

29. See, Bohm, , “Insight, Knowledge, Science, and Human Values”; also, Bohm, David, “On Insight and Its Significance, for Science, Education, and Values,” in Education and Values, ed. Sloan, Douglas (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

30. Bohm, David, “Imagination, Fancy, Insight, and Reason in the Process of Thought,” in Sugerman, , ed., Evolution, Consciousness, pp. 5168; also, Bohm, David, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London, 1980).Google Scholar

31. Lewis, C.S., Surprised by Joy (New York, 1955), pp. 207–8.Google Scholar

32. I take my description in this paragraph of an education that is highly intellectual and aesthetic in an integral way from the theory and practice of Waldorf Education, now more than sixty years old and the largest independent school movement in the world. See, Harwood, A.C., The Recovery of Man in Childhood (London, 1958); Rist, George and Schneider, Peter, Integrating Vocational and General Education: A Rudolf Steiner School (Hamburg, 1979); Hofmann, V. et al., Forschungsbericht über Bildungslebensläufe ehemaliger Waldorfschüler; Eine Untersuchung der Geburtsjahrgänge 1946 and 1947 (Stuttgart, 1981).Google Scholar