The concept of “education” in everyday language: R.S. Peters revisited

The concept of “education” in everyday language:

R.S. Peters revisited

The word “education” is so generally trivialised today that we stand to lose sight of the connection between more central meanings and our chances of living well. In the 1960s, Richard Peters analysed the idea of “education” to be found in our everyday language. Despite the shortcomings disclosed over the years, it still merits our attention today

Introduction

Gaining a better understanding of the more sophisticated possibilities of the meaning of the word “education” can have a startling effect on the way we view our world.

This is mostly because we are so familiar with institutions and processes that are so commonly referred to as “education” that it does not occur to us that the more important and discriminating meanings of the word might be widely abused, and that its more important meanings might be different from this commonly-taken-for-granted. We find that what we have taken as “education” is a vague and empty thing, and that a larger and more important understanding of ourselves and our society and the possibilities of living are available from the meanings we have neglected. Vital aspects of life are seriously missing from the efforts we are most used to as “educational”. In fact in the absence of some of these elements, it can be argued that much of so-called “education” is not worthy of being called “education” at all. Instead, they are an abuse of the learner which does them serious harm – even when they “succeed” in it.

There are three main forces at work here:

We grow up and go through a schooling system, usually regulated by the State, called an “education” system. People who get a lot of this system are often called “educated”, and we are widely encouraged to get a lot of it ourselves, mainly so that we can get a good job. “Education”, here, is counted in certificates, diplomas and degrees, and those who acquire them don’t always seem much better for having them. We may not always enjoy participating in this (and many of us aren’t very “successful” at it). We might think that it could be done much better. But it is so much a part of our world that we take its existence and predominance for granted, as if it is the most important thing that education could be. We rarely question what it is all about seriously, supposing that we would all be better off for more of it, and readily succumbing to its expansion and encroachment into our lives. Indeed, parents worry about it enormously, spending vast amounts of time and money on their children’s “education” when this is all that it amounts to.
The State — even the kind of “democratic” State that we also take for granted — has an interest in our compliance with its authority and administration. It also has an interest in an efficient and flourishing economy. Much of “society”, even in such a “democratic” State, places a premium on stability and conformity at the expense of the development of human potential, or even of living well – particularly if these things might result in behaviour or points of view that seem unusual or unfamiliar or “unconventional”.
“Education”, as a word, implies positive value. When a teacher is said to be “educating”, this can usually be interpreted as praise for what they are doing. If someone is said to be “well educated”, this normally conveys that, at least here, they have acquired some valuable qualities.

The combination of these three forces means that, on the one hand we are not very critical about the sorts of things that the word “education” is applied to, and on the other, because the word conveys something positive, it is useful to slap it on any learning process we want other people to think well of, simply because of the positive aura which the word will present to us. The word has rhetorical, ideological, propagandistic, or manipulative value.

Education and training compared

The best attempt we have at getting clear about the meaning of the word “education”, as it is to be found in everyday language, was offered by Richard Peters at the London Institute of Education in the nineteen sixties and seventies. His approach has been widely criticised, and it certainly no longer has the theoretical value that it was seen to have at the time. I will attempt to put it in the context of hindsight later in this article. For the moment, however, It remains true that his account established a benchmark which has not been superseded.

Peters rightly identified the idea of the “educated person” (in his day, the educated “man”) as the most important one, and sketched a picture of the basic characteristics of that concept in everyday discourse by comparing the “educated person” with the concept of the “trained person”. Clearly training is much narrower in scope and has much more to do with action or activity. It is instrumental, not necessarily worthwhile (we could undergo training in the techniques of torture or deceit), and the role of reasoning in it is weaker. In fact it need not entail reasoning at all, but could simply be mental or physical habituation. In contrast, education implies something about breadth of knowledge and understanding, is intrinsically valuable, and while it will not involve the cultivation of reason at every point, critical reason is essential to it.

These differences can clearly be seen by making several elementary comparisons. Though Peters would not necessarily have approved of my examples, they make the point very quickly, and use the techniques he used. We simply need to ask ourselves what differences we would be trying to convey if we were to choose the expression “physical education” over “physical training”, or vice versa. Similarly, what would be the difference between “moral education” and “moral training”, or “religious education” and “religious training”?

Would there be a difference between a trained surgeon and an educated one? Would we want to be under the knife of a surgeon who was well-educated in the area of surgery, but not particularly well-trained? We usually can’t avoid the importance of the difference when we look at “sex education” and “sex training”. There have been many advocates of sex education in schools, but rarely advocates of “sex training”, although Monty Python performed a skit that traded on the difference.

Intrinsic and instrumental value

In focussing attention on the “educated person”, Peters rightly identified it as a concept which is laden with positive value, and that the value is intrinsic. In this sense of “education”, we do not attempt to become educated as a means to something else, such as a job. Instead, the qualities of the truly educated person are just those that are desirable for a person to have. For this reason, education doesn’t have an aim, or an extrinsic, or instrumental purpose, and this distinguishes it from training, which always does. If it makes sense to say it, it is its own “aim”.

Thus, there is a dramatic difference in meaning between this concept and the ways in which “education” is advocated as a solution to problems of the economy, or social ills such as crime or bad driving. When education is talked of as a means to solving such problems, this crucial concept which Peters has identified has dropped out of consideration.

It is worth noticing, too, that when people discuss these things, they are not talking of a purpose possessed by the learner, but of a purpose they have for them. It is something that we would wish to do to the learner in order to achieve the “desirable” aims of ourselves, as politicians or policy-makers, employers, or even parents. When people enter vocational education, they may do so freely, but to get what they want, they must satisfy us – the people who want to make use of the skill the learner has agreed to acquire.

This does not mean that education, as a quality of the person, and having intrinsic value, cannot also have a positive influence on such instrumental things, and that is why it is conceptually possible for vocational education to be a subordinate part of education itself. We can deliberately acquire knowledge and skills that are also of instrumental value to other people.

What it does mean is that there are more important reasons for engaging in education that override the instrumental, and that if such instrumental reasons replace these real reasons, then education of a more important kind disappears, or is corrupted. We need to know what these truly educational reasons are, of course, and to be convinced that they are the more important ones. These values must be strongly justified and made articulate.

The three conditions

As a result of making comparisons between the “educated person” and the “trained person”, Peters concluded that the following three conditions were necessary to the correct application of the most central meanings of the word “education”:

that “education” implies the transmission of what is worthwhile to those who become committed to it;
that “education” must involve knowledge and understanding and some kind of cognitive perspective, which are not inert;
that “education” at least rules out some procedures of transmission, on the grounds that they lack wittingness and voluntariness on the part of the learner.

Some interpretation of these conditions is necessary. In the first condition, for example, “the transmission of what is worthwhile” is not the transmission of whatever those in power might like to think worthwhile. Indeed, it has much more to do with the transmission of procedures and commitments, and schemes of concepts and principles than it does of “facts”, or information, or even “bodies of knowledge”. For Peters, it is the transmission of a commitment to the pursuit of truth, and to the quest for the best standards of critical reason for seeking the truth. This, in turn, is to be interpreted in terms of traditional ways in which the truth has been pursued, which comes out as something like the traditional academic disciplines. Truth is of value for its own sake. It needs no further justification than that it is a good in itself. For Peters, this is what gives education its intrinsic value.

The second condition states that there must be breadth across these disciplines, with some work in depth, and that connections and interrelationships among the elements must be recognised and understood, which Peters describes as “cognitive perspective”. The elements must, in some important sense, be parts of a very large whole.

This knowledge and understanding must also make a difference to the person. They must be transformed as a result of acquiring it — be different for it, and act differently because of it. In contrast to training, it has to do with the seeing of the bigger picture, or pictures, and being transformed by that. We could be trained in some set of skills, and then drop them; never engaging in the relevant activities again, and perhaps hardly ever thinking about it. But to be educated is to have our outlook on life and the world changed forever.

The final condition follows from the first. If the learner is to come to pursue the truth for themselves, the reasoning they come to employ must genuinely be their own, and not that of their teachers or other influential people. It is inconceivable that people could come to do this through processes in which they were unwitting or involuntary participants.

This does not mean that they must be like this through every educational incident, or with respect to every piece of learning (particularly in the early stages). The importance of something undergone, and even a consciousness of it, may not occur straight away. Indeed, the “wittingness” condition may mean little more than a cognizance – an awareness of (rather than an obliviousness to) the learning intentions of a caregiver – as we might expect in earlier stages of development. But in significant ways the whole process must be characterised by an alertness to what is going on, and, over time, an increasingly voluntary engagement..

Problems with Peters’s account

Peters certainly analysed the most important concept of education which can be inherited from the West, one which can be traced back in practice and in scholarly discussion for several thousand years. Once the requirements of making a living and meeting the basic needs of life have been met, this is the concept which has had the most to offer people when it comes to living in, and making sense of their world. That doesn’t mean, however, that it isn’t seriously flawed. Its most serious problems are as follows:

It is a concept of “education” largely limited to schooling. The tradition is, in fact, much larger than that, but in recent times our sense of this has grown less and less. By using the word “transmission” he certainly had in mind that it was something deliberately done by some people to others, and all of his work emphasised the schooling context, and things like schooling subject matter. This limits the range of kinds of knowledge and understanding which should be pursued to those kinds which can best be pursued through schooling – academic subjects – and it narrows the range of kinds of “truth” that are judged to be of value.
It implies an advocacy for a particular vision of the worthwhile life. It is a life in which the academic pursuit of truth for its own sake must continue to play a serious part, and it defines – and limits – the “transformation” that is supposed to take place. He felt that an educated person would continue to pursue truth for its own sake for the rest of their life, but this was still thought of as being deeply embedded within traditional academic disciplines. This rules out the many widely learned and experienced people who turn their lives to other things, and many other enlarging fields of experience.
The vision of the worthwhile life which is advocated is a life rightly associated with a privileged, leisured ruling class, and has been so associated since the Ancient Greeks. Such a vision has more to do with values and pursuits cultivated among aristocratic ruling elites than it does with a coherent theory of how we might learn to understand the world and our best living within it – and it has proved fatal for his analysis, arresting it in features of the past that are now unwelcome. It involves, after all, nothing more than a collection of pursuits of truth that have developed for various historical reasons by a particular class of people, and that were used to help set them apart as superior. A cultivated member of the ruling class was expected to be familiar with them, but they were not necessarily, or always, developed or pursued with the educational growth of the individual in mind.
Though there is a good intuition in the idea of “cognitive perspective”, there is no clear explanation as to why it is important; or how, and why connections should be seen and made. The academic disciplines, for instance, are often parochial and competitive. There are undisclosed assumptions here about connection, breadth and perspective.

For these reasons, this account of education is not well-suited to our times, or the foreseeable future. The intrinsic pursuit of truth is a wonderful thing, but there are other values, and truth itself becomes problematic once we step outside the confines of Western intellectual tradition, in which this account is rooted, and ponder the many different cultures in which many different things have been pursued with intelligibility – and even within the West. This does not make the pursuit of truth irrelevant, but it does cause us to question the idea of any educational advocacy of a particular way of life – a life considered worthwhile by a particular, Western sub-culture. And it raises the question of the relative importance of things that might be “true”.

Nevertheless Peters’s analysis alerts us to the possibility of a concept of education which is of far more fundamental importance than our more instrumental concerns. To leave education reduced to mere vocational training, or to the production of human capital to be exploited in the service of the economy, or to create mere social conformity and political compliance would be (and is) a catastrophe.

There also seems something of special importance which was captured by his ideas of breadth of knowledge, cognitive perspective and both wittingness and voluntariness. The commitment to more adequate knowledge; to “getting it right” is seriously important too, even if we do not want to cast this in terms of a “pursuit of truth for its own sake”, let alone academic knowledge. I believe that the problems can be resolved in a way that retains the essential insights, and shows us vividly why such general principles of education should matter. With these considerations in mind, I offer the following reformulation of Peters’s conditions:

That “education” involves the development in the learner of effective inquiry and decision about the conditions of human flourishing and their own good living, and into the modes of action that the course of their own inquiry may suggest is important.
That “education” must involve breadth of knowledge and understanding, wide-ranging skill and feeling, connected and related and having considerable cognitive perspective; not being “inert” but transforming, informing and influencing perception and action. It should be about attempting to see and grasp and act within the bigger pictures of our lives.
That the process of “education” engages the critical reason of learners so that they come to believe and act for their own well-considered reasons, and it rules out some procedures on the grounds that sufficient wittingness and voluntariness on their part would be lacking.

The value of education

The fundamental difference here is a change in the nature of what is of intrinsic value in education. What is of value here, are the learners themselves. We can draw on the ethical idea that human beings are ends in themselves, and that educating human beings is a crucial way in which we express that value. It isn’t a means to an external end. It is a way in which we can organize the development and learning of human beings, including ourselves, so that we enhance what is of human value in us. What is of value here has much to do with the potentials of human consciousness, awareness, purposiveness and self-determination.

It is not our business to decide for another what should be their purpose in life, or how they should find meaning in it. At the same time, this does not mean that people come into the world fully prepared to decide this for themselves, and we are not justified in ignoring the requirements of the complex learning which this task might require. Inability to think effectively about what one might do with one’s life and what one might become, to be unaware of the possibilities and opportunities, and to be unable to believe in the variety of one’s potential, is not merely a human tragedy, it s a moral disaster if learning could have been guided to give mastery over these things. We need to think of what learning we would wish to have had secured for us when we entered this world, and to think of it with the humility to recognise that we may be missing a good deal ourselves.

Education is a complex matter. Taking it seriously will involve not just rethinking the content of education (and abandoning that idea of an equal collection of academic disciplines), but taking the concept of education well beyond schooling into all the other realms of life in which experience relevant to what we might do in and with our lives can be gained. We will find, for example, not only that schooling fails to address these matters adequately, but also that the outside world is dominated by suggestions and instructions as to what we should be, often, but by no means only, in the form of advertisements, entertainments and ideology.

A second feature is that various kinds of training must be united under education, rather than always being separated from it. This includes vocational preparation. Deciding what we will do with our lives must include consideration of means, and when the means are considered, they will include all sorts of training which are instrumental.

Bringing training under the rule of educational considerations will transform it, of course. Training which satisfies educational requirements must be subject to the condition that people being trained are to be understood as ends in themselves, and that this value is not to be compromised in the name of any instrumental value. The point is that, if we separate the values of education and training, we are not only being forced, without much help, to weigh training against education, but more importantly we allow the very real possibility that training can be manipulative of human beings as tools and things (as the idea of “human capital” suggests).

Educational sites

The fact that an adequate concept of education must not be restricted to schooling has already been mentioned. What else is there? Well, the family is an obvious candidate, and the media and almost everything on-line must fall within the realm of educational responsibility, as must the workplace, which does so much to shape knowledge, understanding and aspiration in adult life. As John Dewey was apt to make clear, democracy itself, properly implemented, is an educational form of association. All institutions play a role in the formation of minds — from the purveyors of products and services, to the traditional professions, to our political and economic institutions, to architects. We learn much more about what is at stake here by studying such things for their indoctrinatory possibilities. The results of such serious study are likely to be stunning.

Implications

The prevailing approaches to political and economic thought are educationally bankrupt. They assume that people are born and come to adulthood already knowing their own interests. It is just that they don’t know how to be plumbers or lawyers, and need to be trained. Such assumptions leave us wide open to manipulation, so that we may be little more than slaves. Unfortunately, though misery, anger and despair surround us on all sides (if we probe at all beneath the glossy technical accomplishments of contemporary life), most of us accept that view. Though we think of science, technology and management as requiring considerable schooling and learning, we seem content that little is done to prepare our people for living, and we trivialize what might be worth learning about how to live into “life skills”, behavioural recipes, and superficial self-help.

On the contrary, this is a complex area of thought, which is honoured, in its higher degrees of sophistication, as “wisdom”, and there are numerous profound traditions to be understood and engaged with. Instead of entering into the study and critical experience of these things, we have spent our lives looking at how others around us seem to live, listened to what we are told by others who have done no more, and have made our decisions guided by very superficial conventional wisdom, believing that, if there was more to be known about what we might do with our lives, we would have been told.

We have acted in good faith, and have made our commitments. With time, the thought that there might have been more we could have done and become, and much more satisfaction that we could have gained, are questions we are afraid to confront, because we have already lost much time, and acquired many commitments. Our lives are impoverished because the most basic educational responsibilities were not met. We were made workers and consumers without first being made people.

This view exposes the paternalism with which we address the problems of the poor, both in Western countries and in the South. We say that their first essential need is to meet their more basic requirements of life. Genuine education can come later. But education, as I have been describing it, is not an ornament or an icing to be placed on top and to decorate with. It is fundamental to human dignity. It does not have to wait upon the instrumental.

This is, firstly, because training can be devised to satisfy educational conditions, and secondly, the educational environment can be radically improved if all decisions which might influence learning anywhere in the social order are subjected to educational scrutiny and made with educational considerations in mind. To an important extent, this is a matter of educational understanding, and not necessarily a matter of expensive educational technology.

If schools are not the only important educational site, can they be neglected? Certainly not. They would have to be quite different from the way they are at present, however, if they were to be educational. We cannot expect them to be educational while they work under State designs and regulations which overwhelmingly emphasize preparation for the workforce, uncritical citizenship and community participation, and instrumental social agendas. They would have to be comprehensively reconstructed, until they ceased to resemble the factories engaged in mass-production that universal, compulsory State schooling was so much developed to serve.

Official definitions of education would have to go far beyond vacuous cliches about “learning how to learn”, “valuing learning for its own sake”, the “pursuit of knowledge”, and “putting the learner first”, many of which are made manifestly impossible simply through the institutionalisation of schooling. We can’t learn everything, and not all learning or knowledge is valuable — particularly when we take on a serious
educational agenda, and such statements are useless unless they are explained so that it is clear that they don’t just equate knowledge with information, as it might be stored in a computer. In addition, it is vital that these remarks are not just pious utterances, but flow through strongly in the policy decisions themselves.

Within the schools, the same overall commitment to education, genuinely flowing through in decision-making, would have to apply. There are plenty of teachers out there with more than a vestigial sense of what education should be, but their efforts are empty if the system in which they work thwarts them at every turn. Even so, they need a rich understanding of education if they are to have any chance of being effective. If they are to guide learners to think critically about life in general, and their own lives in particular, teachers must be well-equipped to do this themselves, and this would require a much greater and genuinely
educational commitment to teacher preparation and professional development.

To understand the plight of schooling, however, is to understand that it fits within a vast ecology of learning sites which are socially constructed. Schools can achieve very little of educational value on their own, even if they were strictly governed by educational purposes above all others. We do not live our whole lives at school. Even when we are in a “schooling period” of our lives, the influence of school is far from total, and must compete with family, friends, the internet and a host of other institutions. At other periods of our lives, work is the dominant enterprise. When agendas across any combination of other such sites combine, they could easily thwart an educational effort on the part of any one, such as the school. This is surely what we see so commonly under our present circumstances. Uneducational, or anti-educational agendas (indoctrination) dominate out of school, and often within. The learning which a person undergoes is not always an isolated piece.

Fears of social order

A major problem exists, both in school and out, as a result of our fear of education, understood as I have described it. We seem to fear that if people are brought up to make up their own lives, they will make the wrong decisions. We must, of course, begin by introducing them to the social, political, administrative and constitutional systems of our country, as well as with the intent that they be law-abiding. They will never properly find their feet if we do not do this. But we must also, and as early as possible, expose them to serious critiques of these things, and to a critical exploration of alternative ways of doing these things, if they are ever to make up their minds for themselves.

Of course there are those who may say that we do not even do the first of these things adequately, and this would be a serious problem. But my point is that if we stop only at the first, then we deprive them of a chance to properly assent to their own community. More than this, if criticism is not turned back on those elements that seem to be pre-requisites, and are acquired through various forms of training and inculcation, they are in danger of being turned on later with cynicism and a scepticism that they were simply put in place to control the learners for the purposes of others. In fact, of course, we leave these learners in a condition of indoctrination, and often enough they come to sense it, with a political alienation being one of many negative consequences.

But we do fear them learning to make these decisions. We fear it in school, because it would open our own authority to criticism, and we fear it more generally as a potential threat to social order. Perhaps we believe that some of this social order depends upon necessary myths. There are a number of dangerous assumptions we might be holding here.

“These pupils will never become as reasonable as I am.” That this is dangerously paternalistic and patronising should be obvious. In terms of the poverty of our own educational environments, many less promising students than ourselves may well have the potential to be much more reasonable than we are, given an educationally favourable environment.

“These pupils can benefit from my greater experience, and I can save them thinking certain things through which it took me a long, painful, and wasteful time to do”. It is certainly true that they can benefit from our extra experience, but this needs to be used very carefully. It must not be used to forestall serious questions which the students should be exploring seriously for themselves. Our experience, along with the experience of different kinds of numerous others, should be used to aid this process, rather than to by-pass it, and its ambiguity and the possibilities of alternatives should be re-examined to be sure that our ultimate conclusions and memories have not simplified our own views over time. In any event, it too often turns our that our long, painful and wasteful struggle is not the same as theirs.

“These pupils might reach the wrong conclusions”. These pupils will one day be in our position with as much right to determine these things as we claim for ourselves. If we are so sure of what is right, what is it that means that we should prevent them from coming to determine this for themselves in their own lives? This would be to think of them as if they should remain children throughout their lives, compared to us.

Is our conclusion not reasonable, and haven’t we been able to arrive at it ourselves? Are the things that we believe to be right not capable of withstanding serious inspection? Perhaps the real issue is that we doubt that the scrutiny will be carried through properly, and we doubt the students’ abilities to handle the investigation at their particular levels of maturity. That would be a failure to give them enough possibility at critical scrutiny. We are trying to justify giving them too little.

We fail them though, if we indoctrinate until they are near “maturity”, and hope that, somehow, they will automatically be equipped to examine these difficult things for themselves when they are “mature”. That is an illusion. Another is that there is not an enormous amount of important questions about life, and an enormous amount of material for debate in our histories and in our larger social worlds, to ponder and discuss and learn from with intelligence and discipline.

Everyday language revisited

Richard Peters gave us a great gift with his analysis of the use of the word “education”; through exploring the term “the educated person”, and various related concepts as they work in “everyday language” (or “ordinary language”, which was the technical term in philosophy of the day). Such an analysis provided a bench-mark or anchor-point of meaning. Stray too far from the “intuitions” or the “sense” that are to be found within the common family of uses of these words, and we stand to lose meaning; we run the danger of playing with words.

“Well, if you are going to define ‘education’ that way, is it really ‘education’ any more? If you make up your own meanings, other people just aren’t going to understand you, and the language can collapse!”

And it happens often enough. “All education is really indoctrination”. “So long as learning is going on, then we are educating”. “Education is the same as socialization (or enculturation)”. “What education is, is just a matter of opinion – it is all relative”. All statements such as these rob us of vital distinctions. In none of these cases is it worth spending time or money on education at all.

As we attempt to address the issues that I have been identified in Peters’s analysis of the everyday language, we still need to be cautious that we don’t lose the large, ethical significance of education; the spirit of the core idea that goes back several thousand years, and that has much in common with the idea of justice. We need to be sure that we retain a strong connection with that, perhaps even reinforcing it.

Many of the ordinary language theorists of his day believed (as he did) that what we found in the logic of everyday speech was all that philosophy could do. Those judgments were the bedrock. That was to do philosophy – simply to map the existing language. In the many decades of discussion since, however, it seems clear that this won’t do, because what we will find in the language will be inherently conservative, and often outmoded. Meanings will change, whether we like it or not. Philosophy needs to play a role in that change, to be sure that we don’t lose important meanings, and that we play a skillful part in bringing them up to date.

The conservativism in Peters’s concept which is simply unacceptable now, is its expression of that life valued by the aristocratic, ruling class elite of Europe. Western culture has continued to move on, and we have become far too sensitive to the cultural imposition that such a concept carries with it as baggage, to be at all comfortable with it any more. But at the same time, there is also too much power within it – with its emphasis on the big pictures, with its demands for critical reason, and with its sense that education should be an end in itself, and not a mere means – for us to allow it to die, as it is dying. If we do so, a great potential for our humanity – our rights as human beings, and our freedom, will wither away with it. It is our job now to revive and extend the power and potential it had for enabling us to live good lives, while making it available for everyone; not so that we ape an outmoded European elite, but so that we can all take charge of our own cultures in a proper spirit of self-determination.