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Introduction
Education (Completion Benchmark: March 2nd)
The Ideal of the Educated Person*
By Jane Roland Martin
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6
History
R. S. Peters calls it an ideal.' So do Nash, Kazemias and Perkinson who, in their
introduction to a collection of studies in the history of educational thought, say that
one cannot go about the business of education without it? Is it the good life? the
responsible citizen? personal autonomy? No, it is the educated man.
The educated man! In the early 1960s when I was invited to contribute to a book
of essays to be entitled The Educated Man, I thought nothing of this phrase. By the
early 1970s I felt uncomfortable whenever I came across it, but I told myself it was
the thought not the words that counted. It is now the early 1980s. Peters's use of the
phrase "educated man" no longer troubles me for I think it fair to say that he intended
it in a gender-neutral way. Despite one serious lapse which indicates that on some
occasions he was thinking of his educated man as male, I do not doubt that the ideal
he set forth was meant for males and females alike. Today my concern is not Peters's
language but his conception of the educated man — or person, as I will henceforth
say. I will begin by outlining Peters's ideal for you and will then show that it does
serious harm to women. From there I will go on to argue that Peters's ideal is inadequate
for men as well as women and, furthermore, that its inadequacy for men is intimately
connected to the injustice it does women. In conclusion I will explore some of the
requirements an adequate ideal must satisfy.
Let me explain at the outset that I have chosen to discuss Peters's ideal of the
educated person here because for many years Peters has been perhaps the dominant
figure in philosophy of education. Moreover, although Peters's ideal is formulated in
philosophically sophisticated terms, it is certainly not idiosyncratic. On the contrary,
Peters claims to have captured our concept of the educated person, and he may well
have done so. Thus, I think it fair to say that the traits Peters claims one must possess
to be a truly educated person and the kind of education he assumes one must have
in order to acquire those traits would, with minor variations, be cited by any number
of people today if they were to describe their own conception of the ideal. I discuss
Peters's ideal, then, because it has significance for the field of philosophy of education
as a whole.
Jane Roland Martin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Presidential Address at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society,
April 1981, Houston, Texas.
1. R. S. Peters, "Education and the Educated Man," in R. F. Dearden, P. H. Hirst, and R. S.
Peters, eds., A Critique of Current Educational Aims (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp.
7, 9.
2. Paul Nash, Andreas M. Kazemias, and Henry J. Perkinson, eds., The Educated Man: Studies
in the History of Educational Thought (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), p. 25.
3. For a discussion of "man" as a gender neutral term see Janice Moulton, "The Myth of
the Neutral 'Man," in Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Frederick A. Elliston, and Jane English, eds.,
Feminism and Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1977), pp. 124-137. Moulton rejects the
view that "man" has a gender-neutral use.
4. Peters, "Education and the Educated Man," p. 11. Peters says in connection with the
concept of the educated man: "For there are many who are not likely to go far with theoretical
enquiries and who are unlikely to develop much depth or breadth of understanding to underpin
and transform their dealings as workers, husbands and fathers" (emphasis added).
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Introduction
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Education (Completion Benchmark: March 2nd)
EDUCATIONAL THEORY
R. S. PETERS'S EDUCATED PERSON
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History
A
The starting point of Peters's philosophy of education is the concept of the
educated person. While granting that we sometimes use the term "education" to refer
to any process of rearing, bringing up, instructing, etc., Peters distinguishes this very
broad sense of "education" from the narrower one in which he is interested. The
concept of the educated person provides the basis for this distinction; whereas
"education" in the broad sense refers to any process of rearing, etc., “education" in
the narrower, and to him philosophically more important, sense refers to the family of
processes which have as their outcome the development of an educated person.
Peters set forth his conception of the educated person in some detail in his book,
Ethics and Education. Briefly, an educated person is one who does not simply possess
knowledge. An educated person has a body of knowledge and some kind of conceptual
scheme to raise this knowledge above the level of a collection of disjointed facts which
in turn implies some understanding of principles for organizing facts and of the "reason
why" of things. Furthermore, the educated person's knowledge is not inert: it char-
acterizes the person's way of looking at things and involves "the kind of commitment
that comes from getting on the inside of a form of thought and awareness"; that is to
say, the educated person cares about the standards of evidence implicit in science or
the canons of proof inherent in mathematics. Finally, the educated person has cognitive
perspective. In an essay entitled "Education and the Educated Man" published several
years later, Peters added to this portrait that the educated person's pursuits can be
practical as well as theoretical so long as the person delights in them for their own
sake, and that both sorts of pursuits involve standards to which the person must be
sensitive.? He also made it clear that knowledge enters into his conception of the
educated person in three ways, namely, depth, breadth and knowledge of good.
In their book, Education and Personal Relationships, Downie, Loudfoot and Telfer
presented a conception of the educated person which is a variant on Peters's. I cite
it here not because they too use the phrase "educated man,” but to show that alternate
philosophical conceptions of the educated person differ from Peters's only in detail.
Downie, Loudfoot and Telfer's educated person has knowledge which is wide ranging
in scope, extending from history and geography to the natural and social sciences and
to current affairs. This knowledge is important, relevant and grounded. The educated
person understands what he or she knows, knows how to do such things as history
and science, and has the inclination to apply this knowledge, to be critical and to have
curiosity in the sense of a thirst for knowledge. Their major departure from Peters's
conception — and it is not, in the last analysis, very major -- is to be found in their
concern with knowledge by acquaintance: the educated person must not merely have
knowledge about works of art - and, if I understand them correctly, about moral and
religious theories - but must know these as individual things.
Consider now the knowledge, the conceptual scheme which raises this knowledge
above the level of disjointed facts and the cognitive perspective Peters's educated
person must have. It is quite clear that Peters does not intend that these be acquired
through the study of cooking and driving. Mathematics, science, history, literature,
philosophy — these are the subjects which constitute the curriculum for his educated
person. In short, his educated person is one who has had — and profited from
liberal education of the sort outlined by Paul Hirst in his famous essay, "Liberal
Education and the Nature of Knowledge.” Hirst describes what is sought in a liberal
education as follows:
a
5. Ibid., p. 7.
6. R. S. Peters, Ethics and Education (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966). Page references
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IDEAL OF THE EDUCATED PERSON
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first, sufficient immersion in the concepts, logic and criteria of the discipline
for a person to come to know the distinctive way in which it 'works' by pursuing
these in particular cases; and then sufficient generalisation of these over the
whole range of the discipline so that his experience begins to be widely
structured in this distinctive manner. It is this coming to look at things in a
certain way that is being aimed at, not the ability to work out in minute
particulars all the details that can be in fact discerned. It is the ability to
recognise empirical assertions or aesthetic judgments for what they are, and
to know the kind of consideration on which their validity will depend, that
matters.
History
If Peters's educated person is not in fact |Hirst's liberally educated person, he or she
is certainly its identical twin.
Liberal education, in Hirst's view, consists in an initiation into what he calls the
forms of knowledge. There are, on his count, seven of them. Although he goes to
some lengths in his later writings on the topic to deny that these forms are themselves
intellectual disciplines, it is safe to conclude that his liberally educated person, and
hence Peters's educated person, will acquire the conceptual schemes and cognitive
perspectives they are supposed to have through a study of mathematics, physical
science, history, the human sciences, literature, fine arts, philosophy. These disciplines
will not necessarily be studied separately: an interdisciplinary curriculum is compatible
with the Peters-Hirst ideal. But it is nonetheless their subject matter, their conceptual
apparatus, their standards of proof and adequate evidence, their way of looking at
things that must be acquired if the ideal is to be realized.
II. INITIATION INTO MALE COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVES
What is this certain way in which the educated person comes to look at things?
What is the distinctive manner in which that person's experience is structured? A body
of literature documenting the many respects in which the disciplines of knowledge
ignore or misrepresent the experience and lives of women has developed over the last
decade. I cannot do justice here to its range of concerns or its sophisticated argu-
mentation. Through the use of examples, however, I will try to give you some sense
of the extent to which the intellectual disciplines incorporate a male cognitive perspective,
and hence a sense of the extent to which Hirst's liberally educated person and its
twin Peters's educated person -- look at things through male eyes.
Let me begin with history. "History is past politics" was the slogan inscribed on
the seminar room wall at Johns Hopkins in the days of the first doctoral program.10 In
the late 1960s the historian, Richard Hofstaedter, summarized his field by saying:
"Memory is the thread of personal identity, history of public identity." History has
defined itself as the record of the public and political aspects of the past; in other
words, as the record of the productive processes man's sphere - of society. Small
wonder that women are scarcely mentioned in historical narratives! Small wonder that
they have been neither the objects nor the subjects of historical inquiry until very
recently! The reproductive processes of society which have traditionally been carried
on by women are excluded by definition from the purview of the discipline.
If women's lives and experiences have been excluded from the subject matter of
history, the works women have produced have for the most part been excluded from
literature and the fine arts. It has never been denied that there have been women
writers and artists, but their works have not often been deemed important or significant
enough to be studied by historians and critics. Thus, for example, Catherine R. Stimpson
has documented the treatment accorded Gertrude Stein by two journals which exert a
9. In Paul Hirst, Knowledge and the Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p.
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100
EDUCATIONAL THEORY
powerful influence in helping to decide what literature is and what books matter."
Elaine Showalter, pursuing a somewhat different tack, has documented the double
standard which was used in the nineteenth century to judge women writers: all the
most desirable aesthetic qualities - for example, power, breadth, knowledge of life,
humor – were assigned to men; the qualities assigned to women, such as refinement,
tact, precise observation, were not considered sufficient for the creation of an excellent
novel,"2
The disciplines are guilty of different kinds of sex bias. Even as literature and the
fine arts exclude women's works from their subject matter, they include works which
construct women according to the male image of her. One might expect this tendency
to construct the female to be limited to the arts, but it is not. Naomi Weisstein has
shown that psychology constructs the female personality to fit the preconceptions of
its male practitioners, clinicians either accepting theory without evidence or finding in
their data what they want to find.13 And Ruth Hubbard has shown that this tendency
extends even to biology where the stereotypical picture of the passive female is
projected by the male practitioners of that field onto the animal kingdom.'
There are, indeed, two quite different ways in which a discipline can distort the
lives, experiences and personalities of women. Even as psychology constructs the
female personality out of our cultural stereotype, it holds up standards of development
for women to meet which are derived from studies using male subjects.15 Not surprisingly,
long after the source of the standards is forgotten, women are proclaimed to be
underdeveloped and inferior to males in relation to these standards. Thus, for example,
Carol Gilligan has pointed out that females are classified as being at Stage 3 of
Kohlberg's six stage sequence of moral development because important differences
in moral development between males and females are ignored.18
In the last decade scholars have turned to the study of women. Thus, historical
narratives and analyses of some aspects of the reproductive processes of society –
of birth control, childbirth, midwifery, for example have been published." The exist-
ence of such scholarship is no guarantee, however, of its integration into the mainstream
of the discipline of history itself, yet this latter is required if initiation into history as a
form of knowledge is not to constitute initiation into a male cognitive perspective. The
title of a 1974 anthology on the history of women, Clio's Consciousness Raised, is
unduly optimistic.18 Certainly, the consciousness of some historians has been raised,
but there is little reason to believe that the discipline of history has redefined itself so
that studies of the reproductive processes of society are not simply tolerated as
peripherally relevant, but are considered to be as central to it as political, economic
and military narratives are. Just as historians have begun to study women's past,
scholars in literature and the fine arts have begun to bring works by women to our
11. Catherine R. Stimpson, "The Power to Name,” in Sherman and Beck, eds., Prism, pp.
55-77.
12. Elaine Showalter, "Women Writers and the Double Standard," in Vivian Gornick and
Barbara Moran, eds., Women in Sexist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 323-343.
13. Naomi Weisstein, "Psychology Constructs the Female" in Gornick and Moran, eds.,
Women in Sexist Society, pp. 133-146.
14. Ruth Hubbard, "Have Only Men Evolved?" in Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and
Barbara Fried, eds., Women Look at Biology Looking at Women (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing
Co., 1979). pp. 7-35.
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IDEAL OF THE EDUCATED PERSON
101
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6
History
attention and to reinterpret the ones we have always known." But there is still the gap
between feminist scholarship and the established definitions of literary and artistic
significance to be bridged, and until it is, the initiation into these disciplines provided
by a liberal education will be an initiation into male perspectives.
In sum, the intellectual disciplines into which a person must be initiated to become
an educated person exclude women and their works, construct the female to the male
image of her and deny the truly feminine qualities she does possess. The question
remains of whether the male cognitive perspective of the disciplines is integral to
Peters's ideal of the educated person. The answer to this question is to be found in
Hirst's essay, "The Forms of Knowledge Revisited."20 There he presents the view that
at any given time a liberal education consists in an initiation into existing forms of
knowledge. Hirst acknowledges that new forms can develop and that old ones can
disappear. Still, the analysis he gives of the seven distinct forms which he takes to
comprise a liberal education today is based, he says, on our present conceptual
scheme. Thus, Peters's educated person is not one who studies a set of ideal, unbiased
forms of knowledge; on the contrary, that person is one who is initiated into whatever
forms of knowledge exist in the society at that time. In our time the existing forms
embody a male point of view. The initiation into them envisioned by Hirst and Peters
is, therefore, one in male cognitive perspectives.
Peters's educated person is expected to have grasped the basic structure of
science, history and the like rather than the superficial details of content. Is it possible
that the feminist critique of the disciplines therefore leaves his ideal untouched? It
would be a grave misreading of the literature to suppose that this critique presents
simply a surface challenge to the disciplines. Although the examples I have cited here
may have suggested to you that the challenge is directed at content alone, it is in fact
many pronged. Its targets include the questions asked by the various fields of inquiry
and the answers given them; the aims of those fields and the ways they define their
subject matter; the methods they use, their canons of objectivity, and their ruling
metaphors. It is difficult to be clear on precisely which aspects of knowledge and
inquiry are at issue when Hirst speaks of initiation into a form of knowledge. A male
bias has been found on so many levels of the disciplines, however, that I think we can
feel quite confident that it is a property also of the education embodied in Peters's
ideal.
III. GENDERIZED TRAITS
The masculinity of Peters's educated person is not solely a function of a curriculum
in the intellectual disciplines, however. Consider the traits or characteristics Peters
attributes to the educated person. Feelings and emotions only enter into the makeup
of the educated person to the extent that being committed to the standards of a
theoretical pursuit such as science, or a practical one such as architecture, counts as
such. Concern for people and for interpersonal relationships has no role to play: the
educated person's sensitivity is to the standards immanent in activities, not to other
human beings; an imaginative awareness of emotional atmosphere and interpersonal
relationships need be no part of this person's makeup, nor is the educated person
thought to be empathetic or supportive or nurturant. Intuition is also neglected.
19. See, for example, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Avon, 1975);
Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1977); Elaine Showalter, A Literature of
Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1977); Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin Women Artists: 1550.1050 INAW Vork. Álfred A
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