Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of Education - HISTORICAL OVERVIEW, CURRENT TRENDS

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HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
William K. Frankena
CURRENT TRENDS
Nicholas C. Burbules
Nathan Raybeck
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The word education is used sometimes to signify the activity, process, or enterprise of educating or being educated and sometimes to signify the discipline or field of study taught in schools of education that concerns itself with this activity, process, or enterprise. As an activity or process, education may be formal or informal, private or public, individual or social, but it always consists in cultivating dispositions (abilities, skills, knowledges, beliefs, attitudes, values, and character traits) by certain methods. As a discipline, education studies or reflects on the activity or enterprise by asking questions about its aims, methods, effects, forms, history, costs, value, and relations to society.
Definition
The philosophy of education may be either the philosophy of the process of education or the philosophy of the discipline of education. That is, it may be part of the discipline in the sense of being concerned with the aims, forms, methods, or results of the process of educating or being educated; or it may be metadisciplinary in the sense of being concerned with the concepts, aims, and methods of the discipline. However, even in the latter case it may be thought of as part of the discipline, just as metaphilosophy is thought of as a part of philosophy, although the philosophy of science is not regarded as a part of science. Historically, philosophies of education have usually taken the first form, but under the influence of analytical philosophy, they have sometimes taken the second.
In the first form, philosophy of education was traditionally developed by philosophers–for example, Aristotle, Augustine, and John Locke–as part of their philosophical systems, in the context of their ethical

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