meaning of education as a discipline

What Is Education? Insights from the World's Greatest Minds

Forty thought-provoking quotes about education..

Posted May 12, 2014 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

As we seek to refine and reform today’s system of education , we would do well to ask, “What is education?” Our answers may provide insights that get to the heart of what matters for 21st century children and adults alike.

It is important to step back from divisive debates on grades, standardized testing, and teacher evaluation—and really look at the meaning of education. So I decided to do just that—to research the answer to this straightforward, yet complex question.

Looking for wisdom from some of the greatest philosophers, poets, educators, historians, theologians, politicians, and world leaders, I found answers that should not only exist in our history books, but also remain at the core of current education dialogue.

In my work as a developmental psychologist, I constantly struggle to balance the goals of formal education with the goals of raising healthy, happy children who grow to become contributing members of families and society. Along with academic skills, the educational journey from kindergarten through college is a time when young people develop many interconnected abilities.

As you read through the following quotes, you’ll discover common threads that unite the intellectual, social, emotional, and physical aspects of education. For me, good education facilitates the development of an internal compass that guides us through life.

Which quotes resonate most with you? What images of education come to your mind? How can we best integrate the wisdom of the ages to address today’s most pressing education challenges?

If you are a middle or high school teacher, I invite you to have your students write an essay entitled, “What is Education?” After reviewing the famous quotes below and the images they evoke, ask students to develop their very own quote that answers this question. With their unique quote highlighted at the top of their essay, ask them to write about what helps or hinders them from getting the kind of education they seek. I’d love to publish some student quotes, essays, and images in future articles, so please contact me if students are willing to share!

What Is Education? Answers from 5th Century BC to the 21 st Century

• The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done. — Jean Piaget, 1896-1980, Swiss developmental psychologist, philosopher
• An education isn't how much you have committed to memory , or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. — Anatole France, 1844-1924, French poet, novelist
• Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. — Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013, South African President, philanthropist
• The object of education is to teach us to love beauty. — Plato, 424-348 BC, philosopher mathematician
• The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education — Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968, pastor, activist, humanitarian
• Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, physicist
• It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. — Aristotle, 384-322 BC, Greek philosopher, scientist
• Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the world’s work, and the power to appreciate life. — Brigham Young, 1801-1877, religious leader
• Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer – into a selflessness which links us with all humanity. — Nancy Astor, 1879-1964, American-born English politician and socialite
• Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, Irish poet
• Education is freedom . — Paulo Freire, 1921-1997, Brazilian educator, philosopher
• Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. — John Dewey, 1859-1952, philosopher, psychologist, education reformer
• Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom. — George Washington Carver, 1864-1943, scientist, botanist, educator
• Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. — Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, Irish writer, poet
• The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. — Sydney J. Harris, 1917-1986, journalist
• Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. — Malcolm Forbes, 1919-1990, publisher, politician
• No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. — Emma Goldman, 1869 – 1940, political activist, writer
• Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. — John W. Gardner, 1912-2002, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson
• Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. — Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1874-1936, English writer, theologian, poet, philosopher
• Education is the movement from darkness to light. — Allan Bloom, 1930-1992, philosopher, classicist, and academician
• Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know. -- Daniel J. Boorstin, 1914-2004, historian, professor, attorney
• The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values. — William S. Burroughs, 1914-1997, novelist, essayist, painter
• The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. -- Robert M. Hutchins, 1899-1977, educational philosopher
• Education is all a matter of building bridges. — Ralph Ellison, 1914-1994, novelist, literary critic, scholar
• What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul. — Joseph Addison, 1672-1719, English essayist, poet, playwright, politician
• Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today. — Malcolm X, 1925-1965, minister and human rights activist
• Education is the key to success in life, and teachers make a lasting impact in the lives of their students. — Solomon Ortiz, 1937-, former U.S. Representative-TX
• The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education. — Plutarch, 46-120AD, Greek historian, biographer, essayist
• Education is a shared commitment between dedicated teachers, motivated students and enthusiastic parents with high expectations. — Bob Beauprez, 1948-, former member of U.S. House of Representatives-CO
• The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child’s home. — William Temple, 1881-1944, English bishop, teacher
• Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them. — John Ruskin, 1819-1900, English writer, art critic, philanthropist
• Education levels the playing field, allowing everyone to compete. — Joyce Meyer, 1943-, Christian author and speaker
• Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. — B.F. Skinner , 1904-1990, psychologist, behaviorist, social philosopher
• The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers rather than to fill it with the accumulation of others. — Tyron Edwards, 1809-1894, theologian
• Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength of the nation. — John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, 35 th President of the United States
• Education is like a lantern which lights your way in a dark alley. — Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, 1918-2004, President of the United Arab Emirates for 33 years
• When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts. — Dalai Lama, spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism
• Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence . — Robert Frost, 1874-1963, poet
• The secret in education lies in respecting the student. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, essayist, lecturer, and poet
• My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance, but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors. — Maya Angelou, 1928-, author, poet

©2014 Marilyn Price-Mitchell. All rights reserved. Please contact for permission to reprint.

Marilyn Price-Mitchell, Ph.D., is an Institute for Social Innovation Fellow at Fielding Graduate University and author of Tomorrow’s Change Makers.

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A Proactive Approach to Discipline

Restorative discipline seeks to create an environment in which problem behavior is less likely to occur.

Educators who’ve had success with restorative practices find them to be much more than an alternative to suspension. Restorative practices encourage us to engage with our students not only when there’s an incident but throughout the school day. They’re part of a system of discipline that takes us back to the root of that word, the Latin disciplina , meaning instruction and knowledge. They draw on what we as teachers do naturally—teach.

Restorative discipline, then, is proactive and supportive as much as it is responsive. It aims to create conditions in which issues are less likely to arise, and in which, when they do arise, we have the connections and skills needed to handle them and restore the community as needed.

What does it take to adopt an approach to discipline that is proactive and supportive as well as responsive to problems in school? There are several key steps.

Steps to Proactive Discipline

Get to know your students: For both teachers and students to be our best selves, we must get to know each other. Teaching and learning occur through relationships. The stronger the relationship and the better we understand our students, the more knowledge and goodwill we have to draw on when the going gets tough.

Share and teach into classroom expectations: We want to make sure our students know and understand our classroom expectations. Discussing them early on promotes buy-in and allows us to better assess what skills and support students need to live up to our expectations.

Develop classroom norms collaboratively: There is a power in deciding together which norms you and your students need to do your best work. Once you’ve come up with a manageable list, spend some time exploring it. For example, what does respect look, feel, and sound like? Which norms will be easy to follow, and which more challenging? Why? Spend some time problem-solving the more challenging norms, and consider together how you might support one another when challenges arise.

Steps to Supportive and Responsive Discipline

Model kind, supportive, and respectful behavior: Having come up with a list of classroom norms, it’s important that you, as the adult, lead the way and show students how to uphold them consistently.

Review classroom norms and expectations: Be sure to provide reminders about your norms, especially early on. Learning happens over time, and most students need reminders. While standing at the door to welcome your students to class, for example, you might urge them to change putdowns you observed in the hall into kind, supportive language. Remind them of the discussion you had around respect early in the year.

Redirect student behavior using positive language: Such direction can help students get back on track. To a student who’s off task: “I need you to go to page 35, read the first paragraph, and then turn to the questions at the bottom of the page.” To a student who’s disrespectful: “You seem frustrated. I’d be happy to sit with you and problem-solve. Let me know when you’re ready.”

Recognize student effort and growth: Noticing that a student is trying or is making some headway is important—this growth deserves to be celebrated. If a student has trouble focusing for the duration of class, going from five minutes of focused work in September to 10 minutes in October is progress that should be recognized even as we encourage the student to make it to 15 minutes in November.

Signal nonverbal support, recognition, or redirection: If you’ve built a problem-solving relationship with students, you may be able to use proximity or prearranged signals to help a student get back on track or to encourage them, all without saying a word.

Check in and offer gestures of support: Young people in our care often complain about not being seen or heard by adults, especially in middle and high school, which can be lonely, impersonal places. Notice if a student seems troubled. Check in with them: “Are you OK?” or “You look upset—do you need a few minutes to collect yourself in the hallway?” This sends a message that you care, that you see the student and are interested in their well-being.

Have a restorative chat: A one-on-one chat in which you actively listen can help you better understand a student who’s struggling with behavior. Active listening has the additional benefit of helping people calm down, which can encourage them to be more introspective and open to problem-solving.

Imagine a student who spills into class several minutes after the bell, disrupting your lesson. Consider asking if they’re OK. Welcome them to class and direct them to quietly take their seat. When you have a few minutes, pull up a chair. Ask them what happened—why were they late? Express concern about what happened or about this becoming a habit. Have the student reflect on the effects of being late and problem-solve getting to class on time.

The goal of these disciplinary interventions is to teach into behavior while building and maintaining our relationships with students and strengthening the community as a whole. When more serious problems arise or harm is done, we can then draw on the relationships and skills we’ve built to come to a resolution and repair the harm. Meanwhile, our work has had the positive effects of supporting students’ social and emotional growth and creating a more congenial and productive classroom climate.

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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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Higher education: discipline or field of study?

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Higher education, or more strictly higher education studies, is sometimes referred to as a discipline, though it is more often referred to as a field, sector or area for study. But what is a discipline and does higher education studies, at its current state of development, qualify as one? This article re-considers these matters and comes to some conflicting conclusions. The issue of whether higher education studies is, or is not, a discipline should probably, therefore, be regarded as still open for debate.

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Introduction

Higher education studies has grown rapidly across the globe during the last few decades. Thus, one recent study identified 86 specialist English language academic journals focusing exclusively on higher education that between them published over 16,000,000 words in 2016 alone (Tight 2018 ). As a focus for research, then, higher education studies could be argued to be maturing; but is it, as some have argued, a discipline? The purpose of this article is to review the arguments for and against such a view and seek to reach a measured conclusion.

This is not, of course, a new debate; one substantive American examination of the question – which concluded that higher education studies was a field of study rather than a discipline - dates back nearly 50 years (Dressel and Mayhew 1974 ). Others have addressed the question more recently (e.g. Fulton 1992 , Harland 2012 , Macfarlane and Grant 2012 ). Another review, and one that extends internationally beyond the American context, seems timely.

Note that I am deliberately using the term ‘higher education studies’ here rather than just ‘higher education’. Higher education is the sector of activity that is being researched, but the additional word in ‘higher education studies’ is necessary to avoid confusion. If it is a discipline, we should call it ‘higher education studies’ or something like that. If it remains simply a focus for research, ‘higher education’ will do fine.

The article will proceed by first considering if and why it matters whether higher education studies is a discipline or not. The literature on the nature of disciplines (and fields) is then reviewed. Other research foci which, like higher education, have claimed disciplinary status – with more or less success – will also be identified. The relation between higher education studies and educational studies will be examined, and the case for and against the former achieving disciplinary status will be carefully reviewed. Finally, some conclusions will be reached.

Why does this matter?

We may, of course, immediately question if and why it matters whether higher education studies is a discipline or not. Or, in other words, is ‘discipline’ more than simply a label? Are there any positive practical consequences that would come if higher education studies was recognised and accepted as a discipline? And, if it does matter, to whom does it matter: those researching higher education, the academy as a whole or the wider society beyond?

It is the case, as we shall see, that some higher education researchers seek to claim disciplinary status – for the whole of higher education studies or just the particular part of it that they work in – so it clearly matters to them, at least to some extent. Higher education researchers are, as we shall also see, by no means unique in making such claims, which have been regularly made by practitioners in particular fields throughout the history of the academy. Clearly, then, there is some perceived benefit in being a discipline, even if – as with many terms in academia – the word ‘discipline’ is used both loosely and in varied ways.

Widespread recognition of higher education studies as a discipline would undoubtedly give it more status, at least in academic circles. The academy is, of course, highly status conscious – indeed, it might be argued that it is an environment in which status matters as least as much as funding (compare, for example, the attitude toward any relatively new discipline including in its name the suffix ‘studies’ and that towards, say, philosophy or physics) - so such recognition would be hard won and conditional, and thus worth having. It would not, however, have any great impact on the existing disciplinary pecking order, where the pure sciences and medicine clearly rule the roost, so the status of higher education studies would remain relatively low.

Recognition of higher education studies as a discipline beyond the academy, in the wider society and economy, would likely be even less significant. While greater acknowledgement of the work of higher education researchers in understanding and enhancing the diverse operations of higher education would be welcomed, whether they are seen as belonging to a discipline or researching a field is of little relevance outside academe. What matters is fruitful engagement with government, industry and other interested parties or stakeholders.

If, however, recognition of higher education studies as a discipline is denied, the practical business of higher education studies would arguably still continue. But it would remain relatively easier for others in the academy and beyond to ignore the findings of higher education research, as they commonly do so now, and to instead advance their own – anecdotal, poorly evidenced or wholly unevidenced – opinions. Higher education is, after all, a field that is, unusually, researched by those within it, and on which everyone else working within, or with experience of, it has their own opinions (or, as Harland ( 2012 ) put it, it is ‘open access’).

The status of higher education studies - as a discipline or a field of study – does, therefore, matter, and not only to higher education researchers, but also to the academy as a whole, though perhaps not as much as some might wish. So the question is worthy of more exploration.

The nature of disciplines (and fields)

It is a common characteristic of those writing about the meaning and nature of disciplines to start etymologically (e.g. Shumway and Messer-Davidow 1991 , Turner 2006 ). Following this approach, the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers one definition of discipline as ‘a branch of learning or scholarly instruction’ ( 1993 , p. 685) alongside a series of other related meanings concerning correction, religion, training, medicine and the military. That, however, seems overly simple or general, and might be applied to just about any academic activity, or to learning as a whole.

Another short, but more modern, definition is provided by Lawn and Keiner, who state ‘Academic disciplines can be seen as multi-dimensional socio-communicative networks of knowledge production’ ( 2006 , p. 158). This makes their broad purpose, knowledge production rather than just instruction, clearer, as well as their general mode of operation (i.e. communication). It also makes them sound complex, but without revealing any of that complexity.

A fuller definition is offered by Squires ( 1992 , p. 202, original emphases):

disciplines can be defined in terms of three dimensions: (i) what they are about ( object ); (ii) their stance toward that object, in terms of a concern with knowing, doing or being; and (iii) the extent to which they are operating in a normal, reflexive or philosophical mode . The first of these dimensions manifests in the content, topics or problems which are addressed; the second in the methodologies, techniques and procedures which are used; and the third in the extent to which the discipline treats its own nature as the subject of reflexive analysis.

This usefully offers rather more indicative detail on how disciplines work in practice.

Delving more deeply, Krishnan ( 2009 ) considers a range of philosophical, anthropological, sociological, historical and management perspectives on disciplines. While recognising that not all disciplines need demonstrate all of these features, he argues that:

A general list of characteristics would include: 1) disciplines have a particular object of research (e.g. law, society, politics), though the object of research may be shared with another discipline; 2) disciplines have a body of accumulated specialist knowledge referring to their object of research, which is specific to them and not generally shared with another discipline; 3) disciplines have theories and concepts that can organise the accumulated specialist knowledge effectively; 4) disciplines use specific terminologies or a specific technical language adjusted to their research object; 5) disciplines have developed specific research methods according to their specific research requirements; and maybe most crucially 6), disciplines must have some institutional manifestation in the form of subjects taught at universities or colleges, respective academic departments and professional associations connected to it. (p. 9)

While more comprehensive, this is not dissimilar to Squires’ presentation, with both leading with object, and Squires’ notion of stance broken down by Krishnan into theory, terminology and method. Squires does not, however, specifically mention accumulated knowledge or institutional manifestation (at least not in his definition), while Krishnan does not include Squires’ idea of disciplinary reflexivity.

The last of the characteristics identified by Krishnan, which he suggests may be the most crucial, is probably the most obvious when we think about disciplines: the whole paraphernalia of departments, chairs, learned societies, specialised academic journals, conferences, interest groups and so forth. The other characteristics which Krishnan identifies – object, accumulated knowledge, theories, terminologies and methods - are, however, of critical importance, if perhaps harder to pin down.

In their earlier study of the topic, Dressel and Mayhew ( 1974 ) came up with a list of criteria which was similar to, but slightly more extensive than, Krishnan’s:

One commonly accepted criteria of a discipline is a general body of knowledge… A corollary of this first criterion is that a discipline should possess both a specialized vocabulary and a generally accepted basic literature… some generally accepted body of theory and some generally understood techniques for theory testing and revision… a generally accepted body of consistently applied techniques of analysis or a generally agreed-upon methodology… recognized techniques for replication and revalidation of research and scholarship… trappings which symbolize their status as disciplines – scholarly associations… journals… Most disciplines have a recognized sequence of experiences for the preparation of scholars and research workers… But of all criteria of a discipline, possibly the key is a sense of sequence which enables scholars to predict where they should look next. (pp. 3-6)

This list is particularly interesting, both because it was put forward to assess the status of higher education studies as a discipline, but also because it includes criteria not directly addressed in the other frameworks: replication and revalidation, preparatory experiences and the notion of where to look next.

The literature on disciplines emphasizes, amongst other matters, that they are not static entities – indeed, their historical development is widely discussed (e.g. de Ridder-Symoens 1992 , Shumway and Messer-Davidow 1991 ) – and nor are they constant across the globe. Physics, psychology and political science, for example, may be pursued in distinctively different ways in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the USA.

We may recognise types of discipline, with the fourfold distinction between soft/hard and pure/applied that originated with Biglan ( 1973a , 1973b ; see also Becher 1989 , Becher and Trowler 2001 ) still being widely applied. Hard disciplines (e.g. physics, pharmacy) are those with an agreed paradigm and where knowledge is cumulative; soft disciplines (e.g. history, sociology), by contrast, are more contested and less cumulative. Pure/applied concerns the degree to which research is directed towards understanding something that interests the researcher or towards solving practical problems. Chemistry and mathematics, for example, would be (primarily) classified as pure disciplines, engineering and law as applied.

And then there is the distinction which we recognised in the introduction between a discipline and a focus - or field - of (or for) study. Or is it fields? Thus, Macfarlane and Grant ( 2012 , p. 621) argue that ‘the study of higher education may be understood as a multiple series of intersecting cognate fields rather than one that is discrete’, while Clegg ( 2012 , p. 667) goes further in identifying the three intersecting or overlapping fields of ‘research into higher education, academic development and disciplinary teaching research’ as constituting the foci for higher education studies.

Krishnan’s first characteristic of a discipline, its object of research, is fairly synonymous with what we mean here by field, suggesting that fields are components of disciplines. Thus, higher education is clearly a field – or a series of fields - for research, but higher education studies might claim to be a discipline.

We may also, of course, range both above and below disciplines. Taking the latter direction first, disciplines are typically viewed as being composed of numerous sub-disciplines, such that, while most researchers would readily identify with a particular discipline (e.g. history, physics), their real allegiance would be to the sub-discipline (e.g. medieval France, quantum physics) they research and/or teach. Sub-disciplines may become fully fledged disciplines as they develop (e.g. as with the emergence of statistics from mathematics). Thus, in the particular case we are discussing here, the issue may be whether higher education studies is still a sub-discipline of educational studies, or has developed sufficiently far to become a discipline in its own right.

Looking above, or beyond, disciplines, there are all the recurrent arguments which suggest that real, complex issues or problems (e.g. climate change, poverty) can only be addressed through interdisciplinary research, probably outside of higher education institutions at least as much as within them (Gibbons et al. 1994 ). In addition to interdisciplinarity there are a whole range of related terms, of which multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are probably the most common (Davies and Devlin 2010 ). Given the evident interest in studying aspects of higher education across the entire range of disciplines, we might, therefore, seek to recognise higher education as an interdisciplinary field, or fields, for research.

In short, though we may think of academic disciplines as well established and monolithic, they are really rather amorphous, fractured and transitory entities waiting for events, discoveries or new interpretations to transform them; perhaps only slowly but sometimes almost overnight. The map of knowledge, if we think of it like that, is being continually re-drawn (Abbott 2001 , Collins 1998 ).

In this context - and thinking in particular about whether higher education studies might qualify as a discipline or not - it is striking how this question echoes across the whole of academe. Thus, some brief bibliographic searches were able to identify a huge range of fields of study that were, at different times, seeking or arguing for disciplinary status: e.g. American studies (Pearce 1957 ), clinical nutrition (Cardenas 2016 ), cultural studies (During 2006 ), dental hygiene (Cobban et al., 2007 ), English (Randel 1958 ), human resource development (Chalofsky 2007 ), innovation studies (Fagerberg and Verspagen 2006 ), international business (Michailova and Tienari 2014 ), nurse education (Findlow 2012 ), planning (Davoudi and Pendlebury 2010 ), religion (Nemetz 1959 ), statistics (Minton 1983 ) and women’s studies/gender studies (Rollman, 2013 , Safarik 2003 ). There are doubtless many more such accounts.

As the dates for the articles identified suggest, these debates have been going on for a long time. In a general sense, there have been such debates ever since universities were founded, but they have undoubtedly increased in recent times as knowledge has both ballooned and fractured.

Is higher education studies a discipline?

Is educational studies a discipline.

As a preliminary to considering whether higher education studies is a discipline, it is worth spending a little time posing the same question for educational studies, which might, as we have argued, be seen as its parent discipline. Here are two somewhat contrasting perspectives from different parts of the globe. First, from Sweden, Sundberg ( 2004 ) confidently demarcates the period in which what he terms ‘educational science’ (note the use of the word ‘science’ to provide the emergent discipline with added strength) achieved disciplinary status:

Educational science became firmly institutionalised and established as a discipline in Sweden during the golden age of educational reform and the radical breakthrough of comprehensive schooling in the 1950s and 1960s. It is in this period that Pedagogik was separated from psychology and sociology separated from philosophy. (p.394)

Second, and alternatively, from the very different context of India, Sarangapani ( 2011 ) indicates that, while some may view education as a discipline, others strongly challenge this position:

Many of us who conduct research on and teach education in institutes of higher education have been socialised to think of education as a discipline. Yet not only do we find this status disputed, but we also frequently encounter challenges to our claims as experts and to the form and structure of our discourse, both by members of the public and, more disconcertingly, by fellow academics from other disciplines. (p. 67)

Indeed, one might go further in recognising that the status of educational studies as a discipline is also challenged from within education.

Her analysis leads Sarangapani, following Biglan, Becher and others, to apply the term ‘soft discipline’ to education. She notes that education ‘is non-paradigmatic and it is wholly ‘applied’ in the sense of being concerned with a practice’, and ‘it does not have distinct/distinguishing theories that are unique to it’ (pp. 72–73). It is, therefore, in her view, missing at least two of the characteristics of a discipline identified by Krishnan ( 2009 ).

Furlong ( 2013 ), also holding to the idea of educational studies as a discipline, provides a useful summary of the position, particularly in the UK:

As would be true of any discipline, trying to understand the discipline of education means taking into account its epistemological as well as its sociological dimensions… education presents a contradictory picture here. Sociologically, it is and always has been strong in key respects. It is large, complex and strategically important and despite recent policy challenges, particularly in England, it remains relatively well embedded in the university system. At the same time, it is epistemologically weak, largely because of important and unresolved questions about the nature of educational knowledge. It is these difficulties that, despite its size, have served constantly to undermine its position within the academy. (p. 13)

These difficulties have not, however, prevented several sub-disciplines, or specialisms, of educational studies from seeking to claim disciplinary status in their own right; including art education (Logan 1963 ), comparative education (Heath 1958 ), general education (Uljens 2001 ) and even teaching (Loughran 2009 ).

What then of higher education studies? I will use the six characteristics (or criteria) identified by Krishnan as a framework for assessing the claims of higher education studies to be a discipline. These offer a useful heuristic for attempting such a judgment.

A Particular Object of Research.

This is perhaps the simplest of the six characteristics to satisfy. It is arguably also the weakest, as it is difficult to imagine any field, discipline or sub-discipline of research that did not have a particular object. What we are talking about here is that higher education studies should have a focus.

Obviously, higher education studies focuses on higher education; that is the object of the research or study. Conversely, any research or study that focuses on higher education may be deemed to be higher education studies, however its investigators may classify it, even if it takes place within, for example, a department of politics, accounting or chemistry (see the later discussion of institutional manifestation).

Higher education is clearly a worthy object for research and study. To take the UK as an example, at the present time the equivalent of about 4% of the population are registered as students in higher education and about 1% work in higher education in some capacity (full-time or part-time: www.hesa.ac.uk ). Overall, then, this is a substantial enterprise, and, at the level of individual universities and colleges, most are major employers and traffic foci in the towns and cities in which they are located. Looked at globally, the size of the enterprise is quite staggering:

Postsecondary education is now a major enterprise worldwide. Massification has dramatically increased global enrollments; there are more than 170 million students enrolled in 2013, with expansion continuing worldwide. This growth has transformed higher education institutions and systems, and there are now more than 18,000 universities worldwide. (Altbach 2014 , p. 11)

A Body of Accumulated Specialist Knowledge.

It is also clear that, over the years, a significant body of specialist knowledge relating to higher education has been accumulated through higher education research. We have already quoted the estimate of over 16,000,000 words having been published in 86 specialist English language academic journals focusing exclusively on higher education in 2016 alone (Tight 2018 ). That figure increases year by year and does not include other sorts of journals (e.g. education journals, other disciplinary journals) or other types of publications (e.g. books, reports, conference publications), so the true output is much larger than this estimate.

Of course, it may be said that some of this output is repetitive, that a lot of it is small-scale and that it is of variable quality. But these are characteristics of research in general: only a small proportion is truly ground-breaking, large-scale research is very time-consuming and difficult to fund, and most research is not ‘world class’.

What is perhaps more concerning about higher education studies is the issue of accumulation, though, again, this could be said of many of the social sciences. Replication and revalidation studies – two of the criteria identified by Dressel and Mayhew ( 1974 ) - are vanishingly uncommon in higher education studies, and in educational studies as a whole. Thus, Makel and Plucker ( 2014 ) analysed all of the articles published in the then top 100 education journals – which included many higher education journals – but found that only 0.13% of them were replication studies.

Higher education studies also remains a fragmented area of research. Those focusing on particular topics, or applying particular methodologies or theories, or working in particular systems, typically have little to do with others researching higher education, even when they are researching closely related topics (Daenekindt and Huisman 2020 , Macfarlane 2012 , Shahjahan and Kezar 2013 ).

However, while the linkages within higher education studies could certainly be improved, that there is a body of accumulated specialist knowledge – or, rather, a series of developing and disparate bodies - cannot be doubted.

Theories and Concepts.

It is when we get to this characteristic that things become more problematic. Thus, an analysis of the output of 17 specialist higher education journals, published in English outside of North America in 2000, concluded:

an examination of the 406 articles found that 104 (25.6%) made explicit use of theory, that in a further 66 (16.3%) there was some evidence of the use of theory, and that the remaining majority, 236 (58.1%), were wholly a-theoretical. In short - and insofar as the sample examined reflects higher education research practice in general - theoretical engagement would appear to be a minority interest or need amongst higher education researchers. (Tight 2004 , p. 400)

Higher education studies - as a field or discipline – will, of course, likely be lacking in organising theories and concepts if most (published) researchers do not even engage with theory.

However, more recent analysis (Tight 2012 , 2014 ) of 15 leading international journals – this time including five North American journals - came to more positive conclusions. This analysis was of 567 articles published in 2010:

470 (83%) of the articles were found to be theoretically explicit, though the extent of engagement was often limited and the level of theory referred to was frequently low. (Tight 2014 , p. 100)

Three main factors seem to largely explain the difference in these findings. First, the inclusion of leading journals from North America – where higher education research has been established for longer - in the sample, which typically expect authors to explicitly address theoretical (and methodological) issues. Second, the restriction of the non-North American sample to a smaller group of ‘leading’ journals; and, third, the passage of time, with one decade being long enough to significantly raise the quality of articles published in the most competitive, non-North American journals.

The point about the level of theory in use, however, still largely holds. At least two trends can be observed here. First, where better developed and higher-level theories are in use, they tend to be imported from other disciplines or fields and applied to higher education. Examples of such theories include academic literacies (from applied linguistics), activity theory (from psychology), human capital (from economics), institutional diversity (from biological sciences) and managerialism (from management).

There are a few exceptions to this trend, such as communities of practice theory, which arguably developed on the borders of management and education. There are also some examples of what appear to be fairly well-developed higher education theories which, on closer inspection, originate elsewhere. This would include both academic drift, which owes a great deal to institutional theory (i.e. institutional isomorphism), and student attrition, which, remarkably, builds on theories of both suicide and employee turnover (from sociology and business studies respectively).

Second, most theories in higher education studies seem to be developed largely from the topic being researched (i.e. in classic grounded theory or inductive fashion); that is, they may be regarded more as concepts than theories. Examples include theorising around the idea of the university, modes of knowledge, problem-based learning, the research/teaching nexus and student engagement. These may be seen as ‘native’ to higher education studies but involve little more than simple classifications (often dichotomous) or the reification of ‘good’ practice into a model.

There are a few examples of higher education theories which have developed further to become largely accepted within their sub-fields (or sub-disciplines) of higher education studies. Thus, learning approaches theory, which seeks to categorise (albeit in a quasi-dichotomous fashion) and explain students’ approaches to learning, and, by extension, how these may be altered, has wide acceptance within the academic/educational development community. Interestingly, this theory was substantially developed through the use of phenomenography, perhaps the only research design to have been developed (at least partly) within higher education research.

A second, and more recent, example of widespread acceptance is threshold concepts theory, which argues that, in any discipline, certain concepts are more difficult for some students to understand yet are essential if progress is to be made. This has been taken up widely by higher education practitioners, though arguably rather too widely as almost any curricular element may be identified as a threshold concept.

Specific Terminologies.

This characteristic is, arguably, not as critical as the others identified by Krishnan. After all, all academics – though some more than others – tend to use specific terminologies (or, more pejoratively, jargon). For example, the terms academic drift, modes of knowledge and threshold concepts, amongst others, have already been used in this article, each of which would have a particular meaning to other higher education researchers, but probably not to researchers or others outside of this field.

It would be difficult to argue, however, that higher education studies has its own developed technical language, like other more established disciplines such as physics or psychology. Rather, higher education researchers have adopted a great deal of terminology – as well as theoretical perspectives – from other disciplines, particularly across the social sciences but more widely as well. More generally, it is probably the case that higher education researchers would have relatively little difficulty explaining their work to researchers in established disciplines, whereas the reverse would likely be rather more problematic.

Specific Research Methods.

As with theories and concepts, the verdict here would also have to be that higher education researchers have been responsible for little in the way of methodological development. Rather, they predominantly tend to make use of common social sciences research methods, such as interviews, surveys and documentary analysis. The level of sophistication in analyses varies widely, and has a geographical element, with North American-based researchers being much more likely to employ multivariate analysis techniques. Other research methods, such as auto/biographical, observational and conceptual methods, are much less commonly used (or published).

This reliance on the standard social science research methods and methodologies is, however, common to many social research fields, including education in general. Even amongst established social science disciplines, such as human geography, political science and sociology, most research relies on these generic methods. But these established disciplines have also developed their own specialist methodologies, such as geographical information systems and ethnography.

The only methodology to have been substantially developed by higher education researchers of which I am aware, and already mentioned in the discussion of theory, is phenomenography. Phenomenography focuses on people’s understandings or perceptions of particular phenomena of interest. Here, though, the honour has to be shared with education, as the originators of phenomenography were interested in teaching and learning in general, not just in higher education.

Phenomenography is probably better termed a research design, rather than a theory or a method, as it embodies both theoretical (i.e. there are a limited number of ways of perceiving a particular phenomenon) and methodological (typically the phenomenographic interview) perspectives. Even within higher education studies it is very much a minority interest, but it has been picked up and applied to some degree outside higher education (and education) as well.

Some Institutional Manifestation.

The final characteristic suggested by Krishnan is, as already noted, probably the most obvious, and probably the way in which most people would immediately think of disciplines: are there university departments, professors, degrees, journals and professional associations with ‘higher education’ in their titles? There are indeed all of these things.

The identification of 86 specialist academic journals focusing on higher education in 2016 has already been referred to (Tight 2018 ). This is undoubtedly an underestimate, as there is no definitive listing to check. While they are fewer in number, and similarly unlisted, there are also dozens of professional associations or societies focusing on higher education.

However, the presence of higher education studies within the university is both partial and particular. The Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, USA, maintains a very useful Worldwide Higher Education Inventory, which provides plentiful evidence on this characteristic (Rumbley et al. 2014 ). In 2014 it identified 277 graduate-level higher education programs (two-thirds of them in the United States) and 217 higher education research centres or institutes (50 in the USA, 44 in China and 18 in the UK) in 56 countries worldwide.

However, the programs identified are all graduate level; that is, they are postgraduate certificates (typically induction programmes taken by newly appointed academics), master’s degrees or doctoral programmes. Higher education is rarely studied at first degree level, unlike most disciplines. And the institutional presence of higher education usually takes the form of research centres or institutes, rather than fully fledged academic departments.

In the United States the most common higher education studies presence is in the form of an institutional research office, charged with benchmarking the university’s performance against its competitors, and more closely linked to the administration than to other university departments. In the UK or Australia this presence is most likely to be an academic development or teaching and learning centre, charged with improving the teaching performance of new and established academic staff. Typically, these will have fewer than 10 staff. The presence of a group of actively researching academic staff, focused on higher education studies, in a university or college – located in an education department or higher education research centre – is unusual.

Altbach comes up with the following summation: ‘a total conservative estimate of professionals who are involved in research on higher education is probably more than 12,000’ globally ( 2014 , p. 15). While this is, indeed, a conservative estimate, and is out of date, the key point to emphasize for present purposes is that most of these people will only have a part-time commitment to researching higher education, and it may also be short-term. The number of full-time, career track higher education researchers is much smaller.

Higher education studies is unusual – as a field or discipline – in that those contributing are spread all over the academy, in all disciplines and often in the university administration as well. This does have some disadvantages, including lack of communication between those focusing on higher education studies and those focusing on discipline-based educational research (le Roux et al. 2019 ).

Higher education studies may, therefore, be described as an interdisciplinary field (or fields) of research, or, in Harland’s ( 2012 ) words ‘an open-access discipline’; in other words, interested parties from all disciplines are welcome to contribute.

Conclusions

I offer two alternative conclusions, though readers may wish to take up positions in between.

Higher education studies has a clear object of research - i.e. higher education – a major activity worldwide that is clearly deserving of and needing focused research. With a pedigree going back at least a century, and with a major expansion of interest in recent decades, higher education studies has accumulated a substantial body of specialist knowledge.

But here we diverge; either:

There are thousands of academics worldwide with an interest in higher education research, who are supported by learned societies and journals, many of them long established. As a social science, higher education studies makes use of the theories and methods used throughout the social sciences and has begun to develop and contribute its own (notably phenomenography). While higher education studies makes only limited use of specialist terminology, this makes it an ‘open-access discipline’ accessible to all interested researchers.

Higher education studies is, therefore, without doubt a discipline:

we would argue that although the discipline of higher education may seem to be less advanced down the discipline development pathway (if there indeed exists such a thing) than many other disciplines, it is nonetheless a well developed, multi-strand, complex collection of research agendas and people fulfilling these, and is in every respect a full-blown discipline. (Bath and Smith 2004 , p. 13)

There are thousands of academics worldwide with an interest in higher education research, who are supported by learned societies and journals, many of them long established, but they are widely dispersed and marginal within universities and colleges, with few major departments or research centres focusing on higher education. As a social science, higher education studies makes use of the theories and methods used throughout the social sciences, but also often ignores them, and has made few original theoretical or methodological contributions of its own. This is reflected in higher education studies making only limited use of specialist terminology.

Higher education studies is not, therefore, a discipline but an interdisciplinary field of research. In the words of Altbach:

While higher education is not an academic discipline — the study of universities is an interdisciplinary endeavor based on the social sciences — it has emerged in a growing number of countries as a recognizable field of study, developing the standard accoutrements of any academic field. These include journals, publishers that focus on higher education, Web sites, national and international conferences, research centers and organizations, and others. While the development of the field is quite uneven globally, it now exists on all continents and in many countries. ( 2014 , p. 12)

Or, to put it in a more developmental way:

Our findings suggest that, although higher education is not a distinct discipline, it has assumed some disciplinary characteristics - most notably the creation of a discourse community predicated on specialized knowledge and recurrent discursive strategies. (Kimball and Friedensen 2019 , p. 1547)

The fairest conclusion, then, is probably that the jury is still out on the status of higher education studies. Much the same conclusion was reached nearly 50 years ago by Dressel and Mayhew ( 1974 ):

Higher education thus appears to be a field of study – ill-defined at the parameters – that is potentially useful in understanding many phenomenon [sic] and in preparing people for careers in higher education. But if the criteria suggested above are valid in defining a discipline, higher education has not yet attained that distinction. (p. 7)

Some 18 years later, Fulton came to a similar conclusion: ‘Whatever its strengths, higher education studies as a discipline has not yet acquired the capacity to reproduce itself. This is surely a sign of immaturity’ ( 1992 , p. 1820).

It is important that the debate continues, however, because it is only by comparing itself to the exacting standards of established disciplines that higher education studies can hope to advance to disciplinary status in due course. Progress in this direction is largely in the hands of higher education researchers themselves, through demonstrating and communicating the worth and applicability of their research.

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Tight, M. Higher education: discipline or field of study?. Tert Educ Manag 26 , 415–428 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11233-020-09060-2

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Academic Disciplines

Disciplines and the structure of higher education, discipline classification systems, discipline differences.

Discipline is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a branch of learning or scholarly instruction." Fields of study as defined by academic discipline provide the framework for a student's program of college or postbaccalaureate study, and as such, define the academic world inhabited by scholars. Training in a discipline results in a system of orderly behavior recognized as characteristic of the discipline. Such behaviors are manifested in scholars' approaches to understanding and investigating new knowledge, ways of working, and perspectives on the world around them. Janice Beyer and Thomas Lodahl have described disciplinary fields as providing the structure of knowledge in which faculty members are trained and socialized; carry out tasks of teaching, research, and administration; and produce research and educational output. Disciplinary worlds are considered separate and distinct cultures that exert varying influence on scholarly behaviors as well as on the structure of higher education.

The number of disciplines has expanded significantly from those recognized in early British and German models. Debates are ongoing about the elements that must be present to constitute a legitimate disciplinary field. Among such elements are the presence of a community of scholars; a tradition or history of inquiry; a mode of inquiry that defines how data is collected and interpreted, as well as defining the requirements for what constitutes new knowledge; and the existence of a communications network.

Disciplines and the Structure of Higher Education

Influence in the academic profession is derived from disciplinary foundations. A hierarchical structure of authority is not possible in colleges and universities given the autonomy and expert status of faculty with respect to disciplinary activities. Consequently, the structure of higher education is an associational one based on influence and persuasion. Interaction between the professor and the institution is in many ways shaped by the professor's disciplinary affiliation. This condition is not only a historical artifact of the German model of higher education that was built on the "scientific ethos" from which status in the profession has been derived, but it also results from faculty members having their primary allegiance to a discipline, not to an institution. Disciplinary communities establish incentives and forms of cooperation around a subject matter and its problems. Disciplines have conscious goals, which are often synonymous with the goals of the departments and schools that comprise an institutional operating unit.

Colleges and universities are typically organized around clusters of like disciplines that have some cognitive rationale for being grouped together. The seat of power for decisions on faculty promotion, tenure, and, to some extent, support for research and academic work, lies in the academic department. Thus discipline as an important basis for determining university structure becomes clear. In institutions placing lesser emphasis on research and in institutions more oriented toward teaching, the faculty may adopt more of a local or institutional orientation than a cosmopolitan or disciplinary orientation. In these institutions faculty performance and recognition may be based on institutional as opposed to disciplinary structures. Therefore, the strength of discipline influence on organizational structure in research institutions, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges, for example, can be expected to vary.

Discipline Classification Systems

Numerous analytical frameworks are evident in the literature for classifying academic disciplines for purposes of comparative study. Four of these frameworks have drawn much of the focus of empirical work in the study of discipline differences. These are codification, level of paradigm development, level of consensus, and the Biglan Model. Each of these frameworks is reviewed in turn with relevant commentary on categorical variation determined through empirical study.

Codification. Codification refers to the condition whereby knowledge can be consolidated, or codified, into succinct and interdependent theoretical formulations. As a cognitive dimension, codification describes a field's body of knowledge as opposed to behavioral attributes of scholarly activity. Use of the codification framework in the study of discipline has essentially been displaced by the use of the high-low consensus concept, because consensus, or level of agreement among scholars, has been determined to be a function of codification.

Paradigm development. Paradigm development, as first developed by Thomas S. Kuhn, refers to the extent to which a discipline possesses a clearly defined "academic law" or ordering of knowledge and associated social structures. "Mature" sciences, or thosp> with well-developed paradigms such as physics, are thought to have clear and unambiguous ways of defining, ordering, and investigating knowledge. At the opposite end of the scale are fields such as education and sociology, which are described as preparadigmatic. These fields are characterized by a high level of disagreement as to what constitutes new knowledge, what are appropriate methods for inquiry, what criteria are applied to determine acceptable findings, what theories are proven, and the importance of problems to study. The terms paradigm development and consensus are thought to be interchangeable as they describe a common dimension of disciplinary fields–the extent of agreement on structure of inquiry and the knowledge it produces.

Consensus. The core of the paradigm development concept is the degree of consensus about theory, methods, techniques, and problems. Consensus implies unity of mind on elements of social structure and the practice of science. The indicators of consensus in a field are absorption of the same technical literature, similar education and professional initiation, a cohesiveness in the community that promotes relatively full communication and unanimous professional judgments on scientific matters, and a shared set of goals, including the training of successors. Researchers commonly attribute high levels of consensus to the physical sciences, low levels to the social sciences, and even lower levels to the humanities.

Greater particularistic tendencies, that is, judgments based on personal characteristics, have been exhibited by low-consensus disciplines. For example, in award structures in the sciences, the lower the consensus level the more awards are based on personal characteristics. With respect to the peer-review process, low-consensus editorial board members have been shown to be more likely to accept publications from their own universities. Also, in selection of editorial board members, low-consensus journals put more emphasis on personal knowledge of individuals and their professional associations.

The Biglan Model. Anthony Biglan derived his taxonomy of academic disciplines based on the responses of faculty from a large, public university and a private liberal arts college regarding their perceptions of the similarity of subject matter areas. His taxonomy identified three dimensions to academic disciplines: (1) the degree to which a paradigm exists (paradigmatic or pre-paradigmatic, alternatively referred to hard versus soft disciplines); (2) the extent to which the subject matter is practically applied (pure versus applied); and (3) involvement with living or organic matter (life versus nonlife systems). The natural and physical sciences are considered to possess more clearly delineated paradigms and are in the "hard" category. Those having less-developed paradigms and low consensus on knowledge bases and modes of inquiry (e.g., the social sciences and humanities) are considered "soft." Applied fields tend to be concerned with application of knowledge, such as law, education, and engineering. Pure fields are those that are viewed as less concerned with practical application, such as mathematics, history, and philosophy. Life systems include such fields as biology and agriculture, while languages and mathematics exemplify nonlife disciplines. Biglan's clustering of thirty-three academic fields according to his three-dimensional taxonomy is displayed in Table 1.

Subsequent work by Biglan substantiated systematic differences in the behavioral patterns of faculty with respect to social connectedness; commitment to their teaching, research, and service roles; and publication output. Biglan concluded that the three dimensions he identified were related to the structure and output of academic departments. Specifically, hard or high-paradigm fields showed greater social connectedness on research activities. Also, faculty in these fields were committed more to research and less to teaching than faculty from soft or low-paradigm fields. Those in hard fields also produced more journal articles and fewer monographs as compared to their low-paradigm counterparts. Greater social connectedness was exhibited by scholars in high-paradigm fields, possibly as a result of their common orientation to the work. Applied fields showed greater commitment to service activities, a higher rate of technical report publication, and greater reliance on colleague evaluation. Faculty in life system areas showed higher instance of group work with graduate students and a lesser commitment to teaching than their counterparts in nonlife systems areas. Empirical research applying the Biglan Model has been consistent in supporting its validity.

Discipline Differences

While the disciplines may share a common ethos, specifically a respect for knowledge and intellectual inquiry, differences between them are vast, so much

so in fact that discipline has been referred to as the major source of fragmentation in academe. Disciplines have been distinguished by styles of presentation, preferred approaches to investigation, and the degree to which they draw from other fields and respond to lay inquiries and concerns. Put simply, scholars in different disciplines "speak different languages" and in fact have been described as seeing things differently when they look at the same phenomena.

Differences in discipline communication structures, reward and stratification systems, and mechanisms for social control have been observed. In addition to these variations in structure of disciplinary systems, variations at the level of the individual scholar, the departmental level, and the university level, summarized in a 1996 work by John M. Braxton and Lowell L. Hargens, are drawing a good bit of scholarly attention. To illustrate the extent and content of differences reflected in the literature, a comparative review of discipline differences, based on nature of knowledge, community life and culture, communication patterns, and social relevance or engagement with the wider context, has been synthesized from the work of Tony Becher in Table 2.

It is important to note that the differences captured here encompass both epistemological and social characteristics of each of the four discipline groups. Much of the early study of disciplinary variation focused primarily on the epistemological or cognitive aspects, and it was essentially studies in the sociology of science that brought attention to the social aspects of disciplinary work. Indeed the social factor is becoming more a focus of study with increased attention to the disciplinary impacts on academic organization and leadership. In better understanding how social and epistemological characteristics are manifested in disciplinary groups, scholars will move closer to a theory of discipline differences.

See also: F ACULTY P ERFORMANCE OF R ESEARCH AND S CHOLARSHIP ; F ACULTY R OLES AND R ESPONSIBILITIES .

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L IGHT , D ONALD , J R . 1974. "Introduction: The Structure of the Academic Professions." Sociology of Education 47 (winter):2–28.

L ODAHL , J ANICE B., and G ORDON , G ERALD . 1972. "The Structure of Scientific Fields and the Functioning of University Graduate Departments." American Sociological Review 37 (February):57–72.

R USCIO , K ENNETH P. 1987. "Many Sectors, Many Professions." In The Academic Profession: National, Disciplinary, and Institutional Settings, ed. Burton R. Clark. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

M ARIETTA D EL F AVERO

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Definition of discipline

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of discipline  (Entry 2 of 2)

transitive verb

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The Root and Meanings of Discipline

Discipline comes from discipulus , the Latin word for pupil , which also provided the source of the word disciple (albeit by way of a Late Latin sense-shift to “a follower of Jesus Christ in his lifetime”). Given that several meanings of discipline deal with study, governing one’s behavior, and instruction, one might assume that the word’s first meaning in English had to do with education. In fact, the earliest known use of discipline appears to be punishment-related; it first was used in the 13th century to refer to chastisement of a religious nature, such as self-flagellation .

punish , chastise , castigate , chasten , discipline , correct mean to inflict a penalty on in requital for wrongdoing.

punish implies subjecting to a penalty for wrongdoing.

chastise may apply to either the infliction of corporal punishment or to verbal censure or denunciation.

castigate usually implies a severe, typically public censure.

chasten suggests any affliction or trial that leaves one humbled or subdued.

discipline implies a punishing or chastening in order to bring under control.

correct implies punishing aimed at reforming an offender.

teach , instruct , educate , train , discipline , school mean to cause to acquire knowledge or skill.

teach applies to any manner of imparting information or skill so that others may learn.

instruct suggests methodical or formal teaching.

educate implies development of the mind.

train stresses instruction and drill with a specific end in view.

discipline implies training in habits of order and precision.

school implies training or disciplining especially in what is hard to master.

Examples of discipline in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'discipline.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle English, "chastisement, system of ordered conduct, instruction, branch of learning," borrowed from Anglo-French & Latin; Anglo-French, borrowed from Latin disciplīna "teaching, instruction, branch of study, orderly conduct based on moral training" (Medieval Latin, "chastisement, scourging"), from discipulus "pupil, learner" + -īna, suffix denoting a place or practice (from noun derivative of feminine of -īnus -ine entry 1 ) — more at disciple

Middle English disciplinen "to subject to chastisement, educate," borrowed from Anglo-French & Late Latin; Anglo-French discipliner, borrowed from Late Latin disciplīnāre "to teach" (Medieval Latin, "to punish, scourge"), derivative of Latin disciplīna "teaching, discipline entry 1 "

13th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing discipline

• self - discipline
• sub - discipline

Dictionary Entries Near discipline

disciplinatory

disciplined

Cite this Entry

“Discipline.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discipline. Accessed 28 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of discipline.

Kids Definition of discipline  (Entry 2 of 2)

More from Merriam-Webster on discipline

Nglish: Translation of discipline for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of discipline for Arabic Speakers

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about discipline

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Education as Mental Discipline

WHEN doubts are suggested as to the value of certain time-honored subjects included in the elementary and secondary curriculum, one is told that the subjects in question are valuable because they ‘train the mind.’ ‘Training the mind’ is therefore a phrase which expresses a definite educational theory — the theory, namely, that the most important function of the school is to discipline the mental faculties so that in after life they will be serviceable instruments ready for effective use. The faculties to be thus trained are memory, reason, imagination, observation. People who believe in ‘training the mind,’ or in ‘formal discipline,’ which is the same thing technically expressed, almost invariably hold that the timehonored subjects—Latin, algebra, geometry, and so on — best serve this purpose. They believe that subjects which will themselves probably never be used furnish the most effective mental gymnastic, to use another favorite expression; that memory developed by learning Latin grammar, observation practiced in distinguishing moods and tenses, reason practiced in algebraic or geometrical operations, are so many weapons, in fighting trim, ready to be put to such uses as arise out in the world subsequently. The theory of mental discipline or formal discipline is therefore the bulwark of conventional or traditional education.

The opposing conception may be described as education on the basis of content. Education on the basis of content endeavors to equip the pupil with a varied body of properly-ordered material, which will serve his purposes, stimulate his interests, and engage his growing powers. It selects things to teach, not primarily for the purpose of training the mind, but because the things are in themselves useful, satisfying, or inspiring — because, in a word, they serve some purpose which is valued either by society or by the individual, be the purpose material, utilitarian, artistic, spiritual, or what not. Education by content docs not deny that there is such a thing as training. Indeed, having once chosen a particular subject or content, it insists that this content should be so presented as to develop the maximum power and interest. But it entirely disbelieves in the training of general faculties — a general memory faculty, a general reasoning faculty, a general faculty of observation — on which the theory of formal discipline sets such great store. It holds that really no such faculties exist, and hence that they cannot be trained. There are instead — so content-education believes — many kinds of memory, many kinds of reasoning power, many kinds of observing faculty; and all we know of training is that these various abilities are within limits improvable through exercise. Content-education holds, therefore, that, if the mind is to deal with varied, yet definite and specific experiences, problems, and activities, education or training should concern itself with such experiences, problems, and activities —not with totally different and very limited problems and activities. Hence the emphasis on a content which is in range and quality fairly representative of the world as a whole and of the mind in all its varied interests and capacities. 1

American education is, on the whole, dominated by the former of the two conceptions I have briefly characterized — that is, by the theory of formal discipline. Children study most of their present subjects, not because they serve essential purposes or represent significant experiences, but because they are supposed to ‘train the mind.’ From time to time in recent years, to be sure, content-studies have crept in or been forced in. But it would be a mistake to suppose that this indicates a deliberate abandonment of the disciplinary line. On the contrary, the new content-studies have largely shared the fate of the rest of the curriculum — they have been taught so as to ‘train the mind.’ Their presence does not therefore indicate that the contenttheory is crowding out the theory of mental discipline.

The frankest and most unqualified embodiment of the disciplinary conception of education is the preparatory school. I single it out in this discussion because, particularly in the East, it represents the kind of training given those who qualify for admission to college — those, that is, who want to get a higher education. It is true that increasing numbers enter college, in the East as in other sections, from public and private high schools which do not describe themselves as preparatory schools. Nevertheless, high schools preparing students for college have been directly and indirectly compelled to approximate the preparatory school in the course of study and in the way in which the course of study is handled. Thus the influence of the American college works strongly in the direction of fastening on the secondary school the disciplinary conception of education. I propose in this paper to consider this procedure; in a subsequent one I shall try to convince college authorities that they ought to promote an experiment with the alternative conception.

The preparatory school devotes itself, then, to mental discipline. It seeks to train the mind by forcing it to do intellectual tasks mostly of little inherent interest, but of gradually increasing difficulty. Some pupils do, indeed, get interested; at times the personality of the teacher will irradiate the instruction; at times the study takes on the character of a game which minds of a certain type like to puzzle out. Again, it happens that in every class certain pupils do with ease and almost intuitively the tasks that are defended because of the deliberate intellectual effort that they are supposed to require and to train. I have never heard any believer in mental discipline explain what becomes of the theory in the case of such students — the students, I mean, who see through the thing in this rather effortless fashion. We need not, however, worry about them; for the number of those who succeed easily because of interest in the game or because of native capacity is not large enough to upset the contention that most pupils find intellectual tasks of the type employed difficult and unappealing. To consider what sort of training — intellectual and moral — these pupils get out of their hard and dull tasks, is the main purpose of this paper.

The preparatory school curriculum is made up of languages, abstract mathematics, history, and a bit of science. On its face, it is predominantly a thing of words and symbols. The mind that it trains is therefore necessarily the wordmind — the mind that has to do with words, the mind that can be reached through words, and only in so far as it has to do with words or can be reached through words. If there be people — as there surely are — who think more or less in materials, in colors, in sounds, in images, in action, the word-discipline of the preparatory school is not for them, in so far as they think or act in those media. Now, of course, no education is going to dispense with words and symbols, and the best possible education is going to make a large use of them. But words and symbols are not used in the preparatory school discipline as they are used in daily life. In daily life words are used to suggest meanings or ideas. The preparatory school, on the contrary, uses words and symbols, not primarily to transmit a meaning, but, without emphasis upon meaning, as a method of disciplining the will, the reason, the power of analysis. The other type of school I mentioned — the content type — would employ words and symbols as keys to living subjects, as ways of summarizing experience, as stimuli and challenges to action. Not so the preparatory school. The preparatory school employs words and symbols as formal instruments for disciplinary exercise. And, as we shall see, it treats pretty much all subjects in pretty much the same fashion.

Let me make sure that I am understood when I say that the preparatory school curriculum or the college-entrance programme— call it which you please—is overwhelmingly a thing of words and symbols taught for formal ends. Note in the first place the prominence of language studies and the objects which the language studies subserve. Over one half the subjects offered are languages; much more than one half the time of pupils in school and out of school goes to the study of languages — to the study of languages, furthermore, which pupils do not learn and are not expected to learn. I say the languages are not learned; no one expects them to be learned. They are taught, not for the sake of their meanings, not to be used in suggesting ideas, but as a means of discipline.

Now consider what happens when a child studies, without learning, Latin and Greek. He commits to memory paradigms, conjugations, and vocabulary. What is the process? A mechanical remembering and identifying of arbitrary correspondences between mere words. Each particular ending in Latin equals something, or one of several somethings, in English; each word in Latin equals something, or one of several somethings, in English. There is a list of cases with meaningless names to be arbitrarily accepted; it is astonishing how glibly children learn to employ this incomprehensible terminology. It is no part of the child’s business to ask why; it is, in the main, his business to take the thing on faith and to commit it to memory. Thus, a whole series of declensions is memorized: in the first declension, a long a is a symbol to be mechanically identified with what is called ablative singular, drum a symbol to be mechanically identified with genitive plural, and so on. Subsequently things called moods, voices, gerunds are accepted on the combined assurance of the printed page and of a teacher who treats this printed page with convincing gravity. Intelligence — on the child’s part — is rarely involved ; there is rarely anything for him to understand; there is rarely any stimulus to his wit or interest. It is,

I repeat, a mechanical process which some children do readily and some do not — and there is an end of the matter.

An enormous mass of such arbitrary material has to be taken aboard like so much lifeless freight — declensions, conjugations, regular, irregular, with no end of equally arbitrary exceptions. Nor does arbitrariness end when the grammar forms are learned; for the syntax is from the pupil’s point of view, generally speaking, just as arbitrary, just as much a matter of faith. He is told that ut means ‘that,’ — ‘in order that,’ or ‘so that’; that when it means ‘ in order that’ the negative is ne; when it means ‘so that,’the negative is non; once more, a mechanical set of correspondences, to be mechanically memorized and mechanically applied. So far as he is concerned, it might as well be the other way round or any old way round. No reaction which he can feel or perceive would follow the reversal. Where alternatives are open, the pupil usually fumbles or guesses; some hapless children have a diabolical tendency to guess wrong — just as Mrs. Wiggs’s children were carried irresistibly into an open rain-barrel, when with the slightest good fortune they might have avoided it. In such instances the teacher’s displeasure, evinced by a low mark, not some untoward experience with the rain-barrel, is the pupil’s only way of knowing right from wrong.

I do not, of course, mean to deny that now and then Latin and Greek can be made, and indeed are made, to convey a distinction in meaning which the child may be brought to see is genuine — as, for example when the prepositions in and ad are distinguished. But even if such opportunities were much more abundant than they are, they would not give to classical study the disciplinary virtue asserted for it. The content learned and the method by which it is learned go together; the child cannot acquire a method in vacuo with power to apply it afterwards to other situations that may arise. The child who learns to make a verbal distinction learns just that —and that is practically an end of the matter; he is not acquiring a generally applicable analytical skill. If the teacher happens to possess a wider interest in his classics and if in consequence his teaching is more or less vitalized thereby, the pupils profit by just so much. The subject is made just so much more real; its stimulating, engaging, or, if you prefer, disciplinary effect is increased by so much, and no more. The disciplinary theory, however, tends strongly to restrict the teacher’s opportunity to develop his subject on these side lines. In any case, the scope of meaning or reality in operating with dead languages is as a pinpoint compared with vast arid stretches of formality or arbitrariness. For the most part, teacher and pupil operate, or, better, attempt to operate analytically on intellectual lines with empty, unreal symbols devoid of the breath of life.

One half the subjects of a curriculum based on the old-fashioned college-entrance requirements can thus be criticized for many pupils as mere juggling with words and symbols — a juggling which does not in the end hope or intend to be familiar enough with them to become unconscious of mechanism and conscious of the ideas which languages are meant to communicate. Nor is this failure to learn the language as language regarded by the preparatory school as a fair criticism; for learning the language is not what the school aims at — so far, at least, as the avowed theory of the preparatory school goes. The school aims at mental discipline — and the reader is now in a position to judge how much and what kind of discipline most pupils get from the preparatory school language studies. Moreover, whatever they get, there is no reason whatever to suppose that as discipline it. goes beyond the particular abilities called into action by it. In this respect, the discipline got from learning Latin resembles the discipline got from playing chess. You train what you train.

Mathematics is another formal subject, taught, mainly, not for the sake of imparting knowledge that is or can be used to serve some purpose or other, but taught, once more, because it is supposed to discipline a certain faculty — primarily the reason. In practice, if only teachers observed what happens, it might be perceived that algebra is learned, not as a rule by the exercise of anything that can be properly called reason, but passively, mechanically, just as Latin grammar and Latin syntax are for the most part learned. And just, as the Latin student is reputed to be successful if he can reproduce what he has taken in, so the algebra student succeeds when he can mechanically perform the operations that the teacher or the book performs. He is told that a2 X a3 = a5, while 2a X 3a = 6a2; and, more or less precariously, he comes to do the same thing himself. When negative or fractional exponents are reached, he is — as they say — ‘drilled ’ until hazily and doubtfully he can carry out the same operation. A bit later, and in the same imitative fashion, he learns to apply the binomial theorem or to solve quadratics involving two unknown quantities in this way or that, according as they resemble this type or that. But throughout he is dealing with words and symbols through which he does not penetrate to the realities represented.

Nor is the study illuminated by being brought to bear. Formal discipline does not require that; as I pointed out in discussing Latin, the tendency is in the opposite direction. The disciplinary purpose narrows and impoverishes. Hence the preparatory school curriculum offers nothing in the way of science or industry which might relieve the teaching of mathematics of its uncompromisingly abstract character, or might tend to mitigate formality by means of an occasional touch of reality. In consequence, save in rare instances, the student, goes through a mechanical exercise to which he remains spiritually indifferent — an exercise which does not tap his interest or power, and which for that reason leaves him very much the person that it found him. Highly typical is the girl who made 83 per cent in algebra in the latest collegeentrance examinations, after being ‘ prepared ’ in one of the most successful preparatory schools in the East. Just before entering the examination, she ran through with her father all the common quadratic types, glibly explaining the appropriate solution of each. It was a perfect performance — mechanically considered; but when it was finished and the subject dismissed, she suddenly broke out, ‘ Oh, by the way, father, what is a quadratic anyway?’ Which reminds me of a keen little fellow who recently explained to his mother: ‘You are not expected to understand algebra — only to do it.’ Algebra then, like Latin and Greek, means the mechanical handling of symbols, in close imitation of set models. As a discipline it would at most train children to operate imitatively with formulas whose origin and function they do not appreciate.

The theory of formal discipline is so pervasive that it has subdued other subjects which, it might be supposed, have and can have only content-value. How, for example, does the preparatory school teach history? In the first instance, the history selected is usually Greek and Homan, not modern — a choice which sacrifices at once the powerful motivation of the student’s environment. Ancient history has, to be sure, its proper place in education, but ordinary schools have thought little as to what that place is. The choice of Greek and Roman history is, therefore, not a choice dictated by a sense of the value of content; still less is the treatment calculated to bring out content-value. The subject is presented just about as formally as can beThe unit or symbol is larger, a paragraph, instead of a case or tense or formula; but words and symbols still. There is a textbook of Roman history in which things are boiled down to the form in which the pupil must absorb them with a view to their subsequent reproduction. Of the realities which these feeble paragraphs vainly attempt to portray, few obtain any grasp whatsoever. For the time being, a capable fellow can tell you the main features of the laws of Solon or the Licinian rogations. But the subject-matter was not chosen because of intrinsic interest and importance; and the teacher aims, not at cultivation of historic or civic interest, but at a neat and presentable formal achievement. One may well be puzzled as to what faculty is trained by this kind of exercise; a recent authority tells us that it is ‘memory, imagination, and social reasoning! ’

I mentioned science. In the last school-year, or the last but one, boys and girls whose faculties have for some eight to ten years been disciplined on case-endings, moods, rides of syntax, algebraic formula?, Euclidian demonstrations, Roman constitutions, and the like, are permitted to get a year of a chosen science — physics, or chemistry, or physiology. Well, tardily, to be sure, — but. let us not be ungrateful, — the eager boy, itching by this time for a contact with real problems, his curiosity deadened, but not yet wholly dead, — here at last, he will have done with words and symbols; he will come face to face with content, with phenomena. Not so, however. Preparatory school science, like preparatory school language, preparatory school mathematics, preparatory school history, is intellectual in aspect, meagre in content, disciplinary in purpose. The child’s normal scientific interest and activity arc derived from the world of phenomena and objects in which he lives. In reference to that world, he is, as has been said, ‘an animated interrogation point,’: he wants knowledge of that world; he strives to understand it and to do something with it. The content-teaching of science would heed these strong instincts; and discipline, if we may use the term, would come because of the reality and variety of the efforts made.

This would be science taught from the standpoint of content. The preparatory school, interested in discipline, selects a single science,—physics or chemistry,—presented in strictly logical or intellectual fashion, in a systematic, even if elementary, form; and thereupon, the pupil studies bookishly described phenomena, experiments, and laws, with the same strong emphasis on memory, mechanism, and faith that is characteristic of his study of Latin and algebra. He gets in his physics and chemistry as little sense of the real phenomenal world as he gets sense of meanings when he studies Latin, or sense of uses when he studies algebra or geometry. And what faculties are disciplined? Why, the faculties of ‘observation and concrete reasoning’!

Thus, our children study science, our children study history, just as they study German and French and Latin — not to gain insight or mastery or understanding, not because the subject-matter is a selected portion of their present or prospective experience which in one way or another is going to make a difference to them, but for the purpose of disciplining faculties that do not exist, by means of exercises, the real disciplinary outcome of which remains uninvestigated. They do not study languages as a way of getting at and conveying ideas. They do not study history as a way of arousing and satisfying social curiosity. They do not study science because they wonder at the world about them, or want to be able, so far as may be, to understand or control it. School science, is, therefore, as Dr. Wickliffe Rose once remarked, apt to be ‘ Latin under another name.’

I am at a loss to say just what the preparatory school English course — or the college-entrance English requirements, which is the same thing — aims to accomplish. It may, perhaps, be fairly regarded as an attempted discipline in taste and expression. As such, it is, of all the features that constitute the preparatory school programme, the most dismal failure. For the futility of conventional English teaching, in respect to both taste and expression, is precisely the point that strikes any observer, who, not being responsible for the teaching, is compelled to deal subsequently with the pupils who have passed through it. A university law school professor recently deplored, in conversation with me, the meagre vocabulary, feeble style, and paucity of ideas characteristic of the ‘picked’ students to whom his first, professional courses were addressed. How could it be otherwise? The art of expression develops where there is something to say; but the preparatory school curriculum, and, most of all, the English course, disdains any content such as would give the pupil something to say, and, instead, devotes itself, as consistently as it can, to a ‘discipline,’ which bleaches out all subjects to a uniform deadly pallor. As for taste — taste is something to be developed, not something to be summarily forced upon the pupil. Why should the long-drawnout analysis of dull, unsympathetic, and ill-adapted ‘classics’ like Comus, develop an ordinary pupil’s taste? and why should a man or woman who teaches English for twenty years be compelled every year to dawdle for days over L’Allegro, IlPenseroso , and Burke’s speech? In the thing itself there surely resides no sovereign virtue whatsoever

— only infinite boredom for pupil and teacher alike.

In fact, however, the English course — like the Latin course and the history course and the mathematics course and the science course — was devised by persons who never took into consideration such factors as boy-nature, girlnature, what is left of teacher-nature, or the realities of life and the universe; and it is carried out implicitly by teachers who do not compare what actually happens with what the theory of mental discipline assumes is happening. For, just as soon as the product is tested, — tested as to knowledge of the subjects studied, or tested as to the power thereby developed, — at that moment the whole structure will collapse like the house of cards that it is.

Mental discipline thus effaces the natural distinctions between different subjects; it makes Latin, history, mathematics, science, and English as nearly as possible the same. It empties the subjects of content in order the more effectively to utilize them for intellectual discipline. I repeat what I have already said: this discipline trains what it trains, — not general faculties, but specialized abilities, — the degree of specialization depending on the relative breadth or narrowness of the presentation; on the extent, that, is, to which discipline forgets itself and for the time being becomes content. Dr. Rose very aptly compares the champions of mental discipline to the Egyptian priests who planted rows of dead sticks which, for disciplinary purposes, they watered regularly; had they planted corn, they would have got the same discipline, and something more: the corn, for example, and everything directly and indirectly involved therein.

The champions of mental discipline do not usually try to prove their case by testing the faculties supposed to have been trained. From time to time a business man avers that his classical training lay at the bottom of his commercial success; and some engineers are credibly reported to have expressed the same sentiment. But retrospection is, to say the least, unreliable. I do not forget, of course, the examinations — the preparatory school examinations and the college-entrance examinations. But these examinations do not test the faculties which mental discipline claims to have trained; they are not tests of memory-power, reasoning-power, observation-power, imagination. They test only whether the candidate remembers the things by means of which the faculties in question arc said to have been trained. If a boy is required to learn

in order to train his memory, you do not prove his memory to have been trained by requiring him to repeat the lines (especially if, as is usually the case, he has forgotten most of them). Nor do you prove that a long succession of geometrical propositions has trained his reasoning power, because he can reproduce the simpler ones, after hard drilling on them. You merely prove that a person who lias done a thing often enough can sometimes do the same thing again — more particularly if he has been warned in advance as to just when he may be called on to do it. Meanwhile, certain types of memory and reasoning power and observation might really be tested; but, to prove the preparatory school contention, these powers would have to be tried on material that is both fresh and varied. This is not done.

A much more limited test might however have its uses — namely, a test of the power of pupils in the very subjects with which they have been working. The school tests and the college-entrance tests are not sufficiently objective; besides, the results have not been studied in a way to throw light on the fundamental questions involved. Latin is taught — we are told — so as to train the mind. Very well; let us find out in the first place, how well it is taught. A certain state superintendent of education has recently asked every fourth-year high-school Latin pupil in his state to tell in writing the meaning of a piece of simple Latin prose. On the basis of the performance he makes a preliminary estimate of the efficiency of Latin teaching in his state as between 10 and 15 per cent. This result and other results not a whit more encouraging ought to suggest to believers in mental discipline a series of problems. If Latin is taught to train the mind, how successfully must it be taught in order to train the mind? Is any kind of result better than none at all? Is an inferior result — failure in greater or less degree — capable of harming the mind or character? What does an efficiency of 15 per cent signify? Does it guarantee training, or may it indicate damage? If it should be decided that 15 per cent efficiency is not helpfully disciplinary, then just where shall the line be drawn? Suppose we tentatively assume that an efficiency of 60 or 75 per cent indicates a trained mind, can an efficiency of 15 per cent, objectively measured, be raised to an efficiency of 60 or 75 per cent, similarly measured, and if so, how? Is success in this possible? If possible, what would it cost in time, effort, and money? Would it be worth what it cost to all, or only to those who can achieve it with a moderate expenditure? If a low final grade indicates damage, what shall be done for those who cannot be brought above it? Obviously the same questions can and should be raised as to the other subjects in the disciplinary curriculum. And when the disciplinarians begin to study education in a scientific spirit, they will entertain such questions and patiently seek the answers to them.

Before leaving the subject, I must touch on one other point. Mental discipline is sometimes, as I have said, called a ‘gymnastic,’ and it is held to be justified by the bodily analogy. I do not want to be entangled in a discussion based on metaphors; the metaphors are too apt to come between the disputants and their subject. But so much I may say: the physical gymnasium may or may not train the muscles for other uses; at any rate, it makes only a limited demand daily on the time and energy of the boy; it leaves him free to cultivate other forms of physical expression and urges the wholesomeness of so doing. Not so the mental disciplinarians. Their procedure — meagre and one-sided though it be — tends, by mere pressure, if not otherwise, to exclude other forms of mental and spiritual activity. At a time when pupils are being formally disciplined and mentally trained by means of six subjects all presented in the same fashion, one might suppose that teachers, supposed to be students and observers of the adolescent mind and soul, would be aware of other potential interests and capacities that must be given a chance. Not at all.

Children with a turn for the woods, for animals, for poetry, for music, for modeling, for drawing, or with the possibility of such a turn, have no right to be heard as against the sure intellectual and moral salvation promised by a mental discipline, which has never been subjected by its votaries to a critical examination! If the grind destroys or starves out their possibilities — well, their ‘faculties’ have been trained!

When I say that American schools generally are committed to the theory of formal discipline, I do not mean that other claims are not from time to time also advanced. Latin and Greek are occasionally defended on the ground of their culture-value. The champions of formal discipline appear not to realize that the culture argument flatly contradicts the disciplinary theory, and really accepts the content view of education. In any event, the methods pursued and the results obtained belie the culture argument. Latin and Greek have culture-value only for those who learn the languages and read the literatures. But so few of those who study Latin and Greek learn them, read their literatures, or take any interest in their literatures, that the culture claim cannot be taken seriously as a ground for general and enforced study of Latin or Greek. If, of course, any one desires to learn Latin or Greek as he would undertake to learn French or German, and for the same kind of reason, no objection could be urged, for such study would be calculated to realize culturevalue — which is a real and not a format end. But an argument for the classics based on the assumption that they are to be mastered and appreciated cannot possibly serve as an argument for a study that does not result in mastery or appreciation, and is not expected to result in either. It is a tactical blunder for believers in classical culture to make common cause with the mental disciplinarians, for classical culture can thus only be involved in the ruin which has overtaken mental discipline.

Precisely the same must be said of any argument for Latin or Greek on the ground that higher education must transmit the inheritance of the race. The transmission of culture in the shape of literature, art, history, philosophy — this is content-education, not disciplinary education. Transmission can be effected either through the original language, or through translation, or through both. But if through the original, then the language must be learned, just as French is learned, as a medium for the communication of ideas. The disciplinary purpose is once more a contradiction. Persons who really believe in the culture argument or the transmission argument cannot too soon extricate themselves from their present educational company; they belong on the content side. Instead of defending education of the disciplinary type, they ought to be raising the question as to how in this busy modern world the content of ancient culture can be conserved and transmitted. Whatever the way, it will not be through schools organized and conducted on the theory of mental discipline.

The situation in respect to the theory of formal discipline is, indeed, a curious one. It dominates American education generally; it receives in the preparatory school a clean-cut, unqualified embodiment. Our educational administrators thus accept it, believe in it, practice it. Meanwhile, among students of the science and art of education, — that is, among those who are concerned with the study of educational processes and results, — the theory of formal discipline has, nowadays, no standing whatever. It is as though the students of disease believed, let us say, in the germ theory, while the practitioners of medicine took no stock in it at all. As a matter of fact, practitioners of medicine listen to the student s of disease; but educational administrators are still wary of psychologists and such folk!

For our present purpose, I need not argue the case against formal discipline further. It is clear that its psychology is seriously at fault; for the faculties —memory, reason, etc. — which formal discipline thinks to train in such wise that they can afterwards be used to deal with any problem or emergency that arises, simply do not exist in separate form. Memory, reason, imagination are not single entities which can be disciplined once for all. There are all sorts of ways of remembering, reasoning, and imagining; so that, from the standpoint of training, not a monotonous, verbal, and intellectual set of exercises is needed, but rather all kinds of physical and intellectual experience. Further, formal discipline errs in belittling the possibilities of interest, in ignoring the urgency of knowledge and power adapted to practical needs, social and personal, and, finally, in overlooking the significance and importance of individual capacity. It is at once false in its psychology and too narrow in its outlook.

A school that concerned itself with content would begin by asking what children naturally do and are capable of doing; what tasks life imposes; what accomplishments are of inherent value; what different sorts of ability can be profitably and happily employed. It would set out to guide and to develop the interests and abilities of children; it would select from the objective world significant objects — languages, literature, art, civics, industry, physical phenomena — in the hope of making them objects of genuine and significant concern to growing boys and girls. It would not bother with discipline in the abstract; but it would endeavor so to do its work that habits and attitudes of the right kind would tend to become the ways in which the individual expressed himself. In a content school such as I am describing one would study languages in order to underst and them, to use them, to have access to the ideas stored up in them, to satisfy one’s curiosity, if one will, about their history, structure, and so forth. But always one’s aim would be involved in the language, not in some supposed medication of one’s mental faculties through it. Again, one would study science, not to discipline the mind, but to serve a purpose through knowing the subject; the same would be true of history and literature. Science, literature, history, modern languages, industrial processes, would be taught because they answer the questions which live people ask and can be led to ask, or because they in their substance minister to our needs, capacities, or aspirations, — taught, that is, because they serve purposes and in order that they may serve purposes.

Some of the purposes will be what some people might, perhaps, call low; some of the purposes will be what they might be pleased to call high. We can afford, however, to be less concerned with the topography of the purposes than with the reality or genuineness of the results. If literature can be taught so that there is a vital connection between school and home reading; if history can be taught so that it supplies the child with answers to his problems and raises more problems still; if languages can be taught so that they can be used; if science can be taught so that the world about us is either intelligible or intelligently unintelligible; if industry can be so utilized that the child can understand and sympathize, it is immaterial by what adjective either the effort or the result is described. Is it not clear that this way of studying restores to every subject its proper individuality and thereby engages the mind in various ways? There could indeed be no greater absurdity than to divorce training from content, even were it possible; all the advantage lies the other way. In other words, the purpose for which subjects are taught lies, not in the pupil’s mind, but in the subjectmatter and its relations to existence and life; and the more varied and appealing and trying, if you will, the subjectmatter, the better for the boy, whether the result be viewed from the standpoint of discipline so-called, or from the standpoint of knowledge, interest, and power. The purposes inherent in subject-matter and its world-relations are infinite in variety. Some are utilitarian; some spiritual. Some are mediate — that is, lead elsewhere; some end with their own attainment. But they are always and invariably real, not formal; and discipline comes — if it comes at all — through exercise and experience with various realities.

At heart, intelligent teachers of the classics must know this just as well as we do; they must in their candid moments admit to themselves that they hold on to the theory of mental discipline because their present subjects are not successfully taught as content. They defend Latin and Greek as instruments of mental discipline; but they know perfectly well that that is not why Latin and Greek came into education. Latin and Greek came into education as real subjects, not as formal subjects; they came into education because they embodied more valuable thoughts than other languages, and because except through learning Latin and Greek the thoughts were not accessible. Suppose even to-day someone invented a way to teach Latin, — a way to teach it so that preparatory school pupils could speak it, read it, care for its literature, — would not the preparatory schools jump at it and never mention mental discipline again? Do they not really know that there is more good of one kind or another to be got out of knowing a language than out of the discipline acquired through failure to learn it?

Consider the question from another angle. I know a family of children whose father reads, writes, and speaks Latin. It is to him a language in the same sense and for the same purpose as English and French. His children are acquiring Latin as they are acquiring English and French. There is no question of grammar or syntax, of formal or of informal discipline. They are absorbing Latin through their pores. Is this a bad thing or a good thing? Are those children acquiring a language at the expense of a discipline? Are they getting culture by sacrificing mental training, and, perhaps, moral training, too? Are we to say that, if Latin could be learned as children grow up, because it is spoken in the household, the loss to intellectual training would be utterly disastrous? Of course, no one believes this. Everybody knows that the value of Latin is in knowing Latin, as the value of French is in knowing French, and the value of botany is in knowing botany, and in using it to solve problems and serve purposes; and that thorough and varied knowledge in this sense is effective as training because it involves wide, varied, stimulating, and resourceful employment of one’s capacities. If, then, Latin is to remain in the curriculum, it remains in order to be learned; and if it goes out, it goes out because it is not learned, or because other languages or other subjects are better worth while.

In conclusion, a word by way of quieting the apprehensions of those who fear that real studies will weaken character through appealing solely to spontaneous interest and through following slavishly its vicissitudes. I observe here once more indications that the disciplinarians have not exerted themselves to understand the opposing theory, and have not carefully reflected upon their own practice. When, for example, they discover a teacher of Greek who interests his pupils and arouses their enthusiasm, they do not discharge him. They do not tell him to make the work disciplinary by making it dull; they raise his salary. If interest — whether native or derived — is salutary in respect to Greek, why is it dangerous in connection with a modern subject or activity? Now let me say that in my judgment every teacher, every parent, every business man, every person responsible for any kind of result, will do well to enlist the most vigorous possible interest on the part of those with whom he is trying to work. That only means that the workers are active, assertive, that their powers are mobilized — the very attitude that a good teacher or effective leader aims to procure.

I do sincerely hope that every teacher in a modern school will have enough common sense to do this. The preparatory schools themselves do it when they can, and are right in so doing. Interest, whether native or derived, is indeed the most direct, though not the only, path to moral, intellectual, and economic salvation. So far from being a source of possible demoralization, it is the most certain means of preventing just that.

Perhaps it may be said in reply that it is not so much interest that is to be dreaded, as the heeding of variable and inconstant interests. But this is a manufactured bogey. The modernist does not propose to follow up every interest: he proposes to select and to develop significant interests. Nor does he propose to heed only the child’s native interests and to drop activities as soon as interest flags. Subjects and activities will be selected because they serve purposes. Many of them will be interesting, if teachers are fairly competent — the more, the better. But they will be taught because they serve purposes, not because they tickle the palate, and they will be taught thoroughly enough to serve their purposes, whether they cease or continue to interest. Difficult things will be done— some with zest, let us hope, others by hard pulling against the stream. In both cases — as in all cases — the effort will lead somewhere, and it will be supported by the consciousness that it does lead somewhere. Meanwhile, such effort involves no surrender of the principle that interest, derived as well as native, forms a legitimate and powerful motive. I should work it to the limit; I feel sure that far more can be done with it than is commonly done; but it is, after all, only one aspect of a complicated problem, and no well-informed person has ever made it the sole criterion of educational value.

• For an admirable discussion of this whole question, the reader is referred to Professor Ernest C. Moore’s What is Education ? — THE AUTHOR. ↩

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Meaning of discipline in English

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discipline noun ( TRAINING )

• In some of these schools , army-style drills are used to instil a sense of discipline.
• The new teacher had failed to enforce any sort of discipline.
• Problems arise if the parents ' approach to discipline is inconsistent .
• He's always harping on about lack of discipline.
• Several of the teachers were ineffectual at maintaining discipline.
• asynchronous
• chief academic officer
• communicative
• multi-course
• non-conditioned
• non-didactic
• non-education
• sex education
• show/teach someone the ropes idiom
• socialization
• socializing
• special education

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

discipline noun ( SUBJECT )

• Afrocentrism
• applicative
• hard science
• historiography
• orientalist
• sub-discipline
• suicidology
• technically

discipline verb ( PUNISH )

• ankle bracelet
• ball and chain
• be brought/called to account idiom
• endorsement
• fixed penalty
• flay someone alive idiom
• get what's coming to you idiom
• gross misconduct
• skin someone alive idiom
• someone should be shot idiom
• sort something out

discipline verb ( CONTROL )

Discipline | american dictionary, discipline verb [t] ( punish ), discipline | business english, examples of discipline, collocations with discipline.

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Education And The Discipline Meaning In Education | ResearchWap Blog

• Posted: Monday, 25 May 2020
• By: ResearchWap Admin

Education And The Discipline Meaning In Education

Most at times seeing or hearing the word education, many people always think of places like schools, colleges, polytechnics, and universities. And when hearing the word, many people often confuse it with schooling or at times they might also look to particular jobs like teaching or tutoring and the problem with this is that education as a discipline entails much more than schooling or particular jobs like teaching or tutoring.

Apparently, education as a field of study is analyzed on different characteristics of a discipline. The term education has a multifaceted meaning. Therefore, before analyzing the nature of education as a discipline it is necessary to first analyze the meaning of the term ‘education’, before going into the discipline meaning in education.

What is Education?

The term “Education” in English, ‖ was taken or derived from the Latin words Educare, Educere, and Educatum. And the term “Educatum”‖ denotes the act of teaching,  it also means to train or mold. The terms Educare and Educere mean to bring up, to lead out, or to draw out propulsion, or impetus from inward to outward.  These all terms mainly indicate the development of the latent faculties of the child.

The term education stands for both the study of the field and for the formal enterprise (or system) that is being studied. To understand this dual meaning very well, consider these two definitions of education.

 The first is a standard definition from the American Heritage Dictionary:

• The act or process of educating or being educated.
•  The knowledge or skill obtained or developed by a learning process.
• A Program of instruction of a specified kind or level.
• The field of study that is concerned with the pedagogy of teaching and learning.
• An instructive or enlightening experience.

The second is from the essay on “Education”, by William Frankena in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas:  

• As the activity of one doing the educating, the act or process of educating or teaching engaged in by the educator.
• The process or experience of being educated or learning that goes on in the one being educated.
• As the result produced and in the one being educated by the double process of educating and being educated.
• As a discipline or study of education.

From these definitions, it is clear that the term “Education” is used in three senses: Knowledge, Subject, and Process.

In the first sense, all formal and informal knowledge gained by an individual during his or her lifetime is termed as his or her education. When a person achieves a degree up to a certain level, we do not call it education. For example, if a person has secured a Master's Degree then we utilize education in a much-narrowed sense and call or say that the person has achieved education up to Masters Level.

In the second sense, education is used in a sense of discipline. For example, if a person had taken education as a paper or as a discipline during his study in any institution then we utilizes education as a subject. As a field of study education is a contemplative search for theory and science of the process of educating. In the third sense, education is used as a process. In fact, when we talk of education, we talk in the third sense i.e. education as a process. As an enterprise, it contains various systems of education and, therefore, primarily an activity. However, in this study, we are dealing only with the second meaning of education i.e. education as a subject or discipline that is taught at various levels. The subject relates itself to the preparation of educators and the study of teaching-learning conditions. Most precisely the discipline of Education can be defined as the study of the process of educating. It studies various factors, methods, and elements involved in the process of educating. In this view, educators look to act with people rather on them. Their task is to educe (related to the Greek notion of  educere ), to bring out or develop potential. Such education is:

• Deliberate and hopeful.  It is learning we set out to make happen in the belief that people can ‘be more’;
• Informed, respectful, and wise.  A process of inviting truth and possibility.
• Grounded in a desire that at all may flourish and share in life . It is a cooperative and inclusive activity that looks to help people to live their lives as well as they can.

It also studies various principles and ideas govern this process. A major purpose of education as a field of study is to help to understand and improve the enterprise. As an activity, the education enterprise is highly complex. Its immediate purpose relates to the intellectual, moral, social, and physical development of our students, and its functions, socially and civically, to maintain and improve a democratic way of life, such complexity, with competing goals and values, requires strong analytical thinking and understanding so that the system is operated in a thoughtful and effective way. Therefore the discipline of education has been designed to prepare scholars who are responsible for both the field of study of education and the educational enterprise. 

Education in Primitive and Early Civilized societies

The term education can be applied to primitive societies only in the sense of enculturation, which is the process of cultural transmission. A primitive person, whose culture is the totality of his universe, has a generally fixed sense of cultural progression and timelessness. The model of life is relatively static and absolute, and it is transmitted from one generation to another with little deviation. As for prehistoric education, it can only be inferred from educational practices in surviving primitive societies.

The purpose of primitive education was to guide their children to become good members of their tribe or band. There is a marked emphasis upon training for citizenship because primitive people are highly concerned with the growth of individuals as tribal members and the thorough comprehension of their way of life during the passage from pre-puberty to post-puberty.

Because of the variety in the countless thousands of primitive societies, it is difficult to describe any standard and uniform characteristics of pre-puberty education. Nevertheless, certain things are practiced commonly within cultures. Children actually participate in the social processes of adult activities, and their participatory learning is based upon what the American anthropologist Margaret Mead called empathy, identification, and imitation. Primitive children, before reaching puberty, learn by doing and observing basic technical practices. Their teachers are not strangers but rather their immediate community.

In contrast to the spontaneous and rather unregulated imitations in pre-puberty education, post-puberty education in some cultures is strictly standardized and regulated. The teaching personnel may consist of fully initiated men, often unknown to the initiate though they are his relatives in other clans. The initiation may begin with the initiate being abruptly separated from his familial group and sent to a secluded camp where he joins other initiates. The purpose of this separation is to deflect the initiate’s deep attachment away from his family and to establish his emotional and social anchorage in the wider web of his culture.

The initiation “curriculum” does not usually include practical subjects. Instead, it consists of a whole set of cultural values, tribal religion, myths, philosophy, history, rituals, and other knowledge. Primitive people in some cultures regard the body of knowledge constituting the initiation curriculum as most essential to their tribal membership. Within this essential curriculum, religious instruction takes the most prominent place.

Education in the earliest civilizations

The history of civilization started in the Middle East about 3000 BCE, whereas the North China civilization began about a millennium and a half later. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations flourished almost simultaneously during the first civilization phase (3000–1500 BCE). Although these civilizations differed, they shared monumental literary achievements. The need for the perpetuation of these highly developed civilizations made writing and formal education indispensable.

Education as a Discipline

Education is a relatively new discipline that combines aspects of Psychology, history, philosophy, sociology, and some practical studies. Its domain is the whole complex of the process of educating. The discipline of education is nowadays a compulsory subject used for educating teacher educators. Education is, of course, also a field of research that aims to understand the process of education. The main problems and questions education deals with what content should be taught to pupils and students (the question of the curriculum)? How should the content be taught (the question of teaching method)? What other educational goals shall be pursued in addition to teaching knowledge and skills (the question of values)? In other words, education has to answer the questions of truth, learning, and morals. It has to reflect on the higher goals of education beyond passing on random knowledge and skills. The study of education would be the reflexive effort of looking at the reality of education and trying to understand how it is practiced. 

This is a serious question that whether education can be called a discipline, and there are three schools of thought on the subject. The first suggests that since education borrows from and combines with other, more traditional, disciplines and often focuses on practice; it should not be called a discipline but a field of study or a second-level discipline. Using the same rationale (that many areas within education bring together a traditional discipline within an educational frame), the second school of thought calls education an inter-discipline. In addition, education has its own set of problems, questions, knowledge bases, and approaches to inquiry; the third school of thought pushes for accepting education as a discipline.

One reason for the lack of consensus around the use of 'discipline‘ for education is that as a field of study, education may be seen as one of a set of academic program anomalies in which enterprise itself is primarily an activity. Within universities, this includes schools and colleges that are considered professional schools: engineering, nursing, medicine, law, social work. In the words of Klein 1990,8 We could say that education, as a professional school, is a second-level discipline in that it focuses on a unique activity-education- by borrowing, considerably, from many traditional disciplines.

Looking specifically at areas in education that bring together a traditional discipline and education, we could use the term inter-discipline to describe education. Considering education as an inter-discipline suggests that the work of scholarship in education should focus on bringing together the disciplines as a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches. 

At this point, it would be well worth examining education as a discipline. Not only does education have its own set of problems, questions and knowledge bases, and approaches to the inquiry but also that which is borrowed from other disciplines often becomes transformed within the study of education. To evaluate education on different criteria of a discipline, objectives of studying education as a discipline should be considered first because objectives of study delimit and decide the nature and scope of any field of study.

Education is a discipline that is concerned highly with the methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various no formal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships).

Education can also be seen as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation. Children—whether conceived among New Guinea tribes people, the Renaissance Florentines, or the middle classes of Manhattan—are born without culture.

Education is designed to guide the young generations in learning a culture, molding their behavior in the ways of adulthood, and directing them toward their eventual role in society. In the most primitive cultures, there is often little formal learning—little of what one would ordinarily call school or classes or teachers. Instead, the entire environment and all activities are frequently viewed as schools and classes, and many or all adults act as teachers.

However, as societies grow to be more complex, the quantity of knowledge to be passed on from one generation to the next generation becomes more than any one person can know, and, hence, there must evolve more selective and efficient means of cultural transmission, and the outcome or the result is formal education—the school and the specialist called the teacher.

As society becomes ever more complex and schools become ever more institutionalized, the educational experience becomes less directly related to daily life, less a matter of showing and learning in the context of the workaday world, and more abstracted from practice, more a matter of distilling, telling, and learning things out of context.

This concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere allows children to learn far more of their culture than they are able to do by merely observing and imitating. As society gradually attaches more and more importance to education, it also tries to formulate the overall objectives, content, organization, and strategies of education. Literature becomes laden with advice on the rearing of the younger generation. In short, there develop philosophies and theories of education.

 Education project topics

THE PROBLEMS OF TEACHING PHYSICAL AND HEALTH EDUCATION IN JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS (A CASE STUDY OF SELECTED SCHOOLS IN BWARI AREA COUNCIL, FCT-ABUJA)

COMPARISM OF USING TWO EDUCATIONAL MEDIA IN TEACHING AND LEARNING DIGESTIVE SYSTEM OF FARM ANIMALS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN ADAMAWA STATE

EFFECTS OF TEACHERS’ EXPERIENCE IN THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS IN MATHEMATICS (A CASE STUDY OF SOME SELECTED SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN IFAKO IJAYE LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF LAGOS STATE)

EFFECTS OF PRACTICAL METHOD ON THE EFFECTIVE TEACHING OF PHYSICS IN SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS. (A CASE STUDY OF OJODU LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA IN LAGOS STATE)

EFFECTS OF COMPUTER-BASED INSTRUCTION ON THE LEARNING EFFECTIVENESS OF HEARING IMPAIRED PUPILS IN LAGOS STATE SPECIAL PRIMARY SCHOOLS

DISTRIBUTION AND UTILIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN TWO STATE/FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OWNED SCHOOLS IN LAGOS STATE

INVESTIGATION INTO OPENNESS-VALUES AND COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING FACTORS INFLUENCING SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT IN ONDO NIGERIA

IMPACT OF TEACHER’S EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATION ON THE PERFORMANCE OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN ECONOMICS

CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING VERBS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS (A STUDY OF TWO SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN LAGOS STATE)

TRANSFORMING TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS FOR MASS HIGHER EDUCATION THROUGH DISTANCE AND OPEN LEARNING APPROACHES IN NIGERIA

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