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Papers by Paul Standish
Journal of Philosophy of Education
This paper sets out to consider what is probably the most widely known of the writings of Paul Hi... more This paper sets out to consider what is probably the most widely known of the writings of Paul Hirst, ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’. It examines the central concept of the ‘forms’ and goes on to explore the provenance of the ideas he develops in this paper, exposing diversity and some tension between these. At the end it offers some brief suggestions regarding the prospects for the idea of a liberal education today in the light of Hirst’s views.
Philosophy of Education
's thought-provoking essay gives sensitive and careful attention to a thinker whose significance ... more 's thought-provoking essay gives sensitive and careful attention to a thinker whose significance for education is very much still to be realized. In what follows I want to explore the provocations of her essay-the vision of education and of the teacher-student relationship she calls us toward-and also, exploiting the double genitive in my title, to provoke her in a number of ways: by pointing to some potential misunderstandings that she will probably want to resist, and by stretching Levinas in ways that she may well not countenance.
Philosophy of Education
The titles for the 1953 film The Band Wagon are seen against the set-piece display of a top hat a... more The titles for the 1953 film The Band Wagon are seen against the set-piece display of a top hat and cane. The first scene shows an auction room: the auctioneer appeals in vain for bids for these items, the possessions, it turns out, of the now faded star Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire). The film, then, begins with loss-loss of celebrity and the devaluing of these mementoes of his talent. In the second scene, a train is speeding to New York. Two loudmouths talk about Hunter as a has-been, while Hunter himself, behind a newspaper, overhears. When the train arrives, he is initially reluctant to leave the carriage. Then, hearing that there is a reception party-a red carpet and eager reporters are waiting-his mood lifts. He steps out proudly but is immediately upstaged: Ava Gardner, playing herself, emerges from the carriage behind him and poses for the cameras, which are there for her. Hunter is left standing by himself, leaning on a cart piled high with luggage. It is only when a porter moves the cart that he is disturbed into action. He walks along the platform, singing somewhat mournfully "By myself, by myself." Throughout the whole sequence we do not see his feet. The sequence is carefully color-coded-the porters black, the passengers white, the aging Hunter's suit a pasty grey, the beautiful Ava Gardner in dazzling chiaroscuro. The train carriage bears the name "General Grant." There is already here then a questioning of the terms of praise, especially of when it is empty or hollow and when it is not.
Philosophy of Education
The starting point for my discussion is music. It is a characteristic of development in music tha... more The starting point for my discussion is music. It is a characteristic of development in music that its innovations and specifically its avant-garde challenge its audience. In a sense this must be the case by definition, but my suggestion is that this occurs in music in a way that is more pronounced than in the other arts. At its inception, be-bop was not for the faint-hearted, while free jazz can sometimes leave its audiences bewildered. Charlie Parker's desire to exploit all twelve notes of the chromatic scale echoed the revolution that Arnold Schoenberg had more or less brought about. And Schoenberg's music and its legacy, through the middle decades of the twentieth century, continued to baffle audiences, perhaps in unprecedented ways. In some respects, the question was the one that could be heard in the galleries and museums: "Is this art? What can it mean?" Innovation in the literary arts around this time produced troubled reactions too, but given that words are, as it were, condemned to mean something, the question arose perhaps in a less ground-shaking way. Visitors could be mystified by Carl André's "pile of bricks," but at least they could see they were bricks. Moreover, while in the gallery one could simply take a look and then walk away, the audience in a concert hall is more or less captive for the duration of the performance. In sum, then, the challenges of music at this time proved especially testing, and audiences were often at a loss as to what they were listening to. Was this really music at all, or was it just a noise?
Scottish Educational Review
Education Without Risk
Education in an Age of Nihilism, 2012
Seeing Connections: From Cats and Classes to Characteristics and Cultures
This paper examines the idea of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of context in the light of his preo... more This paper examines the idea of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of context in the light of his preoccupation with seeing connections. The importance of this is considered in relation to more deductive and inductive forms of reasoning, unduly constrained notions of what it is to follow a rule, and ideas of defining characteristics and identity. The implications of contextualist views are examined, as well as the consequences of the application of the familiar lumper-splitter distinction, which emerges originally in disputes in the taxonomical sciences. The relation between seeing connections and imagination is brought to the fore. The paper provides further reason to challenge dominant conceptions of assessment in education and their pervasive effects on curricula.
Data can seem to be the very foundation of research, the sine qua non of enquiry into education. ... more Data can seem to be the very foundation of research, the sine qua non of enquiry into education. Yet this thought can be troubled by questions about the provenance of data or about how something comes to be constructed as data in the first place. And most researchers face questions about what to do with data when it arrives – where, in the social sciences more than the physical sciences, results of tests rarely show conclusively what to do next, and where, in light of this, interpretation comes to the fore. The present discussion explores problems of objectivity and subjectivity, and of fact and value, as these arise in relation to these matters. The idea that the mind is more or less separate from the body and the idea that there is a realm of fact distinct from the realm of value in many respects laid the way for contemporary notions of objectivity and subjectivity, not least in the social sciences. Yet both are now widely discredited. The present discussion will illustrate the na...
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2017
This essay begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called "Emersonian moral pe... more This essay begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called "Emersonian moral perfectionism". It goes on to explore this through close analysis of aspects of Emerson's essay "Experience", in which ideas of trying or attempting or experimenting bring out the intimate relation between perfectionism and styles of writing. "Where do we find ourselves?" Emerson asks, and the answer is to be found in part in what we write and what we say, injecting a new sense of possibility and responsibility into our relation to our words. But that language and the lives that go with it are at the same time burdened with a past, and in the case of English, and the American context especially, it is marked with a kind of repression relating to questions of slavery and race. These matters are implicated in questions of constitution, in both general and specific senses. Hence, inheritance and appropriation become causes of critical sensitivity, as do the forms of praise acknowledgement that should meet them. The essay explores ways of thinking through Emerson's relation to these aspects of experience and seeks to find responses pertinent to today.
Learning to Change
The Therapy of Education, 2007
We saw at the beginning of this book how the kindly apocalypse both reveals and obscures. Extendi... more We saw at the beginning of this book how the kindly apocalypse both reveals and obscures. Extending across the self-help shelves of our bookstores and libraries, it offers plentiful advice on turning our lives, our schools and our businesses around. It finds its way inexorably into counselling and educational practice. Sometimes this is evident in therapeutic measures addressed to specific problems — to bullying, to stress, to shyness and deficiencies of self-esteem, as we saw. At others the advice is more general in kind: use BrainGym for activation of right and left hemispheres; develop interpersonal skills and emotional literacy to enhance your credibility as a leader of change; give quality time to your children; personalize your learning. Select wilderness therapy as a short-term, high impact alternative. Let narrative therapy help produce the meaning of your life.
The Nature and Purposes of Education
A Companion to the Philosophy of Education
In Roger Marples's useful collection The Aims of Education (1999), a number of contributors ... more In Roger Marples's useful collection The Aims of Education (1999), a number of contributors sketch the different ways in which the question of aims has been addressed in educational theory. Kevin Harris's approach is indicative. Recognizing the salience of such questions ...
自らの声で--喪失・出立・再生--カベルによるエマソンの道徳的完成主義 (特集=分析哲学) -- (経験と世界)
現代思想, Jul 1, 2004
Registers of the Religious: The Terence H. McLaughlin Lecture 2010
Ethics and Education, 2012
The Universities We Need
This work challenges some of the assumptions behind recent thinking on lifelong learning and disc... more This work challenges some of the assumptions behind recent thinking on lifelong learning and discusses the idea of the learning society through a reappraisal of the relationship between the university and the community. It reconsiders the demand for efficiency, effectiveness and accountability.
Educational Discourse: meaning and mythology
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 1991
ABSTRACT Behaviourism and instrumentalism continue to exert an important influence in education. ... more ABSTRACT Behaviourism and instrumentalism continue to exert an important influence in education. Its discourse is infected with scientism, especially in the language of curriculum design and methodology. Theory and practice are peculiarly impervious to criticism from ...
Postmodernism and the Education of the Whole Person
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 1995
In an important sense, therefore, personal and social education has always been, and will always ... more In an important sense, therefore, personal and social education has always been, and will always be, with us. In the past it has manifested itself in a number of aims familiar from school prospectuses-a concern for the building of character, for the development of the whole ...
From Adult Education to Lifelong Learning
Registers of the religious
Ethics and Education, 2012
Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue, first published in 1981, begins with sobering wo... more Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue, first published in 1981, begins with sobering words, the resonance of which has, in the three decades since then, been felt by many. We live in a world characterised by a vocabulary of value whose purchase on life is no longer authentically experienced. Our fluency in its discourse hides from us the emptiness of its signs. In practices of education, one might add, the lexicon of value has become degenerate, with ‘quality’ and ‘criteria’ now reduced to technical terms, while vacuous notions of ‘effectiveness’, ‘performance’, and ‘improvement’ are everywhere to be found. MacIntyre’s diagnosis of our impoverished condition relates to the severing of such vocabularies from the communities that gave them meaning, and in many respects he understands the continuities and commonalities of those communities in religious terms – ‘religion’, whose middle syllable tells us that this is the stuff that binds. When one hears of declining rates of church attendance or of indifference to religion in so much of Europe, amongst young people especially – Dublin is characterised now, I am told, by an aggressively secular society – MacIntyre’s picture rings all the more true. And for many of us there does indeed seem to be no going back. Religion of the kind that, in the not so distant past, structured the lives of so many in Europe, now no longer seems an option. And yet, how parochial, how ethnocentric, this may be! Outside the major coastal cities in the United States, and throughout Latin America, the church thrives. In the former communist countries, in the period since MacIntyre’s book, religion has been released from decades of suppression. Religious broadcasting has grown exponentially, and the church has (again) become big business. And this is to speak only of Christianity. When one considers the strength of Islam, the picture becomes more complicated by far. These are matters of global reach whose significance for politics and education can scarcely be overestimated. But the dynamics they exhibit are also played out in local circumstances, in particular lives, and in the complex tensions of religion and education. The burden of much of Terry McLaughlin’s work, steeped in the prevailing preoccupations of political liberalism, was the relation of religion to schooling: more specifically, the place (if any) of religion in the common school,
Journal of Philosophy of Education
This paper sets out to consider what is probably the most widely known of the writings of Paul Hi... more This paper sets out to consider what is probably the most widely known of the writings of Paul Hirst, ‘Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge’. It examines the central concept of the ‘forms’ and goes on to explore the provenance of the ideas he develops in this paper, exposing diversity and some tension between these. At the end it offers some brief suggestions regarding the prospects for the idea of a liberal education today in the light of Hirst’s views.
Philosophy of Education
's thought-provoking essay gives sensitive and careful attention to a thinker whose significance ... more 's thought-provoking essay gives sensitive and careful attention to a thinker whose significance for education is very much still to be realized. In what follows I want to explore the provocations of her essay-the vision of education and of the teacher-student relationship she calls us toward-and also, exploiting the double genitive in my title, to provoke her in a number of ways: by pointing to some potential misunderstandings that she will probably want to resist, and by stretching Levinas in ways that she may well not countenance.
Philosophy of Education
The titles for the 1953 film The Band Wagon are seen against the set-piece display of a top hat a... more The titles for the 1953 film The Band Wagon are seen against the set-piece display of a top hat and cane. The first scene shows an auction room: the auctioneer appeals in vain for bids for these items, the possessions, it turns out, of the now faded star Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire). The film, then, begins with loss-loss of celebrity and the devaluing of these mementoes of his talent. In the second scene, a train is speeding to New York. Two loudmouths talk about Hunter as a has-been, while Hunter himself, behind a newspaper, overhears. When the train arrives, he is initially reluctant to leave the carriage. Then, hearing that there is a reception party-a red carpet and eager reporters are waiting-his mood lifts. He steps out proudly but is immediately upstaged: Ava Gardner, playing herself, emerges from the carriage behind him and poses for the cameras, which are there for her. Hunter is left standing by himself, leaning on a cart piled high with luggage. It is only when a porter moves the cart that he is disturbed into action. He walks along the platform, singing somewhat mournfully "By myself, by myself." Throughout the whole sequence we do not see his feet. The sequence is carefully color-coded-the porters black, the passengers white, the aging Hunter's suit a pasty grey, the beautiful Ava Gardner in dazzling chiaroscuro. The train carriage bears the name "General Grant." There is already here then a questioning of the terms of praise, especially of when it is empty or hollow and when it is not.
Philosophy of Education
The starting point for my discussion is music. It is a characteristic of development in music tha... more The starting point for my discussion is music. It is a characteristic of development in music that its innovations and specifically its avant-garde challenge its audience. In a sense this must be the case by definition, but my suggestion is that this occurs in music in a way that is more pronounced than in the other arts. At its inception, be-bop was not for the faint-hearted, while free jazz can sometimes leave its audiences bewildered. Charlie Parker's desire to exploit all twelve notes of the chromatic scale echoed the revolution that Arnold Schoenberg had more or less brought about. And Schoenberg's music and its legacy, through the middle decades of the twentieth century, continued to baffle audiences, perhaps in unprecedented ways. In some respects, the question was the one that could be heard in the galleries and museums: "Is this art? What can it mean?" Innovation in the literary arts around this time produced troubled reactions too, but given that words are, as it were, condemned to mean something, the question arose perhaps in a less ground-shaking way. Visitors could be mystified by Carl André's "pile of bricks," but at least they could see they were bricks. Moreover, while in the gallery one could simply take a look and then walk away, the audience in a concert hall is more or less captive for the duration of the performance. In sum, then, the challenges of music at this time proved especially testing, and audiences were often at a loss as to what they were listening to. Was this really music at all, or was it just a noise?
Scottish Educational Review
Education Without Risk
Education in an Age of Nihilism, 2012
Seeing Connections: From Cats and Classes to Characteristics and Cultures
This paper examines the idea of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of context in the light of his preo... more This paper examines the idea of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of context in the light of his preoccupation with seeing connections. The importance of this is considered in relation to more deductive and inductive forms of reasoning, unduly constrained notions of what it is to follow a rule, and ideas of defining characteristics and identity. The implications of contextualist views are examined, as well as the consequences of the application of the familiar lumper-splitter distinction, which emerges originally in disputes in the taxonomical sciences. The relation between seeing connections and imagination is brought to the fore. The paper provides further reason to challenge dominant conceptions of assessment in education and their pervasive effects on curricula.
Data can seem to be the very foundation of research, the sine qua non of enquiry into education. ... more Data can seem to be the very foundation of research, the sine qua non of enquiry into education. Yet this thought can be troubled by questions about the provenance of data or about how something comes to be constructed as data in the first place. And most researchers face questions about what to do with data when it arrives – where, in the social sciences more than the physical sciences, results of tests rarely show conclusively what to do next, and where, in light of this, interpretation comes to the fore. The present discussion explores problems of objectivity and subjectivity, and of fact and value, as these arise in relation to these matters. The idea that the mind is more or less separate from the body and the idea that there is a realm of fact distinct from the realm of value in many respects laid the way for contemporary notions of objectivity and subjectivity, not least in the social sciences. Yet both are now widely discredited. The present discussion will illustrate the na...
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2017
This essay begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called "Emersonian moral pe... more This essay begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called "Emersonian moral perfectionism". It goes on to explore this through close analysis of aspects of Emerson's essay "Experience", in which ideas of trying or attempting or experimenting bring out the intimate relation between perfectionism and styles of writing. "Where do we find ourselves?" Emerson asks, and the answer is to be found in part in what we write and what we say, injecting a new sense of possibility and responsibility into our relation to our words. But that language and the lives that go with it are at the same time burdened with a past, and in the case of English, and the American context especially, it is marked with a kind of repression relating to questions of slavery and race. These matters are implicated in questions of constitution, in both general and specific senses. Hence, inheritance and appropriation become causes of critical sensitivity, as do the forms of praise acknowledgement that should meet them. The essay explores ways of thinking through Emerson's relation to these aspects of experience and seeks to find responses pertinent to today.
Learning to Change
The Therapy of Education, 2007
We saw at the beginning of this book how the kindly apocalypse both reveals and obscures. Extendi... more We saw at the beginning of this book how the kindly apocalypse both reveals and obscures. Extending across the self-help shelves of our bookstores and libraries, it offers plentiful advice on turning our lives, our schools and our businesses around. It finds its way inexorably into counselling and educational practice. Sometimes this is evident in therapeutic measures addressed to specific problems — to bullying, to stress, to shyness and deficiencies of self-esteem, as we saw. At others the advice is more general in kind: use BrainGym for activation of right and left hemispheres; develop interpersonal skills and emotional literacy to enhance your credibility as a leader of change; give quality time to your children; personalize your learning. Select wilderness therapy as a short-term, high impact alternative. Let narrative therapy help produce the meaning of your life.
The Nature and Purposes of Education
A Companion to the Philosophy of Education
In Roger Marples's useful collection The Aims of Education (1999), a number of contributors ... more In Roger Marples's useful collection The Aims of Education (1999), a number of contributors sketch the different ways in which the question of aims has been addressed in educational theory. Kevin Harris's approach is indicative. Recognizing the salience of such questions ...
自らの声で--喪失・出立・再生--カベルによるエマソンの道徳的完成主義 (特集=分析哲学) -- (経験と世界)
現代思想, Jul 1, 2004
Registers of the Religious: The Terence H. McLaughlin Lecture 2010
Ethics and Education, 2012
The Universities We Need
This work challenges some of the assumptions behind recent thinking on lifelong learning and disc... more This work challenges some of the assumptions behind recent thinking on lifelong learning and discusses the idea of the learning society through a reappraisal of the relationship between the university and the community. It reconsiders the demand for efficiency, effectiveness and accountability.
Educational Discourse: meaning and mythology
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 1991
ABSTRACT Behaviourism and instrumentalism continue to exert an important influence in education. ... more ABSTRACT Behaviourism and instrumentalism continue to exert an important influence in education. Its discourse is infected with scientism, especially in the language of curriculum design and methodology. Theory and practice are peculiarly impervious to criticism from ...
Postmodernism and the Education of the Whole Person
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 1995
In an important sense, therefore, personal and social education has always been, and will always ... more In an important sense, therefore, personal and social education has always been, and will always be, with us. In the past it has manifested itself in a number of aims familiar from school prospectuses-a concern for the building of character, for the development of the whole ...
From Adult Education to Lifelong Learning
Registers of the religious
Ethics and Education, 2012
Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue, first published in 1981, begins with sobering wo... more Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue, first published in 1981, begins with sobering words, the resonance of which has, in the three decades since then, been felt by many. We live in a world characterised by a vocabulary of value whose purchase on life is no longer authentically experienced. Our fluency in its discourse hides from us the emptiness of its signs. In practices of education, one might add, the lexicon of value has become degenerate, with ‘quality’ and ‘criteria’ now reduced to technical terms, while vacuous notions of ‘effectiveness’, ‘performance’, and ‘improvement’ are everywhere to be found. MacIntyre’s diagnosis of our impoverished condition relates to the severing of such vocabularies from the communities that gave them meaning, and in many respects he understands the continuities and commonalities of those communities in religious terms – ‘religion’, whose middle syllable tells us that this is the stuff that binds. When one hears of declining rates of church attendance or of indifference to religion in so much of Europe, amongst young people especially – Dublin is characterised now, I am told, by an aggressively secular society – MacIntyre’s picture rings all the more true. And for many of us there does indeed seem to be no going back. Religion of the kind that, in the not so distant past, structured the lives of so many in Europe, now no longer seems an option. And yet, how parochial, how ethnocentric, this may be! Outside the major coastal cities in the United States, and throughout Latin America, the church thrives. In the former communist countries, in the period since MacIntyre’s book, religion has been released from decades of suppression. Religious broadcasting has grown exponentially, and the church has (again) become big business. And this is to speak only of Christianity. When one considers the strength of Islam, the picture becomes more complicated by far. These are matters of global reach whose significance for politics and education can scarcely be overestimated. But the dynamics they exhibit are also played out in local circumstances, in particular lives, and in the complex tensions of religion and education. The burden of much of Terry McLaughlin’s work, steeped in the prevailing preoccupations of political liberalism, was the relation of religion to schooling: more specifically, the place (if any) of religion in the common school,