The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education: Mapping the Decline and Its Consequences by Andrew D. Colgan & Bruce Maxwell (Eds.), New York: Routledge, 2020

The essays collected in The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education: Mapping the Decline and Its Consequences, edited by Andrew D. Colgan & Bruce Maxwell, tell the story of a discipline’s fall from prominence in teacher education and some ways this trajectory might be meliorated or reversed. In the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, philosophical study was “widely recognized as essential to the craft of teaching” (Colgan & Maxwell, 2020, p. 1). During this period, nearly all pre-service teachers were required to take a course in the philosophy of education. Compare this today with Canada, the only country for which there is data, where less than 10% of educator preparation programs require a course in philosophical thought (p. 5), and the decline is obvious. The anti-philosophical bent in teacher preparation programs, of course, is not anomalous. As Alasdair MacIntyre (2007), Philip Kitcher (2012), and others have noted, we live in an age that is generally skeptical of philosophical inquiry. The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education does not spend much time reflecting on this broader context. For Kitcher and MacIntyre, at least, some of the blame for our present age’s philosophical skepticism falls at the feet of philosophers. Kitcher laments a drift in academic philosophy from a Deweyan focus on the “study of the good life” and seeking “to understand how opportunities for living well can be promoted by social institutions” (2012, p. 345) towards “arcane puzzles” (p. 346) of metaphysics and epistemology. MacIntyre’s worries point to a deeper anxiety: that seemingly unavoidable methodological tendencies in ethics and political philosophy – where the problems of life are defined and rooted – make it unlikely that philosophers are likely to make progress on these problems. Specifically, MacIntyre (2007) observes that in contemporary ethics and political philosophy it is standard to appeal to conflicting starting points – basic judgments, perceptions, or intuitions – to establish what purport to be “normative” ethical and political conclusions. But problematically, the inferences drawn from these disparate starting points leave us with conflicting conclusions – all purporting to be “normative.” Philosophical inquiry into “normative” ethical issues can thus appear to boil down to a purely preferential choice between internally coherent but conflicting views. MacIntyre refers to the non-cognitive ethic we are left with amidst such fragmentation as “emotivist” (p. 8). MacIntyre’s insight, if well founded, bears directly on the predicament of the philosophy of education. The empirical study of preferences and their satisfaction is a canonical domain of social scientific inquiry. So, if MacIntyre is correct, then it should be no surprise that philosophy in general and philosophy of education in particular have witnessed a decline not felt in the same way by the social (and natural) sciences. The latter but not the former, one might think, are more conducive to solving the problems of life. The chapters in Colgan and Maxwell’s edited volume – divided into three sections – largely abstain from such meta-philosophical questions and their practical consequences. Nevertheless, the chapters shed light on the decline in prominence of the philosophy of education, what has been lost, and how the field is already rethinking and re-establishing its place in the unique context of teacher education. A common theme that emerges across the volume’s sections is a shift of the sort Kitcher recommends towards the concrete problems of life and theorizing on terrain closer to that studied by social scientists. This, of course, is one response to problems in the epistemology of philosophy noted by MacIntyre: if the most philosophers can hope to do is reframe possibilities for interpreting and practically satisfying preferences, then …