Critical Reflections on Teacher Education: Why Future Teachers Need Educational Philosophy by Howard Woodhouse, Routledge, 2023

In November of 2021, at the Glasgow COP26 (the United Nations Climate Change Conference), youth climate activist Greta Thunberg gave a speech that reverberated around the world. She spoke to the need to be critical of global leaders and the “beautiful speeches” and “fancy commitments and targets” coming from a “greenwashed” gathering, one that bends to the desires of the Global North to continue the established patterns of “doing nothing” and pursuing growth at the cost of the planet (Thunberg, 2021). For Thunberg, the pomp and pageantry of COP26 was a distraction from the efforts by those in power to “actively [create] loopholes and [shape] frameworks to benefit themselves” and to continue “business as usual and blah blah blah” (Thunberg, 2021). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to have any hope of addressing the climate crisis and its “threat to human well-being and planetary health,” we cannot continue with business as usual; the “window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all” is rapidly closing (IPCC, 2022, p. 33). Howard Woodhouse’s new book, Critical Reflections on Teacher Education: Why Future Teachers Need Educational Philosophy, acknowledges this closing window and proposes a philosophical framework for climate change in teacher education. He argues that we (primarily in the English-speaking Global North) cannot continue with business as usual in teacher education. Woodhouse relates the need to teach educational philosophy to future teachers to the problems they face in their daily practice, but also the oncoming challenges that will imbue a field that calls on practitioners to raise critical participants in democratic, pluralistic societies. Teachers need a skill set that can empower critical and reasoned engagement, as well as “the necessary autonomy of qualified judgment defining their profession” (Woodhouse, 2023, p. 1). Without an education that prepares them to respond to the “anti-educational undertow” and to cope with challenges such as the climate crisis, business as usual will maintain the status quo and bow to the market and late-stage capitalism, and teachers will simply be technicians supporting dehumanizing goals that further disconnect us from “all that lives” (Woodhouse, 2023, p. 127). Woodhouse’s concerns about the decline of philosophy of education in teacher education programs are not unfounded. Colgan and Maxwell catalogue the “marked rise and fall in prominence” (2020, p. 1) of the formally essential area of study, and the impacts of its impoverishment. According to a survey of teacher education programs in Canada, as of 2013 only 10%, or 12 out of 124 programs, still require a course in philosophy of education for graduation (Maxwell, Tremblay-Laprise, & Filion, 2015). Woodhouse takes up this demise in his first of the book’s five chapters, in which he asks, “how is it that educational philosophy, which was once considered a foundational discipline in teacher education, has been so severely marginalized?” (Woodhouse, 2023, p. 11). His approach is a blend of storytelling and a discussion surrounding the “market model of education” (Woodhouse, 2023, p. 12) in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, followed by an examination of its impacts on teachers that dips into one of the book’s heroes, British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, and his call for educational philosophy. Russell’s humanism is central to Woodhouse’s argument for reflective and reflexive teachers who do more than fill an empty bucket with water or a mind with information. Without a meaningful and robust approach to the discipline of philosophy of education in teacher education programs, and a strong counter to the “market model”—an approach in which “government control and market imperatives exert pressure over teachers” (Woodhouse, 2023, p. …