Abstract
The acquisition of knowledge has long held an undisputed place in any listing of the goals of education. Yet knowledge as an abstract body of universal truths worth imparting to the young has suffered a series of perhaps fatal blows. The first blow came from the Pragmatists, primarily Dewey, who psychologized knowledge away from abstract truths into personally held beliefs and then subordinated beliefs to the practical activities that gave rise to them. Beliefs when socially vetted were taken as true of reality. To act is to take one’s beliefs as true. True in any absolute and final sense was gone.
The second blow came from social theorists beginning with Weber and Durkheim who claimed that beliefs themselves were merely internalized versions of social realities: “Conceptual thought was social and nothing but an extension of society. . . . Logical life has its first source in society” (Lukes, 1973, p. 441). Social formations vie for power and the right to instill the knowledge congruent with their interests leaving little room for the personal agency and responsibility. The effect has been to treat as problematic notions like knowledge, objectivity, truth, and reality that have long served as the basis for educational thought and practice. To many the result is an alarming diversity of knowledge and beliefs, an unacceptable relativism, and a neglect of personal responsibility.
David Bakhurst’s book The Formation of Reason is the first in a generation to show that a theory of the desired sort—one that accommodates both Dewey’s concern with personal agency and the social-cultural foundations of knowledge—could be formulated along lines currently being explored in the philosophy of mind, thereby rescuing the valued educational goals of abstract valid knowledge, personal rationality, and social responsibility.
Bakhurst draws heavily on the work of the philosopher John McDowell, author of the influential 1994 book Mind and World, and on Ilyenkov and other Russian thinkers on whom he has written in the past (“my Russians,” as he affectionately calls them). Bakhurst develops two critical ideas that any educator would be interested in: first, the remarkable and original way that the social dimensions of mind are addressed and, second, the centrality of education to any theory of human development. Although working within a social-cognitive perspective, Bakhurst rejects the widely held theories of social constructionism for two reasons, their embrace of a radical cultural relativism and their inability to address in a compelling way the nature and role of personally held beliefs and reasons. The ability to form and hold rational beliefs is essential to the “independence of mind” that allows one to “take responsibility for [one’s] thoughts and actions” (p. 137).
Bakhurst addresses the personal and the social in terms of the concept of Bildung, only roughly translated as enculturation or education. Bildung, a philosophical German concept certain to make its way into English, is a concept designed to show that human development is inadequately conceived as either a natural unfolding through universal developmental stages or as a social process of internalization of culture. Rather, human development is to be seen as the growth of personal competence that includes acting in a world organized by the giving and demanding of reasons for actions and beliefs, living in what Sellars (1956) would later call “the space of reasons.” Reasons, like beliefs, are personally held yet social in that they are formulated in a public language and so can be socially monitored and judged in terms of normative standards of correctness—true or false, valid or invalid, and so on. Bildung is the lifelong process of fully developing one’s rational capabilities not merely through the internalization of culture but through a systematic education in which one acquires a critical respect for valid knowledge and the ability to act knowingly, rationally, and autonomously.
In these and many other ways (he cites no less than 44 publications by McDowell alone), Bakhurst paints an impressive picture of a person as a rational agent, capable of acting in the light of reasons and taking responsibility for his or her actions and beliefs. This is just what we would want for an educational theory. He writes:
The story of the Bildungsprozess cannot be told without a robust sense of the reality of the natural world and of ourselves as natural beings within it, and with . . . recourse to the notion of rational agents responsible for their thoughts and actions. (p. 45)
Bakhurst’s great achievement is not just to put a thumb in the eye of the postmodernists and social constructionists and other classes of relativists but rather his success in formulating a positive theory built upon the best work in the contemporary philosophy of mind and language as well as the cognitive and developmental sciences. His favorites include Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Hacking, theories that offer precise accounts of the dependence of thought on a natural language. And he ties these views to those of McDowell, Vygotsky, and Ilyenkov, who show that it is not merely language that earns us freedom and responsibility but the use of language in a reflective, educated, critical way, the product of a serious education that invites us into “the space of reasons.”
Psychologists will be delighted to find that Bakhurst’s philosophy is completely in tune with current developments in cognitive psychology and the developing theory of mind. The educational dimensions of the work signal promising work in the educational sciences in that it shows how academic goals are at the same time social and moral goals, tied to personal autonomy and moral responsibility.
Bakhurst’s work is very much the opening up of a field rather than the nailing down of one. It promises a line of productive interdisciplinary work among philosophers, psychologists, and educators that only now is coming into view. 1 And it restores to mind and knowledge the pride of place they may seem to have lost.