Philosophy of education at the edge of the world: the concept of education revisited.. more

This article examines possible implications for the field of philosophy of education of data from a recent research study (Lees 2010) of the discovery, by adults, of alternative modalities of education distinct from mainstream schooling. The 2010 study showed that discovery of educational alternatives such as elective home education (Thomas and Pattison 2007) or democratic schooling of a Summerhillian (Neill 1968) type appears to exhibit characteristics closely matching natural science discoveries as theorised by T. S. Kuhn involving anomaly, crisis, revelation, gestalt switch and revolution (Kuhn 1962). This would suggest paradigmatic ‘worlds’ operate within education. Using the article ‘The Concept of Education Revisited’ (Wilson 2003), the present ‘visit’ to the concept of education uses the implications of the above study on discovery’s data on educational conceptual revolutions to suggest that conceptual analysis of education requires substantial revision in the light of the idea of education as paradigmatic at the level of modality. The article posits that not taking into account the possibility that education can be a paradigmatic field at the level of modality tacitly and by omission philosophically conflates education as a concept with a singular ‘paradigm’ of education to be mostly found in and modelled by mainstream schooling.