PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW

Philosophy of Education is an academic discipline. It is strictly speaking an educational discipline, because it studies education just like other educational disciplines such as educational psychology, history of education, sociology of education, etc. They are all educational discipline because their formal object is education. However, they differ in their approach in that each views and studies education from different academic standpoints. Education, viewed from philosophical standpoint is already a philosophical reflection on the process of education. Thus to bring philosophical tools into education in order to solve some educational problem, one needs at least a gentleman grasp of some philosophical orientation which the preceding chapter had already taken care of.
Human beings are complex being, and obviously the only being that can know. Education as we have seen is a complex process of acquiring and synthesizing knowledge for the welfare of the individual and the society. Owing to the complexity of man’s nature, there have a perennial problem of what and how should the education of man be considering the fact that he is a social and higher being. What is actually education? What should be the content of human education(curriculum)? How do we determine good or bad education? What is the standard/yardstick for this determination, and who determines? Who should teach, and which teaching method is ideal? Should education aim at giving facts to the students or to give them the capacity to discover knowledge themselves? These are some of the basic educational puzzles that have kept educational thinkers apart over the centuries. In fact on answer to all the questions sampled above, there has never been a shared opinion on what education is or should be.
For instance, on the aim of education, many have argued that the aim of education is to give the child necessary experience (exposure) that will enable him to solve problems that life may present to him. Whereas many have maintained that education should aim at forming the child with already-made knowledge. A little reflection reveals some of their flaws.
It is the area of philosophy education to fine-tune some working principles that should determine what educational process and goal should be given the higher status of man as a rational being.