Howard Woodhouse is Professor Emeritus and Co-Director of the Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit in the Department of Educational Foundations, University of Saskatchewan. Critical Reflections on Teacher Education is both a resume of his long career as a philosopher and teacher and a diagnosis and suggestions for cures of the malaise of the school system and teacher education. In this slim but complex volume he argues that the continued intrusion of capitalist market values into schools has extended to the curriculum and methods of faculties of education. If left unchecked, this tendency will undermine the capacity of future teachers for critical reflection and autonomous judgement, turning them into little more than transmission belts for government policy and corporate interests. “Without a basic understanding of philosophical issues and their relationship to educational practice” he writes, new teachers “will become lost in the demands of hierarchical school systems that emphasize conformity to rules and policies, which negate the necessary autonomy of qualified judgement defining their profession.” (1)That this transformation would negate the vocation of educators to enable students’ intellectual growth is of no concern to today’s self-styled “reformers.” Woodhouse’s argument alerts educators to the crisis, explains the importance of philosophy to teacher education, and makes a number of practical suggestions for the transformation of classrooms at all institutional levels.

He supports his argument with evidence drawn from his own long career as a philosopher, from the educational philosophy of Bertrand and Dora Russell (and to a lesser extent, John Dewey), the philosophy for children movement, and the place-based educational philosophy and practice of Indigenous communities from whom he has learned in Saskatchewan. He integrates these distinct strands of argument by showing how they are forms of “life-value,” a term he adopts from the work of John McMurtry. McMurtry’s epochal philosophical achievement was to have demonstrated that all values are functions of the needs and capacities of living, sentient beings. Whatever is of value either serves living things as a resource that satisfies their needs or is an expression of their sentient, intellectual, or creative capacities. The Russell’s’ understanding of education as growth, the cultivation of the philosophical capacities of children, and the First Nation’s understanding that scientific knowledge grows up out of lived experience of the nurturing power of the land are all expressions of this underlying principle.

His latest critique of the intrusion of market values into the educational system extends the reasoning of his previous book, Selling Out, from the university system into the primary and secondary school systems. Both books build on the pioneering argument of McMurtry’s “Education and the Market Model” (Paideusis, 1991). In that seminal paper, McMurtry contrasted the values that rule the capitalist market place (all goods are understood as saleable commodities available for purchase by anyone willing to pay the price) with the value that organizes educational systems (the growth of intellect and sensibility through conjoint efforts with teachers in structured but open-ended inquiry). As is evident, the value that organizes educational systems is undermined to the extent that market values invade. To become educated, students must struggle to understand; the burden of inquiry cannot be alleviated through a cash transaction. The work must continue until insight has been achieved, only to start again, in search of deeper and more comprehensive understanding. If education were a commodity then the insights could be purchased, but even if one could buy diplomas they would not acquire the cultivated intelligence that the piece of paper signifies. The problem is solved, McMurtry and Woodhouse both worry, by transforming the content of education. Instead of open ended inquiry schooling becomes a matter of mechanical skill acquisition, efficiently delivered and standardized tested.

The book is organized into five pithy chapters. Each begins with a short personal reflection that motivates the philosophical argument to come. Despite their concision, each is richly illustrated with appropriate historical evidence. The first chapter details the way in which the market model has infiltrated faculties of education in Canada, the UK, and the US. The consequence for future teachers is that their careers will be “reduced to that of technicians working to advance the goals of the market.” (11) However, even that reduction is only a first step. The ‘reformers’ ultimately aim at doing away with living teachers altogether. Woodhouse cites Robert Heterich, president of Educom, an academic-corporate consortium, who advocates “‘remov[ing] the human mediation … and replac[ing] it with automation’ … to reduce unit costs and programme students for the market.”(24) The emergence of ChatGPT perhaps brings this dream closer than educators might have feared.

To the objection that machines cannot teach because machines cannot think, technocrats will respond (as they do in the case of “artificial” intelligence), by redefining teaching as that which the teacher bot can do. Human intelligence is bound up with our self-conscious awareness of our vulnerable being-in-the-world. Therefore, it is not algorithmic, even if some basic operations can be formalized and replicated by machine functioning. All intelligent reflection and action is bound up with meaningful interpretation and caring interacting with the natural and social environment. However impressive the operations of technologies like ChatGPT, they are not alive, do not care, and therefore cannot produce meaningful interpretations of the problems their creators claim they can help solve. However, this objection disappears if intelligence is defined as the machinic assembly of sentences. If students are taught that intelligence is the execution of algorithms then, after a few generations, that is what everyone will believe intelligence is, and the existential basis of the criticism will be undermined.

The same fate awaits teaching if technocrats like Heterich win. All teachers have to rely on routines and rules of thumb which those who would eliminate the teacher believe can be formalized and programmed into a machine. However, as with human intelligence, the affective and communicative core of teaching would be eliminated. Teaching is not the efficient transmission of information; teaching is the multi-sided ability to frame problems in such a way that students form the desire to investigate it on their own. Only through their own efforts can students grow intellectually. The role of the teacher is to help them find their way into whatever problem is under investigation. If students are taught that education is simply the efficient assimilation of skills and data, then they will lose the affective connection to problems that genuine education stimulates. The result will be that the human project terminates in our having replaced ourselves with machines. What will replace the role of effort and striving as sources of meaning in our lives no one can say.

Woodhouse exposes the supreme danger of these trends. He anchors his alternative vision in the educational philosophy of Bertrand and Dora Russell. Woodhouse demonstrates that, despite his occasional lapse into scientism, Russell was, at heart, a humanist and the educational philosophy that he and Dora developed placed the free development of the student at its centre. For the Russells, educational systems should be modelled on the principle of living development that governs the natural world: “The metaphor of growth runs throughout Bertrand and Dora’s educational philosophy … “the humanistic conception of education” they write ‘regards the child as a gardener regards a young tree … as something with an intrinsic nature, which will develop into an admirable form, given proper soil and air and light.”‘(34) Gardening is both joyous and terrifying: one plants the seeds in well-prepared ground but one cannot force them to grow. So too with teaching: the teacher prepares the ground by framing the problem in ways that the students can understand, but then must trust the students to do the work themselves. As the gardener cannot force the tree to grow, so too the teacher cannot brow beat the students to learn. Their task is not to force but to enliven the inner principle, the “desire to know” which, as Aristotle said, lies at the root of human relationship to the world.

Even when well-intentioned, the move to turn teachers into testable skill-transmitters would destroy the nature of education. Anyone can memorize times tables; writing Principia Mathematica requires imagination and drive, not just mastery of the rules of formal logic. ChatGPT can assemble sentences, but until it feels the joy of awakening each morning and the utter desolation of the loss of a loved one, poetry will elude it. Education enables students to find their own voice: some as mathematicians, perhaps, and some as poets, but all as sensitive, reflective, confident but not dogmatic citizens of the world. To become educated is to become alive to the world as a question. Thinking is– as Dewey understood–active intervention into the order of things, the very opposite of parroting the correct slogan or learning what you need to say to get the job. The world will always exceed our grasp, but that is a good thing: the inherent questionability of things ensures that there will always be something meaningful for the next generation to do (as long as there is a next generation).

Despite Russell’s reputation as a stuffy and conservative analytic philosopher, criticism was central to his philosophical practice. “The essential characteristic of philosophy,” he argued, “which makes it a study distinct from science, is criticism. It examines critically the principles employed in science and in daily life, it searches out any inconsistencies there may be in these principles, and it only accepts them when, as the result of a critical inquiry, no reason for rejecting them has appeared.”(32) One can immediately see the importance of this practice of philosophy for teachers and students. If education is not to degenerate into indoctrination, then teachers must be able to think critically about the curriculum they are being asked to teach, and to have the intellectual courage to oppose curricula that suffocates thinking under dogma. By being critical themselves they will instill in students the need to intervene when unsupported arguments circulate as facts or when narrow ideology demonizes and attacks. However, a genuinely critical practice is humbling: no one has all the answers, every position can be questioned, and when one is the target of criticism one knows that one owes one’s interlocutor a reasoned argument.

This capacity for (self)-criticism is central to the vocation of philosophy and education, but it can also– if it is practiced as an end in itself– conflict with philosophy’s positive, life-serving dimension. Life is not only opposition (although we must have the strength to oppose). Life is ultimately worth living because it is an opening to the beauty and magnificence of the universe. Social problems are problems precisely because they impede those who suffer from them from living– feeling, thinking, acting, relating, savouring, enjoying– to the fullest. The principle of life-enjoyment is the root which feeds all struggles. Criticism has to maintain connection with this root lest it degenerate into nihilistic skepticism or despair. Everything is open to challenge, true, but for the sake of expanding understanding, not drowning it in doubt. Woodhouse does not explicitly pose this sort of challenge to Russell’s definition of philosophy, but the final three chapters make clear that he is implicitly aware of these sorts of dangers.

The third chapter focuses on the principles and practices of the philosophy for children movement. First developed in distinct but related directions by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, the effort to incorporate philosophy at every level of education was motivated by the goal of freeing education from rigid bureaucratic structures. Instead of a teacher standing in front of the class drilling students until they can perform the appropriate repertoire, Lipman, Sharp, and their followers reconceived the relationship amongst learners as a “community of inquiry.”(61) Inspired in part by John Dewey’s understanding of education as problem-based inquiry, the proponents of philosophy for children wanted to turn the class room into an incubator of children’s native curiosity.(62) The teacher would be more shepherd and less drill sergeant and the child viewed as a unity of affect and intellect alive in wonder to the world, needing guidance but able to find their own way together with their co-explorers. Thinking of themselves as a community they would feel united in common purpose, but they would also understand that as a community of individual minds, each person sees the world from their own angle. Hence students would also discover for themselves the inevitability of disagreement, the need for dialogue, and respectful argument as the primary means for resolving disputes.

The movement has made some headway in Canada, the UK, the US, but Woodhouse is keen to stress that the trend has been away from philosophical education of any sort. Obviously, if teachers lack philosophical education they will be in no position to cultivate philosophical dispositions in their students. Philosophy is essentially a practice, not trivial familiarity with this or that thinker from the past. Woodhouse defends philosophy first as disposition and practice and second as an academic discipline. The life-value of the academic discipline is not expressed by the fact that exists but in the difference that it makes to those who study it. The development and nurturing of a philosophical disposition towards intelligent criticism in the service of truth and life-enjoyment must be the guiding idea.

No institution is more human than education. Animals learn but their cognitive capacities, no matter how impressive, are minute in comparison to human thought and feeling. It can expand to the edge of the universe and ask what still lies beyond; it can shrink to the size of a quark and imagine the world from that perspective; it is capable of the most tender and subtle refinements of meaning and a generator of metaphorical connection without limit, but poorly educated it is also capable of justifying genocidal violence. Thus, it is not hyperbole to argue that the human future depends upon the quality of our educational institutions and educators.

Woodhouse makes this connection between education and survival through the example of climate change. The final two chapters focus on the link between philosophical education for teachers and their ability to motivate students to understand the problem and become the sort of engaged citizens who can help solve it. In order to advance his argument, Woodhouse draws inspiration and insight from the place-based learning at the heart of Indigenous societies. Drawing on the knowledge of both Elders and Indigenous intellectuals, Woodhouse shows how the holistic (affective, intellectual, practical, and spiritual) understanding of the complex interrelationships upon which life depends must be integral to life-valuable climate change education. Woodhouse cites Marie Batiste and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood to explain the connection between Indigenous and “Western” science. “The traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples is scientific in the sense that it is empirical, experimental, and systematic. It differs in two important respects from Western science, however: traditional ecological knowledge is highly localized, and it is social. Its focus is on the web of relationships between humans, animals, plants, natural forces, and landforms in a particular locality, as opposed to the discovery of universal laws.” (89) While I agree that this difference is real, I do not think that it is best understood as a difference between Indigenous and “Western” forms of science.

The more important point that Batiste and Youngblood are making here, I would say, is that science has a common, practical root. Chemistry does not originate with the periodic table, but with cooking and other forms of life-serving transformation of substances. Taxonomy does not begin with Linnaeus but with long-evolved local understandings flora and fauna and their uses. Medicine does not begin with the MRI machine but with caring attention to vulnerable bodies and the medicinal properties of plants. It is true that the science that has developed since Galileo and Newton demands generalization of results expressed as mathematically formalized regularities, but I think that this demand should be understood as continuous with and a development of that much longer practical history of science rather than as cliched “Western” alternative to older forms of knowing. The mathematical notations that supposed “Western” science employs are not Western in origin but Egyptian and Greek (geometry), Indian (the all important value of 0), and Arabic (algebra). Science, practical and mathematical, has always been an international and cross-cultural practice. Like all forms of knowledge (including religious and philosophical) science can be deployed in ideological ways to justify domination. The best means to oppose this very unscientific use of science is to demonstrate its deeper and more cosmopolitan origins rather than (ironically) allow “the West’ to take credit for the extraordinary and undeniable achievements of post-17th century mathematical natural science.

That said, the more important point is to insist upon the connection between genuine knowledge and the understanding, maintenance, and development of natural and social life-support systems. Woodhouse integrates the various strands of his argument by invoking McMurtry’s “primary axiom of value.” The axiom holds that all value whatsoever either serves life as a means of satisfying a need or expresses the sentient, intellectual, and creative powers of living things. The value of the engaged, reflective, and critical form of education that Woodhouse depends is clearly explained by the axiom. The human intellect needs education in order to develop its full range of abilities, and the educated person experiences life more fully, is capable of a greater range of activities, and is reflectively aware of the interests of others, other living things, and nature as a whole. Life cannot be lived anyway one wants or is able to pay for; since the world exists outside of our won minds and skins we must take into account the needs of others, contribute to their satisfaction in some way, and, overall, strive to live in way which are to “coherently inclusive” of the needs and goals of others.(98)

Education is our first and last line of defense. It must be approached as the hard but joyous work of exploring our universe and the problems of human social life together, in respectful but sometimes difficult argument. Cats and crows can master a few skills and we should admire them for it, but human intelligence is not the mastery of skills and teaching is not the transmission of information. If Covid taught teachers anything, it is that on line platforms are useful for transmitting information, but make actual pedagogical communication extremely difficult. The desire to learn develops best when living learners work together in shared space, challenging and inspiring each other to expand the circle of understanding ever wider.