TEACHING, TEACHER EDUCATION, AND THE HUMANITIES:

RECONSIDERING EDUCATION AS A ‘GEISTESWISSENSCHAFT’1

Gert Biesta

Brunel University London

Introduction

In this paper I engage with the question of what the humanities can contribute to the field of

teacher education. Phrasing the question this way suggests that teacher education needs an

‘infusion’ from the humanities, as if they were separate fields. In contrast, my approach is

inspired by a strand of German educational thought that views education as an academic

discipline located within the domain of the humanities, conceiving the humanities

themselves differently than in terms of the science-humanities opposition often taken for

granted in the English-speaking world. From this angle, so I will suggest, a different challenge

emerges. This is not how the humanities might be able to ‘infuse’ teaching and teacher

education, but rather what is required in teaching, teacher education and teacher education

research in order to keep our understanding and enactment of teaching firmly rooted within

such a framework.

I develop my argument in the following way. I begin by situating the idea of the humanities

within wider discussions about distinctions within and between fields of academic

scholarship, particularly comparing the science-humanities opposition with Wilhelm

Dilthey’s distinction between ‘Naturwissenschaften’ and ‘Geisteswissenschaften.’ Against

1 I would like to thank Chris Higgins for taking the initiative for the Educational Theory Summer Institute at which an earlier version of this paper was presented, and also for our ongoing conversations about education and the humanities. I would like to thank the other participants at the Summer Institute for helpful feedback and illuminating insights.

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this background I discuss the way in which the study of education has established itself in

academe in the German-speaking world – namely as an academic discipline in its own right –

which I contrast briefly with developments in the English-speaking world where education

established itself as an applied field of study. I discuss the idea of education as a

‘Geisteswissenschaft,’ which I characterise as an interested and hence explicitly normative

academic endeavour that takes human action rather than human behaviour as its frame of

reference. I use this angle to look more close at teaching, arguing that teaching – and

education more generally – necessarily raises the question of its purpose or, in more

philosophical language, of its telos. Based on the suggestion that the telos of education has a

threefold structure, that is, that all education needs to take into view three domains of

educational purpose – qualification, socialisation and subjectification – I highlight the role

value judgments play in teaching and argue that the values that are at stake in such

judgments have to be understood as educational values rather than moral or ethical values.

In the final step of my argument I show what this implies for the education of teachers, by

reconsidering the issue of competence-based approaches to teacher education so prominent

in Europe in recent years. I conclude by highlighting how the idea of education as a

‘Geisteswissenschaft’ opens up a different way to think about the role of the humanities in

teacher and teacher education.

Locating the humanities

To me the idea of ‘the humanities’ and also that of the opposition between ‘the sciences’

and ‘the humanities’ still feels a little alien. While this may partly be the result of my

particular professional biography, it is most likely also the result of the fact that my academic

formation mainly took place in continental Europe and, more specifically in the Netherlands.

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At the time when I was a student of education (in the 1980s), educational research and

scholarship, though already making a rapid turn towards the English-speaking world, were

still significantly influenced by German traditions. In this context there were a number of

different distinctions, demarcations and classifications to identify and carve up academic

fields and disciplines. Prominent amongst these was Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction between

‘Naturwissenschaften’ and ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ – the ‘Wissenschaften’ of nature and the

‘Wissenschaften’ of culture or ‘Geist.’2

We should resist translating the German word ‘Wissenschaft’ into the English word ‘science.’

The German notion of ‘Wissenschaft’ has the word ‘Wissen’ in it, which can be translated as

the verb ‘to know’ (‘wissen’) or the noun ‘knowledge’ (‘Wissen’),3 and therefore refers to a

much broader intellectual endeavour than what the word ‘science’ nowadays tend to denote

in English. What distinguishes the ‘Naturwissenschaften’ from the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ is

their object of investigation. The ‘Naturwissenschaften’ study nature and natural

phenomena, whereas the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ study culture and cultural phenomena or,

to be more precise, those realities brought forward by the activity of the human mind (in

German: ‘Geist’), both in their contemporary and their historical manifestation. What is

particularly interesting about the distinction is that both the ‘Naturwissenschaften’ and the

‘Geisteswissenschaften’ are considered to be a ‘Wissenschaft’ and therefore both

legitimately fall within the broader domain of academic research and scholarship. This

creates quite a different situation, at least rhetorically, from that constituted by the science-

2 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Bd. 1 [Introduction in the Geisteswissenschaften. Essay on the foundation for the study of society and history] (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883).3 The German language actually has two words that both translate as ‘knowing’ or ‘knowledge’ – one is ‘wissen’ [verb] or ‘Wissen’ [noun], and the other is ‘kennen’ [verb] or Erkenntnis’ [noun]. The verb ‘kennen’ is a transitive verb, whereas the verb ‘wissen’ is an intransitive verb.

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humanities opposition, where the humanities are always positioned as being outside of the

domain of science, which can then easily be used as an argument for saying that the

humanities are not scientific.

Although Dilthey’s distinction was based on the specific nature of the objects of

investigation, the impact of his distinction was strongly methodological, highlighting a

fundamental difference between research that aims at generating (causal) explanation and

research that seeks to generate (interpretative) understanding. The distinction between

explanation and understanding – which I have always found much more helpful in

discussions about research methodology than the distinction between ‘quantitative’ and

‘qualitative’4 – developed into a major dispute about the epistemological and

methodological foundations of the social sciences in the early 1960s between critical

rationalists (most notably Karl Popper and Hans Albert) and proponents of the Frankfurt

School (most notable Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas). Habermas, in his text

Erkenntnis und Interesse,5 took the discussion forward by suggesting an integrative model for

the study of human action, which included explanation and understanding and a third

‘knowledge-constituting interest,’ that of emancipation. For Habermas the latter marked the

distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ theory.6

4 Biesta, G.J.J. (2010). Pragmatism and the philosophical foundations of mixed methods research. In A. Tashakkori & C. Teddlie (Eds), Sage handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioral research. Second edition (pp. 95-118). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.5 Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972).6 See also Max “Horkheimer, Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung 6, no. 2 (1937): 245-294

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In addition to Dilthey’s distinction and the way this was further developed by critical

theorists, another distinction that was more prominent in the context in which I was

educated was that between alpha, beta and gamma ‘sciences’ (though again the word we

should rather be using here is the German ‘Wissenschaft’ or its Dutch equivalent

‘wetenschap’). The distinction between ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ maps roughly maps onto that

between ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ and ‘Naturwissenschaften’ – the alpha sciences

encompassing fields such as history, language, and philosophy – whereas the gamma

sciences encompass the social and behavioural sciences (such as sociology, economy and, on

some categorisations, also law). My sense is that what in the English speaking world is

referred to as ‘the humanities,’ comes closest to what is captured in the ‘alpha’ category. Yet

my point here is not to get the exact circumference of the humanities ‘right’ – this is a topic

of ongoing debate – but to highlight that the science-humanities opposition is just one way

in which academic fields can be identified and organised, and that it is perhaps not the most

helpful one as it creates an opposition that seems to be without a common ground.

Nonetheless, in the English-speaking world this approach does seem to be very prominent

and influential. Two ‘classics’ that deal with the position of the humanities – C.P. Snow’s The

two cultures (1959), and Stephen Jay Gould’s The hedgehog, the fox, and the magister’s pox

(2003)7 – both use the science-humanities distinction in a kind of self-evident way, and

Gould does so even more than Snow, as the subtitle of his book is Mending the gap between

science and the humanities.

Education as ‘Geisteswissenschaft’

7 Charles P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); Stephen J. Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (New York: Harmony Press, 2003).

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What is interesting, and relevant for the discussion at hand, is that the different ways of

identifying, organising and categorising academic research and scholarship also have had an

impact on the ways in which education has established itself as an academic field or

discipline.8 One significant issue is the fact that in the German-speaking world education

established itself in the first decades of the 20th century as an academic discipline in its own

right, whereas in the English-speaking world education found its place in the university in the

form of the multi-disciplinary study of educational processes and practices. 9 Intellectual

‘input’ for the latter endeavour was considered to come from a range of ‘established’

disciplines such as history, psychology, philosophy and sociology.10 The fact that some of

these disciplines belong to the humanities and some to the (social) sciences sheds light on

the ambivalent and, to a certain degree, contested status of education within academe.11

What is interesting about the German situation is not only the fact that education did

manage to establish itself as an academic discipline in its own right, but also that it did so as

a ‘Geisteswissenschaft,’ thus occupying a far less ambivalent position within the framework

proposed by Dilthey.

Dilthey himself had already called for the development of education as a

‘Geisteswissenschaft’ and had done some work on this, albeit much of this work was not

8 Part of the discussion is indeed whether education should be seen as an academic field or an academic discipline.9 See Gert J.J. Biesta, “Disciplines and Theory in the Academic Study of Education: A Comparative Analysis of the Anglo-American and Continental Construction of the Field,” Pedagogy, Culture and Society 19, no. 2 (2011): 175-192; Gert J.J. Biesta, “Wanted, Dead or Alive: Educationalists. On the Need for Academic Bilingualism in Education,” in Positionierungen. Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft, Pädagogik und Politik, eds. Carla Aubry, Michael Geiss, Veronika Magyar-Haas & Damian Miller (Weinheim: Beltz Verlag, 2012).10 On the history, current status, and future of this particular approach see John Furlong & Martin Lawn (eds), Disciplines of Education: Their Role in the Future of Education Research (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), and John Furlong, Education: An Anatomy of the Discipline (London/New York: Routledge, 2013).11 One place where this tension becomes visible is in methodological discussions that often rely on another opposition, namely between quantitative and qualitative approaches.

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published during his lifetime.12 The actual development of what became known as

‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ was the result of the work of scholars such as Eduard

Spranger (1882 - 1963), Herman Nohl (1879 - 1960) and Theodor Litt (1880 - 1962) (as a ‘first

generation’) and, slightly later, that of Wilhelm Flitner (1881 - 1989) and Erich Weniger (1893

- 1961). They were either students of Dilthey or had taken explicit inspiration from his

work.13

Dilthey’s call to develop the academic study of education as a ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ can be

understood as a response to two tendencies within educational scholarship and practice in

his time. One was the normative-deductive approach to education which, starting from

universal values and value systems such as religion, saw education as nothing but the

inculcation of such values in the next generation. Dilthey’s main objection had to do with the

claim to universality, as he conceived of human beings and their culture as fundamentally

historical and therefore susceptible to change. The proponents of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche

Pädagogik’ who came after him would particularly object to the fact that normative-

deductive approaches ultimately turn education into indoctrination. Their main ambition

was to shield the child from such indoctrination so that it could gain its own freedom and

education could thus be a process of emancipation.

12 See Ulrich Herrmann, Die Pädagogik Wilhelm Diltheys (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971).13 For a helpful introduction to the development of the academic study of education in Germany see ans Thiersch, Horst Ruprecht Ulrich Herrmann, Die Entwicklung der Erziehungswissenschaft (München: Juventa, 1978), and for an overview of more recent developments see Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, „Erziehungswissenschaft in Deutschland: Skizze ihrer Geschichte von 1900 bis zur Vereinigung 1990, in Einführung in die Geschichte der Erziehungswissenschaft und Erziehungswirklichkeit. 3. Auflage, eds Klau Harney & Heinz-Hermann Krüger (Opladen & Bloomfield Hills: Verlag Babara Budrich, 2006): 133-173.

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The other tendency Dilthey was responding to, was the rise of positivist approaches in the

domain of education, that is, approaches that sought to apply the methods and

methodologies of the ‘Naturwissenschaften’ to educational phenomena. While such

approaches might be able to shed light on the natural ‘side’ of human beings – for example

their biology and biological development – Dilthey highlighted that educational phenomena

are fundamentally cultural and historical in character and therefore belong to the domain of

the mind (‘Geist’) and not that of nature. This was Dilthey’s reason for arguing that the

‘Wissenschaft’ of education could be no other than a ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ that had to make

use of historical and hermeneutical methods and methodologies, and not those derived

from the ‘Naturwissenschaften.’

The ‘geisteswissenschaftliche’ approach to the study of education that emerged from these

ideas did not see it as its task to tell educational practitioners what to do – it did not operate

in a prescriptive mode – but rather sought to be in dialogue with educational practitioners

and educational practice with the ambition to clarify (proto-)theoretical insights and

understandings that, in their view, are always already at play in educational processes and

practices. That is why hermeneutical approaches occupied a central role in

‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik.’

The close connection ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ sought to establish with

educational practices also meant that they did not perceive the work of

‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ as that of a distant and distanced observer, but rather

as that of an interested participant. This meant – and this is perhaps the most distinctive

trait of the program of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ – that the academic work was

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thought to share and support the normative orientation of educational practice itself. This

orientation was predominantly understood in terms of emancipation and, more explicitly,

the emancipation of the child from external determination, that is, against indoctrination.

In order for educational processes and practices to contribute to the child’s emancipation it

was considered important that educational practices should be ‘relatively autonomous’ –

this was the phrase used by ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ – that is, not determined or

controlled by ‘outside’ forces (such as the church or the state). This line of thought provided

the main argument for suggesting that the academic study of education itself should be

‘relatively autonomous,’ that is, that it should be an academic discipline in its own right, and

not an applied field determined by insights from ‘other’ disciplines.14 This is indeed what the

proponents of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ achieved in the German academic

context from the early decades of the 20th century onwards well into the 1960s and 1970s,

with traces still visible in the present-day configuration of the field.

Beyond ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’

The prominent position of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ was challenged from the

1960s onwards from two directions. On the one hand ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’

was challenged from the side of Frankfurt School Critical Theory for lacking political

awareness and for focusing too strongly on the child and the child-educator relationship,

forgetting the impact of wider social, societal and political dynamics. This was particularly an

issue in Germany, where many of the ideas from ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ turned

out to be quite adaptable to the Nazi ideology. Out of this critique emerged what in

14 For further detail see Biesta , “Discipline and Theory,’ and Biesta, “Wanted.”

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Germany became known as ‘kritische Pädagogik’ which, although bearing resemblance to

North American ‘critical pedagogy,’ remained more closely tied to its disciplinary and

intellectual roots in ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik.’15

The second challenge to ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ came from those who argued

that ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ was insufficiently empirical in its orientation – that

it was too speculative, too philosophical, and too normative – and that the field of

educational research and scholarship was in need of a ‘realistic turn’ (the ‘realistische

Wendung’ which Heinrich Roth called for in a publication from 196216). This eventually led to

the rise of what Dilthey had tried to keep out, namely the utilisation of methods and

methodologies of the ‘Naturwissenschaften’ in the domain of educational research and

scholarship. This shift was also visible in the naming of the academic field, where ‘Pädagogik’

became increasingly rebranded as ‘Erziehungswissenschaft’ (the ‘Wissenschaft’ of education

and upbringing). This brought the set up in the German-speaking context closer to the way in

which educational research had developed in the English-speaking world.

While the critique formulated by ‘kritische Pädagogik’ about the lack of political awareness

of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ is valid and important, there are in my view still

aspects of the ‘programme’ of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ that are worth

considering today. One thing that is interesting about the conception of ‘Wissenschaft’ of

‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ is that it is an engaged or interested form of scholarship

that explicitly aligns itself with the normative orientation of educational practice itself. This is

15 See Klaus Mollenhauer, Erziehung und Emanzipation (München: Juventa, 1976).16 Heinrich Roth, “Die realistische Wendung in der Pädagogischen Forschung,” in Neue Sammlung. Göttinger Blätter fur Kultur und Erziehung. 2. Jg, eds. Helmut Becker, Elisabeth Blochmann & Otto F. Bollnow (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962).

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not a matter of slavishly following any direction educational practice would take, but better

to be understood as an ongoing dialogue with educational practice about what its normative

orientation could be or ought to be, and how such an orientation might be justified. Such a

dialogue requires ongoing discussion about the direction and orientation, that is, the

question as to what makes education good rather than, say, what makes it effective.17

It is important to see that ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ is not the only interested

academic discipline and that in this regard the conception of an academic discipline

exemplified in ‘Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ is not an outlier. 18 Disciplines such as

medicine and law can be said to have a similar relationship with their fields of practice in

that they share an orientation towards the promotion of health and justice respectively. 19

Academic disciplines organised around an interest establish their identity and sense of

direction in quite a different way from disciplines that are organised around a particular

object of study – the latter being the way in which education as an academic field

established itself more generally in the English-speaking world. The second aspect that is

interesting about the conception of ‘Wissenschaft’ of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ is

that it explicitly focuses on human action, not on human behaviour. Whereas behaviour has

to do with what is observable from the ‘outside,’ action refers to behaviour that is

meaningful, both from the perspective of the actor and from the perspective of those the

actors is in interaction with. From this angle, then, we might characterise

17 Gert J.J. Biesta, Good Education in an Age of Measurement (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010).18 See Biesta, “Disciplines and Theory.”19 It is interesting, but slightly tangential to the argument in this paper, that the interested orientation of medicine has become relatively marginal as a result of a strong technological turn in medical research and practice, whereas such a turn has not taken place in the domain of law. This at least suggest that interested disciplines such as education, medicine and law do not necessarily need to transform into a technological or as Dilthey would have called it positivist ‘mode.’

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‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ as an interested ‘Wissenschaft’ of human action and,

more specifically, of educative action.

Making sense of teaching

I have offered Dilthey’s distinction between ‘Naturwissenschaft’ and ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ as

a way to think differently about the position and identity of the humanities. Against this

background I have discussed the idea of education as a ‘Geisteswissenschaft,’ particularly in

the way it was developed in the German-speaking world in the first half of the 20 th century.

What is distinctive about ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ is that it sees itself as an

interested discipline closely connected to the normativity of educational practice, and as a

discipline that focuses on the study of (meaningful) human action, not on the study of

(observable and measurable) human behaviour. Both aspects are, in my view, important

when we try to make sense of teaching, which we need to do before we can say something

about the education of teachers.

Let me begin by stating that I believe that teaching matters. It matters even so much that I

am willing to claim that without teaching there is no education.20 That there is a need to

emphasise the importance of teaching partly has to do with a relatively recent development

in the theory and practice of education, which is the rise of a discourse of learning. The

‘learnification’21 of educational discourse and practice can be seen in a number of discursive

shifts, such as the tendency to refer to pupils, students, children and adults as ‘learners,’ to

define schools as ‘places for learning’ or ‘learning environments,’ and to redefine teachers as

20 See Gert J.J. Biesta, “Giving Teaching Back to Education: Responding to the Disappearance of the Teacher,” Phenomenology and Practice 6, no 2 (2012): 35-49.21 See Biesta, Good Education.

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‘facilitators of learning.’ The rise of the learning sciences is another manifestation of the turn

towards learning. The rise of this discourse has led some to the conclusion that education is

nothing but learning and that the study of education is nothing but the study of learning.

The problem with the language of learning is that it is at least unhelpful and probably

insufficient for articulating what education is about. A brief way of making this point is to say

that the purpose of education is not that children and young people learn – and it is

remarkable that many policy documents nowadays tend not to say much more than this, just

as much research in education nowadays tends to examine the impact of particular

strategies on ‘student learning’ without any further specification – but rather that children

and young people learn something, that they learn it or particular reasons, and that they

learn it from someone. Education, to put it differently, always raises questions about

content, purpose and relationships and the rather abstract process-language of learning

tends to gloss over these questions, which is the reason why it is an unhelpful and to a

certain degree even misleading language in the field of education.

Of the three questions, the question of purpose is in my view the most important one,

because it is only when we have a sense of what it is we seek to achieve through our

educational endeavours that we can make decisions about the most relevant subject-matter

(curriculum) and the most appropriate forms and relationships (pedagogy). There is,

however, something interesting about the purpose of education – something that may

actually distinguish education from many other human practices, including medicine and law

– which is the fact that education tends to function in relation to a number of different

‘domains of purpose.’ In my own work I have suggested that three such domains can be

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distinguished.22 The first is the domain of qualification, which has to do with the role

education plays in the transmission and acquisition of knowledge, skills and dispositions that

qualify children and young people to ‘do’ something (e.g., to become qualified for a

particular job or become qualified to live in complex modern societies). The second domain

is that of socialisation which has to do with the ways in which, through education, children

and young people become introduced to and part of existing traditions, ways of doing and

ways of being (for example vocational or professional traditions, or social, cultural, political

or religious traditions). The third domain is that of subjectification, which has to do with the

ways in which education ‘impacts’ on the personhood of the child or student, promoting

such qualities as, for example, autonomy, criticality, independence, compassion, or grown-

up-ness.

The argument here is that because all instances of education have a potential impact in

these three domains, educators need to take responsibility for what they seek to achieve in

each of these domains. Hence the domains not only appear analytically as three functions of

education; at the very same time can be understood as three domains of purpose in

education. It is important at this point to acknowledge the distinction between aims and

purposes.23 Whereas aims are the concrete things that we intend our educational

endeavours to bring about or that we expect our students to achieve, the purposes of

education have to do with wider rationales for our educational endeavours. One could say

that the purposes of education give meaning and identity to the practice of education. They

22 See Biesta, Good Education.23 See Richard S. Peters, The philosophy of education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 13.

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constitute, in other words, the ‘telos’ of the practice of education, and the suggestion I am

making here is that ‘telos’ of education has a three three-fold structure.

Teaching, judgement and educational normativity

When we look at teaching in this way, it becomes clear that teaching cannot proceed just on

the basis of factual information and knowledge about what is the case, but needs

engagement with the question as to what is considered to be desirable in relation to each of

the three domains and the three domains together. This is not a matter of scientific evidence

about ‘what works’ but requires judgement about what is considered to be desirable. The

question is therefore fundamentally a normative question, that is, a question that involves

values and valuations. It thus requires value judgements on the side of the teacher. This is

why I would maintain that teaching is fundamentally a normative profession.24 The idea that

value judgements play a central role in teaching is often stated with reference to the idea

that teaching is a moral or ethical practice.25 While I do not wish to suggest that teachers

should act in unethical or immoral ways, I wish to argue that the normativity of education is

not ethical or moral but has to be understood as an educational normativity because

teachers who engage with their students in an ethical way do not automatically act in a way

that is educationally significant. To make a judgement about what is educationally desirable

we need, in other words, educational values rather than just ethical or moral values.

24 On the idea of normative professionality see, for example, Harry Kunneman, “Social Work as Laboratory for Normative Professionalisation,” Social Work and Society 3, no. 2 (2005).25 See, for example, David T. Hansen, Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching: Toward a Teacher’s Creed ( New York: Teachers College Press, 2001); and Peter C. Murrell Jr., Mary Diez, Sharon Feiman-Nemser & Deborah Schussler Teaching as a Moral Practice: Defining, Developing, and Assessing Professional Dispositions in Teacher Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

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To get a sense of what educational values might look like, we can think, for example, of the

distinction between education and indoctrination. Indoctrination refers to those activities

that seek to suppress the independence and autonomy of the student or what we might call

the student’s right to responsible self-determination. To suggest that indoctrination is not a

case of education thus indicates a conception of education in which education is seen as

what we might refer to as autonomy-enhancing action of one person (a teacher) ‘towards’

another person (a student).26 To suggest that this is what education should strive for is not

stating a fact but expressing a preference, and it is only with reference to such a preference

– a normative conception of what education is – that it becomes possible to make

judgements about what educators should seek to achieve in relation to the three domains in

which education functions. I do not see this as a matter of introducing ethical or moral

values into the domain of education, but rather as one of articulating educational values.

Such values require forms of theory and theorising that are distinctively educational rather

than, say, philosophical, sociological or psychological. This provides a further reason why

educational theory and theorising is different from theorising that takes place in other

disciplines, which is also part of the reason why the proponents of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche

Pädagogik’ argued that ‘Pädagogik’ needed to be an academic discipline in its own right.

Teachers’ judgements are not exhausted by the question what it is that they should aim to

achieve in relation to each of the three domains. There are two further important ‘moments’

of judgement in teaching. One stems from the fact that there is no perfect synergy between

the three domains of purpose but that they rather are in tension. This means that teaching

26 I give this as an example of what an educational value might look like, but am neither suggesting that this is the only way in which educational normativity can be articulated, nor that notions such as autonomy and self-determination are uncontested.

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always also requires a judgement about the best balance – or perhaps it is better to say: the

least worst compromise – between the three domains. The main way in which education in

many counties is currently out of balance is the result of an overemphasis on achievement in

the domain of qualification which puts pressure on what can be achieved in the domains of

socialisation and subjectification, for example because an emphasis on (individual)

achievement in the domain of qualification communicates that competition is ultimately a

more important value than cooperation, which not only sends out a strong message in the

domain of socialisation but also impacts on the formation of the personhood of the student.

A third ‘moment’ of judgement stems from the fact that the ways in which education is

conducted cannot be understood as neutral means to bring about certain ends. Rather the

‘means’ of education contribute substantively to the ends. This is a theoretical way of saying

that students are not only taught by what teachers say, but also by how they do. This means

that teaching also requires ongoing judgement about what we might call the educational

quality of the ‘means’ of education (where means have to be understood in the broad sense

of ways of ‘doing’ and ‘organising’ education). This means that judgement is not only needed

with regard to the content of education but also with regard to the form – and in all cases

the ‘bottom-line’ is the question whether what is done is educationally desirable.

From teaching to teacher education: Becoming educationally wise

In the previous two sections I have highlighted the fact that education always raises the

question of purpose, that the question of purpose is a normative question, and that to

engage with this question – that is to give an answer to the question what the purpose(s) of

education should be – we need to engage in value judgements where these values have to

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be understood as educational values that stem from a (normative) conception of what

education is or, to put it differently, that stem from a conception of what good education is.

The specific kind of judgements, to which I have referred as educational judgements, play a

central role in teaching if it is granted that teaching is not the mechanical delivery of

information but is orientated towards broader educational values that seek to promote the

independence – on with a term I prefer: subject-ness – of children and young people, that is,

the promotion of their existence as subjects of action and responsibility, and not as objects

of the directions of others.

In my argument so far I have not tried to ask what the humanities might be able to

contribute to education and teacher education because posing the question in that way

suggests that the humanities and education are (to a large degree) separate fields. I have

rather pursued the idea that we understand education as a ‘Geisteswissenschaft,’ that is a

form of scholarship that seeks to be in dialogue with educational practice and that, in doing

so, supports the values that inform and give direction to educational practice. I have argued

that education, unlike learning, inevitably raises questions or purpose and that value-

judgements are therefore indispensible. As the remit of my contribution was the question of

the humanities and teacher education I will, in the final step of my argument, draw the lines

of this paper together with reference to the question of the education of teachers.

The simple answer to the question of what the previous considerations might entail for the

education of teachers is that such education should help teacher to ‘acquire’ a ‘capacity’ for

making educational judgements or, more concretely, an ‘ability’ for engaging in an intelligent

and informed way with the question what in the concrete and specific situations they work

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in is educationally desirable. It is as simple but also as complicated as that. (I will explain

below why I put several terms in quotation marks.)

To argue that teacher education should focus on the ‘ability’ to make educational

judgements stands in rather sharp contrast to the way in which teacher education is

currently configured in many European countries, where competence-based approaches

tend to prevail.27 The idea of competence marks an important shift in focus from what

teachers should know to what they should be able to do, and potentially even to how they

should be. In this regard competence-based approaches seem to represent a more practical

and more holistic outlook in that they encompasses knowledge, skills and action, rather than

seeing such action as either the application of knowledge – an idea captured in evidence-

based approaches to teaching – or the enactment of skills – an approach particularly

prominent in those situations where teachers are supposed to pick up their skills 'on the

shop floor.'28

Yet the idea of competence is not without problems, and also not without risks.29 The risks

have to do with the way in which the notion of competence is defined and understood; the

problems with how it is being implemented and enacted. With regard to matters of

definition competence can, on the one hand, be seen as an integrative approach to

professional action that highlights the complex combination of knowledge, skills,

27 For an overview and critical analysis see chapter 2 in Ruth Heilbronn, Teacher Education and the Development of Practical Judgement (London: Continuum, 2008).28 This is the direction in which teacher education in England is currently going as a result of the decision to make schools rather than universities responsible for the education of teachers (although English policy makers consistently refer to this as training rather than education).29 See Martin Mulder, Tanja Weigel & Kate Collins, “The Concept of Competence in the Development of Vocational Education and Training in Selected EU Member States: A Critical Analysis, “Journal of Vocational Education and Training 59, no. 1 (2007): 65-85.

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understandings, values, and purposes.30 In such an interpretation a competence-based

approach clearly has the potential to promote the professional agency of teachers. Yet many

commentators have shown that the idea of competence actually steers the field of teaching

and teacher education in the opposite direction through its emphasis on performance,

standards, measurement and control, thus reducing and ultimately undermining the agency

of teachers,31 thus suggesting that it is being interpreted through a framework of behaviour

more than action.

With regard to the practical implementation of the idea of competence in teacher education

there are a number of additional problems. One has to do with the fact that any attempt to

describe in full detail everything What teachers should be competent at, runs the risk of

generating extensive checklists that are far too long and far too detailed. The existence of

such lists can result in a situation where teacher education turns into a tick box exercise

focused on establishing whether students have managed to ‘cover’ everything on the list.

This not only can lead easily to a disjointed curriculum and an instrumental approach to the

education of teachers, but also runs the risk of turning teacher education from a collective

experience into a plethora of individual learning trajectories where students are just working

towards the achievement of their 'own' competencies, without any need to interact with or

be exposed to fellow students. A further problem is that competencies are always orientated

towards the past. It is, after all, only possible to describe what a teacher needs to be

competent at in relation to situations that are already known. Yet teaching is in a very

fundamental sense always open towards the future. There is a danger, therefore, that a

30 For such a definition see Ruth Deakin Crick, “Key Competencies for Education in a European context,” European Educational Research Journal, 7, no. 3 (2008): 311-318.31 See Heilbronn, Teacher Education, 21-25.

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competence-based curriculum for teacher education ties students too much to the current

situation – or to a particular interpretation of the current situation – rather than that it

prepares them sufficiently for meaningful action in an unknown future.

All this feeds into what is perhaps the most important problem with and limitation of a

competence-based approach to teacher education, which is the fact that good teachers not

simply need to be able to do all kind of things – in this regard it is true that they need to be

competent (and being competent is a better formulation than having competences) – but

that they also need to be able to judge which competences should be utilised in the always

concrete and specific situations in which teachers work. If competences in a sense provide

teachers with a repertoire of possibilities, there is still the challenge to decide which of those

possibilities should be actualised in order to realize good and meaningful teaching. While the

possession of competences may thus be a necessary condition for good teaching, it can

never be a sufficient condition. And the reason for this lies in the fact that good teaching, as I

have indicated above, requires judgement about what an educationally desirable course of

action is in this concrete situation with these concrete students at this particular stage in

their educational trajectory.

These considerations suggest that what good teacher education needs at the very least, is to

focus on the ‘ability’ of teacher students to make judgements about their teaching, at the

micro-level of their classroom practice and at the more meso- and macro-levels of the design

of education. Such judgements concern both the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of teaching. With

regard to the ‘why’ of teaching I have already made a detailed case for the role of normative

judgement in teaching. With regard to the ‘how’ of teaching I would like to add a number of

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observations. One insight from Aristotle that I still find very valuable for understanding

teaching, is the idea that teaching operates in the domain of the ‘variable,’ not the domain

of the ‘eternal.’32 This means that teaching is to be understood as a process of actions and

possible consequences, not of causes and predictable effects. In Aristotelian terms we are

talking here about the domain of ’poiesis’ and the kind of knowledge that is at stake here, is

not ‘episteme’ (often translated as ‘scientific knowledge but the more correct translation is

’knowledge of the eternal and invariable), but ‘techne,’ which we might translate as

‘practical knowledge.’ In addition to judgement with relation to the ‘how’ of teaching there

is, as mentioned, also the need for judgement in relation to the ‘why’ of teaching. This, in

Aristotelian terms, is the domain of ‘praxis’ where we need ‘phronesis’ – often translated as

‘practical wisdom’ or, in the English translation of Aristotle’s own words, as “a true and

reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man.” 33

The interesting thing about Aristotle’s approach is that he does not think of this as a

competence – at least not in the behaviouristic interpretation of competence, but rather as

a virtue, that is as what we might call an embodied quality of the way a person acts. 34 Rather

than to think that this is a capacity or an ability or even a competence that students should

acquire, the ambition for teacher education that takes the teleological character of

education seriously – that is the fact that teaching always raises the question of purpose and

does so in the way outlined above – then the challenge is to deepen and enhance the

educational wisdom of teachers by constantly returning to the question what, in this

concrete and unique situation, is the educational desirable way forward.

32 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).33 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.534 I discuss this in more detail in Gert Biesta, “How Does a Competent Teacher Become a Good Teacher? On Judgement, Wisdom and Virtuosity in Teaching and Teacher Education,” in Philosophical Perspectives on the Future of Teacher Education, eds. Ruth Heilbronn & Lorraine Foreman-Peck (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015).

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Concluding comments

In this contribution I have explored relationships between teaching, teacher education and

the humanities. Rather than to take the science-humanities opposition as a starting point, I

utilised Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction between ‘Naturwissenschaften’ and

‘Geisteswissenschaften.’ One reason for this has to do with what we might call the rhetorical

power of this distinction, one in which many different areas of research and scholarship are

all kept within the domain of ‘Wissenschaft,’ unlike what is the case in the science-

humanities opposition where the humanities constantly have to deal with the fact that they

are outside of the domain of science – which is a problem in a world where ‘science’ accrues

so much status. But I also went to Dilthey’s distinction because of the fact that it provides a

rationale for a very particular way in which the academic study of education evolved in the

German speaking world as an academic discipline in its own right, rather than as an applied

field of study. While the history of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ is not without

problems – particularly with regard to its lack of political awareness – the conception of

‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ is, in my view, still very appropriate for capturing some

of the distinctive dimensions of education as a field of practice, most notably the teleological

character of education (the fact that education always raises the question of purpose) and

the fact that education has to be understood as a field of human action – of informed ways

of being and doing – and not as a system of intervention-behaviour-output chains. This is

why education needs ongoing reflection on and systematic engagement with its telos – the

question of purpose – and its dynamics – the question of educational action. Judgement, as I

have suggested, is indispensible with regard to both which means that one of the key tasks

for teacher education is prepare students for such judgement, both about the ‘how’ and the

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‘why’ of teaching. What emerges from this for the wider discussion about teaching, teacher

education and the humanities is the imperative to develop and deepen modes of theory,

research, and scholarship that are appropriate for the kind of practice education is. This is

what the central ambition of ‘geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik’ has been, and I think that

it is an ambition that needs to be revisited not least because dominant ways in which

educational research seems to develop in the 21st century seem to be modelled on a

conception of ‘Naturwissenschaft’ rather than ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ and therefore continue

to miss the point of what education is and what it ought to be about. That ‘the humanities’

as understood in the English speaking world have a lot to contribute to this task as well, is

without doubt. Nonetheless what I have tried to argue in this paper is that the conception of

education as a ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ may perhaps help to articulate in a more precise way

what kind of work needs to be done and what the humanities may be able to contribute to

this.

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