Leaders in Philosophy of Education: Intellectual Self Portraits (review)

I have had the great pleasure of reading a very interesting book that was brought to my attention by the editors of Education and Culture, not a book I had as yet picked up on my own, but one I was planning on reading. Len Waks has put together a wonderful collection of autobiographical essays by top scholars in the field of philosophy of education for our enjoyment; I have had the pleasure to know many of these scholars, some of whom I hold dear as teachers, some of whom I consider good friends, and some of whom I am discovering for the first time. It is my sincere hope that this review will help draw others' attentions to Leaders in Philosophy of Education as well.

Waks tells us in his introduction that he was motivated to work on this project by a Philosophy of Education Society (US) presidential panel session he attended in 2003, where these questions came up: Why are leading scholars from just a few decades ago now ignored? Why has a field that has developed significantly since the 1950s not done a better job of keeping its best work alive? Waks set about to to capture "the best work in the field since the 1960s" from philosophers of education in North America and the United Kingdom. The twenty-four scholars invited to contribute their intellectual self-portraits were all selected by Waks based on his knowledge of the field and checked against the table of contents of four philosophy of education journals: Educational Theory, Studies in Philosophy and Education, The Journal of Philosophy of Education, and Educational Philosophy and Theory, "to confirm the selected authors had been active in the field over at least a quarter century" (vii). Scholars whose contributions have been for less than twenty-five years were excluded, as well as senior scholars who had been absent from conferences and journals for many years. Waks hopes to put together a second series that includes younger scholars and any who should have been included in this series but were inadvertently left out. He does not claim that those included are all the leaders in the field, but that that they are "among the leading philosophers of education in the post-analytical revolution period" (vii).

I give you Waks's criteria for selection as it affects the collection of authors included in the text. Among these twenty-four authors, there is a good balance of thirteen US and eleven UK philosophers of education. However, from a gendered perspective, there is a strong imbalance, with seventeen men and seven women, which is an accurate reflection of the period under consideration, the 1960s and 1970s. In terms of approaches to philosophy, this text strongly represents the analytic philosophical leaders of the time, and the minority voices present during this timeframe are almost nonexistent. The result, like all stories captured, is a reminder to us that history is the telling of what happened by the winners, not the losers. During the 1960s and 1970s the winners in philosophy in the UK and US were analytic philosophers. They got the upper hand and became the leaders in their field of study, thus becoming the gatekeepers for conference programs and journal publications. Given Waks's criteria for selection, only the majority voices of analytic philosophers were going to come to the top. But there was no holding back the tides of change coming from European scholars as well as pragmatists. One will not find continental philosophers in this volume: existentialists, phenomenologists, and Marxists are not represented. As Maxine Greene would say (someone who is strikingly missing from this text), there are no toads in this garden.¹ This collection of scholars is a fair representation of what was considered good philosophy during the time frame Waks is trying to capture (eleven of the thirteen US authors are past...