In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Education as Dialogue: Its Prerequisites and Its Enemies by Tasos Kazepides
  • Andrew Stables (bio)
Tasos Kazepides. Education as Dialogue: Its Prerequisites and Its Enemies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2010. 192. $29.95

In this provocative and very well-written book, Tasos Kazepides argues that dialogue is fundamental to education and that the capacity for reason and the holding of certain ‘gentle virtues’ are fundamental to dialogue. Educators thus endowed can induct students into the disciplines through sharing their expertise and enthusiasm. This offers the potential for a more rewarding educational experience than any gained from a narrowly instrumental approach that reduces teaching to training and denies the internal logics of practices.

The approach is analytic (there is scarcely any reference to Continental philosophy) and the major influence is Wittgenstein, though there is some very astute critical engagement with R.S. Peters and Paul Hirst, indeed, perhaps the most compelling critique I have read from within the analytic tradition. It is from the later Wittgenstein that the key concepts are derived, however: that of disciplinary practices as ‘forms of life’ and their taken-for-granted assumptions, or ground rules, as ‘riverbed propositions.’ I share this commitment to Wittgenstein but feel that Kazepides’s interpretation is a little conservative in places; I shall return to these concerns briefly.

The book has very considerable strengths, with many passages revealing a sharp analytic mind. Particularly compelling is the outright rejection of the aims-and-objectives conception of education. By a series of utterly convincing steps, the author concludes, ‘education is not in the category of things that can have aims and objectives.’ Rather, ‘We do not teach aims and objectives but only subjects and their inherent standards, ideals and tastes.’ The teacher is thus both a role model and an informed sharer of enthusiasm and expertise, for ‘children must be participants in a form of life to acquire the prerequisites.’

Central to the argument is that education comprises induction into forms of reasoning as opposed to doctrine. While this general point is well made, there are places where it is hammered home with a vehemence that some readers may find counterproductive. At times, the conceptual analysis lacks the critical rigour evident in the early discussion around [End Page 519] the nature of education. Most striking is the attack on religion. Consider, for example, the following:

If we put the numerous religions on a continuum, from the metaphorical left to the literal right, we will see that those that hold a metaphorical view do not talk about god, the hereafter, miracles, and the like literally and do not take seriously the canons of the Church, the hierarchy of the traditional priesthood, and their alleged authority.

Many liberal Anglicans (for example) would respect the ‘canons of the church’ and the authority of the priesthood as upholding rights to free will and personal interpretation. There are similarly unreflective rejections of Rorty’s conception of truth as solidarity, of theories that are not open to Popperian falsifiability, and of normative relativism, while ‘equality’ is not examined critically as a value but merely accepted on the grounds that it ‘does not cause wars.’ However, conceptions of equality are often in bitter conflict; we need only remember the Cold War for evidence of this. Thus Kazepides’s critical resources are not deployed evenly.

Wittgenstein warned us, ‘Try not to think of understanding as a “mental process” at all. – For that is the expression which confuses you’ (Philosophical Investigations, Section 154), yet Kazepides tends to see life and education both very strongly in terms of ‘mental processes,’ as induction into rational judgment that separates truth from error, with very little attention given to context, embodiment, or our dependence on the non-human. A more radical view that can also draw on Wittgenstein is that education is better understood as response to signs and signals rather than merely the acquisition of concepts. On this account, while basic tenets of Kazepides’s argument hold (the view of a disciplinary practice as a form of life, the value of riverbed propositions, and a richer conception of personal and social growth than is offered by a narrowly instrumental view of education), he...

pdf

Share