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Education and the Good Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Robin Haack
Robin Haack
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Extract

In this paper there is some old news, but not, I hope, stale news. I shall reiterate the view that the dominant aim of education is to contribute to the good life for individuals, an aim expressed by J. S. and Harriet Mill in their famous essay On Liberty. But the paper is not stale news because it is no longer commonplace to defend individualism. The Mills' essay now appears to be a subversive document. Secondly, characterizing the good life at least partly in terms of ‘self-cultivation’ and ‘self-perfection’ seems anachronistic. Conceptions of the good life have changed. Thirdly, On Liberty was subject to sustained criticism by James Fitzjames Stephen, and some of that criticism requires modification of some of the views expressed by the Mills.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 56 , Issue 217 , July 1981 , pp. 289 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1981

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References

1 Warnock, Mary, Schools of Thought (Faber, 1977), chs 4 and 5, esp. pp. 168–173Google Scholar.

2 Devlin, Tim and Warnock, Mary, What Must We Teach? (Temple Smith, 1977), 69–70Google Scholar.

3 Mary Warnock, op. cit., 148, 149.

4 Rescher, Nicholas, Welfare: The Social Issues in Philosophical Perspective (University of Pittsburgh, 1972), 158–60Google Scholar.

5 Mary Warnock, op. cit., 47.

6 Ibid., 144.

7 Scitovsky, Tibor, The Joyless Economy (Oxford: Galaxy, 1976)Google Scholar.

8 James, William, ‘The Energies of Men’, in Selected Papers on Philosophy (Everyman, 1917), 41Google Scholar.

9 James, William, Talks to Teachers (Longman Green and Company, 1901), 211Google Scholar.

10 Krimerman, Leonard I., ‘Compulsory Education: A Moral Critique’, in Ethics and Educational Policy, Strike, Kenneth A. and Egan, Kieran (eds) (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 79–102Google Scholar.

11 S., J. and Mill, Harriet, On Liberty (Penguin, 1974)Google Scholar, ch. 3.

12 Peters, R. S., ‘Education as Initiation’, in Authority, Responsibility and Education, Peters, R. S., (ed.) revised edition (George Allen and Unwin, 1973)Google Scholar.

13 I thank Joel Feinberg, Peter Gardner, Robert Jackson and members of the Bradford Philosophy Seminar for valuable discussions of views in this paper. I am also grateful to Anthony O'Hear who replied to an earlier version presented to a conference on the Philosophy of Education in Sussex, 1978.