School is one of the most powerful social institutions. Its significance consists not only in the deliverance of a wide range of accumulated meaningful and socially valid knowledge and experience but also in the distribution of individuals to various positions throughout the various social strata as well as their governance and, therefore, in the reproduction or reconstruction of the entire social structure. Education was long ago recognized as that cultural lever by which one can transform humans and social reality as a whole.
The historical-philosophical review of education shows that there is a close relationship between the type of society and the activities of education. The interplay between philosophy and education, and also between the specific society’s “philosophy” of culture and the mode of education, admittedly accepted as the most appropriate for a certain society at a certain time, could be very conducive to both philosophy and education - as theory and practice. Walter Feinberg remarks that “although dominated by psychology, the field of educational research was once largely restricted to the general discipline of philosophy [but] the status of education as an applied field makes it difficult to identify any specific method or conceptual domain which would single it out from other fields. For most scholars and researchers, however, the study of education has meant investigating activities related to learning, usually within the context of school [italics added].”
The philosophical study of education presupposes a profound analysis of the contents and methods of education as a means of realization of educational goals, i.e. the philosophy of education. Answering the question about what did/does it mean for a person to be educated, one can provide the necessary reasons as the basis of one or another contents and methods of education. According to Feinberg, “the deeper question about education involves the understanding of intergenerational continuity and change, and the normative concerns that guide the process of social and cultural reproduction [italics added].”
But in contrast to the earlier philosophical studies that accentuated the question of educational goals, the prominence of the behavioral and social sciences has lately shifted the researcher concern mainly to the question of means. The exploration of the more practical issues as, for example, the institutional arrangements that protect and carry on knowledge, the methods used to identify and measure the level of competency, the training of people who will bear and deliver the knowledge acquired by society, the way in which knowledge is being distributed amongst different social groups, etc. have often replaced the more significant question about the identification of the kind of knowledge (truths) and skills that are praised by a given society to be developed and delivered as experience to the next generations. The concrete ways of realization of educational content is no less important than the very contents. They need to be philosophically scrutinized as an integral part of education in order for the fruitful interaction between the developmental patterns (related to student learning abilities and practical skills) and the transmission of the curricular knowledge through teaching to be preserved.