History of Ph.of Ed. (Chambliss, J.J. 1996 pp.461-472)

Philosophy originated in ancient Greece under the pressure of questions about the nature of arete (translated as ‘virtue’). The Sophists claimed that they could teach virtue, thereby challenging the traditional wisdom, which held that virtue is a natural possession of few – the ‘nobly born,’ whose virtues were celebrated in the epics of Homer (c.850b.c.) and the odes of Pindar (518-438 B.C.). In the dialogues of Plato, Socrates is portrayed asking the question, Can virtue be taught? Discussion made it clear that no one knew the nature of virtue. Thus another question naturally arose: What is the nature of virtue itself? Socrates goes on to ask whether virtue is one thing or many things, and how we can know what it is. These are matters of philosophy in that they are questions about the life worth living (ethics), knowing (epistemology), and the nature of reality (metaphysics). At the same time they are matters of education, in that answers to these questions can be found only in an educational (p.461) process that aims to find out the nature of virtue. Thus such questions as what is worth knowing and how we can know it have both a philosophical and an educational dimension. It is clear that, in their origins, philosophy and educational theory stood on common ground. Ideas o clarifying and elaborating the meaning of philosophical questions became theories to be tested. Finding out what thinking makes us do – the practical meaning of philosophical ideas – became an activity of education. Philosophy of education, like philosophy in other contexts, is thinking that results in ideas that unsettle things, that brings about something different from that which once had been taken as settled. Beginning in curiosity about the nature of things, philosophy of education is thinking about what to do in education. Philosophy of education is not thinking that stands apart from action, but thinking that aims to make a difference in human conduct. The ancient Greeks did not use the term Philosophy of education in their writings. Yet, they first envisaged what later thinkers came to call philosophy of education.

In its origins, philosophy attempted to provide a unity in thought that is lacking in the ways reality comes to us, unorganised and fragmented. Yet unity in thought stand only as a possibility for the way things are experienced; what and how things actually are experienced can be found out only when ideas go to work, get tested in reality. So it is in philosophy of education: Any unity that thinking proposes must be tried out in specific processes of education. (p.462)