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R.S. PETERS 1919–2011
Education, then, can have no ends beyond itself. Its value derives from principles and
standards implicit in it. To be educated is not to have arrived at a destination; it is to
travel with a different view.1
Richard Stanley Peters was the founding father of British philosophy of education as
practised in the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1919 and educated at
Clifton College and Oxford University, where he read classics. During the Second World War
he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit and engaged in social relief work. At the end of the
war he became a schoolmaster at Sidcot School while studying philosophy part-time at
Birkbeck College, London. He was appointed to Birkbeck as lecturer in philosophy, then
reader in philosophy and psychology, specializing in ethics, philosophy of mind, political
philosophy and the history and philosophy of psychology.
After 1962 these interests bore fruit almost exclusively in the field of philosophy of
education. For it was in that year that he was appointed to the post with which he became
most closely identified – the Chair of Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education,
University of London. For the next dozen or so years he worked with extraordinary energy to
transform the philosophy of education from a minor intellectual interest of a handful of
scholars into an influential new sub-discipline of philosophy. In all the developments which
followed he was aided by his new colleague and later co-author Paul Hirst. Hundreds of
advanced students from Britain and from English-speaking countries across the world
participated in the new Diploma and MA courses or embarked on doctorates, before taking
posts in colleges or universities in which they would teach the subject in their turn to teachers
or trainee-teachers. Peters and Hirst ensured that philosophy of education became a major
component, along with other disciplines of education, in British initial teacher education,
including the newly created Bachelor of Education courses.
The rapidly growing numbers of trained philosophers of education made it possible for
Peters and Hirst to launch the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain in 1964.
From 1964 until 1975 Peters was the Chairman of PESGB. From 1966 until 1982 he also
edited its annual Proceedings and its successor The Journal of Philosophy of Education.
From 1986 until his death in 2011 Richard Peters was President of PESGB.
During these remarkably fertile years, Peters also produced a stream of influential books
and articles laying the foundations of new-look philosophy of education. Several of his edited
collections and early volumes of the Proceedings contain essays by leading British
philosophers of the time – such as David Hamlyn, Michael Oakeshott, Anthony Quinton and
Gilbert Ryle – whom he encouraged to apply their thinking to educational issues. In 1973 he
edited the volume on Philosophy of Education in the prestigious series Oxford Readings in
Philosophy. This proved the high-water mark of his attempt to establish the subject as a sub-
discipline of philosophy on a par with, say, philosophy of law or philosophy of religion.
After the mid 1970s, however, swiftly failing health led to a marked decline in the
number of his publications. It also put an end to his indefatigable committee work in the
cause both of his subject and also, more widely, the place of educational studies in teacher
education. He retired from his post at the Institute of Education in 1983.
Richard Peters’ philosophy of education was many-sided. Like Israel Scheffler, his
counterpart at Harvard, where he had spent some time as a Visiting Professor in 1961, he
sought to apply to educational issues the clarity and analytical power of mainstream
philosophical thinking of his day. Since the war and until his appointment to the Chair in
1962, the prevailing interest in general philosophy had been in what came to be called
‘conceptual’, or sometimes ‘linguistic’, analysis. This meant concentrating on key concepts in
the field – e.g. the notions of knowledge, moral obligation, God, causality, law, the state,
mind and other mental concepts with the intention of breaking them down into their
component elements and thus revealing their interconnections with related concepts. One
route into this area, followed further by some philosophers than others, was via an
examination of the ways in which the concepts being analysed were expressed in ordinary
language. Hence the narrower concern with ‘linguistic’ within the broader remit of
‘conceptual’ analysis.
Part of Peters’ initial overall project was to apply ‘analytical’ techniques to specifically
educational concepts. While Scheffler focused on the concepts of teaching and learning, and
other British philosophers, encouraged by Peters, investigated these and other notions such as
play, indoctrination, training, growth and socialization, Peters specialized in analysing the
concept of education itself. This led him to claim that for education – as distinct from other
things like training or indoctrination – to be taking place, three criteria have to be met. These
are:
[i] that ‘education’ implies the transmission of what is worth-while to those who become
committed to it;
[ii] that ‘education’ must involve knowledge and understanding and some kind of
cognitive perspective, which are not inert;
[iii] that ‘education’ at least rules out some procedures of transmission, on the grounds that
they lack wittingness and voluntariness.
(Peters 1966, p.45)
Education, on this account – and as elaborated elsewhere in his early writings – consists in
the initiation of the uninitiated into activities which are worthwhile pursuing for their own
sake. Prominent among these are activities concerned with the pursuit of truth like science,
history, literature and philosophy. Educated people are not blinkered specialists in one such
domain but understand the broader perspectives that these disciplines cast on other fields and
on human life more generally.
Under pressure from other philosophers it soon became clear that Peters’ account was no
neutral, objective ‘analysis’ of the concept of education, but a delineation of a particular view
– most at home in certain university and élite secondary school circles of the time – of what
education should be like.
Awareness of this caused increasing difficulties around the end of the 1960s and into the
1970s – both for Peters’ theory and for the new philosophy of education itself. While Peters
attempted to refine his analysis so as to overcome the problem, the wider project of
establishing philosophy of education as a new sub-area of philosophy found itself in jeopardy.
For a branch of philosophy to count as a relatively autonomous field within the parent
discipline, it had, in the heyday of the post-war analytic school, to possess its own key
concepts. Thus philosophy of law revolved around the concept of law and related concepts,
and philosophy of religion around God and connected ideas like immortality. From the start
Peters saw the concept of education as the keystone of the new sub-discipline, supported by
other concepts mentioned above like teaching, training and learning. But if ‘analysis’ of the
concept of education was yielding so little fruit (and the harvests from its sister-concepts
teaching, indoctrination, training etc. were also proving meagre), how could philosophy of
education make out its claim for special status?
But Richard Peters’ main claim to be the architect of late twentieth-century British
philosophy of education lay elsewhere than in carving out a new sub-discipline of philosophy.
‘Applied philosophy’ and ‘applied ethics’ came on the scene largely after Peters’ productive
years had ended, offering philosophical, especially ethical, perspectives on issues in, for
instance, medicine, law, war and peace and the environment. Yet Peters was in effect one of
the first British applied philosophers. He was deeply concerned to help teachers and teacher-
educators to become clearer about the philosophical dimensions of their work. This took
several forms. It meant opening teachers’ eyes to the philosophical inadequacies of
fashionable educational theory, not least the kind of ‘progressive’ theory that found its way
into the Plowden Report of 1967. It meant encouraging them to question the justifiability of
current practices – to do with discipline and punishment, for instance. It meant opening their
eyes to wider issues – about democracy in schools, educational aims, equality, moral
education, the education of the emotions, the role of the headteacher, the nature of
educational disciplines.
This applied aspect of Peters’ work helped to set the broad agenda for British – and not
only British – philosophy of education for the rest of the twentieth century. He bequeathed to
it a problem-centred approach. Unlike other ways of philosophizing about education – the
tradition of historical scholarship found today in, for instance, the German speaking countries
and Japan – the school that Peters helped to shape has been rooted in educational practice and
dedicated to its improvement. But it would be wrong to put all the weight on contemporary
relevance. This is only a part of Peters’ legacy. More central were the connections he made
between surface issues and deeper layers of philosophical thinking, especially in the
philosophy of mind and in ethics. In the latter area Peters underpinned his arguments about
curriculum subjects, moral development, equality of educational opportunity and other topics
with a fully fledged moral philosophy, explicitly indebted to Kant. First-order moral
judgements – that corporal punishment is wrong, for instance – have to be tested against,
among other things, higher-order moral principles of benevolence, freedom, impartiality and
truth-telling. Why these? Peters sought to show that all these ultimate moral principles are
capable of a ‘transcendental’ justification, in that any rational inquirer asking why they
should be followed must be committed to them by virtue of his or her attachment to
rationality itself.
Peters also used a similar pattern of argument in the justification of curriculum activities.
As mentioned above, he saw education as initiation into such intrinsically worthwhile
activities as history, science, literature and philosophy. But what makes intellectual pursuits
like these worthwhile, rather than, say, playing golf or lying in the sun? In a much discussed
chapter in Peters 1966, he argued that it is the concern with the pursuit of truth embedded in
the former which means that the serious inquirer who questions their credentials cannot reject
them without undermining a central element in the rationality to which he or she is
committed.
Whether this or any of the other ‘transcendental’ arguments stand up is doubtful. Much of
the critical discussion of Peters’ ideas has focused on them. The Kantian ethics on which he
based his philosophy of education lost ground in the last quarter of the twentieth century to
Aristotelian perspectives. Peters’ philosophy of education is centred, to borrow part of the
title of one of his most well-known edited collections, on ‘the development of reason’. The
rational life, devoted to a concern for truth, is his lodestar, in philosophy as in life. He is all-
too-conscious of the fragility of this ideal, of, as he termed it, ‘the thin crust of civilisation’.
Emotions and desires beneath the psychic surface constantly threaten the rule of reason and
need to be brought under its sway. Education is a process of initiation into rationality’s
demands.
In many quarters Peters has been seen – and saw himself – as the person who brought the
techniques of post-war Oxford’s ‘analytic’ philosophy to bear on concrete educational issues.
But as the most perceptive of commentaries on his work, written for his Festschrift by his
former colleague Ray Elliott, suggests, he was more ‘a philosopher in the older style’.2 Peters
wrote that his eyes ‘are more likely to be fixed on the brass tacks under the teacher’s desk
than on the Form of the Good’.3 Yet for all his avowed rejection of broad metaphysical
approaches to education, his philosophical stance, in its universalism, attachment to truth and
reason, and emphasis on self-control, was, in Elliott’s eyes, akin to that of the Stoics. Like the
Stoics, too, Peters had a keen awareness of the human predicament – in his case, of our need
to make sense of our lives against the contingency of the world.
Notes
1 Peters, Education as Initiation, p.47.
2 See Cooper, Education, Values and Mind, pp.41–68.
3 Peters, Education as Initiation, p.8.
See also
In this book: Hirst, Scheffler
Peters’ major writings (on education)
Education as Initiation, inaugural lecture, London: University of London Institute of
Education, 1967; 1st pub. London: Harrap, 1964.
Ethics and Education, London: Allen and Unwin, 1966.
The Concept of Education, ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Perspectives on Plowden, ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.
Peters, R.S., with Hirst, P.H., The Logic of Education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1970.
Peters, R.S., co-editor with Dearden, R.F. and Hirst, P.H., Education and the Development of
Reason, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.
The Philosophy of Education, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Psychology and Ethical Development, London: Allen and Unwin, 1974.
Moral Development and Moral Education, London: Allen and Unwin, 1981.
Further reading
Collits, M., ‘R.S. Peters: A Man and his Work’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of New
England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia, 1994.
Cooper, D.E. (ed.), Education, Values and Mind: Essays for R.S. Peters, London, Routledge,
1986.
Cuypers, S.E. and Martin, C. R.S. Peters London: Bloomsbury 2013
JOHN WHITE
