Wittgenstein's Education: 'A Picture Held Us Captive'

Dedicated to educators who are not philosophy specialists, this book offers an overview of the connections between Wittgenstein's later philosophy and his own training and practice as an educator. Arguing for the centrality of education to Wittgenstein's life and works, the authors resist any reduction of Wittgenstein's philosophy to remarks on pedagogy while addressing the current controversy surrounding the role of training in the enculturation process. Significant events in his education and life are examined as the background for successful interpretation, without lending biographical details explanatory force. The book discusses the importance of Wittgenstein's training and dismissal as an elementary teacher (1920-26) in light of his later, frequent use (1930s-40s) of many 'scenes of instruction' in his Cambridge lectures and notebooks. These depictions culminated in his now famous Philosophical Investigations -- a counter to his earlier philosophy in the Tractatus. Wittgensteincame to distinguish between empirical inquiries into how education, language or mathematics might ideally work, from grammatical studies of how we learn on the rough ground to normatively go-on as others do - often without explicit rules and with considerable degrees of ambiguity, for instance, in implementing new guidelines during a curriculum reform or in evaluating teachers. The book argues that Wittgenstein's reflections on education -- spanning from mathematics training to the acquisition of language and cultivation of aesthetic appreciation -- are of central significance to both the man and his pedagogical style of philosophy.

Auteur
Michael A. Peters is a Professor at the Wilf Malcolm Institute for Educational Research at Waikato University, Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and professorial fellow at James Cook University. He is the Executive Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and founding editor of several other journals, including the Open Review of Educational Research and The Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy. His interests are in education, philosophy and social policy, areas in which he has written over sixty books, including most recently The Global Financial Crisis and the Restructuring of Education (2015), Paulo Freire: The Global Legacy (2015) both with Tina Besley, Education Philosophy and Politics: Selected Works (2011); Education, Cognitive Capitalism and Digital Labour (2011), with Ergin Bulut; and Neoliberalism and After? Education, Social Policy and the Crisis of Capitalism (2011). He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2010 and awarded honorary doctorates by the State University of New York (SUNY) in 2012 and University of Aalborg in 2015.
Jeff Stickney is a Lecturer at the University of Toronto. He has taught graduate courses in Philosophy of Education and courses for Philosophy teachers training in secondary education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He is the senior author and consultant on the Grade 12 Ontario text, Philosophy: Thinkers, Theories and Questions (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2011), and has taught philosophy extensively at Bayview Secondary School (York Region, Ontario). He recently supervised a Ph. D. dissertation in Philosophy of Education at the University of Toronto and is currently serving on a doctoral committee at York University. With Michael A. Peters he coedited A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations (Springer 2017), and with Nicholas Burbules coedited the Wittgenstein section in the Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Springer; Chief Editor Michael A. Peters). Stickney presented at the Nordic Wittgenstein Society (Denmark, 2012), the 2015 PESGB Gregynog Conference Orientations Towards Wittgenstein (Wales), and organized panel discussions on Wittgenstein in 2016 for PES (Toronto) and PESGB (Oxford).

Contenu

1. Picturing Wittgenstein's relationships to education. - 2. Judging portraits of Wittgenstein. - 3. Wittgenstein as Educator. - 4. Pedagogical Investigations