EDUCATIONAL THEORY THE ROLE OF THE PHILOSOPHER OF EDUCATION

This paper discusses educational theories and the philosophy of education. The work provides the imperativeness of philosophical pundits on the issue of educational theories and tries to give clarity on the main activities of philosophers of education in handling problems in the field of education. It is established that philosophers often engage themselves in trying to get at the truth on certain important questions by rational means. The paper provides conceptual clarification on certain concepts that formed the topic which include education, theories, philosophy, educational theories and philosophy of education. The paper revealed that the tasks of philosophy of education include among other things, the analysis and clarification of concepts (e.g. knowledge, freedom, authority, discipline, equality, etc) the critical examination of presupposition (e.g. ethical, epistemological, metaphysical, etc) and “attempting to relate or think together as systematically as possible the carefully analyzed contributions from different fields of knowledge and experience”. The paper also revealed that philosophers of education are concerned with a scrutiny of what is said about education by those who practise it and by those who theorize about it. It is discovered in this work that it is the complicated phenomena of education as a group of activities going on at various logical levels, ‘logical’ in the sense that each higher level arises out of and is dependent on the one below that gives rise to theorizing about education. The conclusion of this work is that unless educational activities were carried on and talked about, there would be no subject matter on higher order activities to work on. The result of educational theorizing is educational theory, or more accurately educational theories