ABSTRACT
In the meantime British philosophy had been undergoing a radical sea-change. ‘The question of the relation of subject matter and method is fundamentally the same question that appears in philosophy as the problem of the relation of the subject and object, or of the relation of intelligence, mind, to the world.’ Much the same relationship exists between philosophy of education and educational theory, which interact at all points. The prevailing impression has been that linguistic analysis and logical empiricism between them constitute the philosophy. As a philosophy of education, idealism never really recovered from Popper’s hatchet job in The Open Society and Its Enemies, which sought to debunk Plato and derided Hegel as the prince of windbags. Just as the 1944 Education Act took it for granted that the Christian ethic provided the orthodoxy and terms of reference for national policy-making, so most of the post-war educational writers, Clarke included, were men with sincere religious convictions.
