ABSTRACT
Paul Heywood Hirst has played a major role in the establishment of philosophy of education in the English-speaking world as a distinctive area of academic philosophy and as a contributory discipline within educational studies. He has also been highly influential in a number of institutional and policy-related developments in education and has commanded wide respect as a lucid and inspiring teacher, a lively and tenacious debater and an effective and far-sighted educational leader. After Cambridge, Hirst embarked on a career as a schoolteacher of Mathematics. His success as a teacher led to Hirst's appointment in 1955 to the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Oxford, where he was responsible for the training of Mathematics teachers. Hirst's emphasis on practical reason and on the limitation of theoretical understanding has been apparent for some time in his developing views on the nature of the relationship between theory and practice in education and the demands of professional preparation for teaching.
