Education, training and the preparation of teachers

Richard Peters's views on education, training and the preparation of teachers were a very important formative influence in the reconstruction of education courses which took place widely in the 1960s. Most of the articles indicative of this influence are conveniently gathered together in the collection of papers entitled Education and the Education of Teachers, ¹ but an important contribution omitted from that collection appeared in the volume edited by J.W.Tibble entitled The Study of Education. ² The period in question was one in which the teaching profession's aspiration to become a graduate profession was endorsed by the Robbins Report, which recommended that what had formerly been known as training colleges should be retitled 'Colleges of Education' and that a new degree, the Bachelor of Education, should be introduced. ³ With the introduction of a Bachelor's degree into initial training there was a correlative move towards providing more Master's degree courses for the advanced study of education. Peters was prominent amongst those who determined the character which the content of these new developments would be given. In a nutshell, what he proposed was that the 'undifferentiated mush' which he saw educational studies as largely being should be replaced by the differentiated study of the several disciplines which bore most obviously on education, four of which became canonical: psychology, history, sociology and of course his own subject the philosophy of education. In this development, as in several others, it was not always easy to distinguish the contribution which was primarily due to Richard Peters from the contribution due to Paul Hirst, the two working closely together as they did and presenting arguments which were in many ways complementary.