ABSTRACT
The liberal arts are frequently seen as an important supplement to teachers’ professional training. In placing humanistic, philosophical, and scientific forms of knowledge in conversation with one another, the liberal arts can offer teachers crucial resources for appreciating the full meaning of their relationships with students in schools. The basic problem with incorporating the liberal arts into teacher education is, however, that such concerns seem to unavoidably compete with the professional components of the teacher education curriculum. Although this has led some to recommend exporting teacher education to the graduate phase so that a liberal arts degree can be acquired beforehand, we suggest in this chapter that teacher education can balance the seeming opposition between liberal education and professional preparation. In particular, we suggest that philosophy can be an important bridge between the professional concerns of teacher education and the general subject matter of the liberal arts. To make this argument, we look to the various roles that philosophy has played in the history of the liberal arts curriculum as well as to the early history of teacher education, in which philosophy played an important part of the curriculum. By thus showing that there are the conceptual resources for wedding teacher education and the liberal arts already embedded in the Western educational tradition, we hope to demonstrate that such a combination is an achievable ideal today.
