One problem, as Philip W. Jackson notes, is that processes of formal learning and personal evolution embody a striving for perfection that none of us can achieve. To make it more difficult, the goal, perfection, is constantly changing. If modernity is an endless reflexive process of transformation, education is the quintessential modern activity, a kind of grasping at betterment that can never find rest. Another problem (if it is a problem) is that formal learning and personal evolution have near-bottomless depth. Unlike natural objects, the immanent truth of a human activity like education must be normatively created. There are countless possible norms and many contending factions in education. A third problem, less essential but difficult to escape, lies in politics and policy. Contemporary governments manage the politics of education, and rationalise demands for state support, by modelling education as a business, and learning as a consumer commodity provided in competitive markets. It is what Hegel called an ‘abstract universal’, and while it cannot encompass the whole enterprise of education – in that sense education as a commodity is no more realistic than marriage, or patriotism, as a commodity – it generates a tendency to empty out the content of learning and personal evolution, as if questions of good education are settled by political economy and the profit motive. Schools and universities are forced to focus on the performative bottom line. Students fixate on the utility of the degree without thought for what they can become. Yet, as Jackson concludes, education is about forming people: ‘education is fundamentally a moral enterprise. Its goal is to effect beneficial changes in humans, not just in what they know and can do but, more important, in their character and personality, in the kind of persons they become.’

Because education is always unsatisfying, and because it is enfolded into societies in which transformation is endemic, education always needs reform. Programs for education reform rarely focus on bettering the person that students become, or on bettering the process of person formation, which would require many-sided observation and complex synthetic judgement. They concentrate on easy options such as the mechanics of funding, or governance, or new buildings, or measured student learning achievement. In systemic testing we have a compelling instrument for translating the modernist fixation into continuous incremental advances, locking education research into solely empirical agendas.

Jackson wants us to do something different. He begins the book by recounting a late-career speech by John Dewey in 1938. Dewey urged his audience to ‘devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan’. Jackson asks us to rethink what education means, bringing philosophy of education back into the picture. This move is long overdue and it is done well.

Jackson is a Professor Emeritus in Education and Psychology at the University of Chicago. He tells how he arrived at Chicago in 1955 to find John Dewey’s bust proudly displayed in the hall. His early mentors knew Dewey, and a close study of Dewey’s vast corpus was mandatory. What Is Education? is among other things the story of Jackson’s encounters with Dewey, Hegel, and Kant. He has a facility in using philosophical ideas to explore the processes of thinking and learning in the classroom. All truths are partial truths, emphasises Jackson, and all learning is provisional. There is a marvellous description of how we are challenged to learn through the process – always unnerving, but empowering and ultimately joyful – of continuous self-criticism. Hegel, apostle of the modern, is again pressed into service. Thought moves forward by denying its own prior accomplishments. Negation is ‘a driving force, a tiny engine pushing thought along’. The process is not entirely destructive. Something of the past thought is preserved at each next stage. But it can be tough for students. The art of teachers lies in balancing relentless criticism with appreciation and support, while installing in students the capacity for self-criticism and self-renewal. (Of course, if education is modelled as a consumer marketplace, teachers are merely required to keep the customer satisfied while bumping up their scores. The tiny engine of negation and its ever-challenging truths can only be bad for business.)

Jackson identifies five kinds of truths that concern the educator, the factual truths that were beloved of Mr Gradgrind: systemic truths, in the form of bodies of knowledge or disciplines; instrumental truths, which are concerned with how to do things (instrumental truths are favoured by those who believe that the main purpose of education is to augment productivity); moral truths, which are truths about how to live one’s life; and subjective or personal truths, which are what students themselves believe. The job of the educator is to transform truths in the first four categories into truths in the minds of students. Jackson makes a helpful distinction between Kantian thought based on reason, which underpins the mathematical sciences and tends to be exclusive, and Hegelian ‘speculative thought’, which tends to be connective and inclusive. He wants teachers to expand the space for speculative thought.

So how far should the teacher go in shaping the student? Jackson summarises the dilemma of democratic education:

All teachers share what they know with their students. They want them to adopt the thought of others. But if they have given the matter sufficient thought, as most teachers have, they also want their students to think independently, to be personally convinced of the truth of what is being taught.

The task of the educator is the shaping of independent human agents, persons capable of determining all facets of their lives. This was anticipated by Dewey, promised in the cultural revolution that was constituted in that remarkable inchoate decade, the 1960s, and became the main course taken by modernity. But should a self-determining agent be programmed to adopt the thought of another? Is this the proper role of the teacher? (or the parent?) No. This is where I part company with Jackson. The task of the educator lies in fostering the intellectual and moral capacities, not in filling those capacities with particular social or religious contents, as he implies. Let the students decide.

On the social plane, Jackson is largely silent. All he says is that when education creates ‘an enduring change for the better in the character and psychological well-being (the personhood) of its recipients’, this will trickle down to the larger social setting. He does not share Dewey’s burning interests in the communal and the cross-cultural. Yet the social is now an urgent question in education. The 1960s forged a collectivist notion of the social, the necessary counterpoint to its soaring high freedoms, that was enfolded by the ecological movement. It was too challenging for mainstream capitalism, which instead adopted the invisible hand metaphor. The social became an aggregation of 1960s individualism run amok: ‘greed is good’, which was somehow sanitised in the market. This absurd negation of the social left teachers with nowhere to go, with one Millian exception. The central emphasis on agency means that students must be persuaded of the virtues of those social arrangements – human rights, tolerance, access to resources and institutions – that make self-determining activity possible. Perhaps surprisingly, as it was not always the case, schools, especially primary schools, are often better at this than at teaching arithmetic (which has both pros and cons!) Universities are also cosmopolitan places.

Nevertheless, this is a fine book and deserves to be widely read. I found myself missing the social science context of Dewey’s philosophy, and his secularism, which Jackson might find constraining. But Jackson makes a memorable case for a kind of teaching based on philosophy as a craft. All students deserve to have access to this, and it is seriously troubling that in education we are now worse at it, though better at many other things. We need to return philosophy of education into the core of teacher training programs as quickly as we can.