Philosophy of Education and the History of Educational Thought

Scholars in philosophy of education who discuss the history of educational thought, by which I mean thought about education in the history of philosophy and/or the history of social science, continue to miss a vital opportunity. Their work, more often than it has in recent decades, should do what many essays in fields like ancient philosophy and modern philosophy have traditionally done in examining the past: pick out counterintuitive parts of it and try to show that they are more defensible than they seem. Among other reasons, facing pushback from historical figures is an important way to prevent or offset the effects of group polarization, as psychologists, democratic theorists, and others have called it. The danger that this sort of polarization poses for philosophers of education today is that, on a range of issues, since they all agree with one another and encounter no opposition, they will lose the true beliefs they already have.