英语论文网

cquire some general organizational strategies for modern classroom management, it is unlikely that there is much beyond this for which we might have resort to scientific research. Moreover, although it may take a bit of practice to learn to write steadily and clearly on a blackboard, it is surely a bit pretentious to label as skills many if not most of the acquired techniques and strategies teachers will sometimes be required to exercise in the classroom. I suspect that a rather better case for the place of skills in education and teaching is to be made by construing the performative aspects of teaching, especially those of communication and personal relationship, in the particularistic terms of artistic or craft engagement rather than scientific or technical engineering and management. But this, of course, may be to transpose such aspects of teaching altogether from the key of techné or skill to that of phronésis or virtue. I suspect, for example, that despite contemporary attempts to understand aspects of educational authority and classroom discipline in terms of some sort of managerial techné, these are perhaps ultimately better understood in the context-specific terms of moral relationship for which appropriate resources of personality and character are pivotal. This raises the difficulty for professional teacher educators, of course, that capacities of this kind are often more effectively developed in the field than in the academy. On the other hand, if we can but clear our heads of current professional obsession with pedagogic skills, we may come to recognize that the really deep professional challenges of education and teaching are implicated in a web of complex intellectual, moral and normative questions which must certainly exhaust any training in mere techné. For a response to this essay, see Pearson. 1. See David Carr: "The Dichotomy of Lliberal versus Vocational Education: Some Basic Conceptual Geography," in Philosophy of Education 1995, ed. Alven Neiman (Urbana, Ill.: Philosophy of Education Society, 1996), 53-63. 2. For an illuminating recent addition to the critical literature on skills in education, see Steven Johnson, "Skills, Socrates, and the Sophists: Learning from History," British Journal of Educational Studies 46, no. 2 (1998): 201-14; and for useful critique of competency models of teaching, see Terry Hyland, "Competence, Knowledge, and Education," Journal of Philosophy of Education 27, no. 1 (1993): 57-68. 3. See Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), book 6, sect. 4. 4. On this, see Leslie Perry, Four Progressive Educators (London: Collier-Macmillan, Educational Thinkers Series, 1967). 5. For one such"particularist" approach, see Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: "Phronesis" and "Techne" in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993). 6. Many of these points are eloquently made in John Passmore's splendid work, The Philosophy of Teaching (London: Duckworth, 1980). 7. For the dubious idea of moral competencies, see David Bridges, "Competence-based Education and Training: Progress or Villainy?" Journal of the Philosophy of Education 30, no. 3 (1996): 361-75. 8. The most influential educational application of the "ethics of care" is to be found, of course, in Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminist Approach to Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 9. Dunne, Back to the Rou