There is a distinctive line of response to this kind of challenge that Ifind quite
attractive. This is from the view of philosophy of education as“practical philoso-
phy”(Carr 1995 , 2005 ; Dunne 1993 ), a view that emerged as a decisive alternative
to the analytic tradition of philosophy of education, alongside the postmodernist
critique of philosophy as an epistemology-oriented theoretical project. What Ifind
interesting and instructive about the“practical”nature of this line of response is
twofold. One is that it is based on the view of education as a human practice with its
own tradition and integrity long embedded in educational communities through the
accumulatedpracticalwisdom of teachers. The other is that philosophy of edu-
cation as“practical philosophy”is expected to be not so much“philosophyof
education”as“philosophyforeducation,”in the sense that it is“explicitly com-
mitted to promoting the integrity of education as a practice by cultivating the
educational practitioner’s natural human capacity ofphronesis(practical knowl-
edge)”(Hirst and Carr 2005 , pp. 625–626). This means that the teaching of phi-
losophy of education is in itself expected to beeducativeby producing not
theoretically justified propositional knowledge but “reflectively acquired
self-knowledge”instudent-practitioners. Thus, the idea of teaching or doing phi-
losophy of education as practical philosophy can pre-empt the relevance-question
that can be raised by student-teachers because the whole approach is designed to
begin with students’direct engagement in the understanding of their own educa-
tional practice.
Wilfred Carr, one of the main advocates of this view of philosophy of education,
aims to enable student-practitioners to engage in a form of reflective philosophy
that makes them more self-consciously aware of the prejudices embedded in their
pre-philosophical practical understanding of education and the historical and cul-
tural contexts of their lives. Combining this reflective philosophy with“action
research”as a form of practitioner research, Carr presents his action research as a
kind of inquiry that enables practitioners to test the historically embedded
assumptions implicit in their practice in such a way as to improve their practice
(Carr 2007 , p. 145). Thus, we can say that philosophy of education as practical
philosophy begins with a full acknowledgement of its dependence on the will-
ingness of student-practitioners to recover reflectively the unacknowledged preju-
dices at work in their practical knowledge as a way of improving the practical
knowledge exercised in their educational practice.
While being sympathetic to the“practical”nature of this view of philosophy of
education—in the sense of its being “explicitly committed to promoting the
integrity of education as a practice”—I wonder if there may be another form of
reflective philosophy that can contribute to“cultivating the educational practi-
tioner’s natural human capacity ofphronesis(practical knowledge),” in Carr’s
words. Practical philosophy as action research mayprepare would-be teachers to
be historically conscious and reflective professionals, but it would fall short of
enabling them to be morally mature and emotionally literatehumanisticprofes-
sionals. I want to hold on to the word“humanistic”in order to differentiate what I
am doing most obviously from technicist approaches to teacher education but
also from those forms of practical philosophy associated with Carr and Dunne.
70 D.-J. Kwak