The Teacher as the Forlorn Hope of Modernity: MacIntyre on Education and Schooling

Résumé 0

Since Alasdair MacIntyre denies that there could be a philosophy of education, it seems churlish to accuse him of being a philosopher of education. In one sense, MacIntyre writes almost nothing about education, but in another sense, virtually everything he writes is about education. Unfortunately, MacIntyre does not explicitly theorize the difference between education in general and schooling. Still, in most of his work, he makes it clear that our most important education comes from our informal participation in social practices. Schools, he often says, do little more than reinforce this basic social education, as much as he would like them to swim against the current. Indeed, MacIntyre even denies that teaching itself is a social practice: he argues that teaching is simply an aspect of mastering any true social practice. Part of the practice of mathematics, he says, is teaching mathematics. Why do we need schools at all? Because, he says, social practices in the modern world have become intolerably specialized, leading to compartmentalized human beings who are moral idiots. MacIntyre vests schools with the avowedly utopian mission of overcoming the moral idiocy of modern life by fostering sound practical wisdom in students. I will argue that by properly distinguishing schools from education more generally, we can see: 1) that teaching is a distinctive social practice; 2) that schools already have a distinctive mission, which is to impart the intellectual virtues; and 3) that MacIntyre’s attempt to burden schools with the mission of imparting practical wisdom in general is quixotic and will undermine the capacity of schools to fulfill their distinctive intellectual mission.