Richard Peters and his legacy

Abstract

Richard Peters’s contribution to teaching and research in philosophy of education after 1962 until the mid-1970s was immense, as this piece by two of his colleagues from that period shows. He brought the prevailing emphasis on conceptual analysis in general philosophy to bear on creating a new way of philosophising about education. He worked tirelessly both to expand the teaching of the subject at Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) and especially at in-service levels, and to reform teacher education at the University of London Institute of Education and its associated colleges more generally. He also founded the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and its journal. Despite health difficulties, problems in his analysis of the concept of education, objections to the academic overloading of the PGCE, and the later decline of government funding of in-service courses in the 1980s, much of Peters’s original vision for philosophy of education thrives to this day.