Prepared as part of an educational resource, Philosophy of Education for Teachers, (ed.) J. De Souza, for the organization Parents and Teachers for Excellence. THE EPISTEMIC GOALS OF EDUCATION DUNCAN PRITCHARD University of California, Irvine dhpritch@uci.edu 1. Education has many purposes, including of a practical, social, and political or civic nature. 1 One of the core purposes of education, however, is epistemic, in that we want our educational practices to teach people facts, knowledge, expertise, and so on. Indeed, arguably the epistemic goal of education is essential to it, in that a practice that wasn’t concerned with epistemic goals wouldn’t even qualify as genuinely educational. For example, an indoctrination program run by a police state would hardly qualify as an educational practice, even if it was described as such by the people running it. Once we are clear that education has essentially epistemic goals, this then prompts the natural question as to what they are, and in particular whether there are overarching epistemic goals of education. This is a question that has been engaged with by a branch of philosophy of education known as the epistemology of education. As we will see, how one answers this question has fundamental ramifications for how one thinks that education should be conducted. 2 2. Let’s start with a very minimal conception of the overarching epistemic goals of education, whereby the aim is simply to teach students a range of useful facts and basic cognitive skills. This is not a proposal that tends to be advanced by educational theorists, but it is a common viewpoint in the media. For example, one often hears newspapers columnists complaining that students today don’t know certain important facts (e.g., what happened at the Battle of Hastings) or are deficient