Educational Philosophy and Theory

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James Walker, Philosopher of Education – Five

Michael Matthews, Robert Mackie, Colin Evers, Steve Crump & Paul Hager

To cite this article: Michael Matthews, Robert Mackie, Colin Evers, Steve Crump & Paul Hager
(2022) James Walker, Philosopher of Education – Five tributes from colleagues, Educational
Philosophy and Theory, 54:1, 5-10, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2021.1884359

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1884359

Published online: 15 Feb 2021.

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TRIBUTE

James Walker, Philosopher of Education – Five tributes

Michael Matthews
I first knew Jim Walker when I enrolled in the Diploma of Education at Sydney Teachers College
in 1968. The compulsory Philosophy of Education course was taught by the wonderful Anna
Hogg (1910–2011), a Scottish Christian academic, who in 1932 was the first woman to be
awarded the University Medal in Philosophy at Sydney University. For some years, she had been
Head of the College Education Department. In 1968 she had just recently returned from studies
with Richard Peters at the London Institute of Education. She had hand-picked Jim from an ear-
lier year’s class for a one-year, junior lecturer (tutor) appointment in philosophy of education.
Anna invited five or six students who had previous studied at least two years of philosophy
into an informal ‘honours’ class for whom the semester was spent reading Richard Stanley
Peters’ just published Ethics and Education (Peters 1966). Jim was a visitor to this class. This was
the beginning of almost two decades of philosophical and social engagement with Jim.
In 1969, my first year of school teaching, I enrolled part-time in a Master of Education degree
at Sydney University. William (Bill) Andersen (1924–2019) was director of the philosophy pro-
gramme. Like Anna Hogg, he was a Christian academic, indeed the very model of ‘A
Christian Gentleman’.
There was a core group of perhaps 10–15 students in the graduate philosophy of education
programme. Most became professors of education: Kevin Harris, Brian Hill, Paul Hager, Gabriele
Lakomski, Bob Mackie, Colin Evers and, of course, Jim.
They were heady days for philosophy of education. Each eight weeks or so, the Thursday
evening class would morph into the Sydney Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
(PESA) branch meeting. Local philosophers such as David Armstrong, John Kleinig, George
Molnar, Wallis Suchting and Paul Crittenden would present papers; as would visitors such as
Richard Peters and Paul Hirst. Educational sociologists such as Robert Young and historians such
as Bob Petersen and David Hogan used to attend and contribute to the meetings. With Bill
Andersen’s class as a core, attendance would perhaps vary from 25 to 50 for each PESA branch
meeting. For some many years, I was secretary of the branch, and my memory is that Jim was
president for a number of the years.
In the mid- to late-1970s we used occasionally meet for two or more hours on weekends in
different of our homes to hear one of us read a paper or have discussion about a topical matter.
Philip Steedman and Gabriele Lakomski from, then Bathurst CAE, drove down for these social/
scholarly meetings. Among other things, they were an opportunity for meeting Jim’s then wife
Pamela and his two young boys David and Martin.

CONTACT Paul Hager [email protected] University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway NSW
2007, Australia
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1899783
ß 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
6 M. MATTHEWS ET AL.

Jim did his honours degree in philosophy at Sydney, with a thesis on RS Peters. At the time,
engagement with Quine’s ontology and semantics occupied a good deal of Jim’s philosophical
thinking and was brought to bear on his PESA presentations, interventions and discussions.
There were many references to Quine’s Word and Object. Others of our group, including at least
Paul Hager, Colin Evers and myself, followed Jim down the same Sydney University philoso-
phy track.
Beginning in 1990, Jim moved out of Sydney and up in the institutional world. First to
University of Canberra then, in 1995, to being Dean of Education at University of
Western Sydney.
I became more centrally involved in Science Education affairs, and my almost two decades of
connection with Jim faded. Jim was an example of professional and scholarly competence, ser-
iousness, and integrity. He contributed to the development of all who had the good fortune to
know him.

Robert Mackie
Jim Walker and I, when we first met many moons ago in the early 1970s, had adjacent offices in
the bowels of the Fisher Library, Sydney Uni. I’d been in the library often but didn’t know these
windowless boxes existed. Jim was a lecturer in Education, and I was a part-time tutor at Sydney
and lecturer at Gazal House, the tech-teacher training component of Sydney Teachers’ College
in Ultimo.
Jim, I discovered, had some similar teaching experience to me. We had both taught at
Sydney Tech Boys’ High, and he had been at Sydney Teachers’ College as well. Later, when I was
appointed to the University of Newcastle, Jim had been there too.
Jim and I also shared a background in Philosophy, especially Philosophy of Ed. In this we
were joined by Kevin Harris and Michael Matthews, and the four of us together were regular
contributors to the seminars at the Sydney branch of PESA, and its annual conference. At this
time our ire was directed largely at the London Institute of Education’s peddling of analytical
philosophy of education—Jim devising the rudely apt acronym APE!
Our preferred terrain combined broadly Marxist critiques with a focus on capitalist political
economy. Here we were greatly assisted by the visit to Sydney of two American political econo-
mists Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis, whose Schooling in Capitalist America became a best-seller.
The four of us organised a two-day conference at NSWTF auditorium, then in Sussex Street. The
two days were packed and culminated in establishing the Radical Education Group (REDG) to
carry on locally the work that our American visitors had introduced.
In practical terms this resulted in the production of Radical Education Dossier (RED) in 1976,
emanating from my then home in Reuss Street, Glebe. The first issue featured Bowles and Gintis,
of course, from the conference. Together we bought into many controversies, notably the
unwanted visit to Australia of Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen – racist meritocrats, both of
them. “Why are they here?” asked the RED4 editorial.
In this period two names came up a lot on radical ed. discourse – the Jesuit Ivan Illich whose
Deschooling Society attracted a lot of attention, and more to our taste – mine especially – the
work of the Brazilian literacy educator, Paulo Freire who attacked the alleged neutrality of educa-
tion with the famous dictum “Education is a political event.”
So it was that a number of us, including Jim and Michael, met for a series of Sunday after-
noon seminars on Freire’s main works Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Cultural Action for
Freedom. These discussions culminated in Literacy and Revolution: The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire,
for which Jim wrote the last chapter.
Let me conclude this salute by saying that throughout those years, in so many ways, Jim
stood out. He had the most brilliant intellect of anyone I had encountered. I had the honour of
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 7

reading his doctoral thesis – fabulous, dazzling. He is incredibly bright, sharp and on occasion
incisively critical. There is so much to admire, and looking back on those days, I remain in awe.
Personally, he was always warm, supportive, humorous and generous. A top bloke he was and
remains. Thanks, mate.

Colin Evers
In the summer of 1977, I enrolled at the University of Sydney in a third-year undergraduate
course in education, Education III, as a non-degree student, with the intention of eventually
doing a PhD in philosophy of education. The honours seminar was conducted by Bill Andersen
who taught us the finer points of conceptual analysis. My first contact with Jim Walker came
when I attended the course lectures, twice a week, in the evening. The course content reflected
all the drama of educational ideas at that time: Ivan Illich was de-schooling society, John Holt
was saying that schools are bad places for kids, Freire was proclaiming a pedagogy of the
oppressed, and Bowles and Gintis were critiquing schooling in capitalist America.
Jim’s teaching style was not Socratic, seeking to elicit from us the truths we already knew.
Nor was it Leninist, giving back to us clearly what we had said unclearly. Rather, Jim wanted to
argue with the class and, more importantly, he wanted us to argue with him. This style caused
considerable anxiety as many students saw assignments as an opportunity to tell the lecturer
what they thought he wanted to hear. Later, when I was a tutor marking assignments for Jim’s
course, he gave me his four marking criteria: he wanted to hear arguments. And forty years later,
I still use exactly these criteria for my own teaching.
After completing Education III, my Philosophy IV result from a prior degree in philosophy
enabled me to enter a research degree in philosophy of education on a full-time scholarship.
Since I had done little work in education, I needed to do some Masters coursework, including
one of Jim’s courses on educational policy. Although Walter Feinberg’s Reason and Rhetoric was
formally the text, the course chartered its own trajectory, driven by Jim’s pursuit of arguments
spanning almost every important issue in educational policy.
The early stages of my thesis coincided with the last stages of Jim’s work on his own PhD.
Mine was an attempt to show what philosophy of education would look like from a Quinean
perspective. Jim’s was a sustained attempt to demonstrate the existence, origins, and effects of a
professional mode of production as supplementing, or even extending beyond, a capitalist mode
of production.
During the first two years of my scholarship, the funds proved insufficient to support my
growing family. In an extraordinary act of kindness, Jim shifted to teach some history of educa-
tion courses allowing me to take over some of his undergraduate philosophy of education teach-
ing with an appointment as an Assistant Lecturer.
Despite the seeming divergence of our two research programs we managed, during the
1980s, to co-author some nine papers, mainly on philosophical topics and especially issues in
research methodology. These papers were rather technical and scattered across a variety of jour-
nals, handbooks and encyclopedias. My own efforts at a more systematic statement of a view on
research methodology did not emerge until much later. (See Haig, B.D. and Evers, C.W. (2016)
Realist inquiry in social science, London: Sage.) However, Jim’s views were expressed implicitly in
his brilliant 1988 book Louts and legends: Male youth culture in an inner city school, Sydney: Allen
& Unwin. The book reported on a five-year study of a cohort of boys extending from their last
three years of high school into their first two years beyond school.
Superficially, the research looked like an attempt to replicate Paul Willis’s (1977) Learning to
labour: How working class kids get working class jobs, London: Routledge. But Jim had theoretical
objections, arising out of his PhD work, to Willis’s and the Birmingham group’s use of reproduc-
tion theory to explain school to work transitions. Since reproduction theories deal with a posited
8 M. MATTHEWS ET AL.

known outcome, they place less rigorous empirical constraints on possible causal processes.
Jim’s production theory perspective allowed a more fine-grained causal analysis.
As a result, the research explored micro-cultures as borne by the different key groups of boys.
Jim’s work in epistemology, covering both research methodology and philosophy of science
then provided a framework for extending theories about the dynamics of natural science to
intrude into social science. Micro-cultures were like theories shared by a group and the epistemic
merit of a theory was its effectiveness in solving problems. Intercultural articulation embodied
aspects of both communication and theory competition. This was always possible because Jim
had technical objections, published elsewhere, to the notion of theory incommensurability. The
book also used this machinery to make some sometimes controversial claims about the relative
success of these different theories and how they shaped the different paths the boys took.
My current work on leadership denies the field’s dominant assumption of methodological
individualism. In my recent and current teaching, I use Jim’s book as an exemplar of how a cog-
nitive system can be both extended and distributed in such a way that the unit of cognition is
not the individual but rather the group sharing a micro-culture. It is a masterful entry point into
work in social cognition important for organizational theory.
After I completed my PhD and moved away from the University of Sydney, our collaboration
continued until the end of the 1980s after which our ideas further diverged and we lost an
ongoing contact. I am profoundly grateful for Jim’s friendship and for the intellectual excitement
that we shared in developing some of the most enduring features of my own work.

Steve Crump
James Walker is the most intelligent person I ever met. Over the years of my academic life, I
worked with Vice-Chancellors, Rhodes and Fulbright Scholars, internationally-recognised profes-
sors of high status and regard, senior political, public service and business figures and, whilst all
impressive and mostly decent human beings, none of them came close to Jim as he is also the
most empathetic person I ever met: there is no false dualism there.
Despite/due to the high intellectual level of Jim’s teaching at the University of Sydney his
fame spread into the staffroom of a working class school in the Western Suburbs of Sydney - far
from the sandstone tower of the Madsen building where Jim ran a series of (then) year long
courses under the umbrella of Philosophy of Education alongside Bill Andersen, also an exemplar
of a polymath driven into extinction by performativity and identity politics.
Over lunch one day in the late 1970s, the head of the History Department told me she had
just done a course with Jim Walker that was challenging and inspiring and was convinced I’d
enjoy doing the same. My first course was with Bill, who also changed my life by telling me at
the end-of-year dinner I should consider doing Honours, something that’d never crossed my
mind. Then a year with Jim with people in that tutorial, like Kaye Schofield, who thrilled and
alarmed me with their depth of knowledge, keen insights and desire to learn more and more.
Jim was the perfect person to guide us and lay the foundation for future impactful careers.
Then there was Jim and Colin Evers, debating ‘live’ in front of us and in the journals such
complex and contentious ideas; in the 1980s Philosophy of Education really did seem to be the
discipline driving intellectual growth and, potentially, societal change. I had no choice but to
pursue as best as I could understand those problem-solution paradoxes through a Masters then
PhD under Jim. PESA was a hothouse and we were all friends, spinning around the orbit Jim had
set - not as acolytes or disciples, but fallibly thinking, writing, creating our way through the
meaning of words and actions in a narcissistic world where pragmatic overrode Pragmatism.
Jim and I fell out spectacularly and publicly – over a trivial matter – at the international recep-
tion for AERA held in the sky lounge of the San Francisco Hilton Hotel. It is often the case the
intense supervisor/student doctoral relationship ends in divorce. He took it hard. I swaggered
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 9

outwardly with self-important self-righteous outrage but internally was shattered by the burning
of this bridge. When Jim left academia we met at UTS and he gave me all his treasured John
Dewey books, which was a huge compliment from a man I could never be. Being inner city
Sydney with limited parking, we didn’t linger to catch up properly, but oh I wish we had.

Paul Hager
Although I was never a student of Jim’s, our paths crossed fairly frequently over the years. He
consistently provided me with astute advice and intellectual inspiration that helped to shape
choices and aspirations that were important to my developing career trajectory. For me Jim was,
in effect, an influential informal mentor.
I first met Jim some time in the early 1970s when I began attending seminar papers pre-
sented at meetings of the Sydney branch of PESA. This was my first contact with philosophers of
education. Jim and three or four other Sydney-based philosophers of education were regulars at
these meetings. As well, the liveliness of these seminar presentations was enhanced by Jim mak-
ing participation in these events a formal requirement for his current Masters students.
In the early to mid-1970s I was immersed in my undergraduate Arts degree majoring in phil-
osophy and education. I was also a newly appointed lecturer at the Ultimo TAFE Annexe of
Sydney Teachers College. (Years later this became part of the University of Technology Sydney).
My immediate boss was strongly of the opinion that the ideal grounding for a Teachers College
lecturer was a coursework Master of Education degree. I was put under a deal of pressure to fol-
low this course. My own reluctance to do so was strengthened by the example and wise advice
of two respected colleagues. The first was Jim Walker, who was himself well into completing his
PhD in the Sydney University School of Philosophy at the very time that I was considering alter-
natives for my postgraduate studies. At various chance meetings on campus or at School of
Philosophy research seminars, Jim conveyed to me the enormous intellectual joy he was deriving
from close contact with the bevy of notable philosophers that graced Sydney University in those
years (David Armstrong, John Burnheim, Keith Campbell, Paul Crittenden to name but a few of
them). Jim’s sheer enthusiasm for his PhD studies in the School of Philosophy bolstered consider-
ably my own determination to follow the same path.
The other notable influence in my choosing the PhD option was Tom Rose. Although he was
commonly thought of as a follower of John Anderson, Rose had a much richer interest in the
history of philosophy than most Andersonians. He also rejected Anderson’s key claim that
Aristotelian logic exhausted logic. In fact, Rose had pioneered the study of mathematical logic in
the School of Philosophy from 1951 onwards. I was privileged to be a member of his final Post-
Graduate class before his 1978 retirement. This course dealt with problems and deficiencies in
Aristotelian logic that various 19th century logicians had highlighted and sought to remedy,
thereby anticipating the rise of mathematical (or quantifier) logic. Around that time Rose, aware
that my Teachers College work centred on adult, vocational and professional education,
expressed to me his impression that these fields could be much enhanced by more serious
attention from philosophers. He suggested that I was well-placed to make a significant contribu-
tion by applying insights from philosophy to the real world, practical and conceptual problems
that characterised these fields. So thanks, in part, to the influence of both Jim and Tom, I duly
completed my PhD in the School of Philosophy.
Following his 1995 appointment as Executive Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory, my
next major contact with Jim came when he invited me to serve as Associate Editor. By then I
had become aware that there had been a happy convergence of Jim’s and my own philosophical
interests on topics such as professional practice and holistic understandings of competence. This
is reflected in some of the papers and reviews published in EPAT in those years. For instance in
a 1996 special issue on Vocational Education and Training, edited by David Beckett, Jim and I
10 M. MATTHEWS ET AL.

both contributed papers on professional education. Jim also initiated a 1999 special issue on
Practical Reasoning that David Beckett and I edited. Jim’s term as Editor of EPAT concluded at
the end of 1998. He had overseen EPAT join Carfax as its publisher and grow from two to three
issues per year.
In 1998 Jim was appointed as an Adjunct Professor in the UTS Faculty of Education. Thus for
the next eight years we were colleagues supervising research students working on topics such
as professional, organisational and workplace learning; lifelong learning; and educational policy.
At times we had fruitful input into the ongoing work of each other’s students. Jim was a reliable
source of sage advice for students who needed a fresh eye to comment on their progress.
During this time, as always, Jim continued to expand his own philosophical horizons and inter-
ests. For instance, I recall detailed engagement with Schopenhauer’s philosophy and with con-
nections between Eastern and Western thought.
Overall it has been a distinctive privilege and an ongoing pleasure to have engaged intellec-
tually with Jim Walker and his ever inquiring mind.