Phenomenology and education

philosophy. 'So you're a phenomenologist' she said, 'I have always wanted to know what one looked like'. I gained the impression that she was surprised that, given my academic inclinations, I should approximate so closely to a human being. The episode has remained with me as a reminder of the tenuous position of phenomenology in the British academic scene, where it appears on the lunatic fringe of not one, but two, established disciplines, namely philosophy and psychology. On the one hand, the majority of British philosophers regard phenomenology as the philosophical equivalent of an unidentified flying object; that is, they react with some alarm because they are not really sure what it is, and with considerable scepticism, since the little that they do know about it cannot quite be squared with the real world at which their own thought is so obviously directed. One such philosopher (Mackie, 1978)' states, for example, that he tends to believe either that phenomenologists are merely constructing a pretentious edifice of words or, in his more modest and charitable moods, that he is just not bright enough to follow what is being said. He cannot decide between these alternatives but his readers might judge it implausible that an Oxford don is just not bright enough. On the other hand, the response of many psychologists and sociologists to phenomenology has been more accommodating, but what has passed into these disciplines as phenomenology has little to do with the philosophical preoccupations of phenomenology. For the conventional manner of acknowledging the relevance of the movement for empirical investigations of human behaviour is to point to the importance attached by