Neo-Kantianism, Hegel, Vygotsky and Philosophy of Education

A contemporary philosophy of education must begin by specifying what kind of questions it is entitled to answer and what counts as a good answer in those domains where education operates. It must state how knowledge is made available to learners in schools and colleges, by what norms teachers justify their claims, how different kinds of subject matter shape those norms, and what limits prevent education from pretending to be an all purpose tribunal over culture or science. If we start from the neo Kantian framework reconstructed by Beiser in his The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880, rather than from a Hegelian one, we gain a disciplined way of carrying out that programme. We are told to analyse methods and presuppositions rather than to legislate metaphysics, to distinguish discovery from justification, to respect the autonomy of practices, and to take limits as the shape of our finitude. We also gain a practical vocabulary for curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and teacher education, because on this view objectivity is an achievement internal to practices with articulable rules. The Hegelian framework gives a powerful image of social formation and institutional life, but it inclines toward architectonic unity and teleology where present education requires plural standpoints and explicit translation between them. Beiser’s presentation of the neo Kantian turn is therefore the better fit for contemporary education, and it allows us to pose a further question with some precision, whether Vygotsky’s cultural historical approach to learning sits closer to Hegel or closer to a neo Kantian line. 

The first requirement is a clear account of the role of philosophy in relation to the sciences of learning and to the school subjects. Beiser shows that the neo Kantians defined philosophy as a critical inquiry into the conditions of knowledge, not a supplier of first principles to working sciences. They faced the identity crisis of philosophy brought on by the nineteenth century rise of physics, chemistry and biology by turning from speculative system building to analysis of methods, presuppositions and limits. They rejected both the fantasy of philosophy as a tribunal over science and the capitulation of philosophy to popularised science. The resulting division of labour is exact. Scientists investigate the world according to the norms of their disciplines. Philosophy clarifies those norms, the forms of synthesis they require, and the standards of evidence that entitle claims. If we transpose this to education, we get a framework where educational psychology, neuroscience and sociology describe how learners attend, remember, infer, collaborate and persist, while philosophy of education asks what entitles a learner or a teacher to call a piece of reasoning, a measurement, an interpretation or a model knowledge in a specific subject. That resolves the recurring confusion about what research on learning can and cannot decide. It can inform pedagogy, task design and sequencing. It cannot by itself settle the standards of mathematical proof, the warrant for a historical claim, the criteria for a good model in physics or the force of an ethical reason. Those are governed by the internal norms of the practices in question, and they are the proper object of the philosopher’s analysis. 

The movement’s early history matters for education because it supplies a template for combining empirical study and normative analysis without confusion. Beiser recovers the founders of the early empirical and psychological strand, Fries, Herbart and Beneke. They held that psychology could be a propaedeutic to critique. They began from experience, classified the mind’s operations, and used that classification to locate the a priori forms that a transcendental account would then justify. They insisted on a difference between order of discovery and order of justification. On this model a teacher does not deduce pedagogy from a priori principles, nor reduce standards to behaviour. A teacher begins from how novices actually approach tasks and then designs instruction to help them ascend from those starting points to the norms of the discipline. The later schools then reinforced the autonomy of normativity. Windelband and Rickert framed logic as a set of rules we ought to follow if we aim at truth, justified teleologically by their role in securing knowledge. That shift from questions of origin to questions of right secures the independence of standards from psychological fact while retaining the usefulness of psychology for discovery. This two level structure maps directly onto classroom design. Sequencing, worked examples, practice schedules and feedback timing are discovery side matters illuminated by empirical study. Entitlement to say that a learner knows is a justification side matter fixed by disciplinary norms. The distinction is a working architecture.

The second requirement is a principled pluralism about standpoints. Beiser’s neo Kantians deny a view from nowhere. Objectivity is not correspondence to a hidden substrate available to a single sovereign method. It is the successful synthesis of experience within practices that obey rules that can be stated and scrutinised. In education this yields a robust defence of disciplinary specificity without retreating into isolation. Mathematics, physics, history, literature, the arts and the vocational fields each employ different forms of synthesis and different evidential standards. The classroom should present those differences explicitly. It should train students to justify claims in the terms proper to the field at hand. It should also teach translation between fields. That is not the assertion of a single rational narrative that subordinates all standpoints. It is the practice of moving between them in a way that makes their limits and their continuities visible. On a Hegelian picture the disciplines are moments of a totality, and their limits exist to be aufgehoben as the concept moves. In the concrete settings of mass education that image can mislead. It tempts designers to declare unity that cannot be earned at the level of method. The neo Kantian prescription is more modest and more practical. Secure objectivity inside practices by making their rules explicit and practicable. Then build bridges with full awareness of what those rules permit, where they clash and where they can be mediated. 

A third requirement is a grammar of limits. The thing in itself functions in neo Kantian hands as a limit concept, a marker of our standpoint dependence rather than as a metaphysical posit. The educational analogue is plain. Every pedagogy frames what can be asked and learned. Lessons bring a standpoint and a vocabulary with them. They delimit what counts as evidence and success. Making that frame explicit is part of the work of teaching. It helps prevent dogma inside a subject because reasons are put on the table rather than hidden in routine. It helps prevent relativism across subjects because translation becomes a teachable activity governed by stated constraints. Students come to see why a form of reasoning that succeeds in one practice fails in another, and they can explain the failure. This is the intellectual habit that allows interdisciplinary work to rise above thematic overlap. It is also the habit that allows a citizen to adjudicate policy claims that involve different kinds of evidence without assuming that either one method fits all or that the absence of one method implies the absence of objectivity. 

The fourth requirement is a strategy for assessment that does not deny comparability while refusing to ignore practice bound norms. If objectivity is achieved inside practices, then assessments must elicit the forms of synthesis that define success in those practices. A generic proxy will not do. This does not entail anarchy. It entails designing tasks that allow the relevant norms to be displayed and judged, then building comparability at the right level of abstraction. Proof and problem solving for mathematics, modelling and measurement for the sciences, source criticism and causal narrative for history, reasoned and imaginative interpretation for literature, performance under criteria in the arts, and design iteration under constraints in technology are all assessable if tasks are chosen with care. Rubrics should make the norms explicit. Moderation should work through exemplars that show what counts as better and worse by the practice’s own lights. System comparison can proceed by mapping families of practices to common meta criteria, such as the explicitness of reasons, the handling of error and uncertainty, and the use of counterexamples, rather than by pretending that one metric captures all. This is the assessment analogue of the neo Kantian’s practice first objectivity. 

The fifth requirement is a view of teacher education that matches the foregoing. On a neo Kantian line teachers are stewards of practice specific norms and facilitators of student ascent from experience to rule governed judgement. They need formation in the methods of the disciplines they teach, not only in their content. They need formation in how students actually reason and err at novice stages. They need formation in the ethics of the profession as a distinct domain of practical reason. They need a diagnostic habit of mind that can identify the standpoint of a task and the obstacles a learner is encountering within it. They also need a habit of making reasons explicit, in planning, in explanation, in feedback and in assessment. This is not a rhetorical style. It is a professional norm grounded in the idea that objectivity in education is the practice of giving and asking for reasons according to rules that can be made public. 

A Hegelian approach rightly insists that education belongs inside ethical life. It draws attention to the role of institutions in shaping freedom and to the need for recognition. It encourages teachers to see subjects as connected rather than siloed. It can explain the attraction of integrated curricular narratives. Yet its architectonic ambition and its teleology sit uneasily with the variety of methods and standards that modern subjects actually employ. Where the neo Kantian says that objectivity is practice bound and plural, the Hegelian tends to say that the truth of each practice lies in its place within the whole. Where the neo Kantian says that limits are constitutive of knowledge and that translation is work, the Hegelian tends to say that limits are stages to be superseded. In mass education the first stance gives teachers and curriculum designers usable tools. The second invites gestures toward unity that cannot be cashed out in task design or assessment without flattening differences that matter for learning. Beiser is explicit that Hegel’s metaphysics is knowledge of the absolute. If that claim is bracketed or domesticated, the Hegelian loses what makes the system distinct and risks becoming a set of slogans about connection and development. If it is retained, the match with contemporary education is poor. 

The same contrast bears on education policy. Beiser emphasises that the neo Kantians did not claim to found the sciences from above. They treated the sciences as autonomous facts and aimed to clarify their logic and presuppositions. The education analogue is a philosophy that does not dictate curricula from ideology or from a metaphysics of spirit. It asks, for each subject, what kinds of reasons are in play, what forms of synthesis those reasons require, which pedagogies make the reasons learnable, and which assessments make the reasons visible. Such analysis yields criteria for judging reforms and tools. It rejects accountability schemes that ignore the norms of practice. It resists the equal and opposite temptation to hide behind professional mystique. It keeps the conversation on reasons that can be explained to teachers, students and the public. A Hegelian approach can certainly make contributions to policy by drawing attention to civic purposes and to institutional goods. It will still need the neo Kantian’s practice first analysis to make those contributions actionable. 

A further strength of the neo Kantian framework is its handling of values. Beiser records how the movement defended the autonomy of the moral sphere while avoiding speculative guarantees. In education this becomes a way of treating ethical and civic learning as governed by their own reasons, distinct from economic outcomes and from the cognitive norms of the academic subjects. Teachers can teach students how to deliberate about fairness, obligation and recognition, how to interpret rules in institutions, and how to exercise judgement under disagreement, without pretending to deduce duties from metaphysics. The separation of theoretical and practical reason is preserved in curriculum design. There is room for distinct ethical tasks and standards. There is room for institutional formation that goes beyond classroom talk. At the same time the presence of ethical norms across subjects can be acknowledged and disciplined. A physics class can address responsible modelling of risk. A history class can address fairness in representing testimony. An art class can address appropriation and credit. These are not add ons. They are occasions for practical reason within practices that have their own cognitive norms. The point is that a neo Kantian programme can defend ethics in education without turning it into ideology and without giving it no place. 

Technology and platforms provide a test case for the framework. On a neo Kantian view tools are not neutral. They mediate the space of reasons and can enable or disable the ascent from experience to rule governed judgement. An AI assistant that drafts text, a platform that structures interaction, a dashboard that turns complex performance into a single score, all configure what counts as evidence and how reasons are presented. The criterion for adoption is whether a tool strengthens the learner’s participation in the norms of a field. Tools that hide the reasons that confer objectivity should be rejected or reconfigured. Tools that make reasons more visible and that scaffold the giving and asking of reasons can be integrated, with care and with appropriate assessment. This is an example of how a theory of objectivity as practice bound pays off in concrete decisions. It also shows why a Hegelian appeal to unity will not suffice for present needs. We need to know which reasons a tool supports in which practices, not that the tool participates in the progress of spirit. 

So far the case for a neo Kantian framework has been positive. We should also consider objections. One says that treating objectivity as practice bound leads to relativism. The answer is that practices have rules that can be articulated and criticised in light of their aims. There are internal standards of success that are not arbitrary. There are shared meta criteria that allow comparison and translation, such as explicitness of reasons, handling of error and uncertainty, capacity to learn from counterexamples, and fairness in the treatment of evidence. Another objection says that keeping discovery and justification apart leaves us with thin guidance about learning. The early and late strands of the movement answer together. Discovery is empirical and indispensable. Justification is normative and indispensable. Their relation is the central professional problem of teaching, and it is solved by designing experiences that allow learners to grasp and use the relevant norms. A final objection says that without a strong narrative of ethical life neo Kantianism cannot explain the civic role of schooling. Beiser’s account shows that from the late 1870s neo Kantians widened their focus to ethics and a general outlook on life and defended the autonomy of practical reason without metaphysical inflation. For contemporary pluralist democracies that is an advantage rather than a defect. 

With those foundations in place we can turn to Vygotsky. The question is whether his cultural historical approach should be read as Hegelian, as neo Kantian, or as something that draws from both in different registers. Vygotsky is a Marxist psychologist working to build a new method for psychology in the early Soviet period. He insists that higher mental functions are formed through social interaction and are mediated by tools and signs. He emphasises the historical nature of cognition. He develops the idea of a zone of proximal development to capture how assistance by a more capable other changes the space of possible learning. Much of the secondary literature presents his method as dialectical and Hegelian through Marx. Some writers draw a straight line from Hegelian dialectic to Vygotsky’s account of mediation and internalisation. Others stress the materialist reconstruction of dialectic and the distance from Hegel’s idealism. So when we ask how his framework sits with the neo Kantian one, the answer has to be discriminating. 

On the side of method Vygotsky and the neo Kantians share a decisive move. Both reject a psychology that reduces thinking to stimulus response chains. Both insist that analysis has to capture the forms of synthesis that confer objectivity. Vygotsky’s insistence on mediated action, on tools and signs as the means by which thinking is reorganised, parallels the neo Kantian insistence that objectivity is achieved under rules. The two also converge on the need to study practices rather than isolated minds. Vygotsky’s experiments are often teaching experiments. He studies how instructional arrangements change the trajectory of thought. The neo Kantian would say that such arrangements are precisely the site where norms become explicit and practicable. In this restricted sense one can say that Vygotsky is friendly to a neo Kantian outlook on education because he treats learning as the acquisition of the means to participate in rule governed activity and he treats the classroom as a place where those means are made available through social mediation. 

On the side of ontology and teleology Vygotsky looks more Hegelian, though always through Marx. He uses a dialectical vocabulary of development, contradiction and transformation. He treats concepts as developing historically out of activity. He does not suppose a fixed a priori that structures all experience in the same way. He supposes that the forms of thought are historically made and that they can be reconstructed in the classroom by appropriate organisation of activity. A Hegelian reader will see in this the movement of the concept in miniature. A neo Kantian reader will want to translate this teleology into practice bound norm acquisition without the metaphysics. For the purposes of contemporary education that translation is available. One can retain Vygotsky’s emphasis on mediation, on the joint activity of learners with more capable others, and on the role of tools and signs, while using a neo Kantian account of objectivity to specify which norms are being learned and how entitlement is displayed. 

Consider the zone of proximal development. It is defined as the distance between a learner’s independent performance and their performance with assistance. Its value lies in showing that instruction can lead development rather than merely follow it. If we set this within a neo Kantian frame, the assistance is not a generic boost. It is the introduction of the learner to the rules that confer objectivity in a practice, paced and scaffolded so that the learner can use them. The zone is not a metaphysical space. It is a structured set of opportunities to take part in giving and asking for reasons according to the standards of a field. The right measure of success is not the temporary performance level but the learner’s growing entitlement to make claims that withstand the practice’s tests. This reading keeps what is powerful in Vygotskian pedagogy while avoiding a teleology that teachers cannot operationalise and that can blur the distinction between genesis and validity. 

Now take mediation by tools and signs. Vygotsky’s central thought is that psychological tools reorganise cognition. Language, number systems, diagrams and symbols change how a learner can remember, plan and reason. A neo Kantian account can sharpen this by asking which tools make which reasons available in which practices. In mathematics, for example, the introduction of algebraic symbolism does not merely speed calculation. It makes possible a kind of general reasoning about structure that arithmetic cannot support. In history, a timeline or a causal diagram can make counterfactual reasoning explicit. In science, a modelling environment with visible parameters can make the structure of explanation inspectable and revisable. In drama, a role playing task can make visible different perspectives and open up lines of interpretation. The teacher’s task is to match tools to the norms of the practice and to make the connection between tool use and entitlement explicit. This is Vygotsky as a partner in a neo Kantian project rather than as a rival. 

On inner speech and the internalisation of social dialogue the fit is again close. Vygotsky famously claims that egocentric speech becomes inner speech and that higher mental functions are internalised forms of social interaction. The point for education is not that talk is good in itself. It is that reasons that begin as public moves in a practice become available as private resources for future reasoning. A neo Kantian would describe this as the learner’s acquisition of the capacity to apply rules without prompting. Assessment can and should look for signs of this acquisition by asking for explanations, by requiring justification without cues, and by using transfer tasks that show the learner can carry the reasons into new problems. 

There remain two points where a Hegelian reading of Vygotsky diverges from a neo Kantian one. First, a Hegelian will say that there is no unbridgeable gap between thought and world and that the development of concepts is the development of reality for us. Vygotsky’s accounts of concept formation can be read in that spirit. A neo Kantian will agree that there is no gap in the sense that objectivity is not a matter of matching private sense data to a world beyond reach. Yet the neo Kantian will insist that what confers objectivity is not the movement of the concept as such but the satisfaction of rules within practices that can be made explicit. The relevant teleology is internal to practice aims, such as explanation, proof or fairness, rather than imposed by a story about spirit. Second, a Hegelian will take history to provide a rational pattern of development that can guide curriculum design. Vygotsky himself sometimes speaks as if instruction can reproduce in the learner the path of the concept. A neo Kantian will be more cautious. Historical sequences are heuristics for discovery. They do not fix justification and they do not always serve novice learning well. The order of teaching must be set by what helps the learner acquire entitlement to use the practice’s reasons, not by a fidelity to the historical route by which experts arrived at their present understanding. 

What does this mean for the earlier choice between neo Kantianism and Hegelianism as the better framework for contemporary philosophy of education. It means that Vygotsky gives us dialectical insights into development and mediation that sit comfortably with a neo Kantian account of objectivity in practice, and that those insights can be used without adopting a Hegelian metaphysics or curriculum teleology. If we take Beiser’s advice and treat philosophy’s task as the clarification of methods, presuppositions and limits, then Vygotsky becomes a rich empirical and methodological partner. He shows how instruction changes the learner’s powers. He shows how tools reorganise those powers. He shows how social interaction becomes inner resource. The neo Kantian framework then does the work of specifying which reasons and which standards define success in each subject and how entitlement should be displayed and assessed. 

The positive programme that results is detailed enough to guide practice. In mathematics, teaching proceeds by explicit induction into forms of argument, such as direct proof, contraposition and induction. Tasks are sequenced so that the student first uses the form with visible scaffolds and later justifies steps without prompts. Assessment requires the learner to explain why an argument compels, not merely to produce an answer. In science, teaching proceeds by concept formation and modelling. Students learn to state model aims, to track assumptions, to measure parameters and to compare predictions with observations. Assessment requires students to defend choices by appeal to explanatory aims and error characteristics. In history, teaching proceeds by work with sources, construction of causal narratives and disciplined use of counterfactuals. Assessment requires the learner to weigh testimony and to justify claims about significance with reasons that withstand scrutiny. In literature, teaching proceeds by interpretive argument under standards that include attention to textual features, context and the handling of alternative readings. Assessment requires students to marshal evidence and to respond to objections. In art and design, teaching proceeds by iterative making under criteria for craft and expression. Assessment requires reflective justification of choices in the light of those criteria. Across all subjects the ethical dimension is present where appropriate, as a distinct domain of practical reason that has its own standards of argument and deliberation. This is education as apprenticeship in the giving and asking of reasons within practices, organised by a grammar of limits and supported by tools that make reasons visible. 

There are familiar advantages to this programme. It defends the humanities because it shows exactly which reasons and which standards operate in those fields. It makes space for ethics and civic education without ideology because it preserves the autonomy of practical reason. It integrates research on learning without reduction because it assigns discovery and justification their proper places. It can evaluate technologies by asking whether they support participation in a discipline's norms. It sets an agenda for teacher education that is specific and assessable. It gives a public rationale for assessment that parents and students can understand because it ties grades to explicit forms of reasoning under explicit standards. It shows how to build interdisciplinary work by designing translation tasks where students must carry reasons from one practice to another and account for what changes. It is aligned with Beiser’s insistence that limits are not failures but signposts for inquiry. 

There are also responsibilities and open questions. Plural standpoints require time. A curriculum organised around practice specific norms will do less superficial coverage and more deep work with reasons. Systems committed to high stakes generic testing will resist that change. The reply is that comparability can be achieved by aligning meta criteria and by using moderation across exemplars. The partnership of discovery and justification requires teachers who can read research and who can translate it into task design. That raises the bar for teacher education. The reply is that this is exactly what a profession owes to its public, and that clarity about professional norms protects teachers from fad and from managerial overreach. Equity requires a vigilant use of the normative vocabulary to critique standards that fail their aims or that encode exclusionary assumptions. The reply is that the neo Kantian framework makes those critiques sharper because it asks how a rule serves the practice’s aim, rather than allowing status to settle the question. These are not trivial demands. They are the price of doing education as a rational practice in plural institutions. 

Finally, it is worth asking one more time why the Hegelian framework, though rich, is not the best organising choice for present education. Hegelian ethical life remains a resource for thinking about the civic role of schooling, about recognition, and about the relation between family, civil society and state. There are classrooms where the drama of concept development, carefully staged, can inspire learners. There are moments in the humanities where a grand narrative of culture can orient study. Yet the daily work of teaching and learning depends on norms inside practices, on assessments that display those norms, on translations across fields that respect limits, and on tools that support the giving and asking of reasons. That is where the neo Kantian framework does its best work. It is aligned with Beiser’s core claims about what philosophy after speculative idealism should do. It fits the varieties of present disciplines. It keeps ethics inside education without metaphysical bravado. It treats finitude as a virtue because it insists that good reasons are local and explicit. And it allows us to read Vygotsky, not as a rival framework that must be adopted whole, but as an empirically rich partner whose insights into mediation and development can be slotted into a practice first account of objectivity and learning. 

If we are to summarise the outcome I'd say a contemporary philosophy of education that takes neo Kantianism as its framework will present education as the public practice of inducting novices into the reasons that govern our best ways of knowing and doing, under the limits that those ways impose, with tools that make those reasons visible, and with assessments that ask learners to stand behind what they claim. It will treat the sciences, the humanities, the arts and the trades as plural standpoints with standards that can be taught, learned and criticised. It will treat ethics as a distinct domain with its own reasons. It will build translation between standpoints as a central aim of general education. It will enlist research on learning where it helps novices reach entitlement, while keeping justification independent of causal description. It will adopt technologies where they strengthen participation in norms. And in thinking about Vygotsky it will take from him what fits this outlook, his focus on mediated action, on social genesis and on the deliberate design of instruction that leads development, while declining the invitation to make a speculative teleology the spine of curriculum or assessment. In this way the movement Beiser describes becomes a usable map for contemporary education, and the disputes he traces become living options for how we argue about the work that schools and universities should do now.