Not so long ago, the philosophy of education was part of all teaching courses: Plato’s Republic was on every reading list. David Carr’s thesis is that it would be no bad thing if it reappeared, Plato and all. It was Socrates who demolished the arguments of the Sophists, the market-oriented educationists of their day who taught that the best education was the one the customer wanted. Wisdom and virtue, Socrates showed, were likely to be more important to society than (in Carr’s words) “an unseemly scramble for positional goods”.

Besides, there’s a wider relevance. A model of teacher educational training that disparages theory and reflection as against the inculcation of practical competences (very much the current view) is itself theoretical: it is based on a particular theory of education and learning, and has its roots in fact in philosophy.

You need some knowledge of theories of learning before you can critically examine it - and critical reflection on one’s practice, Carr says, is surely the bedrock of any claim that teaching is a profession, not a trade. Hence his subtitle. Be reassured, though: his approach is thematic, not historical, and sets out to show how our reactions to three broad categories of perennial educational concern - questions of teaching and professional practice, problems that have to do with the nature of learning and knowledge, and issues about the political and social contexts of educational policy - are all shaped in some degree by philosophical concepts; value judgments rather than matters of “proof”.

The first message is that nothing in teaching is as simple as those who don’t teach are inclined to suggest. The policy maker’s injunction “We know what works” begs far too many questions. The teacher who knows this, and can show that it is so, is likely to be a better teacher than the one who doesn’t.

The second section relates classroom and curriculum issues to the philosophical arguments that necessarily (but not always consciously) underpin them: theories of behaviourism and cognition, meaning and language, knowledge and understanding. This involves consideration of Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein: not easy going, but by no means unimportant given the growing emphasis in education on testing and assessment. What, exactly, are we testing? Knowledge as inner experience (Plato’s view) or knowledge as the capacity to do something (the Wittgenstein concept)? Not an easy question.

Finally, Carr discusses the philosophical implications of the wider arguments that frame so much current educational controversy: the clash between liberal and communitarian concepts of identity and values, for instance, or between “traditionalist” and “progressive” standpoints, or between structuralism and post-modernism. These arguments, he says, are seldom new. We talk much today of equal opportunities and inclusion: it is salutary to be reminded, in the context of today’s debates on equality and inclusion, that it was Aristotle who first suggested it was as unjust to treat the unequal equally as the equal unequally.

It’s a challenging book in several senses, more accessible to (and perhaps more important to) those who teach teachers than to teachers themselves. As Carr says, without responsible professional reflection there is not much hope, either for teaching or democracy. But teachers already committed to such reflection will find real value in what he says and in his conclusions. And there’s an excellent glossary.