Richard Stanley Peters was born in Mussoorie, India, on 31 October 1919, the son of a British colonial administrator, and returned to England for his schooling. He read Classics and Philosophy at Queen's College Oxford, interrupted his studies to serve in a non-combatant capacity during the Second World War — a decision that reflected his Quaker commitments — and completed a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 1949. He taught in Birkbeck's philosophy department before being appointed to the Chair of Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, in 1962, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1983. From that chair Peters transformed the academic status of philosophy of education in Britain and internationally, establishing it as a rigorous analytical discipline rather than an annex of general philosophy or an ideological gloss on educational policy. He co-founded the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain with Paul Hirst in 1964, serving as its first president, and edited the journal Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society. He also served as visiting professor at Harvard, contributing to debates in moral education and philosophy of mind in the United States. Peters died in October 2011, leaving behind a body of work that redefined what it means to ask philosophical questions about education.

Peters's most distinctive methodological contribution was his application of the tools of analytic philosophy — above all, careful conceptual analysis — to the central terms and concepts of educational discourse. In Ethics and Education (1966), he argued that the word “education” is not a blanket term for any form of learning or schooling but carries implicit normative criteria: education, properly understood, involves the transmission of what is worthwhile, in a manner that respects the developing rationality of the learner, and that brings about a cognitively transformed, and not merely behaviourally modified, person. He distinguished education from training (which produces specific competencies without necessarily engaging the learner's critical understanding), from instruction (which transmits information without necessarily transforming the learner's values and commitments), and from indoctrination (which bypasses rather than develops rational autonomy). These distinctions were philosophically controversial but immensely productive, generating decades of debate about what schools are actually for and what obligations educators have toward their students.

Peters insisted that education must be not only epistemologically coherent but morally justified — that no account of what education is can avoid the question of whether the knowledge and values it transmits are genuinely worthwhile. He approached this question through the Kantian strategy of a transcendental argument: rather than defending a particular list of worthwhile activities, he tried to show that certain intellectual virtues and dispositions — curiosity, respect for evidence, concern for consistency, openness to revision — were presupposed by anyone who seriously engaged in the question of justification itself. To ask “what is worth doing?” is already to be committed to the practice of reasoned inquiry; education is justified insofar as it initiates people into the forms of inquiry that make the question answerable. This argument was criticised for seeming to privilege the academic tradition's own modes of knowing, and Peters responded to these criticisms in later work by granting greater weight to the affective and motivational dimensions of education and to the legitimate diversity of human activities that make a life go well.

In collaboration with Paul Hirst, Peters developed an influential account of the curriculum grounded in the concept of “forms of knowledge” — distinct modes of understanding, each with its characteristic concepts, logical structure, and truth criteria, whose initiation is constitutive of the educated mind. Although the forms of knowledge thesis was primarily Hirst's, Peters provided the philosophical justification for treating curriculum as something more than an arbitrary selection of useful skills or culturally transmitted content, arguing that the forms represent the cumulative achievements of human reason in making sense of experience and that their transmission is a condition of genuine rationality. This perspective gave philosophical weight to the liberal arts tradition and provided a framework for debating curriculum reform that was both normatively serious and analytically precise.

Peters made significant contributions to the philosophy of moral education, arguing in Reason and Compassion (1973) against both the rationalist view that moral education is essentially intellectual — a matter of teaching children to reason correctly about ethical principles — and the opposing sentimentalist view that it is essentially affective — a matter of cultivating benevolent emotions. He proposed instead that moral development requires the integration of reason and affect, that children must come to care about doing what is right as well as understand what right action requires, and that this integration is achieved through the cultivation of specific virtues — habitual dispositions that are both reasonably grounded and emotionally engaged. He drew on Aristotle's account of virtue as a mean between extremes, updated by psychological research on moral development, to argue that moral education is a long, complex process of character formation rather than a discrete subject to be taught through lessons in ethics.

In his later work, particularly Education and the Education of Teachers (1977), Peters turned to the question of what philosophical understanding teachers need in order to practise thoughtfully. He argued that teacher education should not be merely technical training in methods but should include genuine engagement with the philosophical questions that arise in every classroom: What is it to understand something rather than merely to be able to repeat it? What obligations do teachers have to students who resist learning? How should the competing demands of individual development and social preparation be weighed? Peters did not suppose that philosophical reflection would resolve these questions definitively, but he believed that teachers who had grappled with them were better equipped to respond wisely to the particular situations they faced. His influence on teacher education in Britain and internationally established philosophy of education as a practical as well as a theoretical discipline.

• Ethics and Education (1966)
• The Logic of Education (1970, with Paul Hirst)
• Reason and Compassion (1973)
• Psychology and Ethical Development (1974)
• Education and the Education of Teachers (1977)