Dewey was perhaps the foremost theorist and advocate of participatory democracy as an ethical ideal based on a belief and faith in human experience as a general theory of education that would generate the requisite aims and methods for what he called "organized intelligence" and what we might call today "collective…

The archive is a cultural institution that creates a framework for the social and collective memory and as such is one of the collection of knowledge institutions that not only preserves and classifies "texts" but uses them to re-create collective memory and sometimes to invent cultural histories. Like all knowledge institutions, the…

This interview conducted with Henry Giroux begins by probing Henry's childhood, upbringing and undergraduate years to discover where his sense of social justice took hold. It also questions Henry about his working-class background and the major influences on his thought, including his relationships with Paulo Freire and Howard Zinn. The interview…

This article examines the role of political anger in democracy. It reviews the work of Stephane Hessel before examining the role and reception of anger in classical and modern thought. The author identifies two main traditions within which the concept of political anger can be located: revolutionary violence of the Marxist tradition and the…

This article presents the author's critique on Paul G. Woodford's positions with regard to music education and the notion of liberal democracy. The author seeks to broaden the contextual/historical scholarship around John Dewey and makes it clear that liberalism is a contested concept, as is democracy. He calls for contemporary responses to…

This article examines the "politics of difference," a phrase now almost synonymous with postmodernism and the critique of the Enlightenment. The article provides a post-structuralist take on this critique arguing that a critique of Enlightenment values can lead to a deepening of democracy and using Foucault's notion of governmentality to elucidate…

Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut argue that "the philosophy of 68" eliminates and leaves no room for a positive rehabilitation of human agency necessary for a workable notion of democracy. In their Preface to the English Translation of "La pensee 68," Ferry and Renaut (1990a, p. xvi), refer to the philosophy of the sixties as a…

Education plays an important role in challenging, combating and in understanding terrorism in its different forms, whether as counter-terrorism or as a form of human rights education. Just as education has played a significant role in the process of nation-building, so education also plays a strong role in the process of empire, globalization and…

In this article, the author profiles Jacques Derrida, whose teaching activity made an invaluable and indelible contribution to the intellectual life of the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The question of pedagogy is central for Derrida, not only in terms of teaching people to read and write differently, but as a means for appreciating the…

This paper reviews two main historical approaches to creativity: the Romanticist approach, based on the culture of the irrational, and the Enlightenment approach, based on the culture of the objective. It defends a paradigm of creativity as a sum of rich semiotic systems that form the basis of distributed knowledge and learning, reviews historical…

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces--extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/practical contributions--so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Michael A. Peters has…

This article provides a critical discussion of the neoliberal reforms of higher education focusing on new managerialism and New Public Management. It also distinguishes between democratic and market accountability regimes, examining how the former arise from classical liberalism and the latter from neoliberalism. The article then examines…