The ability to think critically is a defining characteristic of humanity, setting humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. To perceive future consequences of an action, idea, or decision and then adjust these actions, ideas, and decisions accordingly is an integral part of existing as conscious beings in the world. Moreover, critical…

According to Thomas Falk, an authoritarian insurgency against the institutions of liberal democracy operates along both political-economic and phenomenological axes. By corrupting language and stimulating vigilance, this insurgency endeavors to diminish the perceptual and communicative capacities that allow us to articulate a shared reality and…

Recent legislation restricting the topics teachers may discuss with students raises the issue of what role the teacher should play in society. We argue that this legislative scrutiny of teachers is symptomatic of an aversion to defining what a teacher is. We argue that, though a reluctance to provide an explicit definition of "teacher"…

Democracy needs dissent. More specifically, democracy needs citizens with "knowledge" of how to practice political dissent, a willingness to "think" about why and when such dissent is necessary, and "habituation" to the practice of good dissent. Where, then, are citizens to develop such habits? In Sarah Stitzlein's…

Two practices in education--community-based learning and deliberative democratic discourse--have been lauded as highly effective in instilling democratic values in students and preparing them to be active citizens. Both practices have the potential to facilitate the formation of publics in the Deweyan understanding--the building block of…

Changes to the landscape of "public" education in the United States, particularly the proliferation of charter and other non-traditional public schools and shifting forms of school governance, have motivated some philosophers of education to reconsider the form and function of public schools in a democracy. This article is largely…

The author examines one particular systematic and normative theorization of social justice in Barry Bull's "Social Justice in Education." Bull embarks on a timely and ambitious theory-to-practice project of grounding an educational theory of social justice in Rawls's seminal, liberal, distributive justice tome. The author…

For several decades education has struggled to find a way out of the entanglement of modernity, the premises and assumptions under which modern education has operated. According to Robin Usher and Richard Edwards, modern education, as the "dutiful child of the Enlightenment," has been "allotted a key role in the forming and shaping…

In the first half of the twentieth century, the ideal of democracy influenced the conceptions people had of the academic subject matters. A common criticism was that abstract academic subjects served aristocratic societies. Although most theorists considered the academic subjects to be important, they had differing views on the conception of…

Two philosophers of education, Sarah Stitzlein and Lauren Bialystok, have recently expressed criticisms of so-called "Parental Conscience Acts," which allow parents to opt their children out of aspects of the public school curriculum that they find objectionable. (These laws and policies should be distinguished from those which allow…

David Blacker points to a problematic decline in personal freedoms, including student speech rights: "[A]s the 'educational mission' of schools moves ineluctably even further toward warehousing and surveillance--pre-jail--then remaining intra-institutional speech rights will easily be quashed." Critical of the elastic conception of…

One of Amy Gutmann's important achievements in "Democratic Education" is her development of a "democratic interpretation of equal educational opportunity." This standard of equality demands that "all educable children learn enough to participate effectively in the democratic process." In other words, Gutmann demands…

This paper addresses Dewey's complex notion of vocation--particularly his idea of multiple vocational activities--and relates it to educating for vocation in colleges and universities. The author argues that higher educators can best respect a student's autonomy as a chooser--with multiple potential vocations--by giving him or her multiple…

John Dewey provided philosophical accounts on an enormity of issues and ideas within the corpus of his work. Given his incredible productivity, it is especially difficult to locate any singular focus without almost immediately falling into oversimplification. There is, however, a concern that reoccurs with reliable frequency in his work. Dewey's…

The concept of freedom is one of the key ideas in political philosophy. In a liberal society one can do, live, and like whatever he/she pleases, but at the same time there are certain constraints on the individual that balance between one's desires and the common good. In this paper, the author examines the notion of freedom in the age of digital…