Philosophy and schools, children and dynamite, elephants and postage stamps: each has a place, but not necessarily in any natural combination with the other. Whether schools and philosophy belong together depends largely on what we mean by both. To the extent that schools are instruments of government regulation and a mechanism for production of…

This article seeks to open up a re-examination of the relationship between thought and language by reference to two philosophers: John Austin and Jacques Derrida. While in traditional philosophical terms these thinkers stand far apart, recent work in the philosophy of education has highlighted the importance of Austin's work in a way that has…

Incorporating Gadamer and other thinkers from the continental tradition, this essay is a close and detailed hermeneutic, phenomenological, and ontological study of the dialectic practice of Plato's Socrates--it radicalizes and refutes the Socrates-as-teacher model that educators from scholar academic ideology embrace.

This paper explores possible important relationships and sympathies between Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach framework for understanding the human condition and the educational ideas of John Dewey and Paolo Freire. All three focus on the importance of democratic values in a fair, well-functioning society, while Sen and Freire especially…

Participation in service-learning courses has always been considered a part of the informal education in tertiary education worldwide. Originating from the assumption that service-learning courses increase students' civic engagement and bridge the gap between knowledge and practice, service-learning courses have gradually acquired the status…

In this article I intend to explore one possible way of using "place" to rethink "nature," the relationship between humans and nature, and the implications for education. The elucidation and discussion of the sense of place will reveal that there are profound and superficial or, placeful and placeless, senses of place. This…

This study was conducted to address the concept of higher education curricula and its practice from an ecological perspective. First, the significance of ecology is investigated based on two streams of thought; the ecological concept of the university proposed by Ronald Barnett; and the text, "The Three Ecologies" authored by the Italian…

It has been argued that globalization assists the USA to gain a hegemonic position, allowing it to export its culture. Because this exportation leads to the domination by American culture of the local cultures of importing countries, which are the key element in sustaining their citizens' national identity, citizens of these countries are…

This paper explores the concept of subjectivity from the perspective of a nonnative-English-speaking teacher educator at a Midwestern university in the USA. It begins with a literature review on the role subjectivity plays in education. It argues that acknowledging the existence of subjectivity allows us to investigate its enabling and disabling…

This article argues that Mencius' education is "holistic education" that aims at igniting the "silent revolution" from within one's inner mind-heart to be unfolded in society, state, and the world. Mencius' educational philosophy is based on his theory of human nature and his theory of self-cultivation. Mencius…

At the end "Zhuangzi 7," Hundun (the Middle Sea) invites his two neighbours, the North Sea and South Sea, to visit him. They repay his kindness by drilling seven holes (for seeing, hearing, breathing and eating) in his face to make him more "human" but Hundun dies. This essay pursues Daoist, Derridean and Levinasian readings of…

Nowadays, there is still a widely held view that the Chinese and Western modes of thought are quite distinct from each other. In particular, the Chinese mode of thought derived from Confucianism is considered as comparatively less rational than the Western one. In this article, I first argue that although the analogical mode of argumentation,…

There are marked similarities between Confucian ideas about the relationship between action, knowledge and learning, and contemporary educational thinking about action research. Examples can be seen in the relationship between action and research. First, Confucius emphasized the importance of "action" which was different from…

In this article we offer an ontological theorization of care. The article interrogates the self-evident quality of everyday meanings for "care" that might be generated from psychological or biological discourses; we aim to question the way that "care" is applied in a technical or an emotional sense within the field of early…

This article explores an important section of Jean-Paul Sartre's famous early work, "Being and Nothingness." In that section Sartre proposes that part of the human condition is to actively engage in a particular kind of self-deception he calls bad faith. Bad faith is recognized by the obvious inconsistency between the purported…