Although much has been written about Friedrich Nietzsche's views on education over the years, and much has also been written about Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, very little attention has been given to the meaning of, and need for, Dionysian education. In this article, Sean Steel attempts to begin that project. Drawing Nietzsche's…

While honesty is clearly a virtue of some educational as well as moral significance, its virtue-ethical status is far from clear. In this essay, following some discussion of latter-day virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, David Carr argues that honesty exhibits key features of both moral and epistemic virtue, and, more precisely, that honesty as…

In this essay Elizabeth de Freitas follows Tim Ingold's groundbreaking anthropological work on lines and their cultural and material significance to argue that the line is the engine of theory, be it the drawn line of inscription or mathematical measure, the exclusionary line of delineation, or the undulating generative line of flight. De…

In education, art has often been perceived as entertainment and decoration and is the first subject to go when there are budget cuts or test-score pressures. Drawing on Emmanuel Lévinas's idea of the primacy of radical alterity that breaks the totality of our being, enables self-transformation and ethics, and ensures community as a totality…

Kristján Kristjánsson's aim in this article is to bury the old saw that dialogue is exclusively a Socratic but not an Aristotelian method of education for moral character. Although the truncated discussion in Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" of the character development of the young may indicate that it is merely the result of…

In this essay C. C. Wharram argues that Terence's concept of translation as a form of "contamination" anticipates recent developments in philosophy, ecology, and translation studies. Placing these divergent fields of inquiry into dialogue enables us read Terence's well-known statement "I am a human being--I deem nothing…

Since its resurgence in the 1990s, character education has been subject to a bevy of common criticisms, including that it is didactic and crudely behaviorist; premised on a faulty trait psychology; victim-blaming; culturally imperialist, racist, religious, or ideologically conservative; and many other horrible things besides. Matt Ferkany and…

In this essay Luc Van den Berge and Stefan Ramaekers take the idea(l) of "scientific parenting" as an example of ambiguities that are typical of our late-modern condition. On the one hand, parenting seems like a natural thing to do, which makes "scientific parenting" sound like an oxymoron; on the other hand, a disengaged…

A recent report on the UK's higher education system by Lord John Browne exemplifies the dominant trend in education policy initiatives toward a focus on education primarily for employment and for the acquisition of skills. In this essay, Alison Assiter argues that such an entrepreneurial approach neglects essential aspects of the processes of…

Contemporary educational reformers have claimed that research on social class differences in child raising justifies programs that aim to lift children out of poverty by means of cultural interventions. Focusing on the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), Ruby Payne's "aha! Process," and the Harlem Children's Zone as examples,…

In "Reconstruction in Philosophy," John Dewey issued an eloquent call for contemporary philosophy to become more relevant to the pressing problems facing society. Historically, the philosophy of a period had been appropriate to social conditions (indeed, this is why it had developed as a discipline), but despite the vast changes in the…

In this essay Tyson Lewis reevaluates Jean-Jacques Rousseau's assessment of the pedagogical value of fables in Emile's education using Giorgio Agamben's theory of poetic production and Thomas Keenan's theory of the inherent ambiguity of the fable. From this perspective, the "unreadable" nature of the fable that Rousseau exposed is not simply the…

All research has limitations, for example, from paradigm, concept, theory, tradition, and discipline. In this article Lynda Stone describes three exemplars that are variations on limitation and are "extraordinary" in that they change what constitutes future research in each domain. Malcolm Gladwell's present day study of outliers makes a…

Critical pedagogy has often been linked in the literature to faith traditions such as liberation theology, usually with the intent of improving or redirecting it. While recognizing and drawing from those previous linkages, Jacob Neumann goes further in this essay and develops the thesis that critical pedagogy can not just benefit from a connection…

In the article, Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon asks, Did Plato have a philosophy of listening, and if so, what was it? Listening is the counterpart of speaking in a dialogue, and it is no less important. Indeed, learning from the dialogue is less likely to occur as people participate unless listening as well as speaking takes place. Haroutunian-Gordon…