The current educational discourse on Emmanuel Levinas's concept of subjectivity has focused on the pure openness and subjection of the self to the other. Based on such an understanding, some educational theorists hold that Levinas's work has given us new hope for the mission of education, while others deny its relevance. I suggest that this…

In this essay, Vasileios Pantazis examines how two philosophers having different orientations acknowledge and study the phenomenon of the "encounter" ("Begegnung") and its fundamental importance to human life and education. On the one hand, Otto Friedrich Bollnow drew on existential philosophy and philosophical anthropology in his analysis of the…

Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of…

In this article, Walter Parker brings structure and agency to the foreground of the current tumult of public schooling in the United States. He focuses on three structures that are serving as rules and resources for creative agency. These are a discourse of derision about failing schools, a broad mobilization of multiculturalism, and an enduring…

Throughout the twentieth century, middle-class progressives embraced visions of democracy rooted in their relatively privileged life experiences. Progressive educators developed pedagogies designed to nurture the individual voice within egalitarian classrooms, assuming that collective action in the public realm could be modeled on the relatively…

In this essay, Yuli Tamir argues that the growing interest in public education in the developed world in general and in the United States in particular is grounded in a fear of losing global hegemony. The most rational approach to slowing down these hegemonic shifts is to empower public education and allow the neglected human capital vested in…

In our increasingly instrumentalist culture, debates over the privatization of schooling may be beside the point. Whether we hatch some new plan for chartering or funding schools, or retain the traditional model of government-run schools, the ongoing instrumentalization of education threatens the very possibility of public education. Indeed, in…

In this essay David Labaree examines the tension between two competing visions of the purposes of education that have shaped American public schools. From one perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to preserve and promote public aims, such as keeping the faith, shoring up the republic, or promoting economic growth. From the other…

In this essay, James Scott Johnston claims that a dispute over moral teleology lies at the basis of the debate between John Dewey and Robert M. Hutchins. This debate has very often been cast in terms of perennialism, classicism, or realism versus progressivism, experimentalism, or pragmatism. Unfortunately, casting the debate in these terms…

Immanuel Kant envisioned a kind of respect in which one recognizes each human (1) as being not fully comprehensible by any human understanding, (2) as being an end in him- or herself, and (3) as being a potential source of moral law. In this essay, Gregory Lewis Bynum uses this conception of respect as a lens with which to examine African American…

Epistemologies of situated knowledges, advanced by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Lorraine Code, and Maureen Ford, challenge mainstream epistemology's claim to be the gold standard in determining what counts as knowledge. In this essay, James Lang uses the work of these and other feminist theorists to explicate the notion of situated knowledges…

In this essay, Johannes Giesinger comments on the current philosophical debate on educational justice. He observes that while authors like Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz develop a so-called adequacy view of educational justice, Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift defend an egalitarian principle. Giesinger focuses his analysis on the main objection…

Today, the influence of economic thought on educational theory is evident. It seems to weaken, however, the further we travel back in history. In this article, Tal Gilead examines the historical origins of this influence. He shows that it first emerged in French educational thought during the second half of the eighteenth century. Through…

In this essay, Marianna Papastephanou discusses three books--Michalinos Zembylas's "The Politics of Trauma in Education"; Sigal Ben-Porath's "Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict"; and Kenneth Saltman's "Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools"--from the perspective of the material causality of…

In this essay David Labaree explores the historical and sociological elements that have made educational researchers dependent on statistics. He shows that educational research as a domain, with its focus on a radically soft and thoroughly applied form of knowledge and with its low academic standing, fits the pattern in which weak professions have…