In this article, we distinguish between three approaches to ethics in school, each giving an interpretation of the expression "ethics in school": the "descriptive facts about ethics approach," roughly consisting of teaching empirical facts about moral matters to students; the "moral fostering approach," consisting of…

Policy borrowing and policy travelling are words that are often used to mean the same process to different policy practitioners across the globe. Nevertheless, these ideas are also riddled with both ethical as well as political undertones, such that interchanging them becomes problematic. In reflecting on and responding to some of these debates,…

The essay offers a Jewish account of education in nonviolence by examining the first of Emmanuel Levinas' Talmudic readings "Toward the Other." I begin by exploring Levinas' unique philosophy of religious education, which nurtures responsibility for the other, as part of an alternative to enlightenment-orientated modern Jewish…

As philosophers such as Fendler, Bauman and Young have shown, the concept of community poses significant challenges for diversity by reinforcing similarity, necessarily bracketing that which is viewed as outside, other or strange. In this paper, I interrogate the concept of community as it applies to Québec's intercultural context. I explore…

Based on the experiences of one of the authors teaching philosophy for children (P4C) in Iran, the paper asks whether respecting children's rationality, in the form of cultivating their ability and disposition to think critically, is in their best interest in an authoritarian context such as Iran. It argues that, in authoritarian contexts,…

The choice to undertake a PhD is essentially the choice of an individual to complete an individual task that carries the name of the researcher as the cognitive authority and reinforces the place of their respective University within the western academy, with all of the structure of power and authority that comes along with that. But what happens…

In this paper we explore a new way to deal with social inequality and injustice in an educational way. We do so by offering a particular reading of a scene taken from Minnelli's film "The Band Wagon" which is often regarded as overly western-centred and racist. We argue, however, that the way in which words and movements in this…

This article explores aspects of eros in education in relation to ideas of indirectness associated with the French concept of "pudeur," sometimes translated as "modesty". It explores lines of thought extending through Emerson and Nietzsche but reaching back to Plato's "Symposium." This is a means of exposing the…

In this paper, I create philosophical space for the importance of how we say things as an adjunct to attending to what is said, drawing on Stanley Cavell's discussions of moral perfectionism and passionate utterance. In the light of this, I assess claims made for the contribution drama makes to moral education. In "Cities of Words,"…

This paper draws upon Deleuze and Guattari's ideas to suggest a different kind of reading of a narrative of a mother of a child with severe disability, and thus a different kind of ethical response to them. This reading gives readers the possibility of opening up experiences of parents and children with disability, rather than…

Schools in the UK teach pupils about Fairtrade as part of Religious Education, Personal and Social Education, Citizenship, Geography and so on. There are also Fairtrade Schools, where the whole school, including staff and parents, is committed to promoting the brand. It is argued here that promoting this commercial brand to schoolchildren and…

This paper considers the place of freedom in discussions of the aims of education. Bearing in mind remarks of R.S. Peters to the affect that the singling out of aims can "fall into the hands of rationalistically minded curriculum planners", it begins by considering the views of Roland Reichenbach regarding Bildung and his account of this…

"This class is so [insert expletive] depressing." I overheard a student communicating this to a friend upon exiting one of my ethics courses and I wondered how my classes could generate a sense of empowerment rather than depression, a sense of hope rather than despair. Drawing from David Hume's and Martin Hoffman's work on the…

Students in urban under-resourced schools are often disengaged from the curriculum. Distributing voice (agency) to them would seem an obvious counter to their alienation, allowing them to be co-constructors rather than objects of their education. Beyond being pragmatically sound, student agency is, arguably, a psychological and moral imperative.…

Rest's hypothesis that the components of morality (i.e., sensitivity, reasoning, motivation, and implementation) are distinct from one another was tested using evidence from a dental ethics curriculum that uses well-validated measures of each component. Archival data from five cohorts ("n" = 385) included the following: (1)…