Recent radical changes to university education in England have been discussed largely in terms of the arrangements for transferring funding from the state to the student as consumer, with little discussion of what universities are for. It is important, while challenging the economic rationale for the new system, to resist talking about higher…

Proponents of philosophy for children generally see themselves as heirs to the "Socratic" tradition. They often claim too that children's aptitude for play leads them naturally to play with abstract, philosophical ideas. However in Plato's dialogues we find in the mouth of "Socrates" many warnings against philosophising with the young. Those…

In doing philosophy we need to be aware of the awkwardness of thinking in terms of having a method, still more any kind of "methodology". Instead we might consider the different ways in which philosophy has been conceived in terms of contrasts: for example between the written and the spoken word, between exposition and dialogue, and between--in…

The recent wave of interest in "teaching happiness" is beset by problems. It consists of many different emphases and approaches, many of which are inconsistent with each other. If happiness is understood as essentially a matter of "feeling good", then it is difficult to account for the fact that we want and value all sorts of things that do not…

The idea that educational research should be "scientific", and ideally based on randomised control trials, is in danger of becoming hegemonic. In the face of this it seems important to ask what other kinds of educational research can be respectable in their own different terms. We might also note that the demand for research to be "scientific" is…

Much current educational research shows the influence of two powerful but potentially pernicious lines of thought. The first, which can be traced at least as far back as Francis Bacon, is the ambition to formulate precise techniques of research, or "research methods", which can be applied reliably irrespective of the talent of the researcher. The…

The language of self-belief, including terms like shyness and diffidence, is complex and puzzling. The idea of self-esteem in particular, which has been given fresh currency by recent interest in "personalized learning", continues to create problems. I argue first that we need a "thicker" and more subtle moral psychology of self-belief; and,…