Who is keeping watch to warn when policies and practices become essentially the same as those used in previous eras to justify the destruction of human beings? This question is asked by author Jessica Heybach, as she describes the etymological roots of the word "neutrality," the social function of teacher as neutral, and its relationship…

In this article, Bryan Warnick discusses not so much whether creationism should be taught in schools, but how evolution should be taught. He contends that if we are going to prohibit the teaching of something like Intelligent Design (ID) in science classrooms because it is unscientific, what implications does that then have for how we teach…

This paper will consider whether Martin Buber's affirmation of relationships offers a means for people to cooperate in seeking social change. On the one hand, Buber determined that the essence of humanity was in the relationships people formed. On the other hand, he did not think that genuinely mutual relationships could fuel political…

This article considers the concept of self as a core concern within the philosophy of education. The question that is asked is "How do we understand the self that is being educated? This issue is a concern as is any theory of education today that seeks to persuade teachers and public alike that education should be grounded in a healthy,…

How to reconcile the needs of the individual with the needs of the community is an enduring problem in the field of educational philosophy. John Dewey, for example, proclaimed the coordination between the individual and social factors as, "the ultimate problem of all education." When evaluating the dynamics of individualism versus the…

In this article, the author examines Dewey's moral deliberation. Liu argues that Dewey's work will enrich both character education and Kohlberg's moral education. Liu focuses on character education and on Kohlberg's moral education because these are the two dominant approaches. Character education seeks to cultivate good…

In this paper, Adrienne Johnson looks to connect the philosophies of Charles Taylor and Hans-Georg Gadamer toward lifelong education, specifically as they relate to UNESCO's second and third educational principles of democracy, broadly conceived as the realization of one's own potential and human development, understood as the complete…

A small, but growing, number of states have legislation that protects the conscience of parents by allowing them to opt out of teaching practices and content. Most notably, HB 542 in New Hampshire allows parents to opt their children out of the teaching of any material or through any pedagogical style that they find "objectionable" to…

In this paper, the author contends that the ability to create a political realm is dependent upon one's state of freedom. She questions what it means to be free and whether assumptions of the definitions of this concept are always good or beneficial. After discussing some of the known theories about freedom, she states that schools are some…

Until relatively recently, college was for only the few, and only loosely related to economic success. College graduates have always done economically better, on average, than those who did not graduate from college, but that was mostly because only the well-to-do could afford college. Few attended college in the hope of economic advancement in…

In this address, the author builds the case that a new political economy of education, dominated by what Pauline Lipman calls the "neo-liberal social imaginary," is changing the moral context in which educators imagine their professional roles. The author argues that educators are placed in relation to others in rather complicated…

The author argues that Dewey's conception of the lost individual and his proposed solutions for reconstruction can help both schooling and society address problems of depoliticization and individualization. He first examines Dewey's notion of formation of the self, forged through transactions with one's physical and social…

The author examines one particular systematic and normative theorization of social justice in Barry Bull's "Social Justice in Education." Bull embarks on a timely and ambitious theory-to-practice project of grounding an educational theory of social justice in Rawls's seminal, liberal, distributive justice tome. The author…

This article examines whether religious education plays a role in the promotion of harmonious international relations, arguing that a broad religious education with a dialogical approach goes to the heart of what it means to be a citizen in a global community. Christian theologian Hans Kung argues in his book "Judaism: Between Yesterday and…

While there is a whole field devoted to the widely esteemed enterprise of epistemology, until fairly recently much less attention has been given to "agnotology," the study of ignorance. Epistemologists of ignorance use the concept agnotology to signify the study of the making and unmaking of ignorance, as well as the task of…