For several decades education has struggled to find a way out of the entanglement of modernity, the premises and assumptions under which modern education has operated. According to Robin Usher and Richard Edwards, modern education, as the "dutiful child of the Enlightenment," has been "allotted a key role in the forming and shaping…

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…

Henry A. Giroux claims this to be the "worst of times" for US public education. Not alone in this judgment, numerous other scholars stand in agreement with him. These thinkers view the current corporate/accountability/testing movement, with its iron grip on public school policies, as disfiguring and disparaging the US system of public…

In this article, the author responds to the Presidential address, "Ethics for the New Political Economy: What Can It Mean to Be Professionally Responsible?" in which Michael G. Gunzenhauser defines, names, and proposes a professional ethics for educators: an ethics of the everyday. The author introduces her response by stating that…

In his presidential address, which is included in this collection of papers, Kip Kline suggests that the time has arrived to redirect the work of philosophy of education away from the path of critical theory, and thus to depart from what he described as the discourse of "parrhesia." The author takes Kline's critique of critical philosophy of…

Democracy is often theorized as a form of political association grounded in shared meanings, common experiences, and convergent interests among the associated individuals. Because differences and divergences seem to stand in the way of commonality and consensus, the coexistence of a plurality of meanings, experiences, interests, languages,…

In this article, William Ayers constructs his Phil Smith Lecture as a call to action. Grounded in democratic principles of equality and social justice, the author invokes a liberal conception of human worth and the universal right to educational opportunity. The author critiques the passivity of the American polity in the face of Barack Obama's…

In this essay, the authors propose that there are certain psychoanalytic insights, at the intersection of the clinical and of critical social theory, which become crucial at precisely the point of recognizing the hidden curriculum. They contend that it is at this point that a political actor, and an educator or educational theorist interested in…

In the last decade, educational researchers and scholars have turned new attention to the theory and practice of community organizing as a method for addressing education injustices. While there are diverse traditions of community organizing work, by far the most influential model in US contexts is that of Saul Alinsky, whose "Rules for Radicals"…

Critical scholarship frequently depicts literacy education as an "initiation into passivity." Disconnected from the lives of students and reduced to strategies for scoring points on tests, literacy becomes an exercise in the reproduction of a moral economy of discipline, compliance, and productivity. Yet people also recognize that the modern world…

In 2006 the National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) removed the phrase "social justice" from its glossary definition of dispositions. Initially, many educators were disappointed by what seemed like an abrupt removal of this educational value. But in the years since, little has been said or done to understand what, exactly,…