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…

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…

In light of the importance and the potential danger of education during childhood for politically liberal societies, the author has devoted much of his professional career to thinking about and formulating the moral principles that should govern such a society's educational institutions. However, this task cannot be accomplished for all such…

John Dewey provided philosophical accounts on an enormity of issues and ideas within the corpus of his work. Given his incredible productivity, it is especially difficult to locate any singular focus without almost immediately falling into oversimplification. There is, however, a concern that reoccurs with reliable frequency in his work. Dewey's…

According to John Banas and colleagues, the research on laughter in the classroom indicates that a classroom full of laughter increases learning. In contrast, Plato argued that laughter is a vice and chastised those who would give in to it. Nonetheless, between the ancient concept of laughter as vice and the modern concept of laughter as learning…

With only some fear of oversimplification, the fundamental differences between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey that are of concern here can be introduced by giving attention to Lippmann's deceptively simple formulation of a central problem in democratic theory: "The environment is complex. Man's political capacity is simple. Can a bridge be built…

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 the first half of the twentieth century, the ideal of democracy influenced the conceptions people had of the academic subject matters. A common criticism was that abstract academic subjects served aristocratic societies. Although most theorists considered the academic subjects to be important, they had differing views on the conception of…

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…

The English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) is one of the most prominent figures in the development of liberal Anglo-American political thought. Locke's writings had a significant influence on the American Revolution and founding principles of the United States in fundamental ways. The author argues that Locke's influence is…

John Dewey defines democracy as a form of associated living "in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups." Few would argue that people with disabilities have been among the most excluded, the least able to share in the fullness and freedom of "associated…

The growing diversity of school populations in the present education milieu raises issues of treating difference along multiple lines of the social, political and economic well being of children. Difference is here defined as politically significant group identities to which the author refers as cultures or identity groups. Political liberal…

The term "globalization" is relatively new. Alfred E. Eckes, Jr. and Thomas W. Zeiler credit Theodore Levitt for coining the word in 1983 in an article in the Harvard Business Review. In a short time, other authors adopted the term. Thomas Freidman, for example, used the phrase to define the 1990s. Freidman claimed that the world had entered a new…

This essay explores the ways in which the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, defined as "frank speech and telling the truth as one sees it," can help facilitate the development of both intellectual courage and democracy as a way of life. It theorizes dimensions of parrhesia for the purpose of better educating a civic self-image rooted in this…