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, 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…

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…

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…

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 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…

Corporate business practices among leaders of higher education have increasingly come under fire during the last two decades. Questions of university leadership, however, particularly corporate practices, go back at least to the early twentieth century. This paper contrasts the views of Thorstein Veblen and Charles W. Eliot, two prominent early…

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…

The foundation upon which this discussion is based is the basic nature of democracy as both a political and moral ideal. Democracy can be understood as a system of rights premised upon the logic of equality. At its core is a fundamental belief in moral equality, a belief that all human beings possess an equal inherent dignity or worth. The ideal…

While the ethical dimension of human-animal relationships has become a legitimate, rich subject for contemporary moral philosophers, scholars of moral education, and to a large extent, philosophers of education, have remained surprisingly silent on this subject. The primary purpose of this essay is to illustrate the relationship between the moral…

Disability and dependence are integral to the human experience and yet have been largely marginalized or denigrated within Western philosophy. Joining a growing counter narrative from the disability studies movement, several mainstream moral philosophers are helping to redress this error. In this essay, the author discusses ideas from four such…

On September 4, 1957, a crisis occurred at Little Rock Central High School in which a mob of white citizens followed, taunted, and harassed a black student, Elizabeth Eckford, who was attempting to register for classes at the newly desegregated school. In 1959, Hannah Arendt published "Reflections on Little Rock." She argued that children should…

This article considers the notion of service-learning (SL) as essentially different from other similar activities, such as philanthropy, charity, voluntarism, or a single act of kindness which are "one-way" socially engaged activities. Service-learning is different because it necessarily entails reciprocity and mutuality which are "two-way"…