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…

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 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 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…

This paper considers phenomenology as a philosophical framework from which to understand the moral experience of collective memory. As a philosophical approach to human reality, phenomenology contributes insight into the connection between the experiential grounding of collective memory and the reality of the social world. The inspiration for…

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 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…

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 theme of intellectual courage can help anyone re-conceive the activity of philosophizing as a "moral" virtue. For Aristotle, courage was the first of the moral virtues, empowering noble action in the human realm, contemplation the last and highest of the intellectual virtues, enabling the union of the human mind with the eternal and divine,…

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…