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…

When educators label as "emotional" the girl crying in the bathroom or the boy who just slammed his locker shut, they risk assuming that only overt displays qualify as emotional and therefore necessitate attention. The fact is that whether a student outwardly displays emotion or not, he or she is emotional, and the teacher has a…

The discussion participants follow Aristotle in deciding that friends are concerned with each other's welfare for their own sake and cannot be reduced to utility or pleasure, adding that the contemporary notion of friends involves the notion of equal overall power. They find three difficulties with teachers and students being friends. First,…

The author's sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, showed him that adults who held positions of power over children could be duplicitous. After several uneventful months, she started singling him out in hurtful ways for no apparent reason. On top of the established threat of being paddled arbitrarily, Mrs. Hunter started to humiliate him in front of…

In her 1993 text "Educating For Intelligent Belief and Unbelief," Nel Noddings advocated an ambitious plan to challenge the students; she wished to engage them in a dialogue on the religious issues that define those questions, which "matter deeply to everyone." This was seen as a dialogue that can take place at all levels of education, but was…