While there was a flurry of articles throughout the 1990s in philosophy of education on Lyotard, there are still several key concepts in his "oeuvre" that have import for but remain largely underdeveloped or absent in the field. One of the most interesting of these absent concepts is Lyotard's notion of the figural. In this paper, I…

This paper is concerned with the practical importance of different forms of paternalism for educational theory and practice. Contrary to the traditional treatment of paternalism as a sometimes necessary and rather messy aspect of educational practices, I demonstrate that paternalism is to be regarded as an "indigenous concept" (Herbart)…

This paper makes a case for love as a powerful force for "transforming power" in our educational institutions and everyday lives, and proposes that "revolutionary love" serves as a moral and strategic compass for concrete individual and collective actions in critical education. The paper begins by reviewing current…

This paper analyzes the entanglement of the modern concepts of freedom, autonomy, and the modern notion of the subject and how a passion for and insistence on freedom has undermined the reconstruction of human subjectivity in Heidegger and Foucault, and how such passion has also limited the educational effort at addressing the problems brought to…

In this article I will investigate a perceived tension in Swedish early childhood education (ECE) policy between reevaluating certain foundational claims on the one hand and following universal moral commands on the other. I ask the question; how is it that certain commonly held assumptions are being debunked and others left undisturbed in this…

This article seeks to examine the special quality of Eros operative in educational practice, through the frame narrative of Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave." The subject is examined from two aspects illuminating the paradoxical nature of educational practice. The first, epistemological, considers the practicability of learning,…

Despite the growing body of literature and general interest in the intersection between the capabilities approach (CA) and education, little work has been done so far to theorize democratic education from a CA perspective. This essay attempts to do so by, first, getting clear about the theory of democracy that has emerged from Amartya Sen's…

This paper critically evaluates the ways we look to children to educate us and explores how we might depart from that dynamic, exploring how a range of conceptual frameworks from historical and cultural studies and psychoanalysis might contribute to understanding the problematic of childhood, its problems and its limitations. While "child as…

This article explores the role of the Deaf child as peer educator. In schools where sign languages were banned, Deaf children became the educators of their Deaf peers in a number of contexts worldwide. This paper analyses how this peer education of sign language worked in context by drawing on two examples from boarding schools for the deaf in…

Classical conceptual distinctions in philosophy of education assume an individualistic subjectivity and hide the learning that can take place in the space between child (as educator) and adult (as learner). Grounded in two examples from experience I develop the argument that adults often put metaphorical sticks in their ears in their educational…

In this article I explore if and how very young children can be the educators of their early childhood educators. I describe and discuss a story constructed from a fieldwork done in one early childhood setting in Norway. The story is read with Levinas and his concepts Said and Saying. Further I discuss if and how this might be understood as…

The intention of this article is to make an educational analysis of Merleau-Ponty's theory of experience in order to see what it implicates for educational practice as well as educational research. In this way, we can attain an understanding what embodied experience might mean both in schools and other educational settings and in researching…

This article explores the uses of Agamben's philosophy for understanding the educational meaning of practices that typically take/took place at school, such as the collective rehearsal of the alphabet or the multiplication tables. More precisely, I propose that these forms of "practising" show what schooling, as a particular and historically…

Two related aspects of the present "knowledge capitalism" stage of globalisation are discussed in this article: the transformation of education to make it more directly supportive of educational growth and competition, and the growing demands on educational research to provide scientific evidence for education policy and practice, using narrowly…

This paper sets out to examine the place of theory in preschool education, considering the theories to which practitioners and providers have access and which provide a rationale for everyday practices and shape the experiences of young children. The paper reflects the circumstances of preschool provision, practices and thinking in the UK in…