In recent years the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere has addressed the predicament of artists and curators who, in their eagerness to convey a critical message or engage their viewers in an emancipatory process, end up predetermining the outcomes of the experience, hence blocking its critical or emancipatory potential. In this essay I consider…

This paper argues for seeing in-depth news coverage of political, social, and economic issues as "public policy pedagogy." To develop my argument, I draw on Nancy Fraser's democratic theory, which attends to social differences and does not assume that unity is a starting point or an end goal of public dialogue. Alongside the formation of…

In this text I concentrate on semiotic aspects of the theory of political identity in the work of Ernesto Laclau, and especially on the connection between metaphors, metonymies, catachreses and synecdoches. Those tropes are of ontological status, and therefore they are of key importance in understanding the discursive "production" of identity in…

The concept of heterotopia challenges political theory, which has often focused on utopic thinking. Foucault describes a heterotopia as a heterogenous space that juxtaposes in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Streets, squares and parks form heterotopias when their utopic purity as public space…

This paper seeks to examine the plausibility of the concept of "Civic Friendship" as a philosophical model for a conceptualisation of "belonging". Such a concept, would hold enormous interest for educators in enabling the identification of particular virtues, attitudes and values that would need to be taught and nurtured to enable the civic…

Following the rise of virtue and character education, educational philosophers have recently given much attention to questions relating to virtue and the good. This, however, has not been paralleled by a similar interest in vice and evil, which, in this context, are examined only rarely. In this article, I use the work of the American philosopher…

The examination of the modern construction of subject is not over yet. Although many thinkers have exhausted its conceptual ambiguities and practical consequences, its impact is far from fully understood without an analysis of the construction of childhood for the future subject. In this essay, I problematize five constructions of childhood that…

In this paper, I examine the question of how to nurture and develop conscientiousness thinkers and future citizens of diverse liberal-democratic societies from the perspective of virtue epistemology (VE). More specifically, I examine this question in terms of how public schools might frame engagement with religious perspectives in the classroom. I…

"What is ?Curriculum Theory" articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of…

There was a time when, in the Liberal Arts, philosophy and education enjoyed the most intimate and productive relationship. Drawing together philosophy and nature they sought to understand the greatest of human mysteries. This meant thinking about both the macrocosm and the microcosm and especially the relation between them. In this relation lies…

This paper offers a critique of the "democratic state of education" proposed by Amy Gutmann in her influential book "Democratic Education". In the democratic state of education, educational authority is shared among the state, parents and educational professionals; and educational objectives are geared toward equipping future citizens to…

It is commonplace to speak of education as a right. Yet it has been seldom defended as a natural right. Natural rights are pre-social, while education is social intrinsically. This analysis attempts to show how Aristotle's concept of education can be conceived as a natural and necessary process to fulfill individual autonomy. In this sense it…

Although there is ample interrogation of advertising/commercial/media culture in critical pedagogy, there is little attention paid to the fine arts and to aesthetic experience. This lacuna is all the more perplexing given Paulo Freire's use of artist Francisco Brenand's illustrations ("Education for Critical Consciousness." Continuum, New York,…

Films depicting educational relationships typically emphasize personal connections between students and teachers over the educational goals that such relations facilitate. In doing so, these films raise the question of how teachers stand in relation to their institutional roles in such a way as to inspire students' desires for knowledge. In this…

This article aims at making a case for the role of seduction in existential education, that is, education that focuses on the pupil's life choices. First, the article attempts to show that the relationship between the teacher and the pupil can be understood as a form of seduction. Secondly, the article examines how such a relationship functions in…