For years now, public education, and especially public higher education, has been under attack. Funding has been drastically reduced, fees increased, and the seemingly irresistible political force of ever-tightening austerity budgets threatens to cut it even more. But I am not going to take the standard line that government financial support for…

This article concentrates on the necessity for teachers in just one discipline area, namely, science, having philosophical competence and using it to inform their professional life--in their classroom teaching, assessing and institutional engagements--in other words, having a philosophy of science teaching. This group of questions and issues might…

The ethics assessment industry is currently dominated by the second version of the Defining Issues Test (DIT2). In this article, we describe an alternative assessment instrument called the Sphere-Specific Moral Reasoning and Theory Survey (SMARTS), which measures the respondent's level of moral development in several respects. We describe…

This article sketches the contours of a neo-Aristotelian account of education, justice, and the human good, organized around a sequence of three increasingly distinctive features of the Aristotelian understanding of respect for persons as rational beings. The first and second of these features bear on important aspects of educational justice,…

Have college students become careerists rather than intellectuals? Are working-class students to blame for grade inflation, grade-grubbing, and the downscaling of the university's noble mission of educating the whole person? These assertions, although somewhat buried in a mass of facts and findings, are present in almost every research study on…

Political liberalism, conceived of as a response to the diversity of conceptions of the good in multicultural societies, aims to put forward a proposal for how to organize political institutions that is acceptable to a wide range of citizens. It does so by remaining neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good while giving all citizens a…

Under current law, students pursuing an undergraduate degree in the United States are considered financially independent (from their parents) for the purposes of financial aid if, among other conditions, they are 24 years of age or older. When students' parents are able to pay, considering them financially independent may result in more generous…

Academic disciplines have a critical role to play in higher education's response to the planetary challenges of the 21st century. Many academics have embraced the call for a fundamental reorientation of higher education around the goal of education for sustainable development. Individual faculty members who prioritize such a pedagogical goal,…

Recent education literature and research has focused on identifying effective core teaching practices to inform and help shape teacher education and professional development. Although a rich literature on the teaching and learning of history has continued to develop over the past decade, core practice research has largely overlooked…

Engaging students in controversial issues provides numerous benefits for developing democratic citizenship. A wide variety of pathways and challenges exist to their discussion in classrooms, many of which are based upon societal and cultural context. This study explores the context of Guam and maps the issues of controversy within categories of…

The ability to make connections is an important aspect of teaching history and a vital skill in our increasingly globalized world. This study examines how preservice and practicing teachers organize and connect world historical events and concepts for themselves and for instructional purposes. Findings are based on interviews with 2 card-sorting…

Because a pluralistic democracy is inherently conflictual, public deliberation of issues holds the potential to expand the thinking of participants by revealing new insights, perspectives, information, or logics into the participants' consideration. These are ethical questions that ask citizens to decide whether policies, actions, and…

Does the unequal participation of non-traditional students in higher education indicate social injustice, even if it can be traced back to individuals' choices? Drawing on luck egalitarian approaches,this article suggests that an answer to this question must take into account the effects of unequal brute luck on educational choices. I use a…

This article reports findings from a 3-year study on preservice middle and secondary social studies teachers' common content knowledge of politics and current events. Surveys showed that both groups were generally uninformed about these issues, and on almost all measures, the middle-grades preservice teachers performed worse than those in the…

Globalization has unleashed profound changes in education. These include positivistic international school comparisons, a singular focus on schools as drivers of economic development, and the adoption of neoliberal market principles in school. These changes, however, generally go unexamined within the field and literature of global education.…