Paul Hirst claimed that Richard Peters "revolutionised philosophy of education". This does not accord with my experience in the Antipodean periphery. My experience of the work of Wittgenstein, Austin and Kovesi before reading Peters and Dewey, Kuhn and Toulmin subsequently meant that Peters was a major but not revolutionary figure in my…

The primary aim of this article is to bring the work of Deleuze and Guattari to bear on the question of communication in the classroom. I focus on the mathematics classroom, where agency and subjectivity are highly regulated by the rituals of the discipline, and where neoliberal psychological frameworks continue to dominate theories of teaching…

Paulo Freire consistently upheld humanization and mutuality as educational ideals. This article argues that conceptualizations of knowledge and how knowledge is sought and produced play a role in fostering humanization and mutuality in educational contexts. Drawing on Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein," this article focuses on the…

It is sometimes said that we are strangers to ourselves, bearers of internal alterity, as well as to each other. The profounder this strangeness then the greater the difficulty of giving any systematic account of it without paradox: of supposing that our obscurity to ourselves can readily be illuminated. To attempt such an account, in defiance of…

In this article I attempt to engage with Charlotte Bronte as both a teacher and a philosopher. In her depiction of two impoverished gentlewomen as teachers Bronte is, as is often pointed out, drawing on her own history, but she is also exploring two conflicting contemporary philosophic notions: the romantic ideal and the ideal of rationality, as…

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's influential novel "Notes from underground", we find one of the most memorable characters in nineteenth century literature. The Underground Man, around whom everything else in this book revolves, is in some respects utterly repugnant: he is self-centred, obsessive and cruel. Yet he is also highly intelligent,…

Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" has often been associated with what can be called initiation stories. However, in this article I argue that Conrad's text is more than that. It can, I suggest, be read as an allegory of the inaccessibility to reveal the essence of being in command, being in education, and also the…

The servant lives within the social relations of feudal class estrangement. He is a natural moralist who keeps his eyes and his mind open, amidst the compromises, intricacies, and oppression of being a servant, and he sees and understands a good deal more than those around him. Above all, he is a craftsman of experience who, in making history with…

This article explores a significant question, implicit in Kafka's novel "Metamorphosis," explicitly asked by Rorty: "Can I care about a stranger?" Alphonso Lingis's view is adopted to overcome a mainstream belief that there is a distinction between my community and the stranger's community, or us community and…

This article is both a personal response to Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" and an examination of the concept within literature of making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange. It discusses the educative force and potential of Beckett's strangers in a strange world by examining my own personal experiences…

This article examines the concept of the stranger and the experience of strangeness in Albert Camus's "The Stranger." These themes have a range of synergies with educational thought. They also lead us to other concepts that may have a place in educational debate, in particular the concepts of the absurd and rebellion. This train of thought also…

This article examines the attempted reform of education within an emerging audit culture in Australia that has led to the implementation of a high-stakes testing regime known as NAPLAN. NAPLAN represents a machine of auditing, which creates and accounts for data that are used to measure, amongst other things, good teaching. In particular, we…

Educational theorists working within the tradition of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas's thought, posit teaching to be a site of implied ethics, that is, a realm in which non-violent or less violent relations to the other are possible. Derrida links ethics to the realm of friendship, enabling one to understand teaching as a site of the…

Children, the image of the child, and the gendered figures of the girl and the boy are thematics that run through the work of Deleuze and feature prominently in his joint writing with Guattari. However, there are many different children in Deleuze's writings. Various child figures do distinct things in Deleuze's work. In this article, I…

This article brings to light discourses that constituted the education of Asian-American children in California in the second half of the nineteenth century. Guided by Foucaultian ideas and critical race theory, I analyze California public school laws, speeches of a governor-elect and a superintendent, and a report of the board of supervisors,…