This article introduces the notion of the "educational franchise" of Australia's public universities established in the mid-nineteenth century. In his recently published study of the public university and social access in the United States, John Aubrey Douglass suggests that from the mid-nineteenth century a social contract was formed…

In recent papers by Marc Depaepe and Daniel Trohler, philosophers of education are criticised for their tendency to address eternal questions in pursuit of timeless truths, with insufficient awareness of the genesis of the ideas they refer to and insensitivity to historical context. The suspicion of "presentism" in their approach is…