This interview piece addresses the following questions: Does the COVID-19 pandemic offer any lessons for moral character education? Do the experiences of students, educators, and communities during the pandemic illustrate the importance of aspects of character education that may have been known but taken for granted? The three authors bring to…

One area that is almost certain to be of some concern in the coming wave of COVID-related publications is the question of home versus school as "learning environments" -- as specifiable sets of conditions for facilitating and shaping the ongoing learning process. "Learning," in turn, is conventionally understood as a…

COVID-19 reveals the way single causes have multiple effects on children. Proponents of evidence-based education, like their colleagues in medicine, need to attend to the inevitable side effects produced by programs and policies. I explain why continuing motivation to learn is one outcome that no responsible evaluation should omit.

The pandemic has made the mass remote delivery of higher education more plausible as a general direction for growth in the long-term. Choosing between this general direction and the status quo introduces various ethical dilemmas having to do with the basic aims and values of higher education. A move to remote learning as the institutional norm may…

This article extends initial ideas on what hope is, why it matters to democracy, and how to teach it in schools, which were first presented by Sarah M. Stitzlein in her book "Learning How to Hope: Reviving Democracy through Our Schools and Civil Society" (Oxford University Press, 2020). It accounts for recent obstacles to hope,…

The pandemic resurrected gender as a central categorization of citizenship. COVID-19 reminds us that gender oppression continues in its traditional, materialist formulations to structure our economic, civic, and political lives. Postfeminism has diversified feminist discourses, and at times been used as a temporal claim -- the "post"…

Homeschooling was occasionally a subject of popular interest pre-COVID, when media reported horrific cases of child abuse under the guise of homeschooling, or when controversies erupted over efforts in state legislatures or local school boards to introduce very modest oversight measures. COVID made homeschooling something nearly every parent…

Philosophical discussions about leisure time often take place on an abstract level. But leisure time does not exist a priori to lived experience in concreate situations. Its existence, or the lack thereof, is often predicated on the material conditions of daily life. In this article the very real conditions of indebted life are the starting point…

The article is concerned with the difficulty of providing leisure today with a positive definition that goes beyond merely being a negation of work. I argue that the vague boundaries between work and leisure play into the hands of work -- a highly praised activity that is dominant in today's society. I argue that in such a situation, education as…

Much of the current available literature on leisure characterizes it as an additional consumer good: a derivative of capitalist society, featured as a commodity and, for the most part, an industry. This paper argues that recovering the concept of leisure from the ancients, with a contemporary focus on culture and the practice of living artfully,…

The binary work/leisure continues to be used to categorize many human activities, but falls short for ways of life in which a particular set of values undergirds all activities. This paper discusses regenerative forms of growing and harvesting food -- in particular, permaculture and natural farming -- as values-based practices that blur the…

In the pages to follow, I propose a meditation on the concept of study, its place in our contemporary scene, and its relation to the classical notion of leisure. In general terms, we can define leisure as an extreme disposition or state in which our relation to the world remains indeterminate in some way. In this sense, leisure favours a radical…

Appeals to transformative education are so ubiquitous that if an educational advertisement claimed to only offer instruction, consumers might worry they were being shortchanged. However, the meaning of transformative education is often superficially understood, shifting between various conceptions, each bearing distinct ethical complications. The…

Reconceptualizing the notion of creativity is imperative for addressing today's multilayered social, ecological, and educational crises. This paper draws upon the Daoist philosophy of creativity, which connects rather than separates, to elaborate on the creative relational dynamics of a Daoist pedagogy. First, Western conceptions of creativity are…

This analysis will argue that university educators have an ethical obligation to advocate for admission policies that are not exclusively competitive in nature -- what will be referred to later as levelling and remedy approaches. This argument will be detailed in four stages. First, it will use an anecdote and an appeal to virtue to argue that…