In his 2006 essay, "Moral Education's Modest Agenda," Robin Barrow argues for a clearly bounded conception of morality; he presents the moral domain as concerned with moral principles, and moral education as the cultivation of moral understanding. Barrow rejects behaviourism, character education, values clarification, developmentalism,…

This paper offers a defense of Robin Barrow's main arguments in "Giving Teaching Back to Teachers", including additional material concerning the inability of the aggregate data and statistical methods employed in research in education (and research on teaching) to speak to individual teachers and students or to particular classrooms.…

At a time when an ethics based on responsibility for the Other offers a counter to the individualism of neoliberal ideology, I argue that it is crucial to recuperate the possibility of creating the conditions for ethical moments of facing through all means possible, including art. I deliberate the possibilities for art in sustaining Levinas's…

This article examines a Confucian conception of competence and its corresponding response to the competencies agenda that underpins international large-scale assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It is argued that standardised transnational assessments are undergirded by a technical rationality that…

The problem of paternalism, widely discussed in moral and political philosophy, has not received much attention in the philosophy of education. Yet Johannes Drerup claims that paternalism should be considered 'an indigenous concept' of educational theory, and 'the indigenous model of justification' in education. This essay explores Drerup's claim,…

Numerous studies have shown that secondary and college students are increasingly apathetic and disengaged from their schooling. The problem of student disengagement is not confined to under-represented socioeconomic groups; it is found across the country: in cities, suburbs, and rural communities; in wealthy schools and poor schools; in public…

In teacher education programs, there is a prevalent belief that having teacher candidates compose personalized 'my philosophy of education' (MPE) statements is a valuable exercise that prepares them for the teaching profession. This paper argues that the prevailing intentions for, and common practice of, assigning these MPE statements to teacher…