Recent polling shows a marked increase in public distrust towards institutions and fellow citizens in the United States. In this context of rising distrust and democratic crisis, teachers have not been exempt from public scrutiny. Recent legislation in the United States targeting school curricula and classroom discourse reveal a mounting distrust…

According to Thomas Falk, an authoritarian insurgency against the institutions of liberal democracy operates along both political-economic and phenomenological axes. By corrupting language and stimulating vigilance, this insurgency endeavors to diminish the perceptual and communicative capacities that allow us to articulate a shared reality and…

The idea that children need to be exposed to stories of patriotic heroes has again surfaced in recent legislative activity surrounding education. Often, this impulse aligns with a conservative, moralizing vision of teaching history: the flaws of past historical figures should be minimized for the purposes of national pride and traditional virtues.…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004) (IDEIA) requires practitioners to use educational evaluations to assess students in K-12 schools that are suspected of having a disability. The resulting data provides the basis for determining whether students qualify for special education services, their precise educational…

Recent legislation restricting the topics teachers may discuss with students raises the issue of what role the teacher should play in society. We argue that this legislative scrutiny of teachers is symptomatic of an aversion to defining what a teacher is. We argue that, though a reluctance to provide an explicit definition of "teacher"…

In "Religion and American Education," Warren Nord grapples with one of the most difficult aspects of teaching religion: how to help American students, whose religious literacy tends to be severely impoverished, understand religious experience. He writes that "The best substitute for firsthand personal religious experience is…

The efficacy of tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) as an educational and therapeutic asset in schools has been extensively studied, with many middle and high schools employing these games as extracurricular activities because of their positive impact around identity formation, empathy, and social skills. More recent iterations of tabletop RPGs are…

Teachers should be connected to, not alienated from, the philosophical underpinnings of their work. Teachers who understand themselves to be philosophers of education, and who see their work as both practical "and" philosophical in nature, may be empowered with an additional foundational and theoretical "tool" to use both in…

The ability to think critically is a defining characteristic of humanity, setting humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. To perceive future consequences of an action, idea, or decision and then adjust these actions, ideas, and decisions accordingly is an integral part of existing as conscious beings in the world. Moreover, critical…

Teacher educators have been investigating ways to rob the demographic mismatch of this disempowering history. How can white preservice teachers be prepared to do meaningful work with communities of color? Scholars have been skeptical of the ability of white teachers to become fully culturally relevant. Aaron Schutz worries when teachers with…

While the study of ignorance is nothing new to philosophy, this article explores the origin and production of ignorance in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors link the question of a pandemic of ignorance to state education laws and policies that arguably manufacture ignorance. Their purpose is not to create a sense of paranoia or lead…

While its purported aims are noble, the field of study abroad -- or education abroad as it is increasingly known -- is not immune from, and indeed embraces, discourses and practices that are, to use Gert Biesta's term, "learnified." Biesta defines learnification as "the translation of everything there is to say about education in…

Education quite often sends the message that life involves choosing a "thesis" and defending it against objections. Educators frequently require students to "pick a side," justifying their positions with the best reasons available. What should educators teach students about the value of holding opinions and beliefs? Should they…

At the end of 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary announced 'post-truth' as word of the year, and since then, the concept has been invoked around the world to describe the growing anxieties surrounding the current crisis in truth, wherein emotion appears to have replaced fact in the shaping of public opinion. Society is witnessing what seems to be…

Democracy needs dissent. More specifically, democracy needs citizens with "knowledge" of how to practice political dissent, a willingness to "think" about why and when such dissent is necessary, and "habituation" to the practice of good dissent. Where, then, are citizens to develop such habits? In Sarah Stitzlein's…