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…

The world, and the component parts that people generally take for granted about it are those moments put on pause, or, perhaps more accurately, peeled away, revealing something else entirely underneath. The world at the moment of suspension or peeling gives way to another world, or flashes thereof, however brief. To the author, nothing represents…

An important and yet unresolved question has concerned the educational community for generations: what is the role of student agency and how do educators take it into account? Traditionalists claim that students are incapable of true agency, not knowing where their interests lie yet, while progressivists argue that the students are the most…

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterizes this era as a time of "liquid modernity." Rather than settled meanings, categories, and frames of reference, Bauman contends that meaning is always in flux, open-ended rather than closed. This flux is in large part driven and exacerbated by a culture of consumerism. This phenomenology of the…

The concept of freedom is one of the key ideas in political philosophy. In a liberal society one can do, live, and like whatever he/she pleases, but at the same time there are certain constraints on the individual that balance between one's desires and the common good. In this paper, the author examines the notion of freedom in the age of digital…

One of Amy Gutmann's important achievements in "Democratic Education" is her development of a "democratic interpretation of equal educational opportunity." This standard of equality demands that "all educable children learn enough to participate effectively in the democratic process." In other words, Gutmann demands…

Who is keeping watch to warn when policies and practices become essentially the same as those used in previous eras to justify the destruction of human beings? This question is asked by author Jessica Heybach, as she describes the etymological roots of the word "neutrality," the social function of teacher as neutral, and its relationship…

In this paper, the author contends that the ability to create a political realm is dependent upon one's state of freedom. She questions what it means to be free and whether assumptions of the definitions of this concept are always good or beneficial. After discussing some of the known theories about freedom, she states that schools are some…

In this article, the author examines the "educational methods" employed in the chattel slavery of the antebellum American South. He limits the voluminous possibilities of historical sources by looking to Douglass's "Narrative of the Life" (first published in 1845) to supply most of the historical data. In addition to laying out…

John Dewey's pragmatism and progressive education sought to nourish the democratic principles of critical thinking and collective social action, which he saw as central to democracy and threatened by what Jürgen Habermas would call the rise of "instrumental rationality." Dewey was concerned that traditional approaches to education…

In this article, John F. Covaleskie considers a threefold question: (1) what is the nature of the sort of liberty that enables one to live as a free person, but also bound by the requirements of democratic citizenship; (2) what is the nature of the virtues that make this sort of person possible; and (3) what is the nature of the educational…

Those who view the right to a religiously neutral, empirically-based public education as fundamental have been able to do little more than watch in terror as abstinence-only sex education, which excludes information on either safe sex or birth control, has come to prevail in United States (US) schools. Among causes for concern are abstinence…