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…

Changes to the landscape of "public" education in the United States, particularly the proliferation of charter and other non-traditional public schools and shifting forms of school governance, have motivated some philosophers of education to reconsider the form and function of public schools in a democracy. This article is largely…

According to Bryan Warwick, policy can cause tragedy. A famous example is the tragedy described in Sophocles' play "Antigone." In this play, Creon, the political leader of ancient Thebes, causes tragedy in his quest to educate his people about civic loyalty. The conflict engendered by his educational policy eventually brings death and…

The protest and movement #BlackLivesMatter that began in 2012 has fueled a national will of resistance to State violence and has nourished a sense of humanity that demands the valuing of all Black people. As part of the U.S.'s long history of systemic racism and its histories of local resistance, #BlackLivesMatter (BLM hereafter) has renewed…

The funding of public education in many states, especially Illinois, is characterized by inequity. The reality is that students across the state are subject to a disparity in fiscal resources between those attending schools in the wealthiest and poorest districts. The cause of this dilemma is threefold. First, Illinois has a school finance scheme…

A small, but growing, number of states have legislation that protects the conscience of parents by allowing them to opt out of teaching practices and content. Most notably, HB 542 in New Hampshire allows parents to opt their children out of the teaching of any material or through any pedagogical style that they find "objectionable" to…

In this address, the author builds the case that a new political economy of education, dominated by what Pauline Lipman calls the "neo-liberal social imaginary," is changing the moral context in which educators imagine their professional roles. The author argues that educators are placed in relation to others in rather complicated…

This article examines whether religious education plays a role in the promotion of harmonious international relations, arguing that a broad religious education with a dialogical approach goes to the heart of what it means to be a citizen in a global community. Christian theologian Hans Kung argues in his book "Judaism: Between Yesterday and…

Henry A. Giroux claims this to be the "worst of times" for US public education. Not alone in this judgment, numerous other scholars stand in agreement with him. These thinkers view the current corporate/accountability/testing movement, with its iron grip on public school policies, as disfiguring and disparaging the US system of public…

Media portrayals and education policies have combined with anecdotes about charter school successes to produce a favorable assessment of charter schools by two-thirds of Americans. Such media celebrations often group an array of charter school types together, thereby disguising their differences. Indeed, the public seems unaware there are…

In light of the importance and the potential danger of education during childhood for politically liberal societies, the author has devoted much of his professional career to thinking about and formulating the moral principles that should govern such a society's educational institutions. However, this task cannot be accomplished for all such…

The author's sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, showed him that adults who held positions of power over children could be duplicitous. After several uneventful months, she started singling him out in hurtful ways for no apparent reason. On top of the established threat of being paddled arbitrarily, Mrs. Hunter started to humiliate him in front of…

The year was 1909. The United States was in the throes of tremendous social and institutional changes: a rapidly diversifying population, dramatic shifts in political and economic structures, the rise of Progressivism as a paradigm for social reform and social control, and the intense and often grating sounds of a public education system really…

John Dewey defines democracy as a form of associated living "in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups." Few would argue that people with disabilities have been among the most excluded, the least able to share in the fullness and freedom of "associated…

The contradiction between the concept of equality found in the Declaration of Independence and that found in U.S. Constitution led the author to question what the Constitution had to say about education. After all, Montesquieu (1689-1755), a French "philosophe" whose work heavily influenced Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the U.S.…