Voice has become a common goal of educational research and pedagogical practices aimed at equity and social justice. That is, bringing marginalized groups "to" voice, allowing diverse students to "have" a voice, and setting up classrooms that privilege silenced voices are frequent goals in educational research and practice. In…

The words of W. E. B. Du Bois, in his widely-acclaimed work" The Souls of Black Folk," that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line" were a visceral attempt to illuminate the plight of the "Negro" in the United States of America. With this phrase, Du Bois positioned racial valorizations…

The authors begin this essay by sharing excerpts taken from two events at their own liberal arts institution. One was from an opening convocation in 1967, and the second from an accreditation visit in 2014. The two episodes have been presented in order to illustrate the major differences in the ways university experiences have been thought about…

Through an analysis of school uniform policies and theories of social justice, Samantha Deane argues that school uniforms and their foregoing policies assume that confronting strangers--an imperative of living in a democratic polity--is something that requires seeing sameness instead of recognizing difference. Imbuing schooling with a directive…

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…

The author examines one particular systematic and normative theorization of social justice in Barry Bull's "Social Justice in Education." Bull embarks on a timely and ambitious theory-to-practice project of grounding an educational theory of social justice in Rawls's seminal, liberal, distributive justice tome. The author…

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 wishes to thank Barry Bull for his excellent and stimulating paper, and he would like to pose five questions or points for his consideration in response. In preface to his first question, the author wants to say that he finds cogent and persuasive the discussion in the section "Issues for Political Liberalism in Higher Education" of…

In this article, William Ayers constructs his Phil Smith Lecture as a call to action. Grounded in democratic principles of equality and social justice, the author invokes a liberal conception of human worth and the universal right to educational opportunity. The author critiques the passivity of the American polity in the face of Barack Obama's…

In this comparative essay, the author discusses the opposing educational theories of John Dewey and Gregory Bateson. While Dewey believed that the scientific method was the dominant method of solving problems and thereby acquiring knowledge that mattered, Bateson warned that this one-sided approach would lead to actions that could destroy the…

In this essay, the authors propose that there are certain psychoanalytic insights, at the intersection of the clinical and of critical social theory, which become crucial at precisely the point of recognizing the hidden curriculum. They contend that it is at this point that a political actor, and an educator or educational theorist interested in…

This article focuses on developing a progressive philosophy of praxis that challenges, what the author argues is, a post-racial resistance to teaching about racial injustice. Post-racial resistance to teaching can lead to forms of enlightened racism and sexism in the classroom. In this essay, the author develops and extends the use of the metaphor…

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.…

In this paper, the author outlines what No Child Left Behind policy might mean first in personal then in philosophical terms. First, the author will trace a bit of Obama's own educational development: how he was first set on a personal educational journey and how, proceeding along with that journey, he eventually came to successfully elicit…

While the ethical dimension of human-animal relationships has become a legitimate, rich subject for contemporary moral philosophers, scholars of moral education, and to a large extent, philosophers of education, have remained surprisingly silent on this subject. The primary purpose of this essay is to illustrate the relationship between the moral…