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.…

This paper aims to raise awareness of the relevance of the philosophy of Charlotte Mason to primary school education today. First a biography of Mason, tracing her development from an orphaned pupil apprentice to an internationally influential figure, puts her philosophy in context. This is followed by an overview of her philosophy, with a focus…

Responding largely to the impact of industrialization and urbanization on American society, educators across the country embraced the "school gardening" and "nature study" movements advocated by Dewey. Promoted in varying degrees as ways to enhance learning, yield food for their schools, build character, and improve…

Adopting an explicit and reflective approach to the teaching of the history and philosophy of science is useful in promoting high school students' understanding of the nature of science. Whereas the history of science is usually signposted clearly in the school science curriculum, the philosophy of science is considered to be embedded in and…

This paper is about the role and the potential of the history of mathematics in mathematics education. We report a discussion that we had about theoretical issues in this context, particularly about the notion of Otherness as developed by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The focus is on the reading of historical texts, both in the context…

"The Lost History of Western Civilization" is a wide-ranging consideration of the academy's role in producing America's contemporary political and cultural divisions. The report traces the ways in which the 1988 controversy over the teaching of Western Civilization at Stanford set the pattern for today's "Cold Civil War." The…

Through a dynamic interplay of philosophical analysis and fine-tuned fieldwork, this dissertation seeks to bear witness to the presence and power of the "personal core of teaching," a dimension of education that, I argue, is of utmost importance, but which remains largely undervalued by educational policymakers and underexamined by…

Social issues of today are rooted in history, and the study of contemporary issues would thus benefit from tracing their history. In Tanzania, Nyerere's "ujamaa" philosophy and the accompanying education for self-reliance (ESR) policy offer a criterion relevant today in pedagogical analysis. Tanzania is currently implementing…

Purpose: I take as a starting point the disparaging comments about the place of history and philosophy of education in initial teacher education (ITE) made by the chair of the Teacher Education Expert Panel established by the Australian Government in 2023, which I take to be the most recent attempt at resurrecting the tired debate over "the…

The "emergence of literature in eighteenth-century France" changes our understanding of when, how and why modern ideas of literature emerged in France. Using a unique blend of literary and digital methods, it argues that it was in the mid eighteenth century, rather than the nineteenth (as many have claimed), that the word littrature…

The purpose of this article is to add to the debate on the normative status and legitimacy of indoctrination in education by drawing on the political philosophy of Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). More specifically, I will argue that Spinoza's relational approach to knowledge formation and autonomy, in light of his understanding of the natural…

When presented with a new curriculum very few teachers teach in accordance with the prescribed pedagogies. This study reports on how teachers in Zimbabwe selected their teaching methods in response to a new curriculum reform policy. Using a qualitative multiple case study design and the theoretical lens of sense-making, the study interrogated…

This article delves into ecopedagogy, grounded in the work of the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire on popular education and critical pedagogies, to teach students to critically deconstruct the subjectivity and transformability of our world (all humans, human populations) with the rest of Earth (i.e., rest of Nature). As Friere emphasized humans'…

Across the globe, education has recently been through a major semantic shift, where new notions such as 'learning', 'competences', 'projects' came to replace or complement an older, more established, educational vocabulary. The political approach to education has also evolved, as many authors have underlined, from established national forms of…

This study focuses on student teachers who are on the threshold of entering the teaching profession. The aim of this study is to examine their motivations for becoming teachers, their educational ideals and the meaningful experiences inside and outside teacher education that influenced their educational ideals. To examine these, we conducted a…