Philosophy of Education

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, taught himself to read, as a teenager, by spending hours with Plato’s Republic and a dictionary. Later, he describes reading the cave allegory in Republic 7 as “a seminal experience” in his life, “for it had started me thinking and reading and trying to find a way to liberate Black people.” Last year, I decided to teach his book Revolutionary Suicide in my ancient philosophy class alongside Plato. A few (...) key considerations guided my work: I wanted to make sure that Newton and the Panthers were not reduced to Plato cheerleaders. I also needed to introduce the Black Panther Party and its complex histories without overwhelming the students. In terms of Plato, one goal of the class was to offer examples of what might arise as we viewed Republic 7 through this lens. Finally, since the Black Panther Party established many schools—often with inspiring results—I worked to both incorporate key elements of Black Panther pedagogy into my class and design assignments that might allow the students to feel challenged by and connected to these stories. (shrink)

The Brown vs. Board of Education decision’s central affirmation, “separate is inherently unequal,”(the “inherency statement”) is literally false—separate facilities, for different racial groups, can be equal, even if they are often not. The inherency statement has contributed to confusion about integration, (educational) equality, and the relation between them. (1) Schools with one-race-dominant demographics(“separated”) are not necessarily “Segregated” (in the Jim Crow Segregation sense). The forms of racial injustice and subordination involved in separated schools are not necessarily of the same moral (...) character and severity as those of Segregated schools. (2) The Brown decision did not make clear that what was being declared unconstitutional and in violation of the “equal protection of the laws” was precisely the white supremacist system of Segregation itself, in its educational manifestation. (The 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision did so). Separation is “inherently” unequal only within a Segregation system, where the separation reflects a socially recognized stigmatization and assault on the dignity of one group (3) The inherency statement falsely implies that all-Black or all-Indigenous (and thus “separate”) educational institutions cannot be excellent. (4) The existence of an “egalitarian pluralist” tradition, especially in African-American educational thought(but present in different forms within Indigenous, Latine, and Asian American educational traditions), which promotes both equality and separation, is unrecognized as a normative framework in Brown and in subsequent school separation/integration cases. (5) By its misleading touting of integration as the linchpin of equality, the inherency statement masks the vital role of outside-of-school factors, especially concerning students’ socio-economic background, that hinder the achievement of such equality, and closes out an inquiry into what would be required to bring about equality in light of those conditions. The inherency statement implies this because it says we already know that separation is the cause of inequality and integration its remedy. (6) The inherency statement expresses a failure to recognize that integration can be educationally valuable for reasons other than its (alleged or actual) links to equality, in particular as a distinctly favorable setting for civic education that prepares students for life and participation in a multiracial democracy. (The Court recognized the civic importance of education itself, but not specifically of the integrated form of education they mandated.). (shrink)

The years since the world-wide demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 have seen a significant embrace of antiracist education as part of moral education, followed by conservative rollback of such efforts. The article discusses both, and is applicable to the further retrenchment in the second Trump administration (in 2025). Antiracist moral and civic education should educate about both interpersonal racism (racism of individuals toward other individuals) and institutional racism (systemic racial injustices). Each of those areas involves (...) both “negative” values—avoiding racial wrongs—and “positive” values—promoting race-related goods. Negative interpersonal values include stereotyping, antipathy, and demeaning the other. Positive interpersonal values include respecting racial others as equals, recognizing positive racial differences, respecting cultures associated with racial groups. Negative institutional values are the most familiar—ending, mitigating, repairing systemic racial injustices. Positive institutional values include promoting racial justice, understanding, harmony, and a culture of respect throughout society represented in its institutions. Institutional racism requires civic education, in order to recognize patterns of injustice, to analyze their causes, and to be able to measure them against both morally sound and nationally salient ideals (such as equality, liberty, and justice). Antiracist education must be sensitive to students’ particular racial identities, and to asymmetries between the way white and non-white identities function morally and civicly. -/- Although sometimes it is important to ignore someone’s racial identity in interacting with them, “color-blindness,” promoted as an overarching principle by the Trump administration and the retrenchment legislation, cannot play that role. Antiracist education requires that we often take account of people’s race, and the issue is how to do that properly, not to ignore it entirely. (shrink)

It is plausible that there is a contrast between the rich emotional content which is often connected to laypeople’s interest in philosophy and the emotional austerity of doing academic philosophy. We propose the hypothesis that this contrast is one cause of the disappointment some students experience when they begin to study philosophy in college. We also propose a more demanding hypothesis, according to which this emotional contrast is confused with a semantic difference, which misleads students to think that the questions (...) which initially caused their interest in philosophy are not even considered by academic philosophy research. Moreover, we provide a list of concrete empirical research questions which need to be answered to establish whether these hypotheses are true, and we argue that, if they are true, they give rise to a hitherto unnoticed and important challenge to the teaching of philosophy. (shrink)

El artículo actualiza y redescubre la figura controversial de Bartolomé de las Casas, el dominico rebelde, su relevancia educativa y filosófica en el tercer milenio y el futuro civilizatorio. La primera tesis es su modo sustancialmente moderno de educar signado en la afectividad por el otro, la argumentación racional y la agencia. La segunda tesis es educar en la catástrofe moderna de la conquista, las violencias y resistencias, con cierto uso de la lógica contrafáctica de la ucronía y las memorias, (...) como oportunidades para abordar lo contingente y necesario en la filosofía de la historia y la educación. La tercera tesis es el problema de la diferencia y del vivir-con-otros, tanto en la vida de Bartolomé como en los dilemas neolascasianos de crisis de la modernidad y el futuro civilizatorio de las ciencias, tecnologías y sociedades (CTS). (shrink)

Les conceptions que les étudiants en sciences ont de la nature des modèles scientifiques conduisent à une image inexacte de ceux-ci, notamment lorsque les modèles sont vus comme de simples copies de la réalité. Outre le fait qu’elle en-tretient une conception fausse de la nature de la science, cette façon de se figurer les modèles peut constituer un obstacle pédagogique à l’apprentissage. Objec-tifs : Nous évaluons l’épistémologie de Mario Bunge afin de déterminer si elle peut contribuer à résoudre les problèmes (...) liés à la nature des modèles dans un contexte d’enseignement des sciences. Approche : Après avoir identifié les principales ca-tégories des modèles chez Bunge, nous les employons pour examiner divers as-pects du développement historique des modèles atomiques, puis nous appli-quons le cadre théorique ainsi obtenu aux problèmes liés aux diverses concep-tions des modèles en enseignement des sciences. Participants : En raison de la nature théorique de cette recherche, cette étude ne fait pas appel à des partici-pants autres que les chercheurs des recherches mentionnées. Collecte et analyse des données : Nous avons effectué une analyse comparative constante afin d’identifier les schémas de signification communs au cas historique et au cadre théorique. Résultats : Les caractéristiques attribuées aux modèles par Bunge ont été identifiées dans le cas des modèles atomiques. Ces caractéristiques forment un point de vue cohérent et permettent d’aborder, dans le contexte de l’enseignement des sciences, plusieurs questions liées aux diverses conceptions des modèles. (shrink)

This paper explores how an institution of higher education in partnership with a local parent-led organization can support authentic and organic Latinx family engagement and advocacy for dual language bilingual, bicultural, biliterate education (DLB3E). We reflect upon how engaging with Spanish-speaking parents helped us reimagine, reinvigorate, and transform local schools and universities by means of new understandings and practices of linguistic and cultural wealth, community assets, and family empowerment. We argue that this form of collaboration can lead to innovative and (...) positive changes in p-16 education. To demonstrate, we share our developing framework for organizing annual parent conferences hosted by the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Center for Bilingual Studies in partnership with RGV PUEDE (Rio Grande Valley Parents United for Excellent Dual Education/Padres Unidos para una Educación Dual de Excelencia). Our framework shows how to build and strengthen grassroots parent and community advocacy for DLB3E from pre-kindergarten through university by strengthening partnerships between parents, public schools, university faculty, and nonprofit organizations to organize conferences and other types of public conversations in Spanish. (shrink)

Current debates in Clinical Legal Education (CLE) exclude essay writing as a legitimate form of ‘clinical’ pedagogy. This article argues that essay writing should be classified as a form of CLE due to its potential to mirror legal practice and enhance students' reflective capacities. By incorporating Hegelian dialectical reasoning, the paper proposes a structured approach to legal essay writing that includes thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This method encourages students to engage deeply with legal arguments, reflecting on their merits and counterarguments. (...) The dialectical approach aligns with constructivist teaching methodologies, promoting critical thinking and practical skills relevant to legal practice and beyond. The article outlines the theoretical basis of this model and provides a practical framework for its implementation in legal education. It further connects this pedagogical strategy to the development of transferable skills that prepare students for professional legal environments. Through this dialectical method, the paper advocates for a more holistic and nuanced understanding of legal concepts, bridging the gap between academic theory and practical application, and, thus, making the case for the incorporation of Hegel-inspired essay writing into the definition of CLE. (shrink)

This article raises the thought of Heidegger as an alternative to the modern conceptualizations of learning that consider it as mere acquisition or construction of truth by knowledge or integration in truth through the Development of a higher level of consciousness. With Heidegger is going to be able to talk about learning how to inhabit the truth and to be inhabited by it, which implies the acquisition, the construction, the integration, but also "being-in-the-world" (Dasein) like a self before the other. (...) This implies a living idea of learning, because it is not a "representation" that is acquired or built, nor a simple "presentation" of a unitary whole in what one integrates with learning, but understands how living reality that is present and is represented Esenta, projecting itself creatively and shared in the "Being-with" (Mitsein) with tendency to the full unconcealment of the essence of Being with what to inhabit in the fullness of its meaning. (shrink)

Education as a Thick Epistemic Concept (ETEC) is a thick epistemology project that highlights the role of education in both epistemic virtues acquirement and motivation. In this paper, I argue that ETEC is not satisfactory because it relies on a version of Virtue Responsibilism (VR) that is also not plausible, in so far as it relies on the premise that both the motivation and the action-guidedness of epistemic and moral virtues are unified. By rejecting this unification premise, I show that (...) an epistemically virtuous person is not necessarily a morally virtuous/caring person either. It might happen to be the case that an epistemically virtuous person is also a morally virtuous person. However, there is no necessary connection between the two since there can be a sharp gap between their motivation and their action-guidedness. I also argue that there are bad forms of education that can further sharpen the gap between epistemic and moral virtues, further undermining ETEC. Thus, when it comes to education, a thick epistemology project should consider how different forms of education can sharpen the gap in the motivation and the action-guidedness of different types of virtues developed by learners. (shrink)

For feminists, working in/with the ‘posts’ is, always has been, and must be, a collective and collaborative endeavour. Increasingly, post-inquiry involves taking seriously multiplicities of humans, nonhumans, more-than-and-other-than-humans, multispecies and natureculture entities, including viral, microbial, elemental and atmospheric relationalities. The individual papers in this Special Issue, this editorial, and the Special Issue as a whole attest to this imperative pull to the collective-collaborative in seeking to explore the entangled relations of/between feminisms and the ‘posts’. As a collaborative-collective multiplicity, the Special (...) Issue interrogates what these entangled relations offer for reconfiguring gender and education research, theory, pedagogic practice, activism and praxis. (shrink)

Caleb Ward interviews Black feminist writer, poet, educator, organizer, and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Audre Lorde’s spirituality, her ecological political praxis, her pedagogy, and the cross-generational scale of social change.

Concerns around Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in higher education have so far largely centred on assessment integrity, resulting in fundamental questions about students’ broader engagement with these tools remaining underexplored. This paper reports on the findings of a survey that forms part of a wider study, comprising the first empirical investigation of GenAI use by university students as a method of engaging with their academic readings. Our survey of 101 students shows that over half of all students surveyed used GenAI (...) to some degree as a method of engaging with their unit readings. Our findings suggest that students turn to these tools in response to time constraints and conceptual difficulties, while maintaining complex attitudes toward their use: most welcome their availability, yet few report trusting or relying on GenAI-generated interpretations or summaries of texts. Importantly, our data reveals substantial demographic variations in usage patterns, with international students and those taking subjects as electives showing significantly higher rates of AI use to assist with reading. This suggests GenAI tools may be serving as important mediators for attempting to overcome epistemic barriers to learning, particularly for students who face additional linguistic or disciplinary challenges. (shrink)

This paper seeks to initiate a theory of “imaginative dialogues” by articulating four dialogical principles that enable such a dialogue to occur. It is part of a larger project that takes the Socratic dialogue, a widely utilized conversation technique in philosophy education, as a starting point and aims to reinterpret it by shifting emphasis to the pre-reflective, pre-linguistic, and multimodal aspects of dialogues, involving both their verbal and embodied dimensions. To integrate the verbal dimensions of a dialogue with its more (...) elusive embodied dimensions, the paper will examine the notion ‘dialogue’ from the perspective of two different strategies. The first strategy chiefly focuses on the dialogic encounter. The ‘in-between’ of this dialogic encounter enables something to emerge that transcends the individual perspective of the speakers involved. The second strategy is primarily concerned with internal differentiation. The minor differences that constitute this internal differentiation, differentiate a dialogue from within. These strategies are not mutually exclusive but indicate a variation in starting point and orientation. This paper proposes to combine these two strategies by linking accounts of the productive moments in verbal dialogues to an account of the imaginative potential of embodied dialogues. This will enable the articulation of four dialogical principles (derived from Lev Yakubinsky, Oswald Ducrot, Martin Buber, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz) through which an imaginative dialogue can proceed. (shrink)

This paper introduces the symposium on Spinoza on perfectionism and education. It frames the key issue of Spinoza’s perfectionism in terms of a perennial educational problem and introduces the different contributions to this special issue, where Steven Nadler’s main paper is followed by a series of full paper responses by a group of Spinoza scholars and educational theorists. To round off the special issue, Nadler comments on the responses to his main paper.

Philosophy of Education in South Africa during the latter half of the 20th century was characterised by three ideological strands. The first was known as ‘Fundamental Pedagogics’, the second ‘Liberalism’, and the third ‘Liberation Socialism’ (i.e., Marxism/Freire). When apartheid formally ended in 1994 these strands lost their impetus and faded from educational debates, arguably because of the disappearance of apartheid itself, as the locus relative to which these ideological strands positioned themselves. This paper characterises these three positions and some of (...) their major proponents and ideas, and then present an overview of where philosophy of education in South Africa is now, nearly 30 years after apartheid. I suggest that since 1994 the strong, competing philosophical and ideological commitments that informed philosophy of education during apartheid have significantly dissipated, and have not been meaningfully replaced. Instead, education policy and curriculum are now arguably underpinned by neo-liberal concerns, and the results have been, and continue to be, an unmitigated disaster for schooling in South Africa. Part of the reason for this is because philosophy of education is much diminished, and no longer directly meaningfully contributes to, and informs, educational discourse, policy, teacher training and curriculum in South African schooling. (shrink)

A large body of evidence suggests that the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) improves learning. In courses that use PSI, the material is divided into units, students must pass a test on each unit before advancing to the next unit, there’s no group-level instruction, and students advance in the course at their own pace. While studies find that PSI improves learning outcomes in a wide range of settings, researchers haven’t studied the effectiveness of PSI in critical thinking classes. In this (...) paper, I argue that teaching critical thinking with PSI can effectively promote critical thinking skills. I describe a course that uses PSI to teach critical thinking and I present evidence from pre- and post-tests that indicates that students substantially improved their reasoning skills in this course. I also discuss the costs and drawbacks of using this method of instruction and consider ways of addressing these problems. (shrink)

The chaotic situation of today’s VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) and TUNA (Turbulent, Uncertain, Novel, Ambiguous) world is bringing more and more active and passive reforms, including positive and negative aspects, that reform business models. Educational institutions are not exceptional. Regarding the nature of educational institutions’ operation in today’s rapidly changing context, school leaders also need to raise concerns similar to those of business managers from other industries: “How do their institutions continuously renovate to adapt to tomorrow’s world?” Thus, (...) based on organisational learning theories, this project aims to establish a framework to evaluate educational leadership’s influence on the organisational knowledge circulation effectiveness within the K-12 education context. The study combines a structured literature review, bibliometrics analysis, and high-order structural equation model analysis on the survey for teachers among Vietnamese public and private K-12 schools. First, this project proposed and validated a toolset to measure educational leadership as a combination of principalship and teacher leadership. Second, it revealed new insights about the impacts of educational leadership, knowledge circulation, and school culture on teachers’ job satisfaction. The project also offers insights into teachers’ professional development activities across various school types and grade levels in Vietnam, which contribute to further continuous renovation of Vietnamese K-12 schools, and diversify the corpus of educational leadership studies. This project’s results extended the applications of organisational learning theories in K-12 education, as well as can be adopted to establish further knowledge management frameworks in other settings such as higher education or vocational education. (shrink)

In this essay, I investigate if self-respect as Robin Dillon conceives of it in her essay “Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political” can be taught if we presuppose Barbara Herman’s theory of moral education. For Dillon, self-respect is a nonpropositionally held and emotionally forged interpretive orientation that determines one’s understanding of oneself. Further, it cannot be reconstituted through reason if it has been damaged. The claim that reason cannot remedy a lack of self-respect in persons is at odds with Herman’s reason-based training (...) in value. I argue that we do not have sufficient grounds to think that Herman’s reason-based training in value cannot help instil Dillon-type self-respect. (shrink)

In this paper Michael Vazquez and Dustin Webster consider the practice of deliberating about ethical case studies as a means to contribute to the professional development of educators. An ongoing debate is whether or not the study of ethical theory should be included in this practice. Vazquez and Webster argue that a popular strategy, known as the Phronetic Approach, is vulnerable to what they call “epistemic blinders” that arise in the absence of the scaffolding provided by theory. They then sketch (...) an alternative approach to case-based reasoning inspired by Barbara Herman's notion of middle theory. The middle theory approach naturally suggests a balanced method for using case studies in teacher professional development: expose educators to some theory, but only to the degree and at the level appropriate for the specific audience and in light of how frequent interactions with that audience will be. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn’un ufuk açıcı eseri Bilimsel Devrimlerin Yapısı’nda yer verdiği bilimin yapısı ve işleyişi konusundaki tespitleri ve bilimin gerçek doğasını anlama yönündeki girişimleri bilime yönelik sergilenen pozitivist bakış açısını değiştirerek eğitici ve öğrencilerin modern bilim anlayışının özelliklerini daha iyi anlamalarında ve eğitim alanında yeni düzenlemelerin yapılmasında giderek etkili olmaktadır. Başta fen eğitimi araştırmacıları olmak üzere her geçen yıl eğitimciler tarafından Kuhn’un çalışmalarına yönelik artan ilgi ve başvuru bu durumu destekler niteliktedir (Loving ve Cobern, 2000, s. 187). Eğitim araştırmalarında Kuhn’un görüşlerinin (...) etkisinin en çok hissedildiği alanlar kavramsal değişim araştırmaları, yapılandırmacı öğrenme yaklaşımı, Bilim, Teknoloji ve Toplum çalışmaları ile bilime ilişkin kültürel çalışmalar gösterilebilir (Matthews, 2022: 38). Fen eğitimi araştırmalarında ise kavramsal değişim kuramları ile yapılandırmacı öğrenme kuramlarında bu etki görülmektedir (Loving ve Cobern, 2000, s. 187). Fen eğitimi ve öğrenimi konusundaki mevcut yaklaşımlar göz önüne alındığında Kuhn’un düşüncelerinin eğitim alanındaki yansımaları yapılandırmacı öğrenme kuramının temel kaynaklarından birisi olarak değerlendirilmekte (Hodson, 1988, s. 32), bilimsel ilerleme kapsamında paradigma, paradigma değişimi ve paradigmaların eşölçülemezliği gibi bilimin işleyişine yönelik belirlemeleri ise kavramsal değişim kuramında sıklıkla başvurulan görüşler olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Kavramsal değişim kuramlarını desteklemek amacıyla birçok eğitimci (Loving ve Cobern, 2000; Songer ve Linn, 1991; Duschl ve Gitomer, 1991; Metz, 1991) tarafından Kuhn’un bilimsel ilerlemeyi örneklendirmek üzere başvurduğu fizik gibi bilimlerde görülen gelişim ve değişim ile bilimlerde meydana gelen paradigma değişiklerine yönelik düşünceleri, eğitimde gerçekleşen bireysel gelişim ve değişim sonucunda insan zihninde meydana gelen bilişsel değişimler ve kavramsal değişimlerle ilişkilendirilerek öğrencilerin eğitilmesine yönelik araştırmalarda kullanılmaktadır. Fen eğitimi özelinde kavramsal değişim araştırmaları bireysel öğrenme sırasında ya da sonucunda zihinde gerçekleşen kavramsal değişim ve bilişsel gelişim aşamaları ile bilimsel devrimler sonucunda bilim insanları ve bilim topluluğunda meydana gelen kavramsal değişim ve bilimin gelişim aşamaları arasında benzerlik kurularak öğrencilerin fen öğrenimi sırasındaki zihinsel durumlarının araştırmacılar tarafından daha iyi anlaşılabilmesi amacıyla ileri sürülmektedir (Hewson, 1981, s. 383). Kavramsal değişim araştırmaları, Piaget’nin (1969) çocukların bilişsel gelişimi konusundaki görüşleri ile Thomas Kuhn'un (1970a) bilimsel bilginin tarihsel gelişimi hakkındaki çalışmalarının ilişkilendirilmeye başlanmasından yola çıkılarak inşa edilmekle birlikte kavramsal değişim kuramı ya da yaklaşımı fen eğitimi araştırmalarında ön plana çıkan bir yöntem ya da paradigma haline gelmeye başlamıştır (Abell, Appleton, ve Hanuscin, 2013, s. 7; 59). Kavramsal değişim konusunda araştırma yapanlar Kuhn’un bilimin yapısı hakkındaki görüşlerinden hareketle öğrencilerin eğitim alırken karşılaştıkları yeni bilgiler ile zihinlerindeki mevcut ön kabuller ve bilgiler arasındaki uyum ya da uyumsuzluk durumunu belirtmek amacıyla yararlanmaktadırlar (Abimbola 1987, Duit 1991, Villani, 1992). Bu kapsamda çalışmada ilk olarak fen eğitimi alanında kavramsal değişim yaklaşımının temel unsurlarına öncülük eden Kuhn’un bilim anlayışı çerçevesinde bilimsel ilerleme, paradigma değişimi ve farklı paradigmaların eşölçülmezliğine yönelik görüşlerinin detaylarına yer verilerek kavramsal değişim yaklaşımını hangi açılardan etkilediğinin tespiti yapılmaktadır. Ardından Kuhn’un fen eğitimine yönelik görüşleri doğrultusunda ileri sürdüğü öğrencilerin zihninde paradigma gibi önceden bir kabul olduğu düşüncesi sonucunda eğitim araştırmalarında öğrenci merkezli anlayışın ön plana çıkması ile kavramsal değişim yaklaşımının detaylarına yer verilmektedir. Son olarak Margaret Masterman’ın belirlemeleri ile Kuhn’un Bilimsel Devrimlerin Yapısı’nda paradigma kavramını çeşitli anlamlarda kullanmasının kavramsal değişim yaklaşımının temel öğretilerine hangi açılardan kaynaklık ettiği vurgulanmaktadır. Böylelikle bilim tarihinde ya da bilimsel ilerleme süreçlerinde görülen kavramsal değişim ile eğitimcilerin yararlandığı bireylerin zihinlerinde gerçekleşen kavramsal değişime yönelik kurulan benzerlik ilişkisinde öğrencilerin bilişsel ve zihinsel durumlarını daha iyi anlamak için başvurulan kavramsal değişim yaklaşımına ilişkin öğeler derinleştirilerek Kuhn’un görüşlerinin bu öğelerle nasıl ilişkilendirildiği ortaya konulmaktadır. (shrink)

The analyses undertaken in this article refer to the harm experienced in close relationships, where the lack of forgiveness and the breakdown in the relationship can be a source of additional suffering for the victim. Referring to the discussion conducted in the Journal of Philosophy of Education in the years 2002–2003, I assume that one of the most difficult challenges for the injured individual is to determine whether change made by the perpetrator of evil encourages the individual to trust the (...) perpetrator or whether forgiveness can actually be understood as consent to further harm. Another challenge is that the injured person must make a decision about forgiveness when s/he perceives change in the perpetrator if lack of forgiveness is not to become the cause of a definitive breakdown in the relationship. I propose the thesis that a person – by reference to acts of self-forgiveness – can learn to identify the moment when forgiveness is possible and necessary. After explaining what self-forgiveness is, what act it relates to and what its moral value is, I show how self-forgiveness and reflection on the process of self-forgiveness can benefit education for forgiveness of another person. (shrink)

To step up the activity level of academic philosophizing, “Teaching World Philosophies” will propose that one first engage in a thorough housecleaning before teaching world-philosophical traditions today. In the path that will be sketched as an example in this regard, I will critically engage “the West,” a concept that looms over an adequate academic engagement with world philosophies today. Bringing into the conversation Humayun Kabir’s (1906–1969) analysis of philosophy as a space that can generate and foster critical independent thinking within (...) a society, I will argue that a change in ingrained patterns of conducting a social activity like academic philosophy can be changed. This change might, in fact, be urgent especially in those locales in Europe in which academic philosophy as it is practiced today was crafted. (shrink)

Literary cognitivists claim that works of literature can have a significant cognitive value and can be effective in providing readers with opportunities for learning. Anti-cognitivists challenge cognitivists by questioning how literature can offer arguments or evidence for readers’ adoption of new knowledge or understanding. As a mode of side-stepping these objections, cognitivists have recently tended to make their claims more modest and claim only that literature clarifies knowledge readers already possess or provides the opportunity for the development of certain general (...) cognitive skills. In this chapter, I put forward a more bold account of literature’s cognitive value. I argue that a reader’s engagement with a literary work can lead to reconfiguration of their understanding of the subject matter with which the work deals. This bolder defence of literature’s cognitive value, and the account I offer of how readers can access such cognitive value, indicate how literature can form a significant part of character education. (shrink)

The point of departure of this paper is the striking similarities between the dispositions critical media literacy education aims to cultivate and the characteristics conspiracy theorists claim to embody. The golden question of critical literacy, “who benefits?” is in fact the central question of conspiracy theorists: “cui bono?” While critical media literacy educators teach learners to disrupt the common sense, to interrogate multiple viewpoints, to focus on sociopolitical issues, and to take actions and promote social justice, conspiracy theorists claim that (...) they do exactly those things. What I wish to illuminate through this juxtaposition, however, is not a way to clearly demarcate “critical” from “conspiratorial” theorizing, but is a question of educational desirability of skepticism. Skepticism in this paper is not understood as a classical epistemological question of the possibility of knowledge attainment, but as a form of vigilance toward epistemic authorities like the government, media, and academic institutions. Drawing on philosophy of conspiracy theories and political epistemology, I illuminate the problem of radical skepticism that characterizes some conspiracy theories and discuss the pivotal epistemic role of trust. Through this, I claim that critical media literacy education for democratic citizenship must strike a balance between cultivation of skepticism and building of trust toward epistemic authorities. (shrink)

In his paper “Palladium of the People – A Kantian Right to Internet Access”, Christopher Buckman argues for internet access as a universal right. He bases his argumentation on the potential of social media, which has clearly proven itself to be a wrong assumption. This paper builds on his argumentation, but uses the concept of the Fediverse – a decentralized alternative to closed social media platforms – instead of traditional social media to argue for universal internet access, by this completing (...) his argument and additionally, leading to a Kantian right to Fediverse access and three follow-up questions: What are reasonable ways to achieve universal Fediverse Access? How can we act morally in the Fediverse? How can the Fediverse itself become and stay moral – and implicitly through this: how could the Fediverse contribute to a moral world? (shrink)

In this essay, I offer some of the reasons to think that Plato has a substantial contribution to make to contemporary thinking about moral education. To allow a sense of how wide the range of reasons is, I start by listing ten miscellaneous reasons that one can compellingly offer and some of which scholars *have* offered. Then I present my preferred reason, which involves a way of approaching Plato that is new and unorthodox. When you approach Plato this way, you (...) don't try to interpret him correctly. Instead, you use his writings simply as a tool for theorizing, and what you theorize about is how best to carry out the Socratic project of leading other people to self-examination. (shrink)

This paper argues that Rousseau’s lawgiver is best thought of as a fictional teacher of peoples. It is fictional as it reflects an idea that is entertained despite its contradictory nature, and it is contradictory in the sense that it describes ‘an undertaking beyond human strength and, to execute it, an authority that amounts to nothing’ (II.7; 192). Rousseau conceives of the social contract as a necessary device for enabling the transferal of individual power to the body politic, for subsuming (...) individual wills under the general will, and for aligning the good of the individual with the common good. For the social contract to be valid, however, it needs to be preceded by a desire to belong to a moral community that can induce people to join willingly, and that will grant legitimacy to the laws established. If the social contract is the machinery that makes the body politic function, the lawgiver is ‘the mechanic who invents the machine’ (II.7; 191). In this paper we will look closer at the pedagogical functions of Rousseau’s mythical lawgiver by first examining the relationship between the social contract, the general will and the lawgiver. Then, we aim to flesh out a pedagogical understanding of the figure of the lawgiver by way of the two educational dimensions of accommodation and transformation. Finally, we will argue for the importance of understanding Rousseau’s lawgiver as a fictional device allowing for the fundamental and enduring educational task of balancing between the preservation and renewal of society. (shrink)

There are two popular views regarding the origin of critical thinking: (1) The concept of critical thinking began with Socrates and his Socratic method of questioning. (2) The term ‘critical thinking’ was first introduced by John Dewey in 1910 in his book How We Think. This paper argues that both claims are incorrect. Firstly, critical reflection was a distinguishing characteristic of the Presocratic philosophers, setting them apart from earlier traditions. Therefore, they should be recognized as even earlier pioneers of critical (...) thinking. Secondly, John Dewey not only used the term ‘critical thinking’ before 1910, but there were also other authors who used it before him. The meaning of ‘critical thinking’ at the turn of the twentieth century was shaped by various traditions of linguistic usage, including literary criticism, science and medicine, and Kantian philosophy. (shrink)

A major part of philosophical work is engagement with argumentative texts. Engaging with an argumentative text involves correctly identifying the arguments presented in this text. In the context of teaching philosophy in school, the difficulty of correctly identifying arguments in philosophical texts is often underestimated. In this paper, I focus on one specific problem with argument identification that has been neglected in philosophy didactics thus far: the problem that there are many non-argumentative phenomena in an argumentative text that are easily (...) misidentified as expressing (part of) an argument. It is easy to fall for such phenomena if one is not aware of this problem, thereby misinterpreting the author’s intentions. This paper aims to present and discuss such phenomena, as well as to provide guidelines on how to help students recognize them. (shrink)

Many instructors see the use of LLMs like ChatGPT on course assignments as a straightforward case of cheating, and try hard to prevent their students from doing so by including new warnings of consequences on their syllabi, turning to iffy plagiarism detectors, or scheduling exams to occur in-class. And the use of LLMs probably is cheating, given the sorts of assignments we are used to giving and the sorts of skills we take ourselves to be instilling in our students. But (...) despite legitimate ethical and pedagogical concerns, the case that LLMs should never be used in academic contexts is quite difficult to see. Many primary and secondary schools are cutting back their writing instruction in an effort to teach to the test; at the same time, many high-end knowledge workers are already quietly expected to leverage their productivity with LLMs. To prepare students for an ever-changing world, we probably do have to teach them at least a little bit about writing with ChatGPT. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that large language models (LLMs) subvert the traditional undergraduate philosophy paper. For the enthusiastic, LLMs merely subvert the traditional idea that students ought to write philosophy papers “entirely on their own.” For the more pessimistic, LLMs merely facilitate plagiarism. We believe that these controversies neglect a more basic crisis. We argue that, because one can, with minimal philosophical effort, use LLMs to produce outputs that at least “look like” good papers, many students will complete paper assignments (...) in a way that fails to develop their philosophical abilities. We argue that this problem exists even if students can produce better papers with AI and even if instructors can detect AI-generated content with decent reliability. But LLMs also create a pedagogical opportunity. We propose that instructors shift the emphasis of their assignments from philosophy papers to “LLM dialogues”: philosophical conversations between the student and an LLM. We describe our experience with using these types of assignments over the past several semesters. We argue that, far from undermining quality philosophical instruction, LLMs allow us to teach philosophy more effectively than was possible before. (shrink)

A review of Gulson, Sellar, and Webb’s "Algorithms of Education: How Datafication and Artificial Intelligence Shape Policy" (2022) published on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.

We conducted an experiment to determine the impact of short-term pressure on 1,228 Grade 8 students’ outcomes when performing simple math exercises. We required all students to complete 100 simple math questions for 90 seconds. We analysed students’ results and then divided them into three groups: (i) a control group who did nothing; (ii) a group who performed an easy task; and (iii) a group who performed a difficult task. Finally, we required all students to solve another 100 simple math (...) questions in 90 seconds and used a Bayesian model to compare the results of the three groups. We discovered that students who successfully solved complex tasks received higher outcomes within short periods than those who succeeded in the easy task. However, students who failed to solve either the easy or the problematic tasks received lower results than those who did nothing between the two attempts. Also, we found no differences between the results of male and female students. The findings shed further light on the Yerkes-Dodson law about the influence of stress and distress on students’ performances. (shrink)

Diante dos embates e dilemas que vive o Brasil após o ano de 2016, fundamentalmente no que diz respeito a educação pública brasileira, o presente trabalho procurou se debruçar, refletir e verificar a posição e situação do educando brasileiro no cenário social nacional, e sobretudo escolar. Levamos em conta como base de configuração do indivíduo-sujeito e estudante sua identidade enquanto ser biopsicossocial, isso na perspectiva Aristotélica e Marxista de homem, tanto como ser dotado de razão, emoção, vontade, social, político, teleológico (...) (Aristóteles) e essencialmente ser de trabalho e histórico (Marx). (shrink)

In this paper Johan Dahlbeck sets out to propose a pedagogy of “as if,” seeking to address the educational paradox of how students can be influenced to approximate a life guided by reason without assuming that they are already sufficiently rational to adhere to dictates of practical reason. He does so by outlining a fictionalist account, drawing primarily on Hans Vaihinger's systematic treatment of heuristic fictions and on Spinoza's ideas about how passive affects can be made to strengthen reason. Dahlbeck (...) suggests that such an account can help us overcome the problem of assuming that reason needs to be enlisted as an instrument in the educational endeavor to live according to the guidance of reason. The reason this is so is that fictions can use passive affects that are prosocial and that thereby strengthen the sense of community necessary for laying a cooperative foundation for successful joint striving. Dahlbeck suggests further that exemplary teachers are crucial to this endeavor insofar as they can offer educational fictions as imaginative and temporary placeholders for the truth, allowing students to act “as if” they were already guided by reason. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel educational approach to epistemic vice rehabilitation. Its authors Gerry Dunne and Alkis Kotsonis note that, like Quassim Cassam, they remain optimistic about the possibility of improvement with regard to epistemic vice. However, unlike Cassam, who places the burden of minimizing or overcoming epistemic vices and their consequences on the individual, Dunne and Kotsonis argue that vice rehabilitation is best tackled via the exemplarist animated community of inquiry zetetic principles and defeasible-reasons-regulated deliberative processes. The vice-reduction method (...) they propose is made up of four distinct yet complementary components: (1) positive exemplarism of epistemic virtue (saints), (2) negative exemplarism of epistemic vice (sinners), (3) direct teaching/instruction, and (4) cognitive apprenticeship. Dunne and Kotsonis argue that this pedagogical intervention appropriately considers learnings deriving from forensic scrutiny of both ideal and non-ideal interpersonally calibrated zetetic features integral to knowledge acquisition as well as wider societal influences impacting the development of agents' epistemic character. It bridges research on vice epistemology (Cassam's obstructivist theory), social epistemology (corrupted social processes mitigating against vice rehabilitation), virtue epistemology, and moral exemplarism. (shrink)

John Tillson argues, on grounds of children’s well-being, that it is impermissible to teach them religious views. I defend a practice of pluralistically advocating religious views to children. As long as there are no monopolies of influence over children, and as long as advocates do not use coercion, deceit, or manipulation, children can greatly benefit without having their rational abilities subverted, or incurring undue risk to form false beliefs. This solution should counter, to some extent, both perfectionist and antiperfectionist reasons (...) against initiating children into religions. (shrink)

The 1970s Wages Against Housework (WAH) movement has much to offer as we form a “new normal” for life and work within the Covid-19 pandemic. WAH feminist philosophers Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, as well as WAH critic Angela Davis outline the ways in which the housewife functions as a laborer within capitalist accumulation, as her duties to care for the home and rear the children generate the possibility of the husband to labor outside the home. This (...) role of the housewife in Dalla Costa and James’ “social factory” parallels the work of teachers and the chorus of demands to “return to the classroom” that were placed on teachers in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Highlighting these parallels, the argument of this essay is simple: Covid-19 has visibilized the underpaid and unpaid labor of teachers. We ought to engage this moment of visibilization to demand transformative change to the teaching profession. Due to the parallels between WAH's “housewife” and teachers, we have much to learn from WAH theorizing as we demand those transformative changes, especially now as we solidify our “new normal” more than two years since the Covid-19 pandemic began. (shrink)

Education systems are full of harmful violence of types often unrecognised or misunderstood by educators, education leaders, and bureaucrats. Educational violence harms a great number of innocent persons (those who, morally speaking, may not be justifiably harmed). Accordingly, this paper rejects educational violence used to achieve educational ends. It holds that educational violence is unjustified if the condition that innocent persons are harmed is satisfied, that this condition is satisfied in current educational practice (compulsory schooling), and that, therefore, the current (...) education system (schooling) acts in an unjustifiable manner. If the means of educating cannot be justified, then that education system itself cannot be justified, since an end cannot be justifiably pursued if the means requisite to pursuing it are unjustifiable. I call this stance ‘educational pacifism’. (shrink)

The truth table method, natural deduction, and the truth tree method, the three validity proving methods standardly taught in an introductory logic course, are too clumsy for the battlefield of real-life. The “short truth table” test is handy at times, but it stumbles at many other times. In this paper, we set up a general method that can beat all the methods mentioned above in a contest of speed. Furthermore, the procedure can be step-by-step paraphrased in a natural language, so (...) that, unlike the other methods, a real-life logical problem can be analyzed and explained in a real-life language too. (shrink)

The present study aimed to examine how to improve the effectiveness of moral exemplar-applied interventions based on the pillars of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) framework, autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Past research has mainly focused on the relatedness and attainability of moral exemplars for predicting motivation outcomes. The data for this study consisted of synthesized data sets from previous studies examining the motivational impacts of distinct moral exemplars and intervention methods. The main syntheses for these data sets used Multilevel Modeling (MLM) (...) focusing on relatability, attainability, and intervention methods, corresponding to relatedness, competence, and autonomy in the SDT, respectively, as predictors. In general, there was a significant interaction effect between the attainability or relatability, and the intervention method. Autonomous instruction methods, which support autonomy, were demonstrated to boost motivational outcomes. Implications from this study support the employment of SDT to examine the use of moral exemplars in moral education and were consistent with previous exemplar studies. (shrink)

In de afgelopen tijd is compensatoir toetsen in het Nederlandse onderwijs een populaire toetsvorm geworden. Hierbij slaagt een student voor een reeks toetsen indien het gemiddelde op deze reeks voldoende is. In deze analyse betogen wij dat het compensatoire systeem echter zowel onverdedigbaar als moreel gezien onverantwoordelijk is. Het grote gevaar van compensatoire toetsregimes is namelijk dat het hiaten in kennis en vaardigheden tolereert, wat de validiteit van een diploma ondermijnt en bovendien medeburgers in gevaar brengt.

In this paper, I show that there is a bidirectional relationship between gender-based social norms and gender-segregated education policies that excludes girls from knowledge production within the Iranian school system. I argue that gender segregation in education reproduces hermeneutic inequality through the reinforcement of epistemic segregation as a form of epistemic injustice. In particular, I focus on gender-based instructional epistemic injustice, which refers to a set of epistemic practices that actively exclude a student or an education professional in their capacity (...) as a knower from the process of knowledge production within an education system based on gender dynamics, roles, norms, or expectations. This, in addition, has an impact on schoolboys through the reproduction of active ignorance. I conclude that in societies such as Iran, where highly gendered norms play out in the school system and are further reinforced by that system, the result is not limited to gender segregation itself, but extends beyond it to a form of epistemic injustice that wrongs students by reproducing and reinforcing those highly gendered norms. (shrink)

انطلاقا من التقارير الدولية ، والتقرير الأخير للمجلس الأعلى للتعليم ، يتضح جليا أن التعليم نظام يعاني أزمة تتمثل مظاهرها في ضعف مستوى تعلم الخريجين، وتفشي أزمة البطالة، الشيء الذي يؤثر سلبا على التنمية ويعرقلها. سوف لن ندعي أننا سباقون إلى تناول هذه الظاهرة بالتحليل، كما أننا لسنا بصدد وضع خطة للنهوض بالمنظومة التعليمية، ولكن ما يشفع لنا في الكتابة فيه، أنه موضوع مزمن ويحتاج إلى الكثير من الدراسة. كما أن هذه الخطة ستتضمن من أهم عناصرها جديدا غير وارد في (...) الدراسات السابقة وهو الدعوة إلى إدماج تعليم المهن والحرف اليدوية في الأسلاك التعليمية، بدءا من الخامس ابتدائي وإلى مستوى الباكلوريا. والدعوة إلى تغيير النظرة الدونية لهذه المهن ولأصحابها باعتبارها النواة الأساسية لبناء اقتصاد مستقل. ولأنها تشكل الحلقة المفقودة بين تعليمنا وبين مشكلات الحياة باعتبارها غائبة عن هذه الأسلاك، وهذا واقع لا يمكن لأحد نكرانه ولا أحتاج عليه دليلا. وحتى إذا قال أحد أن هذا التعليم موجود، سنرد عليه أنه وجود في مراكز التكوين المهني المستقلة عن الأسلاك التعليمية، كما لا يدخله في نظر العامة إلا الفاشلون. مع العلم أن من أسبا ب فشل نظامنا التعليمي هو كونه تعليما نظريا لا علاقة له بالجانب التطبيقي. للتوصل إلى هذه الخطة، والتي سنحاول قدر الإمكان أن تكون متكاملة، سنعرض لبعض تصورات مفكرين وتربويين مغاربة مثل محمد عابد الجابري 1973، ومحمد جسوس 1997، ومادي لحسن 1997، وكل من الفضيل العيرج وبوشعيب الزين 2014. كما سنعرض لعناصر الالتقاء بينها ولطبيعة اشتغال أصحابها. ثم سنتناول تجربتين عالميتين رائدتين هما اليابان وماليزيا. وسوف لن نقارن بينها وبين المغرب من أجل المقارنة لذاتها، ولكن من أجل وضع الأصبع على سر نهضتها وسر أزمتنا التعليمية الدائمة، وأيضا من أجل استلهام خطتنا التي ذكرنا بعضا من ملامحها قبل قليل. فما هي طبيعة التصورات السابقة؟ وما طبيعة النماذج العالمية الناجحة؟ وما هي بالتالي الخطة التي نقترحها للخروج من الفشل؟ وما الفرق بينها وبين تصورات المفكرين المغاربة المذكورين؟ وهل نحن في حاجة إلى خطط وتصورات، أم أننا في حاجة إلى شيء آخر؟ هذا ما سنحاول الإجابة عليه، اعتمادا على منهج يجمع بين الوصف والتحليل والمقارنة والتفسير في إطار يجمع بين دراسة المضمون ودراسة الحالة. Revue Brochures Educatives مجلة كراسات تربوية (2018). (shrink)

تعتبر الإشكالات المرتبطة بتأهيل المدرسين وبآفاق إصلاح مؤسسات التكوين، أحد الانشغالات التي اهتم بها رجال التربية والتعليم، محاولين الوقوف عند معوقات الإصلاحات السابقة والبحث في أسبابها ومصادرها، وبالتالي التفكير في مشروع إصلاحي يستدعي تقييما عاما لبنيات الخلل من أجل اقتراح سبل فعالة وإجرائية لعلاجها. من هنا جاء قرار إحداث مراكز جديدة بالمغرب، تسمى المراكز الجهوية لمهن التربية والتكوين، والتي سعت إلى إعداد منهاج متكامل وعدة تأهيلية شاملة تستجيب لمستجدات الهندسة البيداغوجية والتربوية الجديدة، ولمنظومة التربية والتكوين، انطلاقا من مرجعيات وطنية ودولية، (...) تتجلى أهميتها في : - استثمار الخبرات والتوجهات الحديثة في مجال التكوين والتأهيل وتحسين مردودية الطلبة المدرسين وتطويرها. - التصور الجديد للمدرس المستقبلي باعتباره وسيطا بين المؤسسة التربوية والمحيط الاجتماعي، وبين مصادر التعلمات وكيفية تدبيرها وأجرأتها، وكذا باعتباره مؤطرا للمشروع المؤسساتي للمدرسة والتربوي للمتعلم، ومخططا للأنشطة التواصلية والبيداغوجية المتمركزة حول المتعلم. - تقديم توصيف جديد لمعايير ولوج هذه المراكز ومواصفات التخرج منها. بدهي أن أي مدرس يمر خلال مساره المهني بثلاث محطات رئيسية هي: المؤسسات الجامعية التي تقدم تكوينا أساسيا في مواد التخصص، تستجيب لحاجيات النظام التربوي والسياسة التعليمية للبلد، ولمواصفات ولوج مؤسسات التأهيل التدريسي، حيث يكون التشاور والتنسيق واستثمار الأبحاث والدراسات المنجزة هو الأساس المنظم للعلاقات بين الأطراف السابقة، ثم هناك مؤسسات التأهيل التدريسي التي تكون الرابط وحلقة الوصل بين الجامعات والمؤسسات التعليمية لاكتساب المعارف النظرية والتجريبية لممارسة المهنة، وأخيرا هناك المؤسسة التعليمية والتطورات البيداغوجية والمعلوماتية التي عرفتها، والتصورات التي تحملها حول المتعلم والمنهاج، وكيفية تبليغ التعلمات وتقويمها. هذه المؤسسات مجتمعة أصبحت تؤمن- وفق الإصلاحات التربوية والبيداغوجية الأخيرة- بمبدأ الاصطحاب الذي يعتبر مطلبا تكوينيا وتأهيليا أساسيا للأساتذة المتدربين عوضا عن القيادة، إذ يقتضي تموقع المصاحب (بكسر الحاء) (وهو عدة أطراف سنحددها لاحقا) جنب المصاحب(بفتح الحاء) وليس خلفه، أو أمامه، وليسيرا معا نحو تحقيق أهداف التكوين المسطرة مسبقا، والنابعة من حاجات المتدربين، وهذا يستدعي منا الوقوف أولا على أهم المقاربات المعتمدة في منهاج التأهيل لتنفيذ دور الاصطحاب. Revue Brochures Educatives مجلة كراسات تربوية (2018). (shrink)