This essay is a review of Dan W. Butin’s edited collection Teaching Social Foundations of Education: Context, Theories, and Issues. I explore how this book helps us to think about the field of social foundations: what it is we do, why, and the challenges we face. I also look at the themes that cut across all ten essays in the collection, including engaging diversity, demonstrating democracy, and reflecting on social foundations as a field.

What is philosophy of education? This question has been answered in as many ways as there are those who self-identify as philosophers of education. However, the questions our field asks and the research conducted to answer them often produce papers, essays, and manuscripts that we can read, evaluate, and ponder. This paper turns to those tangible products of our scholarly activities. The titles, abstracts, and keywords from every article published from 2000 to 2010 in four journals of educational philosophy were (...) analyzed to find out what kind of research is being published in the field of philosophy of education. Over 143 different concepts were identified and analyzed from 1,572 articles. The data suggests that philosophy and education, while primarily concerned with theory, teaching, and learning, tackles a diversity of subjects in a slightly narrowing band of thematic topics. (shrink)

To date, philosophers of education have shown relatively little interest in analyzing the theoretical basis in which the economics of education is grounded. The main argument of this article is that due to the changing nature of orthodox economic theory’s influence on education, a philosophical examination of its underpinnings is required. It is maintained that as a result of economics imperialism, namely the penetration of economic modes of thinking into new domains, educational philosophers have an essential role to play in (...) examining economic theory. The article briefly discusses this role and provides some examples of how educational philosophers can make a unique contribution to current thinking about the relationship between economics and education. (shrink)