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)

The modern tendency to treat all Greek Golden Age textuality as apolitical and escapist has contributed to the ongoing neglect of the first Western educational text, Hesiod's Works and days. Most commentators have missed the interplay of utopian and dystopian images in Hesiodic poetry for lack of the appropriate conceptual framework. Once the escapist prejudice is overcome, the Hesiodic text appears as the first extant Occidental coupling of political utopianism with emancipatory ethico-political education. Once freed of its dated metaphysical-theological resonances, (...) Hesiodic utopianism is compatible with a renewed political and ethical education for cosmopolitanism and justice because the embarrassingly detailed and teleological element of temporal modern utopias and the equally embarrassing rigid architecture of spatial utopias are absent. There is no strict utopian prediction and the message for change is articulated for the whole of humanity. (shrink)