I want to thank Rosa Hong Chen, Laura Louise Sarauw, Robin Small and Emile Bojesen for their thoughtful engagement with themes in my book, Happiness, Hope, and Despair: Rethinking the Role of Educa...

Running like a leitmotif through Peter Roberts’ recently published philosophico-educational writings there is a humanistic thread, which this article picks out. In order to ascertain the quality of this humanism, Roberts is positioned in relation to a pair of extant humanisms: radical and integral. Points of comparability and contrast are identified in several of the writer’s genre-crossing essays. These texts, it is argued, rectify deficiencies in how the two humanisms envision alternatives to capitalism. Roberts skilfully teases out the non-obvious futurological (...) implications of the work of a diverse array of authors, spanning the boundaries of philosophy, social criticism, and literature. In so doing, he underscores the intimate connection between personal self-transformation and ideal-driven social transformation. Further, Roberts challenges humanists of both radical and integral stripes to reconsider the moral grounds of their critique of capitalism. (shrink)

Academic freedom is often regarded as an absolute value of higher education institutions. Traditionally, its value is related to such topics as tenure, and the need for academic work to be free from undue political influence and other pressures that can challenge time-consuming research processes. However, when an analysis of student freedom begins with arguments about free research and free speech, undergirded as they generally are by liberal political philosophy, other considerations, related to broader views of freedom, can slip through (...) the cracks. In this essay, I want to take a step back from typical discussions of academic freedom, to take a broader perspective, before considering how freedom relates to student experience. The first part of this essay explores diverse elaborations and defences of freedom: How it is upheld in the liberal philosophy of Kant, the critical pedagogy of Freire, existentialism, and the capabilities approach to development. Exploring the often contrasting insights and implications of these views, I then connect relevant theoretical understandings derived from them to an exploration of the experience of freedom and of students. This essay thus considers how student freedom, and student academic freedom, are more precarious concepts than typically assumed. (shrink)

Peter Roberts’ recent book, Happiness, Hope, and Despair: Rethinking the Role of Education, has launched a ground-breaking effort that challenges dominant Western conceptions of happiness and the r...