While most educational practices today place an excessive amount of attention on discourse, this article attaches great importance to the reciprocity between speech and silence by drawing from the writings of Plato's Socrates, Augustine, and Paul Gauguin for whom this reciprocity is of the essence in learning. These three figures teach that we learn to speak, listen, and act in relation with the silence of our thoughts. This article claims that Socrates' dialectic is nothing but inward or silent dialogue, which (...) reappears in or is advanced by Augustine, and which is also shared by Paul Gauguin. Yet its manifestation differs one from the other: in Socrates, it manifests itself as silence of thought; in Augustine, as inner vision or contemplation; and in Gauguin, as creative thought or activity. By neglecting or separating speech from silence, today's educational methods do not prepare students to respond to life's questions; neither do they enable students to infuse their conversation with an appreciation of life's beauty. (shrink)

Elizabeth Telfer; Education and Self-Realization, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 6, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 216–234, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1.

Gilbert Ryle; Thinking and Self-Teaching, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 5, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 216–228, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

This is an edited version of an address by Hans-Georg Gadamer, presented at the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Gymnasium, Eppelheim, on 19 May 1999. The text has been edited and translated by John Cleary and Pádraig Hogan.

In the current climate of high-stakes testing and performance-based accountability measures, there is a pressing need to reconsider the nature of teaching and what capacities one must develop to be a good teacher. Educational policy experts around the world have pointed out that policies focused disproportionately on student test outcomes can promote teaching practices that are reified and mechanical, and which lead to students developing mere memorisation skills, rather than critical thinking and conceptual understanding. Philosophers of dialogue and dialogic teaching (...) offer a different view of teaching, one that counters mechanical, transmissive or ‘monologic’ teaching. In this paper, I seek to extend the notion of dialogic teaching as a method of supporting social and moral learning processes. Specifically, my focus is on answering the question: What capacities must a teacher have to engage students dialogically? Drawing on Paulo Freire and other contemporary philosophers, I examine dialogic interaction as involving a way of ‘being with learners’ and put forth three teacher capacities necessary for dialogic teaching: self-critique, narrativity and building community. I then examine further what is concretely entailed in the practice of dialogic teaching using research in educational psychology. I aim to highlight how dialogic teaching, unlike monologic teaching, involves the teacher's active ability to support learners’ identification and exploration of their own blind spots—that is, the limits of knowledge and ability—and those of others. Following this, I consider implications of my discussion for international policy on teacher assessment. I close the paper with considerations for future research on teacher capacity and teacher evaluation. This paper contributes to our understanding of teacher capacity and the nature and aims of good teaching. (shrink)

The notions of literacy and citizenship have become technologised through the demands for measurable learning outcomes and the reduction of these aspects of education to sets of skills and competencies. Technologisation is understood here as the systematisation of an art, rather than as intending to understand technology itself in negative terms or to comment on the way technology is used in teaching and learning for literacy and citizenship. Technologisation is approached here in terms of the understanding of literacy and citizenship (...) as things that one has. Drawing on the phenomenology of Gabriel Marcel the understanding of literacy and citizenship in terms of having is problematised, as is the distinction between having and being. This opens the way for a richer understanding of being literate and being a citizen explored through the figures of the Hermit and the Poet in Thoreau's Walden. Being literate and being a citizen are brought together here in order to consider the implications of their technologisation for academic writing in the university. The question of what we write in the name of in the university is considered in the light of this and of a particular notion of the public. (shrink)

While some argue that the only way to make a place for Philosophy for Children in today's strict, standardised classroom is to measure its efficacy in promoting reasoning, we believe that this must be avoided in order to safeguard what is truly unique in P4C dialogue. When P4C acquiesces to the very same quantitative measures that define the rest of learning, then the philosophical dimension drops out and P4C becomes yet another progressive curriculum and pedagogy for enhancing argumentation skills that (...) can easily be appropriated by any content area. What we want to offer in this article is a reevaluation of P4C that remains faithful to a radical kernel that we find when we do philosophy with children and young adults. To theorise the potential for P4C, we draw heavily on Agamben's work, and in particular his reflections on speech and infancy. We propose that the redemption of P4C necessitates a shift from a community of inquiry to a community of infancy. Such a community is not a community that operates according to predefined rules or standardised assessment protocols but rather is an inoperative community that is defined by letting ends idle. On our account, a community of infancy is an example of dialogic studious play that is neither ritual nor just play, thus avoiding the extreme polarities of the ritualised classrooms of high-stakes testing and the ‘ludic’ postmodern classroom of free play. What is at stake here is to preserve the last vestige of freedom within the school. (shrink)

Resonances between Heidegger's philosophy and Eastern religious traditions have been widely discussed by scholars. The significance of Heidegger's thinking for education has also become increasingly clear over recent years. In this article I argue that an important aspect of Heidegger's work, the relevance of which to education is relatively undeveloped, relates to his desire to overcome Western metaphysics, a project that invites an exploration of his connections with Eastern thought. I argue that Heidegger's desire to deconstruct the West implies the (...) deconstruction of conventional views of learning because both aim to undercut the representational nature of thinking in order to recover thinking as a form of contemplation. Consequently, education should not be conceived as the acquisition of a more or less correct mental picture, but suggests the opposite: the relinquishing of all images in a contemplative aporia. (shrink)

"What does it mean to be lonely?" Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. This book challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way.

This article draws on Martha Nussbaum's distinction between basic, internal, and external capacities to better specify possible locations for children's ‘incapacity’ for autonomy. I then examine Maria Montessori's work on what she calls ‘normalization’, which involves a release of children's capacities for autonomy and self-governance made possible by being provided with the right kind of environment. Using Montessori, I argue that, in contrast to many ordinary and philosophical assumptions, children's incapacities for autonomy are best understood as consequences of an absence (...) of external conditions necessary for children to exercise capacities they already have internally, rather than intrinsic limitations based on their stage of life. In a closing section, I show how Montessori proposes a model wherein both children and adults have autonomy, power, and responsibility, but over different spheres, and suggest implications of these differences for who has responsibility for establishing the conditions under which children can flourish. (shrink)

Self-esteem has become an educational shibboleth. But over-valuing it brings dangers, particularly of dishonesty, manipulation and devaluation of human relationships. Yet there is clearly something here we want to save: a gentler culture with wider possibilities of self-fulfilment. Here I try to distinguish three levels of self-esteem talk. There is the exaltation of self-esteem as the chief aim of education, the therapeutic approach to education and the recognition of self-esteem as one educational value among many. It is the latter, I (...) argue, that can preserve the benefits of the idea of self-esteem while avoiding the worst of its pitfalls. (shrink)

The language of self‐belief, including terms like shyness and diffidence, is complex and puzzling. The idea of self‐esteem in particular, which has been given fresh currency by recent interest in ‘personalised learning’, continues to create problems. I argue first that we need a ‘thicker’ and more subtle moral psychology of self‐belief; and, secondly, that there is a radical instability in the ideas and concepts in this area, an instability to which justice needs to be done. I suggest that aspects of (...) deconstruction are helpful here, and offer a deconstructive reading of Kipling's poem, If—, in order to illustrate the power of literature and a certain kind of philosophy to destabilise and resist closure. (shrink)