While some researchers argue that theories and abstract knowledge are unreliable bases for teachers' work, a wide range of research stresses the need to overcome the gap between theory and practice, or abstract academic knowledge and experience-based knowledge. Here, Silvia Edling maintains that it is relevant to ask why the relationship is…

According to Niklas Luhmann, causality is both an impossibility and a necessity in education. On the one hand, the task of the teacher is an impossible one, because teaching as communication is a closed system that cannot determine the learning of pupils' psychical system in any causal sense. On the other hand, one cannot practice as a teacher…

Can epistemic paternalistic practices make us better epistemic agents? While a satisfying answer to this question will ultimately rest at least partly on empirical findings, considering the epistemological discussion on evidence, knowledge, and epistemic virtues can be insightful. In this paper, Giada Fratantonio argues that we have theoretical…

Examining the still underexplored elements in educational theorist Paulo Freire's work, this essay begins from his claim that problem-posing pedagogy works as a "kind of psychoanalysis." Situating Freire between the critical philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions, Alex Armonda offers a new reading of the problem-posing dialectic,…

In this paper, Katja Castillo approaches the phenomenon of teaching through an analysis of Emmanuel Levinas's unedited conference notes titled "Les nourritures," "Les enseignements," and "L'écrit et l'oral." Levinas's thinking prior to the publication of his major works provides an entry point to his philosophy. In…

For the first time, Walter Benjamin's critical comments on educator and philosopher Rudolf Steiner are examined in depth. In particular, Benjamin detected protofascist themes within Steiner's seemingly progressive notion of child-centered, arts-based, developmentally appropriate early childhood education. But this does not mean that Benjamin…

This article gives a historical-philosophical overview of three generations of pragmatist thinking centered around the question of democracy. It serves as an introduction and contextualization to the papers that develop a third generation pragmatic point of view in the remainder of the special issue. The perspective is from one American-trained…

In this article, Andreas Reichelt Lind explores the possibilities of a Deweyan account of education for democracy. To that end, an account emphasizing democratic habit formation, direct experience of democracy as a way of life, and the distinction between being and becoming is explicated and discussed. Lind shows how these elements together point…

This paper is a combination of a grandfather's musings over his grandson's drawings, combined with a reconsideration of hermeneutics as an early childhood educational theory.

In the context of the ongoing debate on the ontology of education, where instrumentally defined functions and aims are seen as external to what education is and the focus is on defining "the educational," Tomasz Szkudlarek explores a reverse route in an attempt to see, first, what is "the instrumental" before asking how it…

In this article Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon and Megan Jane Laverty discuss Jean-Luc Nancy's conception of listening as presented in his seminal work, "À l'écoute." The authors argue that Nancy uses the term "listening" to refer to the experience of coming to an idea of sound(s) initially encountered as puzzling. They illustrate…

In this paper, Matthew Cowley advances a theoretical approach toward higher education drawn from critical race theory (CRT) and Black Marxism. After an overview of CRT and Black Marxism, Cowley builds a working understanding of two recent (re)conceptualizations of race and class analysis that draw from both: (1) "economies of racism" and…

The concept of responsibility is both omnipresent and highly ambivalent in the field of education. On the one hand, the term is considered to be one of the key concepts of pedagogical ethics, intended to enable a reflection on pedagogical authority. On the other hand, it is inextricably linked to the concept of accountability, which, in fact,…

The guidelines followed by many educational boards recommend behavioristic practices for dealing with student discipline; however, Lawrence Kohlberg's idea of organizing schools as "just communities" suggests a more promising approach. It translates to the school context the core principle of Habermas's discourse ethics: "those…

In this paper, Andrea Fiore sketches the notion of familiarity in Dewey's thought, particularly in its relations with education, aesthetics, and art. The importance of that notion emerges in Dewey's well-known writings such as "How We Think," "The School and Society," and "Art as Experience," where he shows that not…