At a time when there are renewed expressions of concern about how our societies are organised and the health of our democracies, this paper focuses on the role of education in a democracy. Informed by John Dewey's and Martin Buber's accounts of what it is to be educated, and Homi Bhabha's concept of third space work, the paper presents the case…

In this paper, my aim is to reintroduce and reclaim the concept of civility for the ongoing debates on democratic education within the Arendt-inspired philosophy of education. I juxtapose a prominent interpretation related to theories of radical democracy and radical democratic education, referring to Gert Biesta's work, which amends Arendt's…

Despite being regarded as the great equalizer, public education's close ties with the market economy have made it the great perpetuator. High school teacher Jonathan Lancaster writes that public education has become a structure in which students become career ready, as opposed to world ready. Therefore, educators should shift the narrative away…

In this essay I scrutinize the challenge Paul Hirst set to educational philosophers in rejecting rational autonomy as the central aim of education and proposing initiation into social practices instead. Although I disagree with some dimensions of Hirst's argument, I find his main idea of utmost importance in answering some burning challenges of…

Schools are a microcosm of society and often tasked with fixing society's ills. We need to explore the purpose of education and the place of educators not only to prepare young people to gain the best qualifications they can but also to challenge ourselves as educators and our young charges to be active citizens with enough knowledge about society…

Societies concerned with preventing acts of violent extremism often target the ideas that are thought to motivate such acts. The state's use of educational institutions is one mechanism by which those ideas are subjected to challenge. Teaching liberal democratic values to students is one method. Here, David Stevens argues that this model is…

Changes to the landscape of "public" education in the United States, particularly the proliferation of charter and other non-traditional public schools and shifting forms of school governance, have motivated some philosophers of education to reconsider the form and function of public schools in a democracy. This article is largely…

The blows of the financial recession of 2007-09 and now the COVID-19 crisis have emboldened populist political leaders across the globe. Their platforms typically involve a mixture of nativist or nationalist tropes, often infused with hostility to refugees and immigrants and built upon foundations of racism and intolerance. The internet provides…

In this paper, I address the vital civic principle that democracies cannot exist without informed citizens and that education itself must be about more than training and is essential to creating critical and engaged citizens. Such an understanding is imperative at a time when democracy is under siege all over the globe. As an example of both the…

Dewey's vision for schooling can perhaps be described as an early positive education, a term now attributed to programmes derived from positive psychology. Positive psychology's goals for education share many of Dewey's ideas about community-mindedness and the role of education in nurturing citizenship. Having emerged from positive psychology,…

There has been a long tradition of demonstrating formal education's direct relationship with many dimensions of development, including increased productivity, health, reduced mortality, population control etc. There has also been a literature looking particularly at the 'democratic dividend' from education, both through the lens of global…

Universities play an indispensable role within modern democracies. But this role is often overlooked or too narrowly conceived, even by universities themselves. In "What Universities Owe Democracy," Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, argues that--at a moment when liberal democracy is endangered and more…

In the age of what Gert Biesta calls subjectification, "the uniqueness of each individual human being," the promise of citizens-as-subjects is to break with the ideal of the "good citizen" whose identity is inscribed by state and market. Making such a break involves "exposure to the experiment of democracy," in…

Higher education institutions play an active role in addressing and responding to twenty-first century societal trends. The two main factors, which have transformed the way we live and work are globalization and technological advancements. Consequently, global competence became imperative in twenty-first century. As evident from scholarly…

The popular attraction of Donald Trump has been a conundrum for many educators who have tried to understand the rationale behind his support. This article presents a philosophical argument for what this implies for curriculum design and the intellectual temperament of the populace. There has been much written about the purpose of education to…