Barbara Stengel's purpose in this essay is to complicate our understanding of the quality and status of educational courage as it is typically exercised in schools today, and to offer profiles of that courage in a minor key. If we only portray -- and aspire to -- courage in the heroic form that tilts against a system that is unfair, misguided, or…

On grounds of autonomy, is comprehensive education -- an approach to education that attempts to facilitate the acceptance of certain beliefs and ways of life as being correct, and refuses to sympathetically expose students to contrary beliefs and ways of life -- ethically suspect? Recently, Bryan R. Warnick has argued that it is. In this essay,…

By critically interrogating the methodological foundations of orthodox economic theory, Tal Gilead challenges the growing conviction in educational policymaking quarters that, being more scientific than other forms of educational investigation, inquiries grounded in orthodox economics should provide the basis for educational policymaking. He…

The current educational discourse on Emmanuel Levinas's concept of subjectivity has focused on the pure openness and subjection of the self to the other. Based on such an understanding, some educational theorists hold that Levinas's work has given us new hope for the mission of education, while others deny its relevance. I suggest that this…

Recently, a range of educational theorists have explored and extended upon popular currents in political theory through articulating "open" and "unknowing" pedagogies. Such contributions represent a radical turn away from the presumed "universals" found in proclamations of justice and emancipation and, ultimately, the centering of class analysis.…

In this essay, Ian Hardy argues that a research process involving generalizing from professional educational practice can and should inform the work of educators, including academic researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, but that these generalizations need to be derived from, and in dialogue with, the complexity and specificity of actual…

In this essay, Vasileios Pantazis examines how two philosophers having different orientations acknowledge and study the phenomenon of the "encounter" ("Begegnung") and its fundamental importance to human life and education. On the one hand, Otto Friedrich Bollnow drew on existential philosophy and philosophical anthropology in his analysis of the…

The concepts of tacit knowledge and tacit knowing have been of interest to philosophers and epistemologists as well as behavioral and social scientists. The tacit dimension can be found in both individual and collective practices in versatile, implicit, informal, and unintentional ways. There is no clear, broadly accepted definition of tacit…

In this essay Ben Kotzee addresses the implications of Bernard Williams's distinction between "thick" and "thin" concepts in ethics for epistemology and for education. Kotzee holds that, as in the case of ethics, one may distinguish between "thick" and "thin" concepts of epistemology and, further, that this distinction points to the importance of…

One of the mantras of progressive education is that genuine learning ought to be exciting and pleasurable, rather than joyless and painful. To a significant extent, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is associated with this mantra. In a theme of "Emile" that is often neglected in the educational literature, however, Rousseau stated that "to suffer is the first…

In this essay Amy Shuffelton considers Jean-Jacques Rousseau's suspicion of imagination, which is, paradoxically, offered in the context of an imaginative construction of a child's upbringing. First, Shuffelton articulates Rousseau's reasons for opposing children's development of imagination and their engagement in the sort of imaginative play…

In this essay, James Scott Johnston claims that a dispute over moral teleology lies at the basis of the debate between John Dewey and Robert M. Hutchins. This debate has very often been cast in terms of perennialism, classicism, or realism versus progressivism, experimentalism, or pragmatism. Unfortunately, casting the debate in these terms…

In this essay, Johannes Giesinger comments on the current philosophical debate on educational justice. He observes that while authors like Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz develop a so-called adequacy view of educational justice, Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift defend an egalitarian principle. Giesinger focuses his analysis on the main objection…

Epistemologies of situated knowledges, advanced by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Lorraine Code, and Maureen Ford, challenge mainstream epistemology's claim to be the gold standard in determining what counts as knowledge. In this essay, James Lang uses the work of these and other feminist theorists to explicate the notion of situated knowledges…

Herner Saeverot begins this article with an example: how Soren Kierkegaard used deceit as a means to educate. In one of his biographical texts, it turns out that Kierkegaard's objective was to deceive his readers into a totalized and universal truth. According to Saeverot, Kierkegaard's approach shows that he was a "demystifier," someone who wants…