In this article Cristoph Wulf examines the basic concepts of pedagogy and educational science in the German-speaking world, looking at education and socialization from the perspective of educational anthropology. He makes evident that the complex German concept of "Bildung," in particular, can only be fully understood by means of a…

Jacques Rancière's "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" confronts its reader with an intellectual adventure. In this article, Michael McCreary interrogates why Rancière might have chosen to share Joseph Jacotot's pedagogical ideas with us and how the method in which he casts them might be internal to their teaching. In the first section, McCreary…

There is fierce controversy in the United States over whether parents should be able to choose their children's schools and/or curriculum. To discuss the pedagogical arguments inherent in this question, Todd Alan Price and Ruprecht Mattig begin with the classical concept of "Bildung" as developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt around 1800.…

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 contrast to ancient times, friendship is rarely discussed nowadays as a resource in moral education. Even within Aristotle-inspired character education, where it could naturally claim pride of place, its coverage is miniscule compared, say, to that of the emulation of moral exemplars. The aim of the present article is to retrieve friendship as…

This article aims to serve as an introductory discussion of the European Continental tradition of pedagogics, specifically from a North American perspective. It begins with an overview of the Continental tradition and its main figures. Here, we find a philosophical and, thus, language-sensitive attitude toward the human, the child; and a specific…

This article critically assesses contemporary empirical educational research, directing attention toward overlooked facets of pedagogical practice. Here, Agnes Pfrang and Daniel Castner raise questions about predominant psychological approaches to empirical educational research, instead advocating for a holistic viewpoint that encompasses the…

Augusto Del Noce is widely regarded in his home country of Italy as one of the most important political philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Del Noce's work covers a range of topics including modernity, technology, contemporary Catholicism, secularism, eroticism, communism, fascism, and progressivism. Although Del Noce holds a…

In this article, Campbell Scribner applies insights from history, philosophy, and reader theory to marginal inscriptions in nineteenth-century textbooks, providing a conjectural explanation of student boredom during the period. He contends that boredom was a dialectic and contingent experience, based on shifting notions of childhood and education,…

D. G. Mulcahy highlights some of Jane Roland Martin's major contributions to the field of philosophy of education in this review essay. He focuses on several of Martin's better-known works--including "Reclaiming a Conversation," "The Schoolhome," "Changing the Educational Landscape," "Coming of Age in…

In this essay Gert Biesta asks what the humanities can contribute to the field of teacher education. In addressing this question he turns to the idea of education as a "Geisteswissenschaft" as it was developed in the German-speaking context in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this conception, education is configured as an…

In this article, David Lewin examines the processes of educational representation, simplification, and selection, proposing the term "pedagogical reduction" in order to clarify the role these processes play within pedagogy. Although this term is virtually unknown among Anglo-American educational theorists, it reflects a substantial…

In this essay Sharon Lamb considers how progressives have begun to win the longstanding battle to shape sex education and what they have had to give up in the process. After framing the battle in historical context, Lamb uses discourse analysis to explore the hidden values in the "evidence-based" (EB) curricula that progressives…

In the early 1970s, Thomas Colwell argued for an "ecological basis [for] human community." He suggested that "naturalistic transactionalism" was being put forward by some ecologists and some philosophers of education, but independently of each other. He suspected that ecologists were working on their own versions of naturalistic transactionalism…

In this review essay, K. Peter Kuchinke uses three recent publications to consider the question of how to educate young people for work and career. Historically, this question has been central to vocational education, and it is receiving renewed attention in the context of concerns over the ability of schools to provide adequate preparation for…