The aims of education, and the appropriate means of realising them, are a recurring preoccupation of utopian authors. The utopian socialists Robert Owen (1771-1858) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837) both place human nature at the core of their educational views, and both see education as central to their wider objective of social and political…

Love, Justice, and Education by William H. Schubert brings to life key ideas in the work of John Dewey and their relevance for the world today. He does this by imagining continuation of a highly evocative article that Dewey published in the New York Times in 1933. Dewey wrote from the posture of having visited Utopia. Schubert begins each of…

This project/report worked with three early childhood education centres who have adopted the Reggio Emilia philosophy of educational practice. Each centre works with children and parents in close collaboration and all the staff and centre management are committed to the project. The aim of this project was to work with each centre in developing…

I articulate Charles S. Peirce's philosophy of mathematical education as related to his conception of mathematics, the nature of its method of inquiry, and especially, the reasoning abilities required for mathematical inquiry. The main thesis is that Peirce's philosophy of mathematical education primarily aims at fostering the development of the…

In this article the author has followed an approach of "epistemological defamiliarisation" by looking with new eyes at education. The author wants to follow an approach that "challenges the prevailing common sense" in the hope that it will lead to a new vantage point from where a fresh view of the educational landscape is…

This article opens by raising a need to examine today's moral education for a new century. John Dewey insists that "arts are educative," so that "they open the door to an expansion of meaning and to an enlarged capacity to experience the world." This insight retains remarkable implications for today's moral education. Aesthetic experience is…

I chronicle the changes in my research, especially those that have moved me closer to C. Wright Mills's call for a "sociological imagination" and Dell Hymes's reinvented anthropology. As I spend more time attempting to create and describe equitable educational environments and less time documenting educational inequality, I have adopted a version…

In this essay, Simon Marginson focuses on self-determining academic freedom in universities, and especially the conditions and drivers of the radical-creative imagination that is manifest in sudden intellectual breaks in knowledge. Marginson's objective is to establish foundations in political philosophy for a sociological study of the effects of…

Ireland is in the grip of a postmodern cultural deconstruction on many levels. The traditional "grand narratives" are increasingly viewed with suspicion and disenchantment as Ireland struggles to understand its evolving identity. There is a growing need for comprehensive interdisciplinary research that will facilitate teaching and…

John Dewey's pragmatism and progressive education sought to nourish the democratic principles of critical thinking and collective social action, which he saw as central to democracy and threatened by what Jürgen Habermas would call the rise of "instrumental rationality." Dewey was concerned that traditional approaches to education…

The historical fiction novel straddles the factual and the fictive recreation of past motivations that animate historical events. Through reading a work of historical fiction, Ursula Hegi's novel "Stones from the River," Kent den Heyer and Alexandra Fidyk offer a theoretical consideration of the following questions and their classroom…

Teacher and author Vivian Paley is highly regarded by parents, educators, and other professionals for her original insights into such seemingly everyday issues as play, story, gender, and how young children think. In "The Classrooms All Young Children Need", Patricia M. Cooper takes a synoptic view of Paley's many books and articles,…

Through the presentation of three historical accounts, this article explores the roles imagination and speculation may play within the writing and study of history. By looking at these three incidents, each drawn from the history and historiography of art education over the past 150 years, through a perspective that embraces the value of utilizing…

This article explores how supervisors of teachers preparing dissertations can create a space for the imagination in the tutorial setting. The imagination is seen as "opening up to possibility," where the student is taking a step into the unknown. The article discusses how the tutor can best support this, taking the theme of "holding…

Why was Plato so respectful of the myths and tales which formed the imaginative world of the Greek poets? Looks at the role of the story in balancing the "inner" and "outer" worlds of man and its importance for children. (Editor/RK)