Part Five of Spinoza's "Ethics" includes a notoriously challenging set of propositions about human perfection. Part of the difficulty in interpreting these elements of the work arises from neglecting important philosophical background for the relevant propositions, namely, medieval Jewish rationalism and Maimonides in particular. Spinoza…

This article develops the ideas of perfection and education in Spinoza and Maimonides. Both thinkers identify human perfection with intellectual knowledge and a transformation in affect. They accordingly envision education in terms of enhancing cognition and shaping the desire to know. The first steps are a critical evaluation of imagination and…

John Dewey's educational philosophy provides a compelling resource for empowering adult vocational education through a cultural vision, ultimately rooted in a view of social democracy as the creative task of lifelong learning before us. This is supported by Dewey's interpretation of knowledge construction in its varied cognitive, ethical, and…

This article explores both the prerequisites and barriers of perspective transformation in the context of two Eastern European societies as examples of post-totalitarian states. Although personal cognitive development is considered as an outcome of perspective transformation, I will demonstrate that certain manifestations of cognitive development…

Scholars and practitioners alike often assume that discomfort is a necessary and productive aspect of the college experience. We used a range of theories grounded in the concept of dissonance to question these assumptions and critically analyze the role of discomfort in collegiate learning and development for today's diverse college student…

Social constructivist theorists tend to identify qualitative educational research as discovering meaning and understanding by the researcher's active involvement in the construction of meaning. Although these approaches have been widely influenced by Vygotsky's social constructivist approach, his own theoretical framework has received…

While a substantial body of research exists on First- and Second-Language Acquisition (SLA), research on the language acquisition process that a language minority student goes through when they are acquiring a second language has been largely unexplored. Pedagogical practices that espouse language learning theories facilitate both the language…

The use of Art for educational reasons has been recently developing in Greece both in formal education and in Adult Education. Relevant theoretical texts and studies, (Dewey, 1934. Gardner, 1990. Perkins, 1994) pin point that training through the Arts can contribute to an integrated learning, since through systematic observation of works of art,…

In the past decade there has been a marked push for the development of employability skills to be part of the PhD process. This push is generally by stakeholders from above and outside the PhD process, i.e. government and industry, who view skills as a "summative product" of the PhD. In contrast, our study interviewed stakeholders inside…

Why do some teachers demonstrate great cultural sensitivity in their work with children while others seem mired in stereotypes, perpetuating a view of diversity as exotic or denying that race is an issue in their classrooms? Why is it so difficult to change these dispositions of teachers? And what can we do in teacher education to further the…

In Alex Haley's "Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965), Haley recounts the life of an historical personage of enduring controversy. Whether one reveres or reviles Malcolm, "X", Little, his is a fascinating story of lifelong learning. Rather than conforming to one theory, Malcolm's learning is well explained by certain theorists at certain times in…