"Applications" of knowledge symbolically and structurally "codify" thinking, often displacing the human who is relegated to passive, routine reproduction of operations and left with no space or time to understand or question the relations underlying the processes. This is both mirrored and augmented by the schematic narrowing…

This article takes a conceptual approach to an issue of pedagogical relevance--the presence of "teaching and learning moments" within educational environments. We suggest sources of philosophical confusions that design patterns for the classification and creation of typologies of classroom events. We identify three foundational…

Unlearning is a recurrent theme in Japan. To further understanding of what this entails, we focus on the view of learning laid out by a revered 13th century Zen-inspired playwright. For Zeami, learning involved a movement from the acquisition to unlearning of skills, punctuated by an experience of "mushin," followed by creative…

Chinese students' outstanding performance in several rounds of PISA tests has attracted extensive attention on Chinese teacher professional development practices and system. The school-based teaching research system has evolved for many years in China and became a mature and systematical model for improving teaching quality. However, this system…

Over the past twenty-five years, or so, considerable advances have been made in understanding how learning occurs in the brain, though much of this research is still to make its way into education. One contribution it should be making is to furnish the philosophical critique of past and current theory with supporting empirical evidence. For…

New challenges in the development of teaching methods lead to a large number of new tools, methods, and approaches to teaching. The structure and functions of a class as a basic social group in education is being radically transformed, becoming more and more virtual especially in COVID-19/post-COVID period. In this regard, this study proposes a…

This article explores how different philosophical models and pictures of learning can become dogmatic and disguise other conceptions of learning. With reference to a passage from St. Paul, I give a sense of the dogmatic teleology that underpins philosophical assumptions about learning. The Pauline assumption is exemplified through a variety of…

In this article, I present a model of four dimensions for the idea of learning in the classical Confucian perspective. This model is intended to capture the most essential four aspects of learning which explain why self-cultivation of a human person toward an end of self-fulfillment and social transformation of humanity is possible. I shall also…

Richard Rorty, in his "Consequences of Pragmatism" (1982), acknowledging the pragmatic direction taken by both modern and postmodern philosophy, declared that "James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze…

This paper seeks to explain learning by examining five theories of learning--conceptual analysis, behavioural, constructivist, computational and connectionist. The first two are found wanting and rejected. Piaget's constructivist theory offers a general explanatory framework (assimilation and accommodation) but fails to provide an adequate account…