The popular trend of manifesting involves supposedly making something happen by imagining it and consciously thinking it will happen in order to will it into existence. In this paper Laura D'Olimpio explains why manifesting is a form of wishful thinking and argues that it is an epistemic vice. She describes how such wishful thinking generally, and…

Despite his popularity in educational discourses, Lev S. Vygotsky tends to be read mainly as an educational psychologist or learning theorist. His potential contribution to a theory of education remains largely undiscussed. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is often misunderstood as a sort of "educational tool," which severely…

According to a number of authors, character is dead. On their view, the evidence is in, and all of our attempts to inculcate character in our students have not only failed, but are in fact destined to fail for various reasons. They base their conclusions in part on a number of experimental results that have been obtained since the 1920s,…

In this historical study of English teaching, Jory Brass adopts a governmentality perspective to highlight the contingency and limits of pedagogical arguments that construct an oppositional relation between power and freedom. In the first part of the essay, Brass historicizes contemporary critiques of transmission pedagogies by comparing them with…

The concept of development is currently under revision in education and psychology. In this essay, Eugene Matusov, Renee DePalma, and Stephanie Drye examine a traditional notion of development and provide an alternative sociocultural view. As educators working within a sociocultural approach to learning, development, and education, the authors see…