How should a liberal democratic society value knowledge and understanding, and does this valuation inform how we ought to reason about the justice of our educational institutions? In scholarly and public discourse, it is orthodox to argue that because educational institutions bring about various goods--goods of character such as wellbeing or…

This paper considers the nature of academic judgement. It also suggests that academic judgement is not the special preserve of academics as such and is something with which students can be imbued. It is further suggested that academic judgement is best considered in the context of critical learning which is contrasted with demonstrative learning.…

The purpose of this article is to carry out a philosophical enquiry into the affective nature of creative and innovative processes. Recent studies on future employment suggest that we are at an inflection point whereby any job is in principle at risk of being taken over by computers and robots in the near future. The jobs least at risk, it is…

Within educational philosophies that utilise the Heideggerian idea of "authenticity" there can be distinguished at least two readings that correspond with the categories of "weak" and "strong" utopianism. "Strong-utopianism" is the nostalgia for some lost Edenic paradise to be restored at some future time.…

Shifts in funding and a worldwide trend towards marketising higher education have led to a new emphasis on the quality of the student experience. In the UK this trend finds its strongest expression in recent policy proposals to simultaneously increase student fees and student choice so that students themselves become the drivers of higher…

R.S. Peters' arguments for the worthwhileness of theoretical activities are intended to justify education per se, on the assumption that education is necessarily a matter of initiating people into theoretical activities. If we give up this assumption, we can ask whether Peters' arguments might serve instead to justify the academic curriculum over…

This article examines the relationship between action research and policy and the kind of confidence teachers, policy makers and other potential users may have in such research. Many published teacher action research accounts are criticised on the grounds that they do not fully meet the conventional standards for reporting social scientific…

Science tends to find a solution to the problem of the unreliability of human perception by understanding objectivity as the absence of subjectivity. However, from a phenomenological point of view, subjectivity is not so much a problem as an inevitable starting-point. That does not mean that the problem of the correctness of people's accounts of…