The idea that children need to be exposed to stories of patriotic heroes has again surfaced in recent legislative activity surrounding education. Often, this impulse aligns with a conservative, moralizing vision of teaching history: the flaws of past historical figures should be minimized for the purposes of national pride and traditional virtues.…

Voice has become a common goal of educational research and pedagogical practices aimed at equity and social justice. That is, bringing marginalized groups "to" voice, allowing diverse students to "have" a voice, and setting up classrooms that privilege silenced voices are frequent goals in educational research and practice. In…

The aim of this article is to develop a critical awareness of a pervasive hegemonic ethos and its dehumanizing impact on Foreign Language (FL) classrooms. In doing so, Amy E. Kuiken draws from Paulo Freire's discussion of subordination and transformation, i.e. of oppression and humanization, as a critical lens through which to view current trends…

The small school movement originated in the democratic ideology of Deborah Meier, who sought to create schools that gave students, parents, teachers, and all stakeholders in the communities they served a voice in education. In New York City, Meier's vision was implemented haphazardly by a group of business and political elites able to pour…

The discussion participants follow Aristotle in deciding that friends are concerned with each other's welfare for their own sake and cannot be reduced to utility or pleasure, adding that the contemporary notion of friends involves the notion of equal overall power. They find three difficulties with teachers and students being friends. First,…

In this article, the author responds to the Presidential address, "Ethics for the New Political Economy: What Can It Mean to Be Professionally Responsible?" in which Michael G. Gunzenhauser defines, names, and proposes a professional ethics for educators: an ethics of the everyday. The author introduces her response by stating that…

In this address, the author builds the case that a new political economy of education, dominated by what Pauline Lipman calls the "neo-liberal social imaginary," is changing the moral context in which educators imagine their professional roles. The author argues that educators are placed in relation to others in rather complicated…

The author's sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, showed him that adults who held positions of power over children could be duplicitous. After several uneventful months, she started singling him out in hurtful ways for no apparent reason. On top of the established threat of being paddled arbitrarily, Mrs. Hunter started to humiliate him in front of…

The contradiction between the concept of equality found in the Declaration of Independence and that found in U.S. Constitution led the author to question what the Constitution had to say about education. After all, Montesquieu (1689-1755), a French "philosophe" whose work heavily influenced Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the U.S.…

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…

This essay is a response to Barbara Applebaum's essay, "Engaging Student Disengagement: Resistance or Disagreement?" in which Applebaum explores privileged university students' "disengagement" when asked to confront institutionalized oppression. Applebaum analyzes and recommends Lynn Weber Cannon's rules for classroom discourse…

The recent pop culture iconography of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) label has attracted more devoted (white) fans than a 90s boy band. In philosophy, this trend is evidenced by the growing number of white feminists extending their work in gender analogically to questions of race and identity, as well as the unchecked use of the CRT label to…

Alexis de Tocqueville's concept of the "tyranny of the majority" can benefit social justice pedagogies owing to its capacity to illuminate the silent, invisible character of hegemonic power. As many critical pedagogues have pointed out, this silent and invisible power seeps not only into the public spaces of education, but also into the…

This essay looks to varied conceptions of resistance with the aim of explaining how resistance might be incorporated into a notion of educator professionalism in the most effective way. The author contends that high-stakes accountability policy poses a complicated set of power relations for professional educators. Both students and educators are…

Alice Miller, the former psychoanalyst, has gained world renown for her controversial and provocative writings on child rearing. Miller contends that traditional child rearing practices--in schools, ecclesiastical settings, and the family--consist of physical and emotional cruelty that she labels "poisonous pedagogy." According to…