In this essay Robert Davis provides a critical roadmap, which is also a genealogy, for understanding and examining the history of both the humanities and education in them. It relates appraisal of the so-called "crisis" in contemporary teaching of the humanities to a deeper understanding of "crisis" as a condition for periodic…

School shootings publicized worldwide inevitably awaken the debate about contemporary communication media and violence. It is often conjectured that regular exposure of young people to countless acts of aggression in contemporary popular media leads them to become more aggressive and, in some cases, to commit violent crimes. But is this claim…

Epistemologies of situated knowledges, advanced by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Lorraine Code, and Maureen Ford, challenge mainstream epistemology's claim to be the gold standard in determining what counts as knowledge. In this essay, James Lang uses the work of these and other feminist theorists to explicate the notion of situated knowledges…

In this review essay, Mark Brenneman and Frank Margonis address three recent book-length contributions to the ongoing discussion around cosmopolitanism and educational thought: Mark Olssen's "Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy: Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education," Sharon Todd's "Toward an Imperfect…

In this essay Stefan Neubert argues that John Dewey was a philosopher of reconstruction and that the best use we can make of him today is to reconstruct his work in and for our own contexts. Neubert distinguishes three necessary and equally important components of the overall project of reconstructing Deweyan pragmatism: first, to make strong and…

Educators, not to mention philosophers of education, find themselves in a difficult position nowadays. They are confronted with problems such as which kind of values one would want citizens to embrace, or to what extent social practices of a particular group may differ from what is generally held. In this essay, Paul Smeyers and Yusef Waghid focus…

In this essay Maureen Ford examines a selection of situated knowledges discourses in order to make explicit their attention to political effects. She contends, first, that the "epistemic public(s)" constituted through these discourses are multiple, interactive, performative, and layered, and further that they are explicitly political in ways that…

Investigates the influence of intellectual and political concerns in James Banks' account of multiculturalism, examining his embrace of and hesitations regarding postmodernism, and suggesting that the reasons for this hesitation lie in the tensions between his civic and moral commitments and the radical and skeptical implications of postmodernist…

Asserts that "teachability" is a speculative concept that has for its form and content the absolute, suggesting that its dialectical movement and speculative significance are mis-recognized when the illusionary nature of its constitutive moments is suppressed. The essay outlines the speculative nature of the master/slave relationship in Hegel's…

It is essential for higher education to interpret its institutional goals. This essay facilitates that task by clarifying the intellectual rationale of the postmodern challenge, highlighting the success of that rationale, and arguing that the interrelated critiques of rationalism, realism, and foundationalism show that the modern university…

The relevance of postmodernism for formulating educational policy is discussed, emphasizing the postmodern critique of computerization. Postmodernists suggest that the computer in education may not be as productive as was originally thought because it will bring to fruition the theories of modernism that separate truth from context. (JL)

Despite de Beauvoir's language of bifurcations in her writings, she actually initiates a process of deconstructing Cartesian distinctions between the individual and society, past and present, present and future, means and ends, and ethics and freedom. The paper reconceptualizes her book, "The Ethics of Ambiguity," proposing a movement…

Suggests an account of rationality that opposes modern hegemonic discourse without succumbing to relativism, tracing hostility toward rationality to the advent of modernity, discussing the relevance of reason to new educational ideals, formulating a philosophical account of reason (relying on Habermas' mediating approach to past foundational…

In this essay, Andrew Stables and Stephen Gough explore some of the implications for educational policy and practice of a view of living (and, therefore, of learning) as semiotic engagement. Such a view, Stables and Gough argue, has the potential to displace or circumvent essentially Cartesian models currently dominant within learning theory…

Examines various views of the child, focusing on postmodern subjectivity, discussing: the child as "valuable stranger" and reason's irrational core; the child and the dialect of western reason; and the child, the postmodern subject, and education. It concludes that school as an adult-child intentional community is potentially a space where…