The aim of this paper is to critique the individualistic ontological premises of 'self-directed learning', as it has been developed in humanist education literature in the tradition of Carl Rogers. The authors suggest instead that social-transformative education and its critical social ontology serve the emancipatory promise of education better…

This study examines Bertolt Brecht's theatrical techniques in terms of critical pedagogy and their potential application by critical educators to overcome neoliberalization, neoconservatization, and authoritarization in learning environments. Brecht creates his 'learning plays' in a peculiar form that can be called 'Brechtian dialectics'. Brecht…

Jiddu Krishnamurti was a contemporary of the first non-European Nobel Laureate from Asia, Rabindranath Tagore. Their educational ideas and practices of reform were deeply informed by their own troubled experiences of schooling within the highly mechanised industrial model of education imported from colonial England. Both were school dropouts and…

This article examines the life of Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten in the 1840s. It describes how the kindergarten and its impact in Germany and the United States. It spread at the international level of education because German kindergarten teachers relocated it to other countries when it was banned in Germany. In the years from…

This paper discusses the educational experiment of Rabindranath Tagore and its larger implications for world peace. As violence becomes the new normal amongst the youth of the world, the challenge for societies is to build cultures of peace instead of cultures of violence. In this context, this paper discusses the ideas of Tagore on education, and…

Devoted to the late Paul Virilio (1932-2018) and in the advent of debates surrounding the Anthropocene and in light of corresponding changes to conceptions of scale and image, this paper attempts to extrapolate a Virilian pedagogy of the image. It is Virilio's work which remains timely and singularly fecund in this area and it is for this reason…

Hannah Arendt has been criticised for the sharp distinction she drew between the social and political realms, and her application of this distinction to schools. In this paper, I demonstrate that this distinction can be interpreted as a heuristic that Arendt developed to address a tension that she had encountered in her attempt to understand…

This paper explores aspects of Creative Music in Education [CMinED] practices through a political philosophy perspective based on Jacques Rancière's approach to the notion of democracy. The paper begins with three cautionary tales about the difficult encounter between democracy and music education. This sets the stage for introducing a Rancièrian…

Many educational studies reference ideology, imaginary, and myth constructs represented in programs of study, textbooks, and school rituals. In the fields of history, civic, and social studies education, for example, many scholars frequently employ these terms to examine mythic groundings of particular nationalisms entwined with the ways in which…

In this paper, I aim to explore what role persuasion plays in the early education of children. Advocating Wittgenstein, I claim that persuasion involves imparting to a pupil about a particular world-picture ("Weltbild") by showing rather than explaining. This because we cannot introduce a child to the hinges of a world-picture through a…

Background/Context: This study contributes to ongoing work in professional learning communities, self-study, and reflection. It offers a structure and a process rooted in a philosophy of practice grounded in various thinkers like Dewey, Rogers, Curran, Freire, Gattegno, Greene, and Carini. Purpose/Objective: The purpose of this study is to explore…

There is a rapidly expanding and proliferating number of commercial early childhood platforms, competing for market share in what has become a crowded marketplace. Early childhood platforms provide a wide range of functions including an all-in-one digital ecosystem offering a learning management system; social media communication between…

This paper re-examines the tension between professional and liberal education by revisiting "The Idea of the University" (1852), the seminal mid-nineteenth century treatise of John Henry Newman. In returning to Newman's classic text, we are interested in the significance of his lectures for a contemporary Higher Education increasingly…

The Inspiring Teacher of English Award and the President's Award for Teachers are national awards that recognize outstanding Singapore educators. This paper delves into the practices and philosophies of six award-winning teachers, unravelling the intricacies that distinguish their pedagogical approaches. The study is centred around three pivotal…

In higher education, the discursive establishment of 'faculty' vs. 'administrator' creates a dualistic, hierarchical structure, informing relationalities between/within ourselves and faculty. As administrators, we found/find ourselves in relational encounters, entanglements of material-discursive bodies, that we were/are a part of producing. In…