We identify a recent trend in school mathematics as well as in some of the research literature in mathematics education: an emphasis on the practical uses of mathematics and an increased emphasis on verbalizations as opposed to numerical and computational skills. With tools provided by John Dewey, an early advocate of contextual and practical…

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…

The Chinese "tianrenheyi" thesis bespeaks a correlative cosmology irreducible to the Western metaphysics. This article historicizes "tianrenheyi" for new implications to help rethink the given concepts of 'person/thing,' 'environment/nature,' and 'relationality' in contemporary ethical and environmental education in three…

While the idea of exemplification or role-modelling as a means to the education of moral character and virtue is of ancient pedigree--traceable at least to Aristotle's ethics--the influence of personal example is clearly not unproblematic since individuals may be admired or imitated for less than morally admirable qualities. However,…

This paper focuses on how Taneichi Kitazawa, a leading progressive education practitioner, received the concept of democracy, and reconsiders the meaning of democracy in Japanese progressive education, conventionally considered within the framework of early modern Japanese political ideology. Kitazawa, having gleaned the idea of "common…

Locating political education in a global time of pathos and apathy, this article explores some complexities that derive from various notions of human distance and affect potentialities of democracy as a way of life. It begins with a diagnosis of current, global realities and discusses the philosophical act of diagnosis as such. The operations of…

This paper introduces and summarises a programme of German research into teaching started 20 years ago. This research draws on Herbart's analysis of teaching with its focus on 'Bildung' (formation) which is distinguished from the measurement/psychometric tradition. It offers the possibilities of a deeper empirical understanding of pedagogical…

Dewey's vision for schooling can perhaps be described as an early positive education, a term now attributed to programmes derived from positive psychology. Positive psychology's goals for education share many of Dewey's ideas about community-mindedness and the role of education in nurturing citizenship. Having emerged from positive psychology,…

Dewey's (1938) theory of experience involved the use of history as "a potent agent in appreciation of the living present" (p. 23). Dewey meant his statement as an educational prescription, but it also has significant research implications. These implications can be understood in terms of studying the history of a topic versus using…

Education as a domain of conceptual activity and a field of scientific/scholarly research needs to address the movement from the traumatized subject to subject-as-trauma. This movement and the concomitant conceptual shift in how we ought to understand the subject correspond, in the domain of education, to the "radicalization" of what…

Philosophers of education have long contemplated how the normative charge of education might include disruption of the status quo. Thinking about our work as being in battle with the status quo, though, is problematic. Partly, the author agrees with thinkers like George S. Counts that education can be a vehicle for social reconstruction. But he is…

This paper aims to show how Emerson provides a reworking of Kantian understandings of moral education in young children's "Bildung." The article begins and ends by thinking of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild "Bildung." It explores the role of "Bildung" and self-cultivation in preschools…

How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.' How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it…

Research on science teaching and learning commonly makes use of reductionism to specify conditions of science learning. In my studies of academics'-of-science-teaching-&-learning (academics'"-of-st&l") research practices and values, I discuss how philosophic inquiry shifted my research practices from reductionism to critical (or,…

The way in which educators choose to engage with learners and to offer opportunities to share knowledge of both the physical world and the world of ideas is an ongoing area of international research interest but remains diffuse and difficult to systematise. This idiosyncratic quality underscores the privileged position of teachers as creative…