The American spirit and dream is clearly alive and thriving in our community colleges. To maintain a vital economy, college leaders are being asked to act quickly, effectively, and decisively in order to respond to the forces in society that are reshaping the world and the immediacy with which workers will require retraining or updating of job…

Interpretation is the process by which we find meaning in the things in the world around us: clouds on the horizon, bones, street signs, hairbrushes, uniforms, paintings, letters, and utterances. But where does that meaning come from and on what basis are we justified in saying a particular meaning is the right meaning? Drawing from debates in the…

In an earlier publication, "What Happens in Philosophical Texts," the author presented what he referred to as Matthew Lipman's model theory of the philosophical text. The author argued there that the distinctive form of Lipman's own philosophical novels--the curricular flagship of the Philosophy for Children program--lies in how they…

Increased attention to the relationship between democracy and education in the UK has been accompanied over the past thirteen years by an interest in how art can be used to promote democratic citizenship. While this approach has led to increased funding for the arts, it is not without its problems, and has often entailed an apolitical and…

Incorporating Gadamer and other thinkers from the continental tradition, this essay is a close and detailed hermeneutic, phenomenological, and ontological study of the dialectic practice of Plato's Socrates--it radicalizes and refutes the Socrates-as-teacher model that educators from scholar academic ideology embrace.

One aim of environmental education is to encourage different ways of generating meanings of, valuing, conceiving, and contextualizing "nature." The field of aesthetics provides an affective basis for interpreting our perceptions of environments and relations with other more-than-human beings. This critical essay examines some of the key…

Given that human suffering persists globally on a massive scale, are scholars doing all they ought to be in the pursuit of knowledge? To explore this question, the author analyzes works by Alasdair MacIntyre, Nicholas Maxwell, and Bill Readings. Based on implications derived from their moral critiques of higher education, an alternative, broadened…

The importance of the role of language/discourse in the learning and teaching of mathematics is noted in many mathematics curricula and standards documents. In the research literature, this role has been widely theorised from a Vygotskian perspective. This perspective is limited by some of its underlying assumptions, including an instrumental and…

This paper asks the question of how we can situate the educational subject in what Luciano Floridi has defined as an "informational ontology" (Floridi in "The philosophy of information." Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011a). It will suggest that Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler offer paths toward rethinking the…

In this essay, I investigate the human act of spectatorship as found in the work of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. I will show that each is thoroughly anti-watching when it comes to educational practices. I then problematize their positions by looking at their spectatorial commitments in the realm of aesthetics. Both Dewey and Freire have a…

This article explores an East~West epistemological convergence of embodied democracy in education through cultural humanism illuminated in five main themes in the works of John Dewey (1859-1952), Confucius (551-479 B.C.), and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871-1944): "human-nature interconnection," "self-cultivation," "value…

This research is devoted to the philosophical analysis of legal culture as a determinant of value orientations in the transition period society. The purpose of the study is to discover the essence and specificity of legal culture as a determinant of value orientations in a transition society from the philosophical perspective. In accordance with…

"Artwork as technics" opens discussion on activating aesthetics in educational contexts by arguing that we require some fundamental revision in understanding relations between aesthetics and technology in contexts where education is primarily encountered instrumentally and technologically. The paper addresses this through the writing of…

This essay reconsiders Miguel de Unamuno's contribution to philosophy and education by focusing on his "Amor y pedagogía" ("Love and Pedagogy" [1902])--a piece of fiction considered by many to be the transition point in his work from the documentary realism of the nineteenth century to what Unamuno called "viviparous"…

The paper discusses the place of feminist epistemology in philosophy of education. Against frequently raised criticisms, the paper argues that the issues raised by feminist standpoint theory lead neither to a reduction of questions of knowledge to questions of power or politics nor to the endorsement of relativism. Within the on-going discussion…