This article, a conceptual and theoretical piece, opens a window on "playful learning" as a philosophy of education and a suite of diverse pedagogical approaches, methods, and techniques. The paper criticizes the serious ambience of adult education with its high levels of instrumentalism and performativity. It argues for playful learning…

How should Deweyan educators teach their students about engaging in efforts to bring about social change in a political context marked by polarization, power differentials, and oppression? In this article, Joshua Forstenzer argues that Deweyan educators must encourage their students to engage in pluralistic and creative experiments rather than…

Kant's views about the nature and value of enlightenment have been discussed very much since 1784, and without ever losing any of their relevance and importance. I will discuss a topic that has not been discussed quite that extensively: Kant's conception of enlightenment as it relates to the idea of perfection ("Vollkommenheit") in…

Luce Irigaray offers a powerful 'philosophy of teaching' that connects with the ancient paradigm. In this paper, I discuss the relationship between teaching and love as this is depicted in Plato, and I look at Irigaray's reading of the "Symposium." Then I show how Irigaray's own philosophy can help us to think about the ideal teaching…

Much thinking in psychology and related forms of psychotherapy is in the grip of a conception of inner-outer relationships that distorts the reality of our lives and world. In his later work, and in the last years of his life especially, Wittgenstein battled against this. In the course of his criticism, he developed vivid images that challenge…

Education is astonishingly simple. We have all been through it, whether as children or later in life--indeed, many of us are still going through it in some form or other; we all know what works; and we are all committed to realising its individual and social potential. Such a view of the matter might dispense with the need for philosophy of…

Nothing reveals the differences between an internal (i.e., inherently pedagogical) reflection on educational processes and an external (i.e., derived from a philosophical, sociological, psychological, theological or other perspective) more clearly than the differing attitudes towards alienation. Looked at from outside a pedagogical context,…

Materialist philosophy and socialist ideology are philosophical and ideological approaches that have deep influence and traces in public life practice. Along with the social, economic, and political fields, the field of education has been deeply influenced by materialist philosophy and socialist ideology in certain contexts. Main purpose of this…

Background: A range of psychotherapies are effective in managing an individual's personal reactions to stuttering and reducing the impact stuttering has on their lives. Many of these therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, have their origins in Stoicism, an ancient Greek philosophy founded in 301 BCE. Stoicism remains a relatively…

Learning from Freire can be a live-long endeavor, always adding humor, rigorous critical theory, and narrative. This article addresses the theoretical and cognitive ways in which Freire can be embraced. Moving far beyond banking education and fixed ideological notions of Freire's work, it is important to consider the tentative when reading and…

This paper extends well-established arguments for the liberal potential of vocational education by advocating for the "necessity" of craft learning in a liberal education curriculum. The case for the necessity of craft learning in liberal education is established in two parts, the first looking toward Aristotle and the second toward…

This article summarizes and explores personal librarian philosophies. Much like widely known teaching philosophies, librarian philosophies are statements that reflect an individual's standards and beliefs about their vocation. These statements can be used to incorporate meaning, identity, and direction into professional practice. As a form of…

Every theory of education endorses an image of a human being as someone who can be educated and is capable of self-education and self-cultivation. Since J.F. Herbart, educationalists have been sketching this image under the title "Bildsamkeit," which has become a central element of the specific German way of speaking about educational…

In recent years there has been a notable increase in the use of phenomenology as a research method, particularly in educational research. With the rise of phenomenology as a research method, confusion has also arisen concerning what counts as phenomenology, and how best to practice phenomenological research in non-philosophical contexts.…

This chapter describes transformative learning as a catch-all term to describe many disparate phenomena related to learning processes involved in human transformation. It argues for the distinction between individual theories used to understand these phenomena and the metatheoretical work of analyzing across theories. This article then reviews…