Imagine yourself standing on a beach with the sand being pulled out from under your feet with each retreating wave. You must struggle to regain your footing each time. Now imagine standing on a cement pad on the same beach. Each time the waves come in, you can feel the force of their movement and their power, but your footing is not compromised.…

Politically neutral pedagogy is often the subject of both praise and condemnation. But treating political neutrality as a principle to be either embraced or rejected confuses the issue, because the permissibility of neutrality actually varies across educational contexts. Educational practice should not be evaluated on the basis of whether or not…

Rousseau was a great thinker of educational philosophy. This paper explores Rousseau's view of educational philosophy to be aware of educational goals and innovation using dialectical materialism. Methodology is a comprehensive principle, a development principle, and a specific historical focus. The above method is the basis for understanding…

Much work in physics education research (PER) characterizes faculty teaching practice in terms of whether faculty use specific named PER-based teaching methods, either with fidelity or with adaptation; we call this research paradigm the "teaching-method-centered paradigm." However, most faculty do not frame their teaching in terms of…

Autonomy is considered to be an important feature of professionals and to provide a necessary basis for their informed judgments. In this article these notions will be challenged. In this article I use Michel Foucault's deconstruction of the idea of the autonomous citizen, and his later attempts to reconstruct that idea, in order to bring some new…

This paper draws on recent work by John Clarke and Janet Newman and their colleagues to analyse a relatively coherent governmental project, spanning the decades of Conservative and New Labour government in England since 1979, that has sought to render teachers increasingly subservient to the state and agencies of the state. Under New Labour this…

The term autonomy has multiple meanings based on diversity in theoretical views in current educational literature. Examples are given of multiple meanings of autonomy, and comparisons are made to the Piagetian view of autonomy as self-regulation implying separateness within community. A case is made for the relevance of autonomy as an educational…

The Danish education system has been characterized by democratic values, individual choice of education and institution, emphasis on general education, and teachers' freedom of teaching method. But these characteristics are being undermined by European unity and neoliberalist policies that see education as an element in the market economy.…

Proposes a model for rural education based on the progressive practices of a rural school in Israel in the early 1900s. Desirable characteristics of rural education are organized into four innovative educational models: education for work (including agricultural education); community education; social-ideological education; and curricular autonomy…