This article compares the two worldviews of Daoism and selected lost gospels, and considers the pedagogical implications. It explores their core concepts and how each applies these concepts to define human beings in their world. The comparative analysis shows that they share a view of a process of becoming that defines how humans know and the…

We seek, in this analytical essay, to complicate the conversation around knowledge production in the academy by proposing "intellectual humility" as a mode for moving toward new avenues of knowledge-making, particularly as an epistemic stance against the kinds of "intellectual arrogance" (Lynch, 2017) that have made certain…

In his 2006 essay, "Moral Education's Modest Agenda," Robin Barrow argues for a clearly bounded conception of morality; he presents the moral domain as concerned with moral principles, and moral education as the cultivation of moral understanding. Barrow rejects behaviourism, character education, values clarification, developmentalism,…

(Neuro)psychiatric diagnoses such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a rapidly growing and globally increasing phenomenon, not least in different educational contexts such as in family and in school. Children and youths labelled as ADHD are challenging normative claims in terms of nurturing and education, whereas those labelled…

J. J. Rousseau, thinker of the Age of Enlightenment, breaks a new ground in education with his work "Emile." In his novel, "Emile" is the name of the child he has grown up imaginatively. Rousseau, describing Emile's life and his relationship with his instructor from birth to adolescence, discusses teacher-student relationship,…

This article explores a perplexing line from Rousseau's Emile: his suggestion that the "most important rule" for the educator is "not to gain time but to lose it." An analysis of what Rousseau meant by this line, the article argues, shows that Rousseau provides the philosophical groundwork for a radical critique of the…

Following a trajectory of thinking from the philosophy of Spinoza via the work of Nietzsche and through Deleuze's texts, this article explores the possibility of framing a contemporary pedagogical practice by an ontological order that does not presuppose the superiority of the mind over the body and that does not rely on universal morals but…

In this essay it is argued that the educational philosophy of John Dewey gains in depth and importance by being related to his philosophy of nature, his metaphysics. The result is that any experiental process is situated inside an event, an existence, a thing, and I try to interpret this "thing" as schools or major cultural events such…

Whereas most latter-day Aristotelian approaches to moral education highlight the early habituation phase of moral development, they rarely have much to say, beyond truisms from the "Nicomachean ethics," about the ultimate Aristotelian goal of cultivating fully fledged "phronesis." The aim of this article is to repair the dearth…

If there is a topic on which the humanities might make a distinctive claim, it is that of consciousness--an essential aspect of human being. And within the humanities, music might make its own claims in relation to both consciousness and being human. To investigate this connection, David Clarke and Eric Clarke brought together a wide variety of…

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and UNESCO have proposed that the International Year of Chemistry, 2011, should make a strong educational contribution to the goals of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. This emphasis is absolutely necessary because education for sustainability remains practically…

"Aesthetics" is often taken to be the study of art, but it has come to mean a variety of rather different things in contemporary educational theory and practice, such as: (i) sensory education; (ii) appreciation of beauty; (iii) education in appreciation of the arts. The danger of running these different senses together is explored and…

In this article, the author outlines Plato's notions of play in ancient Greek culture and shows how the philosopher's views on play can be best appreciated against the background of shifting meanings and evaluations of play in classical Greece. Play--in various forms such as word play, ritual, and music--proved central to the development of…

The need for progressive education is prevalent in one of the most underserved portions of the population: the adult developmentally disabled. Though John Dewey wrote little on the education of the disabled, his philosophy, and that of Mahatma Gandhi's, lend themselves to the further education of this unique segment of society. In this paper, I…

Margaret Stephenson begins with the reasoning elementary child as he answers questions about "all things." She centers on the unity of knowledge, leading "from the whole via the parts back to the whole." Imagination is enhanced to bring abstraction to an engaging and lofty motivation, and the elementary self is referred to as…