Today, teaching literature has an established place within the school and university curricula in Western and East Asian countries. This seems so natural that we take the educational role of literature for granted. However, history teaches us that elevating literature to an academic subject required a defense of literature against the critical…

When the newly appointed professor of medicine at the University of Rinteln, Johann Peter Lotichius (1598-1669), delivered an oration entitled "Oratio super fatalibus hoc tempore academiarum in Germania periculis" ("Oration on the pernicious dangers to the universities of contemporary Germany") at said university in February…

Education faces a dilemma: policy and practice are primarily humanist in orientation, and yet the environmental challenges education hopes to confront require moving beyond humanist perspectives -- to posthumanist awareness. Recent policy advances in Victoria, Australia, highlight the empowerment of students. Yet widening the scope of education…

A small project of STEAM education called "Innovation for Love and Care" was implemented in a local secondary school in Hong Kong. Four seventh-grade students participated from November 2020 to February 2021. The project aims to integrate humanism into the traditional STEAM curriculum, to stimulate the students' innovation in a…

Hassan in "The Kite Runner" was brave, kind-hearted and loyal, but he still ended up with misery. From the three dimensional ethical perspective, Hassan's tragedy is not only greatly related to national and religious ethics, but also influenced by deformed family ethics. Thus it can be seen that national discrimination and religious…

In this essay, I demonstrate the value of the Bildungsroman for philosophy of education on the grounds that these narratives raise and explore educational questions. I focus on a short story in the Bildungsroman tradition, Thomas Hardy's "A Mere Interlude". This story describes the maturation of its heroine by narrating a series of…

Here the author takes "ren"-humanity to be, as Confucius says, an underlying, ineffable, potentially universal human quality, and draws a distinction between three different types of moral capacity in the "Lunyu": the man of "ren's" capacity for "li"-proper interactions, his capacity for total…

What are the conditions required for becoming better human beings? What are our limitations and possibilities? I understand "becoming better" as a combined improvement process bringing persons "up from" a negative condition and "up to" a positive one. Today there is a tendency to understand improvement in a one-sided way as a movement up to the…

Were teachers, of the early modern era not longing for the present? Most colleges of that time did not offer a history course. Still, they did teach a lot about the past since the teaching consisted in the reading of the works of ancient writers. This is because ancient science and literature were considered much more advanced than the science and…

Both the language of performance management and the target-setting culture of our schools lead to a "depersonalisation" of education--a failure to respect young learners as persons. They become a "means" to some further non-educational "end". John Macmurray challenged this depersonalisation in terms not only of its impoverished educational…

The issue of competition in sports is controversial in certain philosophies of education, especially among the more conservative, often religious, educators. Some understand competition negatively, as opposed to ideal human solidarity, and therefore argue that the practice of sports conveys dangerous attitudes of violence, pride, selfishness, etc.…

The purpose of this paper is to philosophically explore a "realization-focused" capabilities theory of social justice, as articulated by AmartyaSen and Martha Nussbaum, as foundational to a theory of critical peace education. Paulo Freire's philosophy of critical pedagogy has had and continues to have a profound influence on the theory and…

To conceptualise moral education as "living and learning to bear suffering" offers a humanistic vision for choices people make in the face of drastic threats to their existence. This essay proposes that bearing and transcending suffering--part of the human narrative--helps human beings to realise their ethical potential. Grounded in…

Discusses the influence of Hindu, Moslem, and Buddhist metaphysics on Maria Montessori's own pedagogical philosophy of Cosmic Education, which she regarded as the core of all learning experiences, after her visit to India. Considers the relationship between Montessori's ideas of child development and Cosmic Education, and the effect of Indian…

This issue of "The Community College Humanities Review" contains a series of articles, reviews, and reports addressing various issues related to values education and other areas of the humanities. The issue contains: "The Study of History and the Question of Human Values," by Abraham Ascher; "A Moral Imperative for Teaching Values in a Literature…