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ERIC Number: EJ879946
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-Feb
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0309-8249
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
What Does It Mean to Be an Educated Person?
Hodgson, Naomi
Journal of Philosophy of Education, v44 n1 p109-123 Feb 2010
The competition question "What Does It Mean To Be An Educated Person?" is associated with a powerful and influential line of thought in the philosophy of R. S. Peters. It is a question that needs always to be asked again. I respond by asking what it means, now, to be an educated person--that is, how the value of being an educated person is currently understood, and, further, how it might be understood differently. The starting point of this paper then is not exactly the question of how we should best conceive of education, or of the educated person, in terms, for example, of initiation or of moral development. Instead I am concerned with who the supposedly educated person is today, according to the particular discourses and practices to which we are subject. I begin, then, by outlining the notion of the entrepreneurial self from the perspective of governmentality, with particular reference to questions of economy and the way in which the economic imperative is present in current policy. I then reconsider the idea of the educated person with reference to notions of economy and visibility as these relate to ideas of education and the self in Plato's The Republic. Discussion of readings of The Republic and of other texts of Plato by Stanley Cavell and Michel Foucault indicates how prevailing constructions of knowledge, practice, and subjectivity might be resisted. The question of what it means to be an educated person is thereby released from a particular mode of accounting for the self. [This paper was the winner of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Essay Competition in 2009.]
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A