This important collection of essays offers a sustained philosophical examination of fundamental questions raised by multicultural education in primary and secondary schools. The essays focus on both theory and policy. They discuss the relation between culture and identity, the role of reason in bridging cultural divisions, and the civic implications of multi-culturalism in the teaching of history and literature. Several of the essays examine aspects of multicultural policies in California and New York, as well as the curriculum guidelines promulgated (...) by the National Council for Social Studies. Although much has been published on the subject of multi-culturalism, including the cultural war on American campuses, there is very little available on the impact of multicultural policies for primary and secondary education. So this is a volume that will be welcomed by all those interested in multicultural education: philosophers and historians of education, sociologists, professional educators and policy-makers. (shrink)

i The 2005 decision by Judge John E. Jones in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District was celebrated by all red-blooded American liberals as a victory over the forces of darkness. The result was probably inevitable, in view of the reckless expression by some members of the Dover School Board of their desire to put religion into the classroom, and the clumsiness of their prescribed statement in trying to dissimulate that aim.1 But the conflicts aired in this trial—over the status (...) of evolutionary theory, the arguments for intelligent design, and the nature of science—reveal an intellectually unhealthy situation. The political urge to defend science education against the threats of religious orthodoxy, understandable though it is, has resulted in a counterorthodoxy, supported by bad arguments, and a tendency to overstate the legitimate scientific claims of evolutionary theory. Skeptics about the theory are seen as so dangerous, and so disreputably motivated, that they must be denied any shred of.. (shrink)

_Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy_ introduces the political and educational ideas of Jacques Rancière, a leading philosopher increasingly important in educational theory. In light of his ideas, the volume explores the current concern for democracy and equality in relation to education. The book introduces and discusses the works of Jacques Rancière, a leading philosopher increasingly important in the field of educational theory and philosophy The volume will have a broad appeal to those in the (...) field of education theory and philosophy, and those concerned with democracy, equal opportunities and pedagogy Balanced in its introduction of the political and educational ideas of this author and in its exploration in line with his work of some important issues in education and policy today Contributors from diverse countries and intellectual and cultural backgrounds, including the UK, US, Belgium, Sweden, Spain, France, Canada. (shrink)

Walter Feinberg; The Public Responsibility of Public Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 25, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 17–25, https://doi.or.

Certain attributes are particularly desirable for public educational websites, and websites for ethics education in particular. Among the most important of these attributes is wide accessibility through adherence to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for HTML code. Adherence to this standard produces webpages that can be rendered by a full range of web browsers, including Braille and speech browsers. Although almost no academic websites, including ethics websites, and even fewer commercial websites are accessible by W3C standards, (...) as illustrated by the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science 〈http://onlineethics.org〉, even websites created on limited budgets and with an undergraduate student staff can fulfill these standards. Other desirable attributes, such as provision of annotation for all links and the use of annotated links to give the user alternate ways of ordering and organizing content, are important for making full use of the educational possibilities of hypermedia for websites. (shrink)

In his 1916 preface to Democracy and Education, John Dewey comments that the main goal of his book was “to detect and state the ideas implied in a democratic society and to apply these ideas to the problems and enterprise of education. The discussion includes an indication of the constructive aims and methods of public education as seen from this point of view.”1 More than 100 years later, Sarah M. Stitzlein confirms Dewey’s ideas and expands his (...) scholarship to defend the political legitimacy of public education in the United States. She argues that public schools should enable children to become good citizens who engage in the pursuit of individual happiness, while fighting for social justice. Stitzlein contends... (shrink)

Stuart, SN A review of sociological studies comparing outcomes of schooling across the three educational sectors in Australia has been published by Save Our Schools.

In Singapore, top down public education campaigns have long been a mode of governance by which the conduct of citizens is constantly regulated. This article examines how in two fairly recent campaigns, a new approach to campaign communication is used that involves media interdiscursivity, viz., the mixing of discourses and genres in which the media constitute a significant element. The present approach involves the appropriation of a popular local television character, ‘Phua Chu Kang’, in order to address the (...) public through educational rap music videos. Media interdiscursivity is based on an attempt to engage the public via a discourse of the ‘lifeworld’. The present article analyzes the ‘lifeworld’ discourse in terms of a combination of two processes, ‘informalization’ and ‘communitization’. The dual processes are examined and discussed in relation to the choice of Phua Chu Kang as an ‘ordinary’ and almost ‘real’ person, including his informal register and speech style; his use of Singlish; and his construction of ‘community.’ The presence of Singlish, in particular, is interesting because it is included as part of PCK’s public performance of the lifeworld. The article concludes by considering this form of media interdiscursivity as the government’s shrewd way of achieving its social governance goals. (shrink)

This article aims to enlarge the conversation about religion and public education by inviting readers to think about the benefits to be gained in society by providing a comprehensive religious studies curriculum in our public schools. In such a program, students will develop knowledge and understanding about various religious traditions, forge greater respect for the religious (and nonreligious) other, and think through existential concerns that have interested human beings for thousands of years. While recognizing that such a (...) program is deeply contentious, we nevertheless reason that students, as participants in a democracy as well as members of a global community, must have the skills, tools, and knowledge to function in a religiously diverse world. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the musical work of classical composer Benjamin Britten as a lasting legacy for public music education. Our starting point is the contemporary urgency to rethink both public music education in general, and the public-educational significance of Western classical music in particular, in the face of the dual threats posed by anti-educational tendencies of “functionalization” and “hobbyfication.” Relating this situation to concerns already voiced by Britten in his time, we consider in (...) what ways aspects of Britten’s musical work can be shown to reveal a highly original, post-critical answer to these threats. While his pedagogical musings remain riddled with ambiguities, which readily invite critical deconstruction, our paper argues for the more affirmative option of reconceptualizing these ambiguities as constitutive tensions of a public-educational love for (classical) music. To gauge the practical implications of such a post-critical music-educational love, we analyze the concrete case of the Aldeburgh Festival, perhaps Britten’s most full-fledged effort to reclaim music as a public affair. Thinking about this case, we reflect on how Britten’s legacy could lastingly impinge on the publicness of Western classical music, as well as on ongoing and future practices of public music education in general. (shrink)

In our increasingly instrumentalist culture, debates over the privatization of schooling may be beside the point. Whether we hatch some new plan for chartering or funding schools, or retain the traditional model of government-run schools, the ongoing instrumentalization of education threatens the very possibility of public education. Indeed, in the culture of performativity, not only the public school but public life itself is hollowed out and debased. Qualities are recast as quantities, judgments replaced by rubrics, (...) teaching and learning turned into exchange values. Schools should be central to public life: key locations for the regeneration of values, the cultivation of judgment, and the creation of the conditions for positive freedom. In this article Chris Higgins, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, goes beyond typical treatments of the schools as equalizer of individual opportunity to explore three aspects of educational publicity: the school as an object of communal concern, schooling as preparation for public life, and the classroom as public space. (shrink)

The article considers whether tolerance, in the classical liberal sense, should be promoted in public education. The most substantial counter-argument is that it is problematic to uphold the ?objection condition,? explained below, which is an integral part of classical tolerance, while maintaining tolerance as a virtue. As a response to this, I first discuss an alternative interpretation of tolerance ? ?tolerance as being open-minded, unprejudiced and positive towards difference.? I contend that this understanding is not the preferable one (...) in public education, because it lacks sufficient distinctiveness and threatens to marginalize or exclude the classical concept of tolerance. I instead propose a modified version of classical tolerance to be promoted in public education, whereby permissible objections are restricted so as not to disrespect persons. This version allows, however, for pupils to have a wide range of objections while still being candidates for being called tolerant, with the result that promoting tolerance may clash with other important educational objectives. I argue that promoting tolerance is still needed as part of a robust educational approach to plurality in modern democratic states, but that we must be willing to accept that promoting tolerance sometimes assumes the place of a second-best educational alternative. (shrink)

This paper develops an interpretation and analysis of the arguments for public education which open Book VIII of Aristotle's Politics , drawing on both the wider Aristotelian corpus and on examination of continuities with Plato's Laws . Part III : Sections VIII-XI examine the two arguments which Aristotle adduces in support of the claim that education should be provided through a public system. The first of these arguments concerns the need to unify society through education (...) for friendship and the sharing of a common end. Several versions of his second argument are considered, and the most promising of them is elaborated in connection with an examination of the links between instruction and legislation in the Laws . This yields what is probably the most compelling argument there is for the claim that public supervision of education is a necessary condition for a just society. (shrink)

For years now, public education, and especially public higher education has been under attack. Funding has been drastically reduced, fees increased, and the seemingly irresistible political force of ever-tightening austerity budgets threatens to cut it even more. But I am not going to take the standard line that government financial support for public higher education should be increased. I view that battle as already lost. What I am going to propose is that we stop (...) arguing about the allocation or reallocation of ever more scarce public resources and think of another way to fund public higher education. It's time for a new approach, one that satisfies the left's claim that higher education should be affordable for all, yet one that does not involve increasing expenditure of public funds or commit the government to entitlement programs that it cannot now or at least cannot long afford. What we need is a new proposal that is acceptable to both sides if we are to bring public education into the twenty-first century. And this is what this paper is devoted to providing. (shrink)

Examines intelligent design as a science, a philosophy and a movement for educational reform. Central to all three aspects of ID is its claim that, if science education is to be other than state-sponsored propaganda, a distinction must be drawn between empirical science and materialist philosophy.

This paper develops an interpretation and analysis of the arguments for public education which open Book VIII of Aristotle's Politics, drawing on both the wider Aristotelian corpus and on examination of continuities with Plato's Laws. Part I: The paper opens with the question of why Aristotle would say that no one will doubt that education should be the concern of the legislator, and Sections I–III identify the nature of his enterprise in the Politics, the audience he wishes (...) to address, the conclusions he seeks to establish in VIII. 1, and what public education would amount to for him. An important conclusion reached is that the first of Aristotle's two conclusions in VIII.1 has been routinely misidentified. (shrink)

Colonization of public education—the process by which schools are overwhelmed and penetrated by non-educational imperatives—is usually believed to be caused by capitalism and the hegemonic ideological structures it produces. In this paper I argue that in the case of the United States an additional mechanism produces strong colonizing effects: the institution of local control. In the context of contemporary institutional conditions, local control is the lynch-pin for the production of socio-economic segregation, cumulative disadvantages, and the mythology of popular (...) control disguising the growing control of public schooling through unaccountable bureaucracies and private corporations. (shrink)

How should judges deal with the manifestation of religious symbols in public educational institutions? In light of the important role of human rights in our legal and political system, courts should grant maximum protection under the freedom of religion or belief. The central thesis of this article is that the European Court of Human Rights fails to live up to this standard. In order to reach this conclusion, the article analyzes relevant case law of the European Court and compares (...) its case law with that of the high courts of Canada and South Africa. In addition, the article assesses the case law of all three courts from the angle of interpretation theory and particularly Cass R. Sunstein’s theory of judicial minimalism. Adoption of a more consistently minimalist methodology by the European Court might lead to a greater protection granted to individuals and groups. However, a wide and deep ruling is first required to overturn the current line of reasoning. The European Court can draw inspiration from Canada and South Africa for such a judgment. (shrink)

In recent years much has been written on the political and social effects of the Internet on the public sphere, but comparatively little attention has been paid to its effects on the educational systems in Europe and beyond. More specifically, the effect of the shift in the locus of public communication to the private sphere, with everyone commenting on everything from their personal computers, tends to undermine and delegitimize the traditional institutions of education. New forms of communication (...) need new educational and behavioral standards. At the same time, not only individual citizens but especially public intellectuals and educators have to come to grips with the fact that there is less and less regulation of the new spaces and new publics they address. This article discusses what we can possibly expect our public education to achieve under these new conditions of local and global communication systems. (shrink)

In a recent article, Thomas Nagel argues against the court’s decision to strike down the Dover school district’s requirement that biology teachers in Dover public schools inform their students about Intelligent Design. Nagel contends that this ruling relies on questionable demarcation between science and nonscience and consequently misapplies the Establishment Clause of the constitution. Instead, he argues in favor of making room for an open discussion of these issues rather than an outright prohibition against Intelligent Design. We contend that (...) Nagel’s arguments do not succeed. First, we argue that Nagel’s case trades on an ambiguity regarding the content of non-theological views and fails to engage adequately some of the problems of ID. Then we raise concerns about Nagel’s conclusion; specifically, we will point to three incongruities between Nagel’s argument and his conclusion, and then we will raise a more general worry about the likely impact of Nagel’s view. (shrink)

Ten years of educational reform have not brought dramatic improvements. In Ideology and Educational Reform, David Paris traces the underlying ideological problems that make genuine reform difficult. These include different and often conflicting beliefs concerning the proper role of public education as well as the public's natural ambivalence about schools as government agencies.Paris describes three major themes in public education—common school, human capital, and clientelism. He critically evaluates current policies and proposed reforms associated with each (...) of these topics, including moral education, the school-economy relationship, school choice, and the delivery of social services. Paris proposes better ways for dealing with ideological problems in school practice, and he suggests appropriate directions for policy reform. (shrink)

This book brings the idea of a public—defined in part as the quality of communication among strangers—back into focus. The benefits of doing this are many, but perhaps the most important are to adjust our understanding of what is good teaching and to widen our understanding of what counts as central to the educational process.