This paper explores the implications of a radical republican conception of freedom as non-domination, rooted in the anarchist tradition. In discussing both the non-statist theoretical frameworks and the practical educational experiments associated with this tradition, I suggest that it can add a valuable dimension to recent critical work in philosophy of education that draws on the republican idea of freedom as non-domination.

In Jean Baudrillard and Radical Education Theory: Turning Right to Go Left, the authors argue that Baudrillard has been underappreciated in philosophical and theoretical work in education. They introduce him here as an important figure in radical thought who has something to add to theoretical lines of inquiry in education. The book does not offer an introduction to Baudrillard. Rather, his corpus is mined in order to describe how it functions as a counter to the code of (...) education, rational thought, critical reason, etc. In effect, they establish that Baudrillard advocates for a counter-path to thinking that can shake us out of our ready-made thoughts and realize the radical potential for change. (shrink)

This paper outlines a theory of radical democratic education by addressing a key concept in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: articulation. Through their concept of articulation, Laclau and Mouffe attempt to liberate Gramsci’s theory of hegemony from Marxist economism, and adapt it to a political sphere inhabited by a plurality of struggles and agents none of which is predominant. However, while for Gramsci the political process of hegemony formation has an explicit educational dimension, Laclau and Mouffe ignore (...) this dimension altogether. My discussion starts with elaborating the concept of articulation and analysing it in terms of three dimensions: performance, connection and transformation. I then address the role of education in Gramsci’s politics, in which the figure of the intellectual is central, and argue that radical democratic education requires renouncing that figure. In the final section, I offer a theory of such education, in which both teacher and students articulate their political differences and identities. (shrink)

Context: The current situation in philosophy of science includes central, ongoing debates about realism and anti-realism. The same question has been central to the theorising of radical constructivism and, in particular, to its implications for educational theory. However the constructivist literature does not make significant contact with the most important, mainstream philosophical discussions. Problem: Despite its overwhelming influence among educationalists, I suggest that the “radical constructivism” of Ernst Glasersfeld is an example of fashionable but thoroughly problematic doctrines that can have (...) little benefit for practical pedagogy or teacher education. My critique has a positive goal: it is important to understand why constructivism has generated such severe polarization and disputation. A symptom of the problem is the concern with the most abstruse and obdurate problems of philosophy that have no conceivable bearing on educational practice or anything else, for that matter. The diagnosis is confirmed by those pedagogical recommendations that are allegedly derived from radical constructivism that are touted as revolutionary but are platitudes of common sense. I suggest that, ironically, this observation itself provides some pedagogical insight. Method: The approach adopted for the topic is critical, philosophical analysis of the various claims and theses of radical constructivism in the light of philosophy of science and psychology. Results: The findings of the paper are that central theoretical claims of constructivism are couched in an unclear and unnecessary jargon that obscures the implausibility or banality of these claims. Implications: The value of the paper lies in providing an analysis and critique of central, influential claims of radical constructivism both in relation to issues in epistemology and also in relation to the alleged bearing of these claims on pedagogy. It is suggested that, contrary to the claims of radical constructivists, there are few if any implications for practice and applications. (shrink)

Comparative international education is a complex field that has been defined/described in several different ways. Some scholars (e.g., Getao, 1996) propose that comparative education strives to und...

The book concludes by examining how we might bring such transformation about.Written by two of the leading experts in the fields of early childhood and ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art Education and the Emergence of Radical Art Movements in Egypt: The Surrealists and the Contemporary Arts Group, 1938–1951Patrick Kane (bio)So it wasn’t the aim of the artist to just toss out a work of art. A tradition of the exhibition of the natural, and its meaning was not that it fled from life, but that it had penetrated and plunged into reality. Its meaning was not a (...) prescription or plain exercise in the taste of the sublime, or harmony of forms and charming scenes; and its meaning was not as a decoration of life; it was in its expression of what life inspires in us to give back.—Henry Moore, as quoted by Ramses Yunan, in “The Aim of the Contemporary Artist”1In these crucial days of difficulty, the artists in this country live in tall aristocratic towers.... For this peasant has an art of his own that sustains him, and it is not that art of the educated class.—Kamil Al-Tilmisani (c. 1941–1942)By 1938, as the agrarian crisis in Egypt deepened, the Depression, food shortages, low wages, expropriations of crops, and forced rents opened a polemic among Egyptian intellectuals over the role of the state and the looming threat of fascism. With the dismissal of the government of Mustafa Al-Nahas at the end of 1937, the political turbulence underscored the weakening of the Wafd Party. Opponents of the old Wafdists and supporters of the monarchy resorted to openly fascist tactics, including the establishment of youth organizations and the Blue Shirts, the fascist front of the young Wafdists who modeled themselves on Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The serial crises of agrarian struggles and parliamentary stalemates between [End Page 95] nationalists and monarchists led to increasingly militant stances by the paramilitary fascist organization Misr Al-Fattah (Young Egypt) as a counter to the Muslim Brothers. When Mahmud Khalil resigned from the Wafd and assumed the presidency of the Senate in 1938, his ascension opened a new phase of struggle in politics through culture and the arts.2 In this context, caricatures and satirical sculptures of Khalil appeared in 1939 that parodied him as the icon of a “dictatorship of art.”3 Leading intellectuals from all political stances addressed these issues directly. The cultural journals were peppered with articles on the problems of everyday life and the material crises with such representative titles as ‘Abbas al-Aqqad’s “Food for the Rich,” in which he raised the problem of food shortages and inequity as an issue for reform.4 Within the year, articles in Al-Risala and Al-Thaqafa drew comparisons with French and Italian nineteenth-century landscapes as a model for the recognition of the countryside as a subject. In journalism and the arts, suffering became a part of the recognition of the everyday, as articles appeared on Millet’s nineteenth-century paintings of French peasants.As the war in Europe encroached into the cover pages of Egypt’s cultural journals, Zaki Muhammad Hasan wrote an essay for Al-Thaqafa entitled “The Angelus,” with a reproduction of the 1859 painting by Jean Francois Millet (1814–1874).5 Hasan wrote about Millet’s interest in the “the daily labors of the peasant” as a depiction of the conditions of French peasants. Hasan’s mention of Millet’s own peasant origins, and his listing of paintings of social conditions, including Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), reflected a broadening interest in the artistic subject of the peasant and the rise of the peasant as artist. Although in Millet’s painting there is a prayer scene of a man and a woman in the fields that is generally regarded as the evening prayer with the sun setting, an Egyptian reader could link the prayer with the issue of workers taking breaks in the fields at a time when the issue of compensation of peasant farm workers was paramount.6 Hasan introduced “The Angelus” to his readers as a Catholic prayer in southern Europe offered at dawn, noon, and sunset and compared the origins of the prayer’s stanzas from the Gospel of Luke 1:28–31 with passages from the chapter on Maryam in the Quran... (shrink)

Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end (...) I take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries. (shrink)

Kant begins his Lectures on Pedagogy by stating, “[t]he human being is the only creature that must be educated” (Kant, 2007, 9:441), and he argues that it is through education that we can transform our initial “animal nature into human nature” (ibid. 2007, 9:441). Kant understands education as involving an ordered process of care, discipline, instruction and formation through enculturating, civilizing and moralizing (Formosa 2011). Further, Kant envisages that we should pursue as a species the “moral perfection” that (...) is the “final destiny of the human race” through education (Collins, 1997, 27:470; see Dean, 2014). However, to engage in this pursuit Kant believes that, through education and social change, we have to regulate our “animal nature” and counter the moral corruption of our species, which he calls the “radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by ourselves)” (Kant, 1998, 6:32). If humanity is to pursue its final destiny of moral perfection, then education will need to respond responsibly to the propensity to evil that is deeply rooted in us as finite and imperfect rational beings living in imperfect and at times even in morally corrupted social conditions. This paper outlines some of the relevant issues. (shrink)

Jean Anyon's groundbreaking new book reveals the influence of federal and metropolitan policies and practices on the poverty that plagues schools and communities in American cities and segregated, low-income suburbs. Public policies...such as those regulating the minimum wage, job availability, tax rates, federal transit, and affordable housing...all create conditions in urban areas that no education policy as currently conceived can transcend. In this first book since her best-selling _Ghetto Schooling_, Jean Anyon argues that we must replace these federal and (...) metro-area policies with more equitable ones so that urban school reform can have positive life consequences for students. Anyon provides a much-needed new paradigm for understanding and combating educational injustice. Radical Possibilities reminds us that historically, equitable public policies have been typically created as a result of the political pressure brought to bear by social movements. Basing her analysis on new research in civil rights history and social movement theory, Anyon skillfully explains how the current moment offers serious possibilities for the creation of such a force. The book powerfully describes five social movements already under way in U.S. cities, and offers readers interested in building this new social movement a set of practical and theoretical insights into securing economic and educational justice for the many millions of America's poor families and students. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Marxist studies of schools have overlooked the power of intentional explanations to explain schooling practices and policies. This oversight is at least in part due to many radical analyses failing to distinguish between explaining the acquisition and persistence of beliefs and determining the social consequences that follow from acting on beliefs. I further contend that radical researchers examining schooling practices must develop a more rigorous and refined conception of capitalist class interests.

The paper deals with the way postmodernism has been discussed within philosophy of education and argued for by some authors within this context, and with what this kind of postmodernism can offer to education and to philosophy of education. Particular attention is paid to one of the basic presuppositions, namely the requirement to break with the cultural heritage and look for radical alternatives. A second paper will develop a different view of human action, following the later Wittgenstein, (...) and draw on Frankfurt's ideas on‘the importance of what we care about’ to revitalise the conception of the educational project. (shrink)

Earth system science (ESS) has identified worrying trends in the human impact on fundamental planetary systems. In this conceptual article, we discuss the implications of this research for business schools and management education (ME). We argue that ESS findings raise significant concerns about the relationship between business and nature and, consequently, a radical reframing is required to embed economic and social activity within the global sustainability of natural systems. This has transformative implications for ME. To illustrate this reframing, we (...) apply the ESS lenses of social-ecological interdependence, multiscalar relations, environmental governance, and environmental values to the ME functional domains of institutional purpose, social context and engagement, pedagogical practice, curricular design, and research focus. Our work contributes to the literature on business education for sustainability and the business-society-nature nexus. We explore and apply key ESS findings and concepts, discuss normative implications of these ideas, and offer guidance on transformational pathways for business schools and ME. (shrink)

Problem: What alternative strategies from our experiences using a Piaget-based radical constructivist pedagogy might have more and better results than the current practice of responding in debate form, each side trying to prove the other wrong? Method: Use of Slezak’s paper to illuminate the point that the central problem with the interpretation of RC generally used in such writing is that the authors seem not to be able to operate from the central tenet of RC, which is the opposite of (...) that used in realism. Description of how this failure to use the central tenet of RC results in claims that RC is irrelevant to education and to definitions of good teaching. Results: A specific approach shown to be useful in facilitating the construction of new understanding in science is adapted in order to guide interaction between an RC and a realist, which can result in the realist understanding the RC point of view. Implications: Instead of debating with critics of RC, where each side is trying to prove the other side wrong, we need to change the interaction to one in which members of opposing sides attempt to understand the other’s position. In this situation we are in a position to use a pedagogical strategy in which the realist examines her own fundamental assumption that we can know a mind-independent world, and considers the implications of a starting assumption that is exactly the opposite. (shrink)

Review of Beatriz Molina Rueda (ed.), Studying and Preventing the Radicalization of Islam. What School Communities Can Do? (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2009), 4 volumes.

Quinn presents a radical new perspective on the interrelationships between education and culture. Rather than viewing education in isolation from major cultural debates, she demonstrates how culture shapes education and education shapes culture. Cultural perspectives and rich empirical data from a wide range of research with learners in university, voluntary, community and work settings are used to provide a bridge between cultural theory and the embodied worlds of learners. Drawing vivid links with other cultural evidence from (...) literature and popular culture, this book convincingly shows how anti-realist theory can produce positive material changes both in education and society. (shrink)

Historically, Thomas Aquinas has been controversial for his use of Averroistic-Aristotelian metaphysics. Because of his doctrine of simplicity many of argued that this entails a necessitarian view of nature—a debate that would pass through Spinoza, Descartes, and even to this day. Nevertheless, Thomas would prevail, not only to sainthood, but to become the patron of education and the Teacher of the Church. The task in this paper is to demonstrate that, contrary to many current contentions in Protestant, and especially (...) Evangelical circles, Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics remains a suitable, viable, even preferable framework for Christian Theism and, for the purposes of this paper, scientific thought. The specific focus will be on creation metaphysics and the relationship between current science and Christian thought raised by Lydia Jaeger. I will conclude with an example of the ability of radical contingency in Thomas to both satisfy contemporary physics and frame a consistent and coherent Christian Theism. (shrink)

This paper examines the iconic conception of aesthetic education in the work of Friedrich Schiller, with the aim of elucidating Schiller’s unique innovation of this notion in understanding i) the relationship between aesthetic and ethical value and ii) the transformative possibilities within a collective, social dimension of aesthetic experience. The paper provides an overview of the Kantian origins of Schiller’s aesthetic programme (Section 1). It then considers Schiller’s critique of the perceived failings of the Kantian and Enlightenment republican models (...) of ethical value and political emancipation (Section 2) before turning to his positive alternative aesthetic programme (Section 3). The paper concludes (Section 4) with some evaluation and reflection on Schiller’s original contributions. (shrink)

Purpose: One of my goals in the paper is to investigate why realists reject radical constructivism (RC) as well as social constructivism (SC) out of hand. I shall do this by means of commenting on Peter Slezak’s critical paper, Radical Constructivism: Epistemology, Education and Dynamite. My other goal is to explore why realists condemn the use of RC and SC in science and mathematics education for no stated reason, again by means of commenting on Slezak’s paper. Method: I (...) restrict my comments to Slezak’s paper and leave it to the reader to judge which, if any, of the reasons that I advance for these two states of affairs are not specific to Slezak’s paper. Other readers might not agree with my interpretations of Slezak’s paper, including Slezak himself, but I offer them after having worked with von Glasersfeld in interdisciplinary research in mathematics education for over 25 years. Findings: My findings are that Slezak: (1) rejects RC and SC on the basis of unjustified criticisms, (2) does not explore basic tenets of RC nor of SC beyond the unjustified criticisms, (3) rejects how SC and RC have been used in science and mathematics education, based at least in part on the unjustified criticisms, (3) dislikes how SC has been used in science and mathematics education, a dislike that fuels his rejection of any constructivism, and (4) doesn’t explore how RC has been used in scientific investigations in mathematics education. On the basis of these findings, I conclude that how epistemological models of knowing might be used in science or mathematics education would be better left to the educators who use them in interdisciplinary work. (shrink)

One of the more dominant themes around the use of Deleuze and Guattari's work, including in this special issue, is a focus on the radical transformation that educational institutions are undergoing, and which applies to administrator, student and educator alike. This is a transformation that finds its expression through teaching analytics, transformative teaching, massive open online courses (MOOCs) and updateable performance metrics alike. These techniques and practices, as an expression of control society, constitute the new sorts of machines that frame (...) and inhabit our educational institutions. As Deleuze and Guattari's work posits, on some level these are precisely the machines that many people in their day-to-day work as educators, students and administrators assemble and maintain, that is, desire. The meta-model of schizoanalysis is ideally placed to analyse this profound shift that is occurring in society, felt closely in the so-called knowledge sector where a brave new world of continuous education and motivation is instituting itself. (shrink)

This book radically counters the optimism sparked by Competence Based Education and Training, an educational philosophy that has re-emerged in Schooling, Vocational and Higher Education in the last decade. CBET supposedly offers a new type of learning that will lead to skilled employment; here, Preston instead presents the competency movement as one which makes the concept of human learning redundant. Starting with its origins in Taylorism, the slaughterhouse and radical behaviourism, the book charts the history of competency (...) class='Hi'>education to its position as a global phenomenon today, arguing that competency is opposed to ideas of process, causality and analog human movement that are fundamental to human learning. (shrink)

The Reformation, which spread to Europe 500 years ago, had a profound impact on all spheres of society's life. The development of science, education, social institutions and modern progress in general - all this can be considered a result and a fruit of the course of the Reformation. The 16th-century reformers could not even imagine what a powerful irreversible process was triggered by them through several theological slogans. The entire history of modern civilization can be divided into two periods: (...) before and after the Reformation. (shrink)

John Darling; Progressive, Traditional and Radical: a re-alignment, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 157–166, https://.

(2006). BOOK REVIEW: Perspectives on Policy: Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement, by Jean Anyon. Educational Studies: Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 322-327.

In his article Potentialism and the experience of the new, Jasinski argues for the use of a potentialist approach in education by relating it to a line of thought that starts with Dewey and is fulfilled by Agamben and Lewis. Although the reading that Jasinski offers on potentialism is interesting, his understanding of Dewey is problematic. In this paper, I argue that much of what Jasinski claims as worthy of pursuit in education is already contained in the Deweyan (...) questions of newness, openness, and radical possibility. Even the Agambenian notion of ‘coming community’ falls under a Deweyan understanding of society and democracy, which, in Deweyan thought, always exist in suspension and connectedness. Given such premises, the idea of education that emerges from Deweyan thought is that of a leap. The question regarding what education is and entails is left radically open by Dewey, for education belongs to the not-yet. (shrink)

In this article, I explore some contemporary versions of character education with specific reference to the extent to which they are viewed as constituting a form of citizenship education. I argue that such approaches often end up displacing the idea of political education and, through their language and stated aims, avoid any genuine engagement with the very concept of the political in all but its most superficial sense. In discussing some of the points raised by critics of (...) character education, I defend the need for a more robust and radical conception of the political as a basis for a form of political education. (shrink)

Foucault’s invitation to the subject is to become free of themselves by learning to think differently. Such a project has as its goal the mastery of the self, and can be understood as a Foucaultian ‘politics of ourselves’. Foucault’s ethical turn is an invitation for subjectivity to undertake its own radical education. Whilst this invitation has characteristics unique to Foucault’s philosophical discipline, I argue that it sheds light upon a diversity of practices of subjectivity from the psychotherapeutic and mystic (...) traditions. By seeing these currently available technologies of self in the Foucaultian lens we are given the opportunity to appreciate their work on subjectivity as necessarily political and social, a radical education not limited to the realm of individualistic aspiration and narcissistic temptations. The paper concludes by drawing attention to some implications for education, and for a teacher education that embraces the ‘radical reflexivity’ of some psycho-spiritual practices. (shrink)

Paulo Freire : the educator, his oeuvre, and changing contexts -- Holistic interpretations of Freire's work : a critical review -- Critical literacy, praxis, and emancipatory politics -- "Remaining on the same side of the river" : neo-liberalism, party movements, and the struggle for greater coherence -- Reinventing Freire in a Southern context : the Mediterranean -- Engaging with practice : a Freirean reflection on different pedagogical sites.

Within educational philosophies that utilise the Heideggerian idea of ‘authenticity’ there can be distinguished at least two readings that correspond with the categories of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ utopianism. ‘Strong-utopianism’ is the nostalgia for some lost Edenic paradise to be restored at some future time. Here it is the ‘world’ that needs to be transcended for it is the source of our inauthenticity, where we are the puppets of modernist-capitalist ideologies. ‘Authenticity’ here is a value-judgment, understood as something that makes you (...) a better person. The ‘inauthentic’ person is simply deceived. ‘Weak-utopianism’ is recognising the forces for change in the ‘everyday-immanent’ where we do not look to overcome the world but own it as ‘heritage’. ‘Authenticity’ here is an ontological choice, a modification of inauthenticity, not its opposite. The ‘cult of the authentic’ relates to the ‘strong utopianism’ where ‘authenticity’ has become fetishized, harking back to a purer, pre-modern state, untainted by the ideals of the Enlightenment and ethos of capitalism. ‘Authentic education’ is the overcoming of our environments and socio-historical contexts, opening up new horizons of meaning. The radical notion of freedom that this implies, where one is free from rather than free in the realisation of constraint, may also be another dividing line between the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ readings, which lend themselves to a Messianic narrative. It will be argued that if ‘authentic education’ is understood through a ‘strong utopianism’ it actually re-enforces those very same dystopian ideals they look to overcome as characterised by ‘enframing’. (shrink)

Higher education has been changing radically in recent years, with increasing numbers of students, and complaints about declining standards. This volume brings together leading intellectuals from the US and UK to examine the issues involved.

The essay looks into the pedagogical role of philosophy in shaping the practice of dissent. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s radical understandings of philosophy as a machinic assemblage, it redeploys philosophy as a pedagogical tool which gathers traction from social events and remains invested in a dissensual politics. As a machinic assemblage committed to a dissensual politics philosophy works alongside collective modalities of enunciation that operate outside conventional structures of the academia. Such assemblages of enunciation often inhabit a (...) zone of critical inarticulacy brimming with the promise of new kinds of knowledge. How does philosophy critically interact with spaces of dissent along lines of gender, caste, ethnicity and nationalism to enable novel critical interventions? Deleuze and Guattari’s answer redirects us to a pragmatic engagement with philosophy which involves the manufacture of new pedagogical concepts as part of a schizoanalytic apparatus of protest. These concepts often emerge out of a visceral response to events unfolding around us. Needless to emphasize that such a philosophy which emerges out of a praxial encounter with life cannot be framed as an institutional staple, but takes shape as part of a visceral politics of the now. What then is the role of pedagogy in shaping an ethics of dissent and how can such a pedagogy mobilize plebeian acts of resistance in the sphere of the everyday? (shrink)

This edited collection challenges the urban-centric nature of much feminist work on gender and education. The context for the book is the radical reconfiguration of rural areas that has occurred in recent decades as a result of globalisation. From a range of diverse national contexts, including Kenya and South Africa, Australia and Canada, and the United States and Pakistan, authors explore the intersections between masculinity, femininity, and rurality in education. In recognition of the heterogeneity of categories such as (...) ‘rural girl’ and ‘rural boy’ they attend to how educational exclusions can be magnified by differences in relation to social locations such as class, race, or sexuality. Similar critical insights are brought to bear as authors examine what it means to be a male or female teacher in rural environments. Contributors draw on data ranging from contemporary feature films to historical materials, along with detailed ethnographic work and participatory approaches, to produce a compelling narrative of the need to understand education as experienced by those who are not part of the urban majority. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Gender and Education. _. (shrink)

How can we reconcile the fact that in order to act virtuously we appear to need to refer to the concept of a free will, while, at the same time, there are convincing philosophical arguments (aligned with a contemporary scientific understanding of natural causation) discrediting any viable notion of an unconstrained or uncaused will? Taking its cue from this important question, this chapter will proceed along the following lines. First, I aim to substantiate the link between contemporary character education (...) and the concept of the free will so as to illustrate the interdependency between the two. Next, I will scrutinize the concept of a free will, raising some philosophical concerns about its validity in a contemporary educational context. This involves looking at the philosophical stakes involved in proposing a unique capacity to intervene with the causal order of nature. At this point, I will suggest that there is a way out of this conundrum, and I will continue by proposing a radically different understanding of the will, offered by the seventeenth-century rationalist Spinoza. The chapter will close by looking at some of the practical consequences of grounding contemporary character education in a Spinozistic conception of the will. (shrink)

Hegemony and Education explores how the educational insights implicit in Antonio Gramsci's historical materialist outlook have been reconciled to the post-Marxist theory of 'radical democracy.' The author argues that there is an urgent need to redefine the dynamics of hegemony as a theory centering on the problem of cognitive and moral submissiveness; that is, a problem indicative of the pathologies of capitalism with respect to democratic theorizing.

In the contemporary culture of accountability and the ‘economy’ of education this generates, pragmatism, as a philosophy for ordinary practice, needs to resist the totalising force of an ideology of practice, one that distracts us from the rich qualities of daily experience. In response to this need, and in mobilising Dewey's pragmatism, this paper introduces another standpoint in American philosophy: Stanley Cavell's account of the economy of living in Thoreau's Walden. By discussing some aspects of Cavell's The Senses of (...) Walden that suggest both apparent similarities and radical differences between Thoreau and Dewey, I shall argue that Cavell discovers rich dimensions of practice in Thoreau's American philosophy, ones that are overshadowed in Dewey's pragmatism: that he demonstrates another way of ‘making a difference in practice’. Cavell, as a critical interlocutor of Dewey, from within American philosophy, offers a way of using language in resistance to the rhetoric of accountability and in service to the creation of democracy as a way of life. I shall conclude by suggesting that the enriched tradition of American philosophy from Dewey to Cavell is to be found in their promotion of philosophy as education and education as philosophy. (shrink)