The Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC) was a coalition of housing activists active in the years between 1998 and 2012 (Monsebraaten, 2012; Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, 1998, 2012). Their efforts bore witness to the rise of dehousing (Hulchanski, 2000, 2010), and the associated trauma and deaths of those forced to live without housing. Upon their closure, they donated their collective files to the City of Toronto Archives. This paper articulates how the curation and public provision of their collected material operates as a significant form of public pedagogy. First, the TDRC files are what I term a "counter-archive within." That is, nested within a conventional archive, often figured as a repository for colonial common sense, motivated by the preservation of state power (Stoler, 2002), lies a counternarrative that challenges the epistemic authority of neoliberal logic. Secondly, in tandem with monthly public events, such an archive resists the "re-scripting" (Edkins, 2003, p. xv) of trauma in commemorative practice; activists as archivists unveil the faults in state-managed temporal arrangements. And finally, the storing of such material in a public institution like the Toronto Archives ultimately foregrounds the archive as a public thing (Honig, 2017) that requires our contestation, care, and attention.
Listening is a familiar activity in education but has received less interest in the literature than speaking, matching its position in our popular culture, which focuses on freedom of speech and extrovert demeanor. Drawing on John Dewey to understand what characterizes creative listening in educational dialogue, this paper argues that creative listening initiates and prolongs explorations into a subject matter through creative tensions, here described as the interplay between originality and meaningfulness that triggers further inquiries and gives rise to ambivalent experiences within the teacher. Through these tensions, creative listening widens the subject matter and increases the opportunities for teachers and students to connect to the world of the subject matter. To achieve this form of listening, the teacher must artfully navigate the tangle of creative endeavors to facilitate enriched educational experiences for the students. By highlighting creative listening as a subtle but powerful force in educational dialogues, this paper strives to emphasize and expand the role of listening in education, promoting an understanding of the way silent communications aid complex forms of knowing.
Teachers engaged in moral education face a puzzle. We aim to bring children up to believe in and subscribe to basic moral standards such as prohibitions against harming others and requirements to help when we can. At the same time, there is widespread reasonable disagreement about the content and justification of morality, and teaching standards as justified when there is reasonable disagreement is wrongfully indoctrinatory. I analyze two answers to the puzzle, posed by Hand (2018a) and White (2016), defending White's education in altruism approach against Hand's criticisms by drawing from an analogy with the teaching of standards and principles in other subjects. Moral standards need not be metaethically justified to children all the way down, like how we need not teach children the metaphysical foundations of math and science in order to teach the standards of math and science in a way that does not wrongfully indoctrinate them. I conclude in favor of a pluralistic approach to teaching the reasons to abide by basic moral standards.
Drawing on our empirical study engaging focus groups of highly experienced educators and stakeholders (n = 12) in Ontario, Canada, we examine the cruel refiguration of educational worker care under neoliberalism in public education. Austerity policies have degraded conditions in the schools such that educators are unable to fulfill their attachments to education as a public good. In addition, the neoliberal individualization of responsibility asks workers to address worsening conditions as individuals, collapsing structures of solidarity. In this paper, we explore the phenomenological aspects of how neoliberal individualism structures educator moods, examining educators' affective interplays of grief, rage, despair, determination, and exhaustion as they struggle to independently uphold or repair a system under duress. We argue that neoliberal conceptions of care are insufficient-and indeed Sisyphean-as singular efforts cannot address the current widespread systemic problems. Instead, we suggest educational workers should disavow individualism, refusing to bear personal responsibility for systemic issues, and should instead seek broader, collective organization against further neoliberal education reforms.
This article takes the form of an interview with Dr. Michelle Forrest. Aphilosopher of education, a teacher, a feminist, and a mentor to many, Michelle has been a longtime member of the Canadian philosophy of education community. This interview, conducted by her colleague, Adrian Downey, and her PhD student, Ren & eacute;e McKinstry, looks back over Michelle's work in philosophy of education, offering her the chance to reflect on her contributions considering the changes in educational thinking and social circumstance throughout her career. Specifically, Michelle discusses her dissertation on pedagogical openness and the openness of the text, the feminist ethics of care and feminist irony, the dangers of comparative thinking, coloniality, and the significance of the Canadian Philosophy of Education Society (CPES) to her career and life as aphilosopher of education. The interview concludes with Michelle's advice to future scholars working the foundations of education and especially philosophy of education.
'Love of learning' is a phrase that appears frequently in school mission statements, among others with similar connotations. Using 'Love of learning' as a case, I employ comparative conceptual analysis to characterize the value underlying the phrase before reviewing the implications this holds for practice in schools that use the phrase in their mission statements. I argue 'Love of learning' refers to a distinct, intrinsically valuable phenomenon that implies a particular type of learning experience. A commitment to fostering 'love of learning' at school would require developing environments conducive to each student having this particular learning experience. This carries implications for practice, particularly in schools that include fostering 'love of learning ' in their mission statements. As a case, the conceptual analysis of 'love of learning' presented here demonstrates the need to review mission statements to assess whether values conveyed therein align with institutional practices.
In this paper, I aim to showcase and texture the reasons why children’s autonomy is a topic worth revisiting in schools. I advance the premise that student autonomy is a necessary condition for well-being and argue that children’s capacities for autonomy are as broad and important as adult capacities and requirements for autonomy. New understandings about the purpose of school education and what it means to be a child yield important implications for, and constraints on, adult entitlements to paternalizing children in schools. In this paper, I outline reasons why, all things considered, a soft-paternalism approach in schools promotes greater student well-being. I offer practical pathways for teachers to take a soft-paternalism approach that views children as powerful thinkers in school classrooms. The takeaway from this view is that children are entitled to determine their own learning and educational goods for well-being to a far greater degree than is currently promoted in schools.
This paper explores some of the perils to American democracy in the age of the Internet, social media, and the filtered bubbles that its citizens inhabit. I open my analysis by revisiting the myth of the Tower of Babel in order to reflect on the insights that can be gleaned for the present state of disinformation. Then I turn to an examination of the notions of polarization and structural stupidity, while tying them to the distinction that C. Thi Nguyen makes between epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. I then argue that the insights of the myth of the Tower of Babel can take us only so far and that an adequate understanding of the current state of affairs in the United States needs to consider the crisis in the authority of knowledge. I base my argument on some insights of philosophers Walter Lippmann and José Ortega y Gasset, who were both concerned about the role of private citizens and the public in the life of a democracy. I conclude this paper by discussing various positions that philosophers of education can take in the age of Babel, while advocating for the need to adopt a probing stance.
This article proposes anti-currere as a non-philosophical intervention in curriculum theory, drawing on the work of François Laruelle to challenge the field’s foundational obsession with the Real. It argues that curriculum study, despite its surface diversity, remains structurally wedded to a philosophical decision that monopolizes reality by predetermining what is thinkable. Through incisive critique of canonical concepts like the planned/lived curriculum binary, the paper reveals how curricular discourse habitually reproduces the very structures it claims to disrupt. In response, anti-currere is posited as a radical strategy of withdrawal from the decisional compulsions of the field – a minoritarian, non-standard mode of thought that reorients curriculum toward the immanence of the Real rather than its capture. Rather than offering another curriculum-as- x , anti-currere opens a space for stranger, generic curricular thought unbound by the auto-production of identity, representation, and method.
This paper explores the extent to which critique in the educational sciences can be mechanized. This is the case when critique of pedagogical concepts and discourses is entirely determined by the structures and processes of the critique itself. If the process of critique functions independently of the specificity and concreteness of its object, the critique can be called generic and the critical system a trivial, that is, non-dynamic, machine. In these cases, the critique machine is cognitively closed and yields no information about the criticized concepts, structures, or phenomena. The paper argues that this, in fact, represents a significant proportion of critique in the educational sciences. The critique machine, as reconstructed here, consists of a sequence of four process stages. Finally, it is demonstrated that there are structural inconsistencies between these process stages.
This paper explores how Hannah Arendt’s view of education as love (1958) can contribute to refreshed perspectives of democratic education. In recent decades, the task of contemporary early childhood education has gradually moved towards an enhanced focus on individual learning and freedom of choice, closely intertwined with an image of the child as an active participant with rights (e.g., Kjørholt, 2012; Sjöstrand Öhrfelt, 2019). The increased emphasis on subject knowledge, measurable achievements, and competition, mainly driven by a neoliberal agenda, is seen to affect and possibly reduce the role of care and democracy within education (e.g., Brogaard Clausen, 2015; Moss, 2017). Arendt’s views on education as love offer a thought-provoking mirror to the changed landscapes of early childhood education. She was critical of the emancipation of children and claimed that, as newcomers, children need to be protected from the world, as well as the world also needing to be protected from the children. Through a theoretical conversation between Arendt and Joan Tronto’s theory of democratic care (2015), I will argue that interdependency and vulnerability need to be acknowledged within contemporary democratic early childhood education, and that allocation of responsibility continues to be an essential issue within education.
