EDUCATIONAL THEORY最新文献

This essay defends the use of empirical comparative analysis in the development of normative inquiry. In it, Juan Espíndola argues that comparisons between two or more carefully crafted cases can help us appreciate the relevant contextual considerations that must be factored into normative analysis. In the social sciences, comparisons are used to control whether a generalization holds across cases, for explanatory purposes. Comparisons have a controlling function. With respect to normative endeavors, Espíndola contends, comparisons can play a similar function. They can serve as a heuristic device to help us appreciate differences in what people value; in this sense, they also play an epistemic function, which can help us refine normative theories, especially if their ambition is to offer action-guiding prescriptions.

Learning and development are well established as concepts in educational psychology. Gert Biesta has used terms such as “learnification” and “developmentalism” to describe a tendency that, in his view, removes existential qualities from teaching and education. Although important in the right contexts, the concepts do not represent the core of what education should be about, he claims. Jostein Sæther notes that in many ways he shares Biesta's view on the most fundamental quality of education, i.e., helping young people exist as independent subjects in confrontation with their own will, responsibility, and freedom. In this paper, he addresses the overarching question of whether it is possible and desirable to think educationally about psychology in educational theory, specifically through relating Biesta's critique to selected handbooks, reviews, and metaliterature. Sæther does not propose integrating educational psychology into Biesta's existential theory but rather hopes to open a dialogue on different points of view that challenge each other in fruitful ways. The process of discussing certain principles, problems, and examples should yield a certain kind of “unclean” educational psychology, one that is relevant to “subjectification.” There are problems related to eclecticism and the tension between essence and existence, yet, in this context, Sæther sees a dialogical project as the only way forward.

Pablo Picasso allegedly once said that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. I feel that something similar has been the case where it concerns my own contributions to the field of educational scholarship. Looking back, I would say that it took me about twenty years from the start of my studies in education to the publication of the first monograph, Beyond Learning,¹ in which I felt that I was making a slightly original contribution to the educational conversation. During these twenty years I was mainly a student of other people's ideas, and much of my writing during that period consists of accounts and interpretations of the work of a number of philosophers, most notably John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Rancière. In the fifteen years following the publication of Beyond Learning, I published four more monographs — Good Education in an Age of Measurement (2010), The Beautiful Risk of Education (2014), The Rediscovery of Teaching (2017), and World-Centered Education (2021)² — and also a few more “minor” works. The main trend I discern in these publications is my ambition to get closer to education or, in terms of the title of this paper, my ambition to take education itself seriously.

While it is entirely legitimate for philosophy of education to ask philosophical questions about education or for psychology of education to ask psychological questions about education, such work does raise the question of how philosophers or psychologists would identify the object of their studies, that is, education itself. In some of my writings on these issues I have phrased it by asking who is asking educational questions about education, although I have also experienced that for those who have been educated in the Anglo-American “construction” of educational studies,³ such a question is actually quite difficult to make sense of. As I recount in one of my papers, I once received feedback from a reviewer who said that the suggestion that one can ask educational questions about education was “as nonsensical” as the idea that one can ask “cookery questions about cooking.”⁴ Over the years I have found that trying to figure out what education itself actually is, is far more difficult than many would assume, which is the reason why I think that I'm only slowly moving in the direction of finding a satisfactory answer to this question. It is, in that sense, indeed taking “a lifetime.” The reason why I have persisted, however, is because I also think that it is a really important question to ask.

A key reason for this is that without a sufficiently robust account of what education itself is, there is a danger that education, and particularly the practice of education, is quickly taken over by other logics, agendas, and priorities. This is what has

Education professionals, such as teachers, policymakers, and school leaders, come to ethical deliberation with diverse views based not only on their different role obligations but also on different epistemic and moral norms. In this paper Daniella Forster argues that mental normativity — the ethics of belief — has professional implications especially significant in education, given the narrowing of teacher education and the polarization of public discourse about educational issues. Using case studies may be useful method for increasing interpersonal reflective equilibrium about ethical issues in education; moreover, Forster suggests here that the moral evaluation of belief practices may also be amendable. Readers are invited to consider how generating insights into the moral evaluation of diverse beliefs and belief practices in education provides additional conceptual tools for elevating public dialogue through normative case-based dilemmas.

Thought experiments and normative case studies can play different and complementary roles in moral and political philosophizing. Thought experiments help us to sculpt and refine normative concepts and alert us to contradictions between intuitive judgments and basic principles, or among intuitive judgments, thus informing our reflective equilibrium about what fundamentally matters. Normative case studies assist us in judging how to trade off conflicting values in specified circumstances. Engaging with a sufficient number of well-wrought normative case studies can thus inform our ultimate judgments about the relative weights of different values.

This symposium features papers from scholars engaged in a cross-national study and dialogue about education and pedagogy. In a time of increasing politicization and instrumentalization of education, as well as increasing diversity and digitalization, we seek to go forward with education theorizing and practice by (re)considering education's scholarly, theoretical, and practical roots. The scholars in this symposium have engaged in hermeneutic readings of US education and curriculum theorizing in relation to Continental thinkers who directly and indirectly influenced their approach to education. By reading historical texts in the contemporary moment, we seek to emphasize the role of education theory in reconceiving pedagogy. The need for this task has been expressed in recent publications including Miranda Jefferson and Michael Anderson's Transforming Education, Bill Green and Per-Olof Erixon's Rethinking Education in a Global Era, among many others.¹ The main objective of this symposium is to bring breadth and depth to a study of education theorizing by drawing from the hermeneutic study of classic texts in the context of cross-national dialogue. We begin this introduction with a brief exploration of education studies in the US context, and then turn our attention to the German perspective on education studies. The last two sections explain our methodology and introduce the papers in this issue.

In the United States, educational theory and practice has been understood as a practical, applied field influenced by a wide range of disciplinary perspectives including sociology, anthropology, and psychology as well as politics. In the case of politics, preparation for work serves as a primary educational goal, and education more broadly is modeled in relation to particular social-normative rules that narrow its scope (for example, so-called “parents' rights”). As a consequence, we can observe a denigration of educational theory as well as a lack of respect for the pedagogical profession and scholarly discipline. One possibility for countering these trends, we believe, is to return to classical texts and authors who focused on fundamentals of educational theory in the early formation of the discipline.

The most prominent US education philosopher who worked on this neglect of education theorizing in a US context was John Dewey. Dewey's ideas were influenced by German thinkers who preceded him, and this dialectical engagement pervaded his philosophy. At the same time, his writings were also shaped by his pragmatic commitment to considering the usefulness of philosophy for addressing practical problems of society. Yet to some extent the focus on his pragmatism has obscured the Continental roots of Dewey's philosophy.

Several generations later in the field of curriculum studies, Ian Westbury and Stephan Hopmann organized an important series of meetings on curriculum and Didaktik in order to capture the co

There is fierce controversy in the United States over whether parents should be able to choose their children's schools and/or curriculum. To discuss the pedagogical arguments inherent in this question, Todd Alan Price and Ruprecht Mattig begin with the classical concept of Bildung as developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt around 1800. Next, they compare Humboldt's ideas with the ideas of John Stuart Mill and Milton Friedman, who stand in the tradition of liberal thought, as Mill was strongly influenced by Humboldt and Friedman, in turn, by Mill. Finally, they consider Friedman's role as a central figure in the school choice movement, and are thus able to trace a line of thought from Humboldt to actual controversies. Price and Mattig's analysis here shows that the liberalism of Humboldt, Mill, and Friedman revolves around diversity and choice in education. Moreover, it traces that in the process of translating, translocating, and transcontextualizing Humboldt's original thought through Mill to Friedman, the complexity of arguments about education and the role of parents and the state in a liberal society has been unduly reduced. The authors conclude the paper by proposing a principle for thinking about the relationship between different educational institutions in democracies.