This paper re-examines the tension between professional and liberal education by revisiting The Idea of the University (1852), the seminal mid-nineteenth century treatise of John Henry Newman. In returning to Newman’s classic text, we are interested in the significance of his lectures for a contemporary Higher Education increasingly under pressure to be ‘useful:’ on this understanding, ‘useful’ denotes an arguably limited and utilitarian sense where the university guarantees its students a well-paying job on graduation. In pressing on this distinction between (...) ‘the useful’ and ‘the useless’ – a distinction that continues to plague discourse on the contemporary university – our paper focuses on the experiential and pedagogical aspects of education that find recurring emphasis in Newman’s classic work: aspects of place, of community, and of the teacher–student relationship. (shrink)

What is philosophy of education? This question has been answered in as many ways as there are those who self-identify as philosophers of education. However, the questions our field asks and the research conducted to answer them often produce papers, essays, and manuscripts that we can read, evaluate, and ponder. This paper turns to those tangible products of our scholarly activities. The titles, abstracts, and keywords from every article published from 2000 to 2010 in four journals of educational philosophy were (...) analyzed to find out what kind of research is being published in the field of philosophy of education. Over 143 different concepts were identified and analyzed from 1,572 articles. The data suggests that philosophy and education, while primarily concerned with theory, teaching, and learning, tackles a diversity of subjects in a slightly narrowing band of thematic topics. (shrink)