Michel Serres was a successful scholar who made a living within the university on two continents. However, he also viewed the university with great trepidation and tried to warn young scholars against falling victim to the university culture that encouraged a scholar to become a critic and not do original work. In place of the current university system, Serres offers an alternative vision that I refer to as the Diogenes University.

Responding to Michael Luntley's article, ‘Learning, Empowerment and Judgement’, the author shows he cannot successfully make the following three moves: (1) dissolve the analytic distinction between learning by training and learning by reasoning, while advocating the latter; (2) diminish the role of training in Wittgenstein's philosophy, nor attribute to him a rationalist model of learning; and (3) turn to empirical research as a way of solving the philosophical problems he addresses through Wittgenstein. Drawing on José Medina's analysis of the fundamental (...) role of training in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, the paper offers a tour of key passages in the Investigations and other works to develop an understanding of what Wittgenstein meant by ‘mastery of techniques’. In opposition to Luntley's liberal‐individual, or his subject as rational agent, the author explores Wittgenstein's non‐foundationalist, forms of life approach to how we act with agreement. More effort must be given to differentiating Wittgenstein's view from that of the analytic school, which Luntley appears to echo despite his criticism of the analytic divide. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the conflicting principles revealed respectively by those who argue for the common school and by those who seek to promote a system of schools that, though maintained by the state, might reflect the different religious beliefs within the community. The philosopher, John Dewey, is appealed to in defence of the common school, though similar ideas are reflected in the developing comprehensive ideal in Britain.

Dialogue is the basis of philosophy in the Western tradition and has taken many different forms.1 From dialogue based on the dialogus, on dialectics and elenchus (Socrates and Plato), through relig...

This article explores the educative importance of ethos from a broadly philosophical perspective. It is argued that, for a range of reasons, the notion of ethos in the context of education needs to be brought into clearer focus. An analysis is offered of the concept of ethos, with particular reference to the context of classrooms and schools. The educative importance of ethos is explored, with reference to a range of difficulties and challenges which it presents.

Opposition to university fees is often framed as a defence of higher education as a 'right' rather than a 'privilege'. However, the basis and nature of this right is unclear. This article presents a conceptual exploration of the question, drawing on an initial analysis of international law. An argument is put forward for a right to higher education seen as one of a number of possible forms of post-school education, restricted only by a requirement for a minimum level of academic (...) preparation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the identity of the teacher as a dialectical being that is in permanent construction, to identify some obstacles teachers might find in this process while operating in an institutional framework, and the effects these could have upon the teacher and the goals she pursues with her students. By ruling out the idea of identity as an autonomous self that can be constructed with no ties with its context, we propose that identity is (...) dialogical and is built through the relationships we establish with others. This fact situates the relationship between the student and the teacher at the center of pedagogical practices and allows us to establish the ideas of teacher presence and integrity as central elements for the moral development of students. In this context, we identify the excessive institutionalization of the role of the teacher as a cause for the reduction of identity and a defensive retreat to the possible outcomes of being judged by strictly formal criteria, wh... (shrink)

This article offers a sympathetic interpretation of Paul Feyerabend's remarks on science and education. I present a formative episode in the development of his educational ideas—the ‘Berkeley experience'—and describe how it affected his views on the place of science within modern education. It emerges that Feyerabend arrived at a conception of education closely related to that of Michael Oakeshott and Martin Heidegger—that of education as ‘releasement’. Each of those three figures argued that the purpose of education was not to induct (...) students into prevailing norms and convictions, but rather to initiate them into the ‘civilized inheritance of mankind’. I conclude that interpreting Feyerabend's educational ideas within this conception of education as releasement lends a new coherence to his remarks on science and education, in a way that renders certain of his political proposals—such as the ‘separation of science and the state'—both more coherent and more compelling. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that genuine dialogue is a refined human achievement and probably the most valid criterion on the basis of which we can evaluate educational or social policy and practice. The paper explores the prerequisites of dialogue in the language games, the common certainties, the rules of logic and the variety of common virtues; defends dialogue as a normative concept and interprets the principles of dialogue as extensions of its prerequisite virtues. Finally, it examines (...) the social conditions that are conducive to dialogue and those that frustrate it. (shrink)

The dominant model of curriculum design in the last century assumed that school education could be organized around aims, defined primarily in terms of students' behaviour. The credentials of this model were questioned by, among others, Lawrence Stenhouse, who pointed out that education serves purposes that cannot be stated in terms of behavioural objectives. In this article, I offer support for Stenhouse's conclusion and go beyond it, showing that if education aims at critical understanding of its own value, then it (...) is even more radically open-ended than Stenhouse argued.My argument is based on two premises. One of them is that the reason why people disagree about what education involves is that they have less-than-perfect knowledge of what human characteristics are worth cultivating. This premise is supported by a theory of meaning advanced by Hilary Putnam. The other premise is that one of the aims of education is intellectual independence. From these premises, I conclude that a successful course of education serves purposes that cannot be completely stated in advance. (shrink)

In this article, we describe a longitudinal inquiry into what it means to be a person in our contemporary world. Our method constitutes a dynamic, non-objectifying fusion of empirical and philosophical anthropology. Field-based anthropology examines actualities: how people lead their lives and talk about them. Philosophical anthropology addresses possibilities: who and what people could become in light of actualities while not being determined by them. We describe and illustrate our fieldwork in the classrooms of 16 teachers who work in New (...) York City public schools. We have sought in our observations to identify and think about signs or expressions of persons-in-the-making. We also touch on a series of dinner-discussions we have held with the teachers. These meetings have centered on the question of becoming a person in today’s political and cultural environment, and how education figures into the equation. Finally, we also describe the weekly meetings we have held as a research team, in which we engage the play of concepts and percepts. We close with remarks on the conceptual and existential ties that can link philosophy and fieldwork in schools. (shrink)

This paper outlines the rationale underpinning the conception of science education as sociopolitical action, and then presents a critique of such a conception from the perspective of liberal education. More specifically, the paper discusses the importance of the conception of science education as sociopolitical action and then raises questions about the content of school science, about the place and value of scientific inquiry, and about the opportunities students have for self-directed inquiry. The central idea behind the critique is that a (...) conception of science education as sociopolitical action downplays the importance of knowledge for its own sake and totally neglects the personal/aesthetic dimension of science. (shrink)

The activities analysed by Spinosa et al., viz entrepreneurship, citizen action, and cultural leadership, are all central to the American experience. They have a common phenomenological structure and a common purpose, which is to ?disclose new worlds?, i.e. so to reconfigure the collective perceptions as to bring about ?large?scale cultural and historical changes?. Each, more or less unselfconsciously, is an exercise of skill, an expression of freedom, and a building of solidarity through the recovery or discovery of human meanings. I (...) argue that unless we know the ends to which skill and freedom tend, and in which meaning is found, all three (which the authors treat rather as ends in themselves) are underdescribed, and impossible to see as possessing or conferring value simply per se. The same goes for the original three activities. Cultural leadership, citizen action, and entrepreneurship can work as easily towards bad ends as good. To see them as virtual ends in themselves, then, is premature, and a kind of formalism. (shrink)

My concern in this essay is not so much with the invisible work or hidden labor produced by neoliberalism, but rather with what Joseph Pieper describes as an emerging culture of “total work”. More than the sheer number of hours of work, Pieper diagnoses a transformation in the way we view work. Work has become the exclusive point of reference for how we see and define ourselves. We are, Pieper feared, increasingly incapable of seeing beyond the working self. The human (...) being has become the human worker. Historically, the ideal of leisure offered a counter vision to this tendency. Michael Oakeshott notes that while human beings must attend to the necessities for survival, they are most especially distinguished by their capacity for leisure—by an ability to pursue questions, conversations, and explorations that transcend the realm of production and consumption. To overlook and exclude leisurely pursuits is to diminish our humanity. (shrink)

Michael Oakeshott reflected on the character of religious experience in various writings throughout his life. In Experience and Its Modes (1933) he analyzed science as a distinctive "mode," or account of experience as a whole, identifying those assumptions necessary for science to achieve its coherent account of experience in contrast to other modes of experience whose quests for coherence depend on different assumptions. Religious experience, he thought, was integral to the practical mode. The latter experiences the world as interminable tension (...) between what is and what ought to be. The question, Is there a conflict between science and religion? is, in Oakeshott's approach, the question, Is there a conflict between the scientific mode of experience and the practical mode? Insofar as we tend to treat every question as a practical one, these questions seem to make sense. But Oakeshott's analysis leads to the view that scientific experience and religious experience are categorically different accounts of experience abstracted from the whole of experience. They are voices of experience that may speak to each other, but they are not ordered hierarchically. Nor can either absorb the other without insoluble contradictions. (shrink)

This paper considers a distinction between two types of politics developed by Michael Oakeshott in his book The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (1996) and argues that the theoretical framework proposed supplies an illuminating and productive perspective for examining the notion of political extremism. These positions are linked to two other important aspects of his work, namely his account of 'enterprise' and 'civil' association and his differentiation between abstract philosophical entities and concrete political situations. There is also (...) a discussion of the idea of 'perfectionism' which is central to the politics offaith. The paper concludes with a consideration of some of the implications for political education arising from this analysis. (shrink)

This paper considers a distinction between two types of politics developed by Michael Oakeshott in his book The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism and argues that the theoretical framework proposed supplies an illuminating and productive perspective for examining the notion of political extremism. These positions are linked to two other important aspects of his work, namely his account of 'enterprise' and 'civil' association and his differentiation between abstract philosophical entities and concrete political situations. There is also a (...) discussion of the idea of 'perfectionism' which is central to the politics offaith. The paper concludes with a consideration of some of the implications for political education arising from this analysis. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of 'professional trust' and argues that trust is an essential component of what it means to be a 'professional'. The first part of the paper discusses the nature of trust in general and attempts to establish two main points: that we are all involved in relationships of trust and that all trust involves risk. The second section examines the idea of professional trust and draws on an analysis of knowledge provided by Michael Oakeshott that divides (...) knowledge into two components, 'information' and 'judgment'. The central argument is that the exercise of judgement through the possession of 'discretionary powers' is central to being a professional, but that judgement itself resists reduction to propositional formulation because it is essentially tacit and individual. The paper's focus is fairly narrow and does not examine, for example, the role of trust in teacher--pupil relationships, how trust may be related to learning or the role of trust in the pursuit of collaborative educational research. (shrink)

Creating education systems that promote democratic sustainability has been the concern of political thinkers as diverse as J. S. Mill, Dewey, Benjamin Barber and Derek Bok. The classic dichotomisation of democratic theory between deliberative democrats and Schumpeterian democrats suggests that education in the service of democracy can be constructive—that is, provide a student with the skills necessary to elect her leaders without changing her nature—or reconstructive—that is, fundamentally and radically reshape the student to produce a citizen whose goals are transformed (...) to be congruent with society. Michael Oakeshott, who has written extensively both on political regimes and on the purpose of liberal education, offers a third way to assess the connection between government and education. Despite his own dismissal of civic or political education as fundamentally vocational and thus beyond the boundaries of the liberal arts, this paper provides a potentially surprising Oakeshottian defence of political education within the liberal arts with reference to the importance he places on experience as a pedagogic tool. Thus, Oakeshott's educational philosophy has a certain resonance with the recent calls to locate the relevance of liberal arts within the burgeoning development of experiential civic engagement programmes in American universities. (shrink)

Some tendencies in modern education—the stress on ‘performativity’, for instance, and ‘celebration of difference’—threaten the value traditionally placed on truthful teaching. In this paper, truthfulness is mainly understood, following Bernard Williams, as a disposition to ‘Accuracy’ and ‘Sincerity’—hence as a virtue. It is to be distinguished from truth, and current debates about the nature of truth are not relevant to the issue of the value of truthfulness. This issue devolves into the question of whether truthfulness is a distinctive virtue of (...) teachers, which they have a special obligation to exercise in the face of competing aims. This paper defends the idea of distinctive professional duties and considers two conceptions of teaching which ascribe a central place to truthfulness. The first conceives of teaching as a personal relationship within which trust, and hence, it is claimed, truthfulness, are paramount. This claim is challenged, and the paper concludes by sympathetically considering a second conception of teaching, articulated by Oakeshott and Heidegger. In this conception, teaching is a ‘releasement’ from ‘the daily flux’ of pupils’ lives through a truthful initiation into the alternatives to this ‘daily flux’ found within ‘the civilized inheritance of mankind’. (shrink)

The purposes of higher education in general and of university education in particular have long been subject to controversy. Whereas for some, the main role of universities is to provide professional and vocational education and training and their benefits are to be measured in terms of social or economic utility, their value for others is to be seen more in terms of the liberal development and promotion of certain intrinsically worthwhile qualities of mind and intellect. In this context, indeed, much (...) recent literature on university education has been concerned to reaffirm what are usually taken to have been the liberal purposes of bygone university education over the more instrumental or vocational agendas of much contemporary university and higher education. While recognising, along with other treatments of this issue, that it is to some extent implicated in a false dichotomy between the liberal and the vocational, this paper seeks a clearer rationale for the liberal dimensions and aspirations of university education. (shrink)

In his classic text, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that the structural principles of a society are just when they issue from a procedure that is fair. One crucial feature that makes the procedure fair is that the persons who will be subjected to these principles choose them after they have deliberated together in a condition marked by a certain balance of knowledge and ignorance. In particular, these people know enough to consider principles that are workable, yet converse (...) behind a “veil of ignorance,” unable to predict what their place in society will be and hence discouraged from slanting the principles toward any preferential interests. My paper questions whether this attempt to ensure the disinterestedness of the conversation of justice is feasible. I worry that when we approach this question practically, we discover that the education that furnishes us with the knowledge necessary to choose viable principles must at the same time preclude genuine ignorance about our social position and interests. As an alternative, I suggest that we convene the conversation of justice behind a “veil of existence.” In this condition, people possess knowledge about how their society works and even about their places in it; however, this knowledge does not foster preferential interests because all interests are subjected to the question of their existential meaning. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains in his essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” for our interests to be truly meaningful, they must be affirmed as free responses to our thrownness into existence. Yet how do we find the wherewithal to make such responsible choices rather than lapse into paralysis before their essentially arbitrary differences? My positive thesis is that we may do so by acknowledging how all of us in this existential predicament critically and mutually provoke each to commit oneself to depart from the others in specific ways. This process of provocation is thus educational. It broaches a conception of non-instrumental, non-mimetic, liberal study, one which I try to enact in a writing that employs direct address, regular returns to questions that put discourse at a loss, and expanding webs of association. In this manner, I hope to demonstrate that liberal study may deepen our appreciation of our communal nature, our camaraderie, and thus motivate us to participate unselfishly in the conversation of justice. (shrink)

In this essay I critique two influential accounts of rational autonomy in common schooling that conceive liberalism as an ideal form of life, and I offer an alternative approach to democratic education that views liberal theory as concerned with coexistence among rival ways of living. This view places moral agency, not rational autonomy, at the heart of schooling in liberal societies—a moral agency grounded in initiation into dynamic traditions that enable self-definition and are accompanied by exposure to life-paths other than (...) one’s own. This alternative challenges the tendency in large diverse democracies (such as those of the US and the UK) to prefer common to particularistic schools, thereby placing many types of faith and secular schools on a more equal footing and providing moral justification for education in the national cultures of small liberal republics (such as Denmark, Israel and Lithuania) that maintain special relationships to particular groups while acknowledging the rights of all citizens. I call this approach the pedagogy of difference. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the problems of cultivating a critical attitude in pedagogy given problems with accounts grounded in critical social theory, rational liberalism and pragmatic esthetic theory. I offer instead an alternative account of criticism for education in open, pluralistic, liberal, democratic societies called 'pedagogy of difference' that is grounded in the diversity liberalism of Isaiah Berlin and the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber. In our current condition in which there is no agreement as to the proper criteria (...) for assessing attitudes and actions, for a critical attitude to gain a foothold one must learn to evaluate proposed beliefs and behaviour-based standards within a particular tradition as well as those drawn from another viewpoint. To know oneself, one must engage others who are different. But to engage others in a meaningful way one must be immersed in a tradition to which one is heir or with which one chooses to affiliate. (shrink)

How should we assess programs dedicated to education in virtue? One influential answer draws on quantitative research designs. By measuring the inputs and processes that produce the highest levels of virtue among participants according to some reasonable criterion, in this view, we can determine which programs engender the most desired results. Although many outcomes of character education can undoubtedly be assessed in this way, taken on its own, this approach may support favorable judgments about programs that indoctrinate rather than educate, (...) because education in character entails teleological thinking that is volitional not merely determined. I argue instead that proper assessment of virtue requires an expansive view of character education in both particular and common goods that avoids the tendency to indoctrinate and an inclusive conception of measurement that takes into account qualitative in addition to quantitative methodologies. (shrink)

A themed issue on the work of Michael Oakeshott.

In the present text I discuss Michael Oakeshott’s idea of liberal education and its main menace, authority. By identifying two ways of examining the issue of authority, I launch two different perspectives on this issue. The first one is abstract and it considers an early Oakeshottian essay and Gadamer’s rehabilitation of tradition, and allows me to formulate the following thesis: conversation precedes education. The second perspective is an application, and its concreteness allows me to employ the concept of authority in (...) a more leisurely manner. (shrink)

Ian James Kidd ABSTRACT: This paper presents two challenges faced by many initiatives that try to diversify undergraduate philosophy curricula, both intellectually and demographically. Trade-offs involve making difficult decisions to prioritise some values over others. Backfires involve unintended consequences contrary to the aims and values of diversity initiatives, including ….