Informal home education occurs without much that is generally considered essential for formal education—including curriculum, learning plans, assessments, age related targets or planned and deliberate teaching. Our research into families conducting this kind of education enables us to consider learning away from such imposed structures and to explore how children go about learning for themselves within the context of their own socio-cultural setting. In this paper we consider what and how children learn when no educational agenda is arranged for them (...) and we link this manner of learning to the Deweyan ideas of learning as transactional and learning-in-context. We also use our empirical evidence to explore the notion of ZPD with regard to informal learning and to consider how children, without specific guidance, go about charting a course of learning through the ZPD. We consider the quality of informal learning particularly with regard to the educational aim of developing reflective and critical thinking, showing how these are integral to informal learning. We suggest that a much wider conception of what learning is and how it happens is needed, away from the confines of formal educational structures. (shrink)

The macaque washes a potato in a stream. It does this because it has seen the dirt come off as another macaque washed its potato, and it knows that clean potato.

This article explores aspects of eros in education in relation to ideas of indirectness associated with the French concept of pudeur, sometimes translated as ‘modesty’. It explores lines of thought extending through Emerson and Nietzsche but reaching back to Plato's Symposium. This is a means of exposing the ‘impudence’ of some aspects of contemporary education and of pointing towards a conception of eros that is otherwise obscured.

Discussion regarding education’s aims, especially its ultimate aims, is a key topic in the philosophy of education. These aims or values play a pivotal role in regulating and structuring moral and other types of normative education. We outline two plausible strategies to identify and justify education’s ultimate aims. The first associates these aims with a normative standpoint, such as the moral, prudential, or aesthetic, which is overriding, in a sense of ‘overriding’ to be explained. The second associates education’s ultimate aims (...) with the intrinsic value of personal well-being. We advance reasons to doubt that these strategies are successful. The shortcomings of these strategies impute yet further urgency to the issue of how we are to ascertain and validate education’s ultimate aims. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between love, learning and knowledge as found in three dialogues of Plato, Symposium, Phaedrus and Republic. It argues that the account of the ascent from carnal desire to the love of beauty, as set out in the Symposium, is best seen in terms of a genealogy of love in which the object of love is transformed into an object of knowledge. The Phaedrus shows us how affection and love between two individuals can help motivate a (...) love of learning. The Republic demonstrates the value of knowledge through the distinction between knowledge and opinion. A love of learning is, therefore, driven by that which is genuinely valuable and worthy of love. Plato helps us today in two respects: first, he reminds us that learning can have an affective quality. Second, he reminds that the value of learning is related to the knowledge and insight it yields. (shrink)

Posing the question ‘How diverse is philosophy of education in the West?’ this paper responds to two recent defences of African philosophy of education which endorse its communitarianism and oppose individualism in Western philosophy of education. After outlining Thaddeus Metz's argument that Western philosophy of education should become more African by being more communitarian, and Yusef Waghid's defence of communitarianism in African philosophy of education, we develop a qualified defence of aspects of individualism in education. Our reservations about some aspects (...) of communitarianism lead us to argue for a role for some forms of individualism in African as well as Western education. Finally, reflecting on what is at stake in this kind of comparative philosophy of education, we argue that an over-emphasis on cultural differences can distract philosophers of education from the attention they should pay to the common dangers posed across continents by the influence of global capitalism on education. (shrink)

It has been acknowledged that education includes ‘a love of what one teaches and a love of those whom one teaches’ (Hogan 2010: 81), but two traditions of writing in philosophy of education—concerning love for student and love for subject—have rarely been brought together. This paper considers the extent to which the ‘triangular’ relationship of teacher, student and subject matter runs the risk of the rivalry, jealousy and strife that are characteristic of ‘tragic’ love triangles, or entails undesirable consequences such (...) as transference from one intended object of love to another. It argues that this faultline in the literature of educational love corresponds to education's ‘divided heart’. The implication of this exploration of education's triangular relationship is that we cannot ignore the ‘dark of love’, nor can we address it simply by asserting that educational love must be of a more honourable sort than romantic love. These tensions can be reconciled through the loving recourse of ‘ceasing to strive’ and the possibility of sublimating the two originary loves into a higher ‘love of truth’. (shrink)