The challenge this book addresses is to demonstrate how, in teaching content knowledge, the development of intellectual and moral dispositions as virtues is not merely a good idea, or peripheral to that content, but deeply embedded in the logic of searching for knowledge and truth. It offers a powerful example of how philosophy of education can be brought to bear on real problems of educational research and practice – pointing the reader to re-envision what it means to educate children by (...) developing the person, instead of simply knowledge and skills. Connected intimately to the practice of teaching and teacher education, the book sets forth an alternative theory of education where the developing person is at the center of education set in a moral space and a political order. To this end, a framework of public and personal knowledge forms the content, to which personal dispositions are integral, not peripheral. The book’s pedagogy is invitational, welcoming its readers as companions in inquiry and thought about the moral aspects of what we teach as knowledge. (shrink)

Hugh Sockett; Curriculum Aims and Objectives: Taking a Means to an End, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 6, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 30–61, https:/.

Hugh Sockett; Teacher Accountability, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 10, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 34–57, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1976.

This review article examines Leonard Waks’s innovative collection of essays entitled Self-Portraiture: The Uses of Academic Autobiography: Review of Leaders in Philosophy of Education: Intellectual Self-Portraits. The book is based on invitations to leading philosophers of education to write about their own careers in the field and to offer an intellectual autobiography. The purpose of the book is not primarily to provide a history of particular arguments and their rebuttal, and in this sense it is not directly philosophical, but the (...) chapters do chronicle broader intellectual shifts, and this is invaluable. The article examines the essays in terms of the relation between the professional and the personal, and between political and social contexts. Academic virtues and vices are found to be on display in several of the accounts. Together the essays constitute, albeit to an incomplete degree, the history of a movement, with philosophy of education framed mainly as an Anglo-American pursuit. Finally, in the light of this series of reflections, the article ponders the future of the subject both in relation to the changing context of educational policy and practice, and in terms of its positioning with regard to mainstream philosophy. (shrink)