This handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education combined with an up-to-date selection of the central themes. It includes 95 newly commissioned articles that focus on and advance key arguments; each essay incorporates essential background material serving to clarify the history and logic of the relevant topic, examining the status quo of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discussing the possible futures of the field. The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of philosophy (...) of education, covering a range of topics: Voices from the present and the past deals with 36 major figures that philosophers of education rely on; Schools of thought addresses 14 stances including Eastern, Indigenous, and African philosophies of education as well as religiously inspired philosophies of education such as Jewish and Islamic; Revisiting enduring educational debates scrutinizes 25 issues heavily debated in the past and the present, for example care and justice, democracy, and the curriculum; New areas and developments addresses 17 emerging issues that have garnered considerable attention like neuroscience, videogames, and radicalization. The collection is relevant for lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of education as well as for colleagues in teacher training. Moreover, it helps junior researchers in philosophy of education to situate the problems they are addressing within the wider field of philosophy of education and offers a valuable update for experienced scholars dealing with issues in the sub-discipline. Combined with different conceptions of the purpose of philosophy, it discusses various aspects, using diverse perspectives to do so. Contributing Editors: Section 1: Voices from the Present and the Past: Nuraan Davids Section 2: Schools of Thought: Christiane Thompson and Joris Vlieghe Section 3: Revisiting Enduring Debates: Ann Chinnery, Naomi Hodgson, and Viktor Johansson Section 4: New Areas and Developments: Kai Horsthemke, Dirk Willem Postma, and Claudia Ruitenberg. (shrink)

The belief that we are living in a post-truth age raises a number of complex, paradoxical questions. Does it suggest, for example, that truth no longer matters? Or, that the idea of truth no longer exists? The university, of course, has long been associated with the interests of truth – not only in searching for truth, but in telling the truth. This is made evident in its emphasis on logic, rationality, deliberation, debate, reason, contemplation, reflection and academic freedom. Truth, and (...) its ensuing perspectives, perceptions, agreements and conflicts, are what makes a university what it is. As such, the university is as enmeshed in versions of truth, as it is in versions of power – which serves only to confirm the necessity for a continuous interrogation of these truths, and hence, power. In principle, academic freedom infers that both members of staff and students at universities have the right to engage in intellectual engagement and debate, without fear of censorship. In practice, however, when we take stock of academic freedom in spaces of higher education, we see growing patterns of shutting down, and closing off, rather than opening up. The interest of this article, therefore, is to consider how the university can remain discursively open to that which is new, unfamiliar and unpopular, while simultaneously, doing no harm – either to itself or its students. (shrink)

The global #MeToo movement has precipitated a reckoning with gendered, sexual, and other forms of harassment and bullying in higher education. In academia, harassment is rooted in the history of re...

This book examines how democratic education is conceptualised by exploring understandings of emotions in learning. The authors argue that emotion is both an embodiment and enhancement of democratic education: that rationality and emotion are not separate entities, but exist on a continuum. While democratic education would not exist if it were incommensurate with reason, making judgements about the human condition could not happen without invoking emotion. Synthesising Muslim scholarship with the perspectives of the Western world, the book draws on scholars (...) such as Ibn al-Arabi, Ibn Sina and Fazlur Rahman to offer an enriched and expanded notion of democratic education. This engaging and reflective work will be of interest and value to students and scholars of educational philosophy and cultural studies. (shrink)

This book explores the complicated question of the regulating of speech at universities in South Africa. The authors discuss whether the potential harm of hate speech is sufficient justification for limiting free speech—and how doing so may affect the democratic project.

The teaching profession in South Africa, like elsewhere in the world, is regulated by the specific codes of conduct, as stipulated by the South African Council for Educators. While common criticisms against SACE include failing to ensure the registration of all teachers, and not adequately dealing with the unprofessional conduct of teachers, it is the question of whether SACE can act as an ethical regulator, which attracts the most attention. Seemingly, there exists a tension between the legalistic approach to ethical (...) deliberation, as contained in SACE, and the real experiences of teachers, which teachers argue, are neither understood nor taken into account by SACE. In considering whether it is at all possible to teach teachers how to act ethically, or how to use their ethical judgement, the article turns its attention to the inter-related practices of deliberation, belonging and inclusion, as manifestations of ethical teaching. (shrink)

In May 2017, yet another South African university became a site of hate speech. Three students chose to display Nazi-inspired posters, which advertised an ‘Anglo-Afrikaner student’ event, under the motto ‘Fight for Stellenbosch’. That the posters provoked the response which it so obviously sought, was evident in the student outrage, and the swift condemnation from university management. Neither the prevalence of hate speech, nor its predictable responses, is new. The central concern of this article is to consider the extent to (...) which tolerance can offer a plausible response to hate speech. The questions which arise, however, are: Does the right to divergent viewpoints hold the same legitimacy as antagonistic ones? When is the boundary between legitimate and hate speech breached? Does a democracy imply the tolerance of all forms of speech? Or, are there limits to the forms of speech that a democracy ought to tolerate? (shrink)

In post-apartheid South Africa, a foregrounding of democratic citizenship education through broadened and inclusive participation is especially evident in a decentralised school-based leadership, management, and governance system. Policy-wise, the involvement of parents in School Governing Body (SGB) structures is seen as an enactment of representative and collective consultation, key to the democratisation of schooling and education. In practice, however, the wide-sweeping authority of SGBs, has allowed several schools to continue a historical narrative of exclusion and inequality, effectively widening the gaps (...) between historically advantaged and disadvantaged schools, and putting into effect renewed tensions of inequality and inequity. Key questions arise: has the state erred in its trust of SGBs to enact democratisation? Or are there limits to what democratisation can achieve? In considering these questions, the article explores re-considerations of governance so that interpretations of democratisation of schools are not used in the subversion of education as a public good. (shrink)

Underscoring recurrent calls for the decolonization of university curricula in South Africa are underexplored presumptions that by only disrupting theoretical content, universities might release themselves from a colonialist grasp, that continues to dominate and distort higher education discourse. While it might be the case that certain theories hold enormous authoritative, ‘truthful’ sway, as propagated through western interpretations and norms, there are inherent problems in exclusively approaching the decolonization project as a content-based hurdle, removed from the subjectivities of students’ social, lived (...) and learning realities. The argument advanced in this article is that until the epistemic harm of colonialism and apartheid are afforded careful recognition and attention – as in focusing on the lived experiences, realities, and stories of individuals - the hard work of de-legitimizing coloniality, and its implicit structures of hegemonies and binaries cannot unfold. In addressing these harms, I commence by describing some of the contexts of epistemic harm, promulgated through colonialism and apartheid. This is followed by a consideration of decolonization, both as theory and practice-within-context. Here, I also foreground the #Rhodesmustfall campaign, as a particular moment of painful clarity about why decolonization, as well as transformation have faltered in higher education in South Africa. In the second half, I focus on the necessity of prioritising storytelling as a deep manifestation of decolonization. Stories, I maintain, provide access into unknown lives, and can subvert the invisible, normative framings, which dictate how we live in this world. As a manifestation of decolonization, students’ stories hold profound implications for the recognition and affirmation of pluralist identities, histories, knowledge, values, and worldviews. (shrink)

Women’s bodies, states Benhabib (Dignity in adversity: human rights in troubled times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011: 168), have become the site of symbolic confrontations between a re-essentialized understanding of religious and cultural differences and the forces of state power, whether in their civic-republican, liberal-democratic or multicultural form. One of the main reasons for the emergence of these confrontations or public debates, says Benhabib (2011: 169), is because of the actual location of ‘political theology’. She asserts that within the context (...) of globalization, the concept of ‘political theology’ is complicated by its unstable location between religion and the public square; between the private and official; and between individual rights to freedom of religion versus state security and public well-being. Ultimately, therefore, the nature of the tension between religion as a political theology and the forces of state power can at best be described as a clash between identities of a collective nature (as envisaged by the nation-state) and identities of an individual nature (as manifested in different religions and cultures). Ongoing attempts to counter the ascendancy of religion, and as will be discussed in this article, specifically the ascendancy and visibility of Islamic identity as practiced by Muslim women, has brought into serious debate the notion of a (post) secular society and its implications for religious rights. What emerges from the state’s insistence that individuals not be allowed to enter the public discourse as religious beings, are, on the one hand, the constraints imposed on Muslim women by liberal democracies, and on the other hand, that Islam, as represented by Muslim women, is not constitutive of democratic citizenship. Will the inclusion and recognition of Muslim women, therefore, necessarily augment a democratic citizenship agenda, and will it lead to an alleviation of the conflict? Then, in exploring a re-articulation of an inclusive citizenship—one which is held accountable by its minimization of social inequality—what ought to be the parameters of inclusion and how should it unfold differently to what is already happening in liberal democracies? (shrink)

If Islam continues to evoke skepticism, as it has done most intensely since 9/11, then it stands to reason that its tenets and education are viewed with equal mistrust, and as will be highlighted in this special issue, equal misunderstanding. The intention of this special edition is neither to counter the accusations Islam stands accused of, nor to offer solutions to the myriad challenges facing Muslims in majority and minority Muslim countries. As will be evidenced in the diverse offering of (...) this compilation, the intention is to offer a different perspective, an opportunity, perhaps, to glance at both the tensions and the possibilities that Islam and Muslims have to offer not to only others, but, perhaps, more importantly, to themselves. As such, in many instances the edition, while attempting to encompass as broad a spectrum as possible in terms of multiplicity of religiosity and lived experiences of Muslims and Muslim society, is at once also a critical refection on what Muslims themselves often neglect. This means, that perhaps the tensions inherent in Islam are not so much externally constructed, as they are shaped by the reluctance of some Muslims to critically engage with their own Muslimness and way of being. (shrink)

The euphoria of the recent Arab Spring that was initiated in northern African countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and spilled over to Bahrain, Yemen and Syria brings into question as to whether democratic citizenship education or more pertinently, education for democratic citizenship can successfully be cultivated in most of the Arab and Muslim world. In reference to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates) in the Middle East, we argue (...) that unless gender inequality, mostly instigated by religious-tribal and patriarchal perspectives, is eradicated, it would be impossible to engender any plausible conception of education for democratic citizenship in most of the Arab and Muslim world. Our thesis rests on an understanding that, firstly, education in the Arab and Muslim world is located in an impoverished view of education for Muslims; and secondly, that the notable absence of democratic citizenship is enhanced by gender-based discrimination in society especially in the professions and politics. We contend that education for democratic citizenship in the Arab and Muslim world is necessary and ought to be framed along a pluralist imaginary of citizenship. However, considering the continued prevalence of authoritarianism at politico-social levels our argument is that it seems feasible to enhance and at times disrupt the cultivation of national education drawing on some of the features of a pluralist imaginary of citizenship. (shrink)

Despite unimaginable geopolitical reform and re-humanisation, which saw South Africa transition from colonialism, to apartheid, and now, to a democracy, Muslim education has retained both its character and content. Overdue questions remain unanswered as it becomes evident that while politics and the world of Muslims have shifted – locally and globally – Muslim education in South Africa has remained unchanged ideologically and pedagogically. With Arendt’s seminal essay, ‘Crisis in education’, at the back of our minds, we ask whether a lack (...) of crisis in Muslim education and hence Muslim communities in South Africa, is, in fact, its crisis? Has the cocooning of Muslim education rendered its educational institutions and communities incapable of self-critique, reflection and interrogation? The Islamisation or integration of Muslim education, we posit – in light of a skewed understanding and implementation - has not been responded to persuasively. Put differently, Islamisation, as a recognition that a crisis in Muslim education has unfolded, has not been appropriately understood and its implementation seems to have exonerated a crisis in Muslim education to the extent that such a crisis has been subtly ignored. That is, Islamisation itself presented a crisis to Muslim education with very few, if any scholars, willing to engage with it as a crisis of Muslim education, to which we offer a democratic response. (shrink)

Education in democratic South Africa has been saddled with the extraordinary task of sanitising a once dehumanising and splintered education system into a singular narrative of social justice and creative, problem-solving individuals. This extraordinary effort has witnessed a pendulum swing from the openness of outcomes-based education, to a less flexible National Curriculum Statement, and recently, to what has been criticised as a too restrictive Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement. In its narrow focus on ‘assessment for learning’, CAPS appears to be trapped (...) in a particular understanding of teaching and learning that can be understood only in terms of measurement, thereby discounting education as happening outside that which can be measured. In this article, I contend, firstly, that while education is not averse to measurement, it cannot be allowed to dominate the educative process. Instead, it is possible to reconcile measurement, as expressed through a ‘language of needs’ with a language of ‘coming into presence’, which recognises that learners enter the education arena with their own ideas of what is known and yet to be known. Secondly, I argue, that if a post-apartheid education system hopes to re-humanise its citizens and society, then this will only be possible through cultivating a curriculum, which is understood as a process of socially just encounters—one which is always in becoming, and therefore not necessarily measurable. (shrink)

Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid make the argument that philosophy and education are intertwined as action concepts with the potential to affect teacher education practices. This book addresses pertinent philosophical concepts in education and how these concepts impact teaching, learning, and management as classroom practices.

Conventional teacher education programmes do not equip practitioners adequately to navigate ethically complex situations that arise in teaching. One initiative responding to this deficit is ‘Philosophy for Teachers’ (‘P4T’), a 24-hour residential approach to community philosophy. Piloted originally in England, a further workshop took place in South Africa in October 2017, comprising student teachers, teacher educators and philosophers from three historically different universities in the Western Cape. Significant new insights to emerge included greater clarity on the respective contributions of P4T (...) and other initiatives already applying ‘P4C’ to address professional ethics within teacher education. In particular, P4T re-framed within this new context can be seen to create shared space for reflection on teacher identity and the complexity of difference and ‘otherness’ in classroom practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As academics, we do not only produce and reproduce knowledge; we also produce our citizenship as a social and agonistic space. There are nuances embedded within academic citizenship – unqualifiable, but compelling in their production and reproduction of power dynamics, bringing into disrepute notions of academic citizenship as a homogenous or inclusive space. There are ways of being and becoming within citizenship that might be less readily conceivable, and hence, slip beneath the radar of scholarly scrutiny and debates.We have (...) yet to delve into how we come into the presence of one another. In offering an expanded understanding of academic citizenship as alterity, I argue that academic citizenship has to involve wading into a curious uncertainty about the other so that the immensity of diversity, its unknown-ness, is brought to bear on the university, not as fear and estrangement, but as a rupture with a continuity of Othering. (shrink)

Teaching and Learning as a Pedagogic Pilgrimage is premised on an argument that if higher education is to remain responsive to a public good, then teaching and learning must be in a perpetual state of reflection and change. It argues in defence of teaching and learning as constitutive of a pedagogic pilgrimage and draws on a range of scholars and theories to explore concepts such as transcendental journeys, belief, hope and imagination. The main objective of the book is to show (...) how teaching and learning ought to be reconsidered in relation to that which lies beyond the parameters of the encounters, as well as that which is intrinsic to the encounters. This book gives shape to rituals and routines of engagement and debate, before extending the limitations in deliberative pedagogic encounters to offer desirable outcomes in which both student and teacher can practice a spiritual take on teaching and learning along a continuum of ongoing action. Themes explored in the chapters include the following: Faith and deliberative encounters Post-human ethics of care in teaching and learning Diffracted teaching and learning This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, and teaching and learning in the philosophy of education. It will also appeal to school and university educators, policymakers and prospective teachers. (shrink)

Inasmuch as Muslim governments all over the world dissociate themselves from despicable acts of terror, few can deny the brutality and violence perpetrated especially by those in authoritative positions like political governments against humanity. Poignant examples are the ongoing massacre of Muslim communities in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan by those government or rebel forces intent on eliminating the other whom they happen to find unworthy of living. This article attempts to map Islamic education’s response to violence and terror often (...) perpetrated against people considered to be in vehement disagreement with another, for instance, Muslim rebel forces assassinating Christians in Syria and destroying ancient monasteries, Muslim jihadist fighters kidnapping and assassinating people in revengeful acts of terror and Muslim government militia quelling resistant forces that oppose the government’s so-called reformist agenda. In arguing against any form of violence, we show how Islamic education cannot and should not be associated with any act of violence. Put differently, we take issue with any act of violence even if minimally applied to disrupt acts of violence. On the contrary, we argue that Islamic education is intimately connected to the practice of public deliberation that engenders a community of becoming that will always undermine violence. We develop our argument in the following way: firstly, we give an account of a maximalist view of Islamic education in relation to the notion of a Muslim community in becoming; secondly, in relation to Agamben’s seminal thoughts on potentiality and becoming, we show that a Muslim community in becoming is averse to violence; finally, we argue as to how forgiveness, risk-taking and civility as instances of deliberation can counteract terror, more specifically on the part of a Muslim community in potentiality and becoming. (shrink)

In many ways, Ron Barnett’s academic oeuvre is unique. Without a doubt, he is one of the (if not the) most central founding academics of the research field ‘the philosophy of higher education’, whi...