This essay responds to recent philosophical interest in the Anthropocene by asking : Can and should educators adopt, form, transmit, teach ways of living to maintain, if not enhance Earth’s habitability, especially its habitability for diverse children? This inquiry therefore calls for conceptual study of learning to live through the Anthropocene—with, despite, after, before, amid, among, away from, and against its myriad harms, possible and actual, especially its harms to children. Examining cases of environmental racism in Checker’s Polluted Promises, and (...) other cases of environmental threats to children’s health, in Steingraber’s Raising Elijah, this study begins by proposing the ecological gap in philosophy of education consequential for children resides within another epistemological gap, variously designated gender gap, love gap, care gap. Ruddick’s maternal thinking provides a conceptual frame for theorizing three moral aims of learning to live in the Anthropocene that might inform public schooling. (shrink)

Education is on the cusp of a configurational shift, or, as some may argue, in the midst of it. In the last twenty years the direct influence of corporations and their interest in leading educational agencies has substantially increased with no signs of stopping.1 The corporation has become a leader for systemic change in educational practice.2 This systematic change's emphasis on the mighty dollar brings about many different obstacles for educators and educational theorists to consider, one of these being the (...) way education's monetization affects both learners' and educators' motivation. Where does this shift to the focus of funds find such motivations? Looking through the lenses of both John Dewey and... (shrink)

Reflecting upon Simone Weil’s conception of beauty as food, this essay proposes musical hunger as a metaphoric way of understanding a particular species of “cultural miseducation” as conceived by Jane Roland Martin, that disadvantages children musically and perhaps therefore also spiritually. It examines such musical miseducation with regard to an ethical conception of educational achievement as children’s growing capacities and responsibility for learning to love, survive, and thrive despite their troubles, especially their mothers’ absence, before narrating at length an educational (...) autobiography of musical hunger and posing questions about formal and informal secular educative possibilities for musical nourishment. (shrink)