Many feminist philosophers of education have argued that the teacher's pleasure plays an important role in the classroom. However, accessing such pleasure is often easier said than done. Given our current academic climate, how might teachers develop pedagogical practices that cultivate these delights? This article investigates the (rather surprising) response to this question offered in Augustine's De catechizandis rudibus. Despite his reputation as a pleasure-hater, Augustine spends the majority of his text defending the delights of teaching. In particular, Augustine argues (...) that if teachers wish to find pleasure in teaching, they would do well to study the pleasures of mothers. To this end, I analyse the nature of Augustine's maternal appeal. What insight does Augustine find in the experiences of mothers? In what way does he hope his colleagues will allow these experiences to shape their pedagogies? I conclude by exploring the benefits and the risks of Augustine's claim for those who teach in the contemporary feminist classroom. Augustine's defence of pedagogical pleasure suggests that he shares a common interest with feminist philosophers. But, the social/political limits of his account highlight the value of submitting such pleasures to the terms of feminist critique. (shrink)

Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way.A work of art... provokes in us... an image, which in our souls awakes surprise—sometimes, meditation—often, and always, the joy of creation.To place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.In The Aims of Education, Alfred North Whitehead claims that the goal of education is to cultivate an “aesthetic sense of realized perfection”1—namely, to instruct us in the way of the beautiful. (...) Beauty, Whitehead explains in Adventures of Ideas, is the highest value to attain; apart from it, “[t]ruth is neither good, nor bad.”2 Nor is the world good. Whitehead tells us that the adventure of the world is... (shrink)