ABSTRACTThis article posits an interpersonal ethical commitment to combat dangers to democracy in current times. Largely within an American context, two complementary pillars of ethics are presented. The first is from Nel Noddings and the ethics of care and the second developed primarily from Richard Rorty in a neo-pragmatist view. The contexts of present dangers, worldwide, especially in the USA, and then of this nation’s schooling, situate the ethics. A suggestion for teachers, students, and their schools as ‘citizen educators’ to (...) be active in their communities offers one road forward. (shrink)

The contemporary crisis in AmericanEducation that has resulted in Bush sponsoredfederal legislation for accountability andstandardized testing is the setting for anessay introducing the work of Frenchphilosopher, Julia Kristeva. The comparison isbetween an ``educated subject'' that might wellcome to be constituted in schooling at presentand a ``subject-in-process.'' In a strikinglydifferent vision of human potential, the latterindividual, with open-ended, non-perfectdevelopment, entails the possibility ofpersonal, societal and educational change.Kristeva's theory, based greatly in areinterpretation of Freud, and incorporatingthe semiotic, abjection and love, and revolt (...) iscentral. (shrink)

James Marshall's work on Foucault exemplifies a break with tradition in philosophy of education and if taken appropriately as a new methodology, a new logic, portends a different future for the field. This article begins from a misunderstanding of Marshall. It then posits Marshall as situated in a particular Foucauldian root: a logic break out of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault. From them a different understanding of ‘concept’ is offered as a break with the analytic tradition in philosophy and philosophy of (...) education. (shrink)

Serving as an introduction to the special issue of Studies in Philosophy and Education, “Philosophical Transgressions: Performativity and Performance for Education,” this paper situates the papers that follow in its own performative analysis, especially utilizing the insights of Jean-François Lyotard. From him two ideas are salient, one his conception of knowledge as performance and the other the aesthetic that is a reformist response.

Utilizing the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and Sheldon Wolin,this paper introduces a special issue on ``Educational Rights andEntitlements.'' Its purpose is to characterize and critique `the box ofliberalism' that both advances and constrains what is conceived andenacted in education. Following it are a set of significantcontributions from the sixth biennial conference of the InternationalNetwork of Philosophers of Education, August 1998, Ankara.

‘Introducing Noddings and the Symposium’ is an overview in three parts following an opening comment The three are these: Noddings’s biography highlighting personal background and professional accomplishments; papers overview pointing to key ideas and themes as well as philosophical, literary and metaphorical inspiration; and response comments that take up ideas from the symposium papers and Noddings’s text in brief reconsideration. These ideas are connection of care theory to Noddings’s happiness, recognition of an ethics in doing philosophy, conceptions of needs and (...) wants, and promotion of critical thinking especially in schools. (shrink)

Modernist educational practice operates within an overarching norm of consonance, notions of sameness and agreement that permeate schools and classroom life. This paper posits a needed move to postmodern educational theory and practice through dissonance. Following an intellectual contextualization, two sets of philosophical claims are presented. The first promotes social construction of reality and the second poses dissonance rather than consonance. The paper concludes with a “look” at education from this postmodern perspective.

Connecting identity, broadly defined to recent ‘advances’ in educational research, this paper takes up two different feminist treatments based in pragmatism and poststructuralism. The first is from Charlene Haddock Seigfried on ‘experience,’ and the second is from Peggy Phelan on ‘performance.’ The first is in keeping with a dominant tradition to secure identity through visibility and the second suggests critique through a turn to invisibility. The first arises out of Dewey's naturalism and the second through Lacan, performance art, and anti-representation. (...) At bottom is suggestion that an entire narrative tradition in educational research is potentially self-defeating. (shrink)

All research has limitations, for example, from paradigm, concept, theory, tradition, and discipline. In this article Lynda Stone describes three exemplars that are variations on limitation and are “extraordinary” in that they change what constitutes future research in each domain. Malcolm Gladwell's present day study of outliers makes a statistical term into a sociological concept. Carlo Ginzburg's study of a sixteenth-century miller who challenges Church doctrine initiates the field of microhistory. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's philosophy of the rhizome offers (...) a poststructuralist study of the doing of philosophy and the form of philosophical text. Although Gladwell's study is the only one specifically on the topic of outliers, the other two investigations are outliers as well. Overall the three studies demonstrate what can be revealed and learned when limitation is transgressed. This is an important lesson for educational research—wherein heretofore unimagined societal possibility and reform of education might result. (shrink)