Power, Nina. "Axiomatic Equality: Rancière and the Politics of Contemporary Education." EUROZINE July 1, 2010.

Is it necessary to presuppose the intellectual equality of those you teach? To be an educator at all it seems likely that one would have at least an implicit theory of mind, such that one knows what one is doing (or, at least, what one aspires to be doing) when standing at the front of the classroom. Is education merely the transplanting of gobbets of information onto the blank slate of a student's mind (we could call this the Lockean approach), or are we drawing out forms of rational and creative capacity possessed (equally?) by students qua rational beings? Jacques Rancière contributes much to this debate, particularly in his work on the unusual educator Joseph Jacotot in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. This paper attempts to analyse the possibility of what could be called the "utopian rationalism" of Jacotot (and of Rancière himself), within the context of the modern university. Rancière's work will be read alongside that of Pierre Bourdieu and Ivan Illich as other crucial figures in the understanding of the way in which educational achievement relates to certain assumptions about what teaching involves. Ultimately, it may be that the modern university is antithetical to any possibility of establishing true equality among its players – Rancière's position at times invokes the possibility of a radically de-institutionalized autodidacticism that predicates all learning merely on the basis of the will of those desiring to learn. This stance is the very opposite of the Lockean approach, which emphasizes the passivity of the student-receiver. Can the contemporary university bear the weight of Rancière's challenge? . . .


Read the rest here: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power-en.html.

Wolfe, Alan. "In Defence of a Common Culture." CHRISTIANITY TODAY February 4, 2010.

Hirsch, E. D. The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. E.D. Hirsch is a great American, a scholar who cares deeply about the youth of this country, what they are taught, and how likely they are to become engaged and thoughtful citizens. Hirsch describes himself as having enjoyed a "comfortable life as a conference-going literary theorist" before realizing that the failure of American schools to offer students actual content rather than faddish pedagogical innovations was not only turning young people into cultural illiterates but also was preventing those at the bottom of the ladder from improving their prospects in life through education. The founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation and the author of the controversial Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), Hirsch was adopted by the Right early in the culture wars. But his actual political sympathies are more in line with Albert Shanker, the longterm leader of the New York City teacher's union (to whose memory the present book is dedicated). Hirsch's new book is called The Making of Americans, and while he describes it as both departing from and building upon his previous work, it does more of the latter than the former. Disappointingly there is little new to be learned; anyone who has already read Diane Ravich's Left Back will not glean more history and, indeed, anyone who has read Hirsch's previous books will pretty much know the contours of the argument. Still this book is valuable because it offers a clearly written, highly accessible, and brief statement of the issues that have guided Hirsch for the past two or three decades. Reading William Bennett from the Right or almost any product of a major school of education from the Left, one could be forgiven for thinking that the American school wars were a battle between progressive educators seeking to teach students about the wonders of race, ethnicity, and gender on the one hand and old-fashioned disciplinarians worried about the seductions of relativism and hedonism on the other. The most important contribution Hirsch makes to the way we think about educating our youth is to get us out of using terms such as Left and Right. All wars eventually end, even culture wars. It is time to take the ideology out of our educational battles, a task for which E.D. Hirsch is particularly suited. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/global/printer.html?/bc/2010/janfeb/defensecommonculture.html.

Stern, Sol. "E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy." CITY JOURNAL (Autumn 2009).

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same. Hirsch draws his insights from well outside traditional education scholarship. He started out studying chemistry at Cornell University but, mesmerized by Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature, switched his major to English. Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader’s subjective response, and the text’s historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself. But by the time Hirsch wrote his doctoral dissertation—on Wordsworth—he was already breaking with the New Critics. “I came to see that the text alone is not enough,” Hirsch said to me recently at his Charlottesville, Virginia, home. “The unspoken—that is, relevant background knowledge—is absolutely crucial in reading a text.” Hirsch’s big work of literary theory in his early academic career, Validity in Interpretation, reflected this shift in thinking. After publishing several more well-received scholarly books and articles, he received an endowed professorship and became chairman of the English department at the University of Virginia. Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, “changed my life.” He was “feeling guilty” about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA’s admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.” This finding, first published in a psychology journal, was consistent with Hirsch’s past scholarship, in which he had argued that the author takes for granted that his readers have crucial background knowledge. Hirsch was also convinced that the problem of inadequate background knowledge began in the early grades. Elementary school teachers thus had to be more explicit about imparting such knowledge to students—indeed, this was even more important than teaching the “skills” of reading and writing, Hirsch believed. Hirsch’s insight contravened the conventional wisdom in the nation’s education schools: that teaching facts was unimportant, and that students instead should learn “how to” skills. Hirsch gave a lecture on the implications of his study at a Modern Language Association conference and then expanded the argument in a 1983 article, titled “Cultural Literacy,” in The American Scholar. The article caused a stir, not so much in the academy (and certainly not in the ed schools) as among public intellectuals. William Bennett, then chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, encouraged Hirsch to pursue his theme. Education historian Diane Ravitch urged him to get a book out fast and to call it Cultural Literacy as well. Hirsch heeded the advice, and in 1987, the book landed on the New York Times’s bestseller list, where it stayed for 26 weeks, resulting in a dramatic career change for the author. He kept researching and writing about how to improve the “cultural literacy” of young Americans and launched the Core Knowledge Foundation, which sought to create a knowledge-based curriculum for the nation’s elementary schools. A wide range of scholars assisted him in specifying the knowledge that children in grades K–8 needed to become proficient readers. For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects. By the late 1980s, Hirsch had all but abandoned academic literary studies and become a full-time education reformer. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_hirsch.html.

Pub: E-Learning. DISCOURSE: LEARNING AND TEACHING IN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES 8 (2009).

Contents:

• Editorial: e-Learning in Dialogue by Costas Athanasopoulos FHEA (PRS e-Learning Project Officer, 2007-8) .
• e-Learning Survey Report by Costas Athanasopoulos FHEA (PRS e-Learning Project Officer, 2007-8); Report on a survey conducted by the Subject Centre for PRS on the current state of e-learning in PRS disciplines, and its future development.
• Dialectical Approaches to Theory and Methodology in e-Learning: Implications for Dialogic Teaching and Learning by Richard Andrews, Institute of Education, University of London; This paper argues that the relationship between new technologies and learning is not causal, and is not that simple. Rather, the relationship is dialectical and reciprocal, with technologies and learning developing alongside each other.
• e-Learning in Dialogue: Using e-Learning to Explore the Local Religious Environment by Deirdre Burke, School of Humanities, University of Wolverhampton; This article looks at the underlying pedagogy for a 'dialogical' e-learning approach to the study of local religious communities.
• An Environment, Not a Tool: a Constructivist Point of View on e-Learning by Massimo Capponi, University of Perugia; This paper argues that e-learning doesn’t help to transmit information and documents, but to share, to cooperate, to construct, personally, our own knowledge.
• Philosophy Engines: Technology and Reading/ Writing/ Thinking Philosophy by Annamaria Carusi, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford; This paper considers how various technologies are affecting the teaching and learning of philosophy, as integral aspects of what it is to do philosophy, that is, its epistemic practices.
• Living the Religious Experience in Ancient Rome: Virtual Learning in the Real World by Dr. Steven J. Green, Department of Classics, University of Leeds; This paper discusses the use of wikis in a module on ancient Roman religion.
• Electronic MCQs with no Right-or-Wrong Answers as a Means for Developing Dialogic Thinking by George MacDonald Ross, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds; This paper discusses how electronic multiple choice questionnaires can develop dialogic thinking.
• The Seminar Transformed: Use of Blogs to Enhance Face-to-face Learning at Different Levels by Dr Sara Parvis, Dr Jessie Paterson and Dr Kirsteen Murray, University of Edinburgh; This paper looks at the use of blogs with students at various different levels within the Scottish university system.
• Metacognative Hypertexts by Livio Rossetti, University of Perugia; This paper looks at how hypertexts have been used in the past, and how they might be used in the future.
• What dialogue for the electronic era? by Alex Zistakis; This paper discusses what 'dialogue' really means in an electronic age.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. "The Religious Roots of 'Child-Centered' Education." CLASSICAL TEACHER (Summer 2007).

There are many disputes within the education field, but none so vituperative as the reading and math wars—the battles over how best to teach children to read and to solve arithmetic problems. These aren’t just disputes over instructional techniques--they are expressions of two distinct and opposing understandings of children’s nature and how children learn. The two sides are best viewed as expressions of romantic versus classical orientations to education. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/hirsch.html.

Phillips, D. C. "Philosophy of Education." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY June 2, 2008.

The domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, criteria for selecting evidence that has relevance for the problems that they consider central, and the like. No wonder educational discourse has occasionally been likened to Babel, for the differences in backgrounds and assumptions means that there is much mutual incomprehension. In the midst of the melee sit the philosophers of education. It is no surprise, then, to find that the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content and methods of argument in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg. It is revealing to note some of the names that were heavily-cited in a pair of recent authoritative handbooks in the field (according to the indices of the two volumes, and in alphabetical order): Adorno, Aristotle, Derrida, Descartes, Dewey, Habermas, Hegel, Horkheimer, Kant, Locke, Lyotard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Rawls, Richard Rorty, Rousseau, and Wittgenstein (Curren, 2003; Blake, Smeyers, Smith and Standish, 2003). Although this list conveys something of the diversity of the field, it fails to do it complete justice, for the influence of feminist philosophers is not adequately represented. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/education-philosophy/.

Murray, Charles. "The Age of Educational Romanticism." NEW CRITERION (May 2008).

This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools —its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise. Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-age-of-educational-romanticism-3835. The entire issue on Education is available for download here: http://www.newcriterion.com/currentissue.cfm.

Piereson, James. “'The Closing of the American Mind' at 20." NEW CRITERION November 2007.

It has now been twenty years since the late Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, his bestselling broadside against the ideas and conceptions that animate the contemporary university. The general theme of Bloom’s book is encapsulated in the subtitle: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Bloom’s thesis was striking precisely because it ran against the grain of conventional commentary on the academy. Following the upheavals of the 1960s, educators prided themselves on the degree to which they had reformed the American university in the direction of democracy, equality, and openness. They sought, as they said, to create an academic environment in which students might explore various ways of thinking and living in order to find their authentic selves. Those academic leaders were convinced that they had served democracy and enriched the educational experience of students by all the reforms—curricular and non-curricular—that they had engineered in response to the student revolts of that era. Now here was Bloom bluntly saying that they had actually done something quite the reverse: in the quest for “openness” and democracy, the academics had closed off genuine thought and intellectual exploration, and in so doing had compromised the case for democratic institutions. . . . Read the rest here: http://newcriterion.com:81/archives/26/11/the-closing-of-the-american-mind-at-20/.

Abaunza, George. "Review of AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION by Robin Barrow and Ronald Woods." METAPSYCHOLOGY September 25, 2007

It is likely that there are just as many definitions or explanations of the nature of philosophy as there are philosophers. As a philosophy of education instructor I confess that this is just as likely when it comes to the myriad ways we might approach the study of education with our students. For instance, one might take an historical approach, rather than the thematic-analytic one offered here by Barrow and Woods. Yet, there is one thing anyone who has a stake in education, regardless of philosophical bent, ought to share in common; an unabashed concern for analytical rigor in the ways we conceptualize 'education' or what it means to 'be educated'. Without such clarity we cannot be said to be truly 'thinking' about education, let alone drawing consistent conclusions from empirical studies that first take their shape from these very conceptions. . . . Read the rest here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3839.