Filling in the blanks: The Anti-Cahn Anthology of Alternative Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education

Abstract

This article arose as a critical response to the second edition of Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education (2012) edited by Steven M. Cahn (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lissa Paul, a professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University in the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada, assigned Cahn’s anthology as the core text in a postgraduate course she taught in the winter of 2021: ‘The right to education: Historical frameworks’. As the course was designed to interrogate the philosophical grounds of (primarily North American) pedagogical practices, the masculine, Eurocentric biases of Cahn’s anthology mirror those underlying our educational institutions. In response to those biases, the five students in the class addressed Cahn’s errors of both omission and commission by developing something like a prospectus or book proposal for what Lissa dubbed the Anti-Cahn Anthology of Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education. In this article each student contributes a rationale for the inclusion of someone ‘missing’ from Cahn’s book and suggestions for selections from key texts. Adriana Brook writes on the medieval African-Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, Jessi Skye on the eighteenth-century Indigenous philosopher Handsome Lake, Rebekah Carlsson on the famous advocate of early childhood education, Maria Montessori, Jessica Dieleman on the late African American scholar bell hooks and Breanne Wilde on Jules Gill-Peterson and histories of the transgender child.