Students labeled with intellectual disability, including those with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities, are subject to numerous practices that diminish or demonstrate disregard for their status as knowers. The widespread acceptance of epistemically undermining educational practices aligns with a prominent philosophical conception of equal moral status, which we reject. The alternative conception of moral status that we outline brings into view a developmental dimension that is often ignored in moral status debates. We argue that epistemically undermining educational practices are morally and epistemically demeaning toward intellectually disabled students when and because they betray a basic moral obligation to protect students’ formative opportunities within educational contexts. We show that epistemically undermining practices constitute a serious wrong to students in their capacity as knowers. Evaluating the moral adequacy of educational practices requires a concern for the diverse, pluralistic conditions under which students’ epistemic capacities might be enabled to grow and develop.

Liberals tend towards the belief that indoctrination in education is problematic because it undermines autonomy. People who had beliefs forced upon them through education, while not being equipped with the cognitive tools necessary to critique these beliefs, would not become autonomous; such people, not being capable of choosing the sorts of values they wish to live in accord with, would not be the authors of their own lives. Recent literature, however, questions this view of the relationship between autonomy and indoctrination. Indoctrination may not be possible to avoid within education; we all have biases as a result of the way in which we were raised, which we may struggle to critique. I argue that rather than attempting to avoid indoctrination within education, we should instead think about how to indoctrinate in the right way . This does not mean forcing people into beliefs, but attempting to shape the child’s emotional commitments to align with beliefs which can be justified in line with their own autonomy, while still encouraging the child to be critical. In this sense, we are indoctrinating people to be autonomous.

Universal school choice programs are rapidly expanding in the United States. One argument in support of school choice is that it unleashes the power of competitive markets to improve schools and satisfy customers. This article reexamines the idea that school choice is a consumer choice. It does so, first, by comparing school choice with other forms of consumer choice, like the choice of a breakfast cereal, along eight dimensions. The comparison shows that school choice functions very differently than it does with other types of consumer goods or services. Second, using the work of German sociologist Georg Simmel, the article looks at how competitive markets have been said to advance human relationships and create communities. The article then seeks to find a way to reconcile the potential upsides of consumer choice with the benefits of public deliberation, advocating for a renewed attention to choice programs within public schools, formulated in certain ways.

Many liberal democratic countries have enacted policy programmes aimed at preventing support for violent extremism. In countries such as the United Kingdom, part of this responsibility falls upon state-maintained schools. Teachers are charged with – among other things – challenging the claims, arguments and ideological narratives supportive of terrorism as well as promoting liberal democratic values as a counterweight. Insofar as the aim is to rationally dissuade those in danger of being ‘radicalised’ in this way, this article argues that this approach is unlikely to succeed in all but a narrow range of cases. It argues that the claims that radicalisation occurs through lack of knowledge or poor critical reasoning skills, and that improving these things is the antidote, is at odds with the consensus of social scientific research on partisanship and knowledge, and the phenomenon of motivated reasoning. Challenging beliefs and ideological narratives – whether directly or through more indirect mechanisms – will likely serve to entrench and harden those beliefs in those being drawn towards them. Contrary to this, the article argues that adoption of beliefs supervenes on membership in groups or affiliation to social movements and causes. Individuals receive the benefits of belonging, self-esteem and friendship from such affiliations. It is the receipt of these goods that drives commitment to cherished, identity-forming beliefs. Reasoned engagement therefore misses its target because those beliefs are not held on an epistemic basis. This has important consequences for education. Reasoned engagement is only likely to work where the person seeking to persuade, and the target of that persuasion, have fundamental beliefs and commitments in common. Educational resources are better focused on providing the contexts for students to receive and enjoy the feelings of belonging, self-esteem and friendship, rather than focusing those resources on defeating arguments.

This article investigates the roles of imitation and emulation in the development of virtue by questioning the way these learning mechanisms are distinguished in the literature. Conventional views distinguish a deliberate kind of emulation, necessary for the acquisition of practical wisdom and virtue, from the unconscious and automatic imitation of virtuous actions. In this article, this binary is challenged through an analysis of two (autobiographical) novels by the French author Edouard Louis. Eddy, the main character in both novels, adopts behaviours from his friends and teachers on purpose, driven by personal goals rather than the models’ virtuous motives. The novels help us to imagine a new category of moral learning, called ‘deliberate imitation’: it is goal-driven but not fully aligned with the virtuous intentions of the role models. This type of imitation blurs the distinction between imitation and emulation and may serve as a transitional phase. The article ends with a discussion of the implications this type of imitation may have for moral education. It is suggested that teachers may have less control over which of their actions students take to be exemplary and which ones not.

This article develops the ideas of perfection and education in Spinoza and Maimonides. Both thinkers identify human perfection with intellectual knowledge and a transformation in affect. They accordingly envision education in terms of enhancing cognition and shaping the desire to know. The first steps are a critical evaluation of imagination and the development of the mind’s rational, inferential powers. These steps stabilize and strengthen our positive affects, and they arouse a desire for what Spinoza calls the third kind of knowing and Maimonides calls intellectual apprehension. Individuals achieve this highest perfection by degrees, if at all. Spinoza argues that the more the body can undergo, the more we know, the more active and hence the more perfect we are, and the more joy, love, and satisfaction we experience. Spinoza calls the third kind of knowing both scientia intuitiva and amor dei intellectualis. Maimonides’s perfect human being experiences an intellectual apprehension of the existence of God and receives flashes of insight concerning aporetic metaphysical questions. Although Spinoza’s amor dei intellectualis transforms the knower’s way of living, it is not explicitly political. Maimonides’ model of the perfect human is Moses, whose intellectual apprehension brings about a passionate love for God and eventuates in prophecy, which Maimonides theorizes as the overflow of intellectual attainment through imagination. Moses is the most perfect prophet, the one who founds and organizes a community.

This article’s question is whether Spinoza understands the highest human perfection – which he equates with both our highest good and the love of God – as a theoretical state, consisting in having knowledge and the perfection of beliefs, or as a practical state, consisting in having virtue and the perfection of action. Consequently, the article is also partly about how Spinoza understands moral education, that is, whether the education necessary for achieving the highest human perfection is fundamentally theoretical or practical in nature. The article answers this question by considering Spinoza’s view of the highest good in the context of Maimonides and Crescas. The article argues that Spinoza adopts elements of both philosopher’s views, including Crescas’s view that the highest good must also be a practical state of virtue, which means that Spinoza must understand moral education as resulting in the perfection of action as well as knowledge.