In this article, I argue that philosophy must be taught mandatorily in primary education, in light of considerations about epistemic injustice. I maintain that denying primary school students access to philosophical education wrongs them as epistemic agents, by limiting their opportunities to develop intellectual resources required for justified reasoning about norms of belief, action and emotion. I hold that such limitations constitute a direct form of epistemic injustice in a broad sense, understood as damage to epistemically significant capacities. Moreover, I claim that these limitations increase vulnerability to narrower forms of epistemic injustice, including at least testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, by holding back the cultivation of cognitive virtues and critical thinking dispositions that function as safeguards against prejudicial, discriminatory and irrational belief-formation processes. I conclude that since epistemic injustice inflicts significant harm on individuals as epistemic subjects, educational policymakers ought to prevent it where possible and, thus, establish philosophy as a core component of primary school curriculum.

Abstract The forthcoming inclusion of philosophy in Aotearoa New Zealand’s secondary school curriculum presents a timely opportunity to rethink how philosophy should be taught. This paper argues that philosophy education must move beyond the standardised and overly academic models often found in universities, which risk reducing the discipline to technical exercises rather than meaningful inquiry. Returning to the dialogical and imaginative spirit of Plato’s Academy, the paper advocates for teaching practices that prioritise dialogue, curiosity, and creativity over rote instruction and rigid assessment. Drawing on experimental teaching methods developed in collaboration with a university colleague and on practical experiences teaching philosophy at a secondary school in New Zealand, it demonstrates how dialogical and creative assessments, such as student-written dialogues and role-based discussions, enhance engagement and deepen philosophical understanding. These approaches are situated in relation to the Philosophy for Children movement (Lipman, 2003; Lipman et al., 1980) and the broader literature on dialogic pedagogy (Alexander, 2020; Mercer, 2002), showing that the Platonic model shares important commitments with these traditions while offering a historically grounded and imaginatively rich framing for secondary classrooms. By treating philosophy as a living practice of reflection and conversation, this approach aims to cultivate students’ capacity to think independently, imaginatively, and critically within the context of Aotearoa’s evolving curriculum.

This paper presents an evidence‑based framework for character development across the global network of Outward Bound (OB) Schools. Using the Eisenhardt multiple‑case, cross‑case theory‑building method, the study examined 11 OB Schools operating in diverse cultural and operational contexts to understand how character development is fostered worldwide. Analysis revealed five key “levers” that were associated with character development opportunities: educational philosophy, service, authentic adventure, educational models, and instructor behaviors. These levers vary by context yet appear most potent when intentionally aligned to create coherent educational experiences. The resulting framework provides a practical tool for OB Schools seeking to strengthen character development through aligned design and implementation strategies. More broadly, this work advances the field of character education by highlighting both the distinctive strengths of outdoor experiential learning and the ways a global educational organization can balance overarching pedagogical coherence with the need for local adaptability.

ABSTRACT Biesta defines three basic dimensions of education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. In the teaching of acting, qualification and socialization are inevitable. This paper focuses on subjectification in acting pedagogy. Subjectification is what makes the actor’s situation truly existential. Stanislavsky’s expression of the existential experience of being here and now is “Ya yesm” and finds its most evident exponent in the method of Active Analysis. Psychologist, writer, performer, and teacher Ivan Vyskočil developed the principle of radical openness in his discipline of “the dialogical acting with the inner partner,” in which the actor learns to listen to his inner impulses and respond authentically without fear of making mistakes. Stanislavsky and Vyskočil similarly argue that acting cannot be learned through imitation of patterns, but that the actor must become the subject of action, radically open to the situation and audience. Finally, the text focuses on education as practical wisdom and the acting teacher as “phrominos,” capable of making wise educational decisions which are always specific to the educational task in question.

As a core course in preventive medicine, epidemiology contains abundant resources for ideological and political education. However, current teaching practices still face challenges such as fragmented exploration of ideological and political elements and awkward integration methods. Grounded in the fundamental mission of moral education and talent cultivation, this study focused on the distinctive characteristics of epidemiology and developed the "One Core, Two Integrations" teaching model for ideological and political education for preventive medicine students. This model crystallized the distinctive core educational philosophy: "Tracing Etiologies, Pursuing Truth; Safeguarding Health, Being Pioneers". It promoted the deep integration of professional knowledge instruction with scientific worldviews and methodologies, as well as of professional case analysis with professional ethics and social responsibility. Complementary efforts included five systematic teaching resource developments: syllabus optimization, case database construction, online course development, expanded resource integration, and standardized lesson plan compilation. A three-stage teaching implementation process-"pre-class guidance, in-class deepening, and post-class extension"-was established and put into practice. The research culminated in a systematic, actionable teaching framework for integrating ideological and political education into epidemiology courses. Its practical application has effectively promoted the coordinated development of students' professional competencies and ethical standards, thus achieving a mutually reinforcing relationship between curriculum development and disciplinary advancement. This framework provides a referenceable model for deepening the integration of ideological education with specialized instruction in epidemiology and related medical disciplines. It holds significant practical value for strengthening the value orientation in public health talent cultivation and advancing the implementation of the Healthy China strategy.

Environmental education occupies a paradoxical position in contemporary schooling: proclaimed as urgent by policymakers, endorsed across international frameworks, yet persistently marginalised in practice. This paper argues that the intractability of this paradox cannot be resolved at the level of curriculum design, pedagogical method, or institutional policy, because its roots are ontological. Drawing on recent literature across environmental education research, philosophy of education, and environmental philosophy, the paper traces the problem through four interconnected dimensions. The first concerns the contradictions embedded in what environmental education teaches and for what purpose. The second is the mismatch between the abstract, universal learner presumed by dominant frameworks and the culturally embedded, place-specific persons who actually inhabit classrooms. The third is the marginalisation of non-Western knowledge traditions by frameworks that position Western science as the default mode of environmental knowing. The fourth is the structural incapacity of the modern school—itself a product of the modernity that generated ecological crisis—to house genuinely transformative environmental education. The paper concludes by sketching the contours of an ontological reorientation, drawing on diverse philosophical traditions including Anthropocosmism, ancient natural philosophy, Indigenous epistemologies, and contemplative approaches. It argues that environmental education requires not better implementation of existing frameworks but a more fundamental rethinking of what it means for human beings to know, inhabit, and be responsible to a living world.

As an educational philosopher and an experimentalist Gandhi wanted to make a new social order based on truth and non-violence. According to him, “truth shall set you free” and education helps one to reach the peak of self-realization. He wanted a social revolution through Basic Education; which does not stand for mere technique rather it stands for a new crafts-centered approach full of spirit and self-realization. This paper is primarily experimental as well as analytical in nature; Covering the broad areas of Gandhian Educational Philosophy such as Cultural Education, Curriculum of Education, Role of Teacher, Imparting Discipline, Women’s Education, Aims of Education, Adult Education, Basic Education etc. This paper also tries to examine general merits and demerits of Basic Education and its relevance in modern society with the help of scientific outlook.

Although mentoring practices are widely recognised in educational settings, mentoring by the principal alongside other mentors remains largely unrecorded, making the formation of their identities as mentors an important area of inquiry. This self-study examines the evolving mentorship identity of a Salesian educator who served as a school and college principal and as an educational researcher engaged in a national mentoring mission. Six episodes of formal mentoring across institutional and national contexts, along with mentees’ feedback, were collected to reflect on mentoring experiences and contributed to the thematic analysis. The study is grounded in Bandura’s (1997) self-efficacy theory, the prepare-support-growth lens from the National Mission for Mentoring (NMM) in India, and in alignment with the Salesian educational philosophy. The findings revealed three themes that illuminated the process of mentoring identity formation: mentoring as accompanying presence, mentoring identity and leadership formation, and mentoring as a dialogic and transformative practice. The dual vantage point of practitioner and researcher enriches reflexivity and reveals how mentoring identity is shaped. This study presents a contextually embedded model for mentorship development, illuminating the development of mentoring identity through mentoring practices and feedback.

Within contemporary Catholic pedagogy, education is facing unprecedented pressures owing to globalisation, digitisation, and the increase in pluralisation of societies. Within this study, the focus will be on assessing the sustainability and relevance of contemporary Catholic philosophical ideas on education that are grounded in religious expressions and backed up by findings from Lebanese Catholic schools. Built on an integral anthropology that commits to attaining harmonious development of the intellect, morality, community, and spirituality, the paper seeks to assess the relevance of contemporary pedagogies. A mixed-method design was adopted, combining questionnaires (N ≈ 200), semi-structured interviews with principals, teachers, chaplains, and catechists (n = 10), and two focus groups across twelve schools in Mount Lebanon. The results demonstrate a wide tendency towards convergence between Catholic purposes and modern ‘student-centered’ practices, particularly with regard to aspects of reciprocity, inclusivity, and autonomy. The results also pose pressing questions with regard to performance-based cultures, overexposure to media, and disenchanting spiritual times in overly packed curricula. The Catholic schools should be seen as educational synthesis where tradition and innovation are merely contrasted in terms of insight rather than opposed to one another. This study contributes to the discussion of religious education by highlighting the potential and necessity of a collaborative renovation and by pointing out regional strategies meant to guarantee holistic formation in times of instability.

Decolonising education through Robert Sobukwe's humanist and educational philosophies: A critical content analysis

ABSTRACT This is a personal retrospective by Terry O’Banion, a prolific author and provocative idea champion who focused his career on innovation in community colleges and higher education. His published works spanned over 60 years and included several hundred articles, books, chapters and monographs. Published posthumously, O’Banion shares the influences in his upbringing and education that contributed to his scholarship and early career and chronicles his career path to his retirement and beyond. He describes how his introduction to progressive education and later to humanistic education, as well as his encounters with major figures in education and psychology, shaped his philosophy of education and continued to impact his thought leadership throughout a career spanning six decades. He segments his life into phases including his childhood, his experiences, doctoral studies, community college leadership roles, national organizational leadership and post-retirement contributions. Throughout these experiences, O’Banion consistently advocated for community college reform and learner-centered education. He concludes the essay with a personal creed that reflects the values, purpose and lifelong commitments that defined both his work and his life.

A return to the etymology and emergence of Bildung in tandem with the novel offers a means of recovering dimensions of experience that have been somewhat muted in contemporary educational philosophy. The paper takes a critical stance toward recent appropriations of Bildung, particularly within philosophy of mind and education. Although prominent figures such as John McDowell and David Bakhurst bring some breadth to their accounts, their argument is grounded in primarily cognitive and intellectual terms. They interpret Bildung through reason, conceptual mastery, and the formation of the person as a rational being. In response, I turn to Bildung’s earlier associations with experiential, affective, and expressive formation, and to its literary articulation in the Bildungsroman, to show how the Bildungsprozess unfolds through struggle, uncertainty, and lived encounter. Works such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man narrate the unruly and often turbulent nature of formation in their stories, where human becoming resists closure or neat resolution. Revisiting Bildung in this light restores to education a sense of movement, creativity, and transformation that are difficult to contain within intellectual or conceptual accounts alone.

This paper engages Bernard Stiegler’s concept of symbolic misery to interrogate the transformations of education in the digital age. Stiegler’s account of the pharmakon—technology as both remedy and poison—provides a philosophical lens for understanding how educational technologies simultaneously democratise access to knowledge and erode the symbolic and relational fabric of pedagogy. The argument develops in three movements. First, it situates symbolic misery within the broader philosophical dialogue on technology, drawing connections to Derrida’s reading of Plato’s Pharmacy, Simondon’s notion of individuation, and Guattari’s reflections on machinic subjectivity. Second, it examines how digital infrastructures risk disindividuation, reducing education to standardised processes of information delivery while undermining desire, meaning, and dialogic engagement. Third, it considers the possibility of renewal through what Stiegler calls negentropic practices of care—educational forms that resist machinic repetition and foster individuation, creativity, and collective sense-making. While examples from contemporary higher education illustrate these dynamics, the paper’s primary aim is to contribute to ongoing debates in educational philosophy by rethinking pedagogy under conditions of symbolic misery. It argues that the future of education depends not on rejecting technology, but on inhabiting its ambivalence—transforming its toxic potential into a resource for symbolic vitality.

ABSTRACT The study observes the rising global demand for educational reform and suggests possible alternative adjustments through the philosophies of Sri Aurobindo and Henry Thoreau, two seminal thinkers from the Indian and American Renaissances. Although they belong to different cultural and philosophical roots, both critiqued the colonial and conventional education system’s conformity, passivity, rote learning, and punitive discipline. Sri Aurobindo’s integral education, rooted in Vedantic thought, emphasises spiritual evolution through yogic self-regulation. Henry Thoreau’s nature-based pedagogy, rooted in transcendental philosophy, promotes self-reliance, experiential learning, and moral suasion. Both of them responded to the inadequacies of colonial, industry-driven, and skill-based education by envisioning evolutionary alternatives concentrating on holistic human growth. Through a comparative analysis across four dimensions: critical assessment of the contemporary education systems, philosophical foundations and pedagogical methodology, the educator’s role, comparative perspectives on epistemic in/justice and moral education, the study highlights their shared rejection of rigid, authoritarian pedagogy. The paper argues that their legacies offer possible insights for reimagining contemporary education that parallels the decolonial turn of epistemology. Further, the paper briefly discusses how their educational philosophies foster critical learning and thinking, and also critically considers the limitations of their philosophy.

ABSTRACT This paper offers a discussion of Hartmut Rosa’s turn to religion, arguing that it does two things. First, his turn to religion addresses a critical gap in his thinking on resonance. Second, his religious thought offers us resources to address polarization, introducing new ways to approach adolescent education. To draw out the significance of Rosa’s thinking for the field of philosophy of education (and educational thought more generally), I place his thinking in conversation with the work of John Dewey, arguing that Rosa’s approach to religion is to be preferred to Dewey’s, especially because it opens new possibilities for how philosophers of education conceptualize their work in these polarized and polarizing times.

ABSTRACT In this paper, my aim is to sketch out a pedagogical concept departing from the existing musical term sympathetic resonance. This is an admittedly experimental endeavor, serving to test out the currency of an already well-established term in a conceptual landscape that is foreign to it. What I hope to attain by this is to open up for a new array of questions for the philosophy of education, indicating a novel approach to the study of pedagogical relations. My hypothesis, such as it is, is that sympathetic resonance stands to offer a conceptual guide for understanding how teaching a group of students can work by teachers (knowingly or unknowingly) offering various overtones to be latched onto and elaborated in different ways by different students. Sympathetic resonance is offered as a conceptual tool for better understanding the complex dynamics of maintaining parallel pedagogical relationships.

Philosophy of education can be described as a field, a mode of enquiry, and as a tradition. While not all philosophers of education recognise or appreciate philosophy of education specifically as a tradition, it is indisputable that it is a particular culturally embedded social practice that is carried out and developed across generations. This essay considers how philosophers of education view tradition, in the field and in education. I examine educational philosophy scholarship in relation to tradition in four sections here that reveal a spectrum of approaches. These approaches are, basically, that (1) traditions and conceptualising traditions matter; (2) traditions in philosophy of education matter, rather than the conceptualising of tradition(s); (3) traditions and the nature of tradition are of little to no interest or peripheral to the field; and (4) traditions should be regarded with suspicion. Overall, apart from a few exceptional thinkers, most philosophers of education reference tradition(s) in a thin, superficial sense rather than in a more deeply reflective or substantive sense. I reflect on the value of this examination and the potential for further explorations of tradition in the field in the conclusion.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I offer a suggestion for incorporating a set of texts in philosophy of mind, written by or about women, that concern how we can improve or emend our understanding, or philosophy of education. These texts challenge a current assumption in philosophy of mind – that the human mind comes fully formed – while also demonstrating the social nature of human cognitive development, challenging more individualist accounts. These texts and the questions they raise highlight that our awareness of the world, our ability to represent and reason about it, subsists alongside habit formation, and that cultivating both reason and proper habits or virtues is important not only for each of us epistemically as individuals but also for the well-functioning of human society. The suggestion situates familiar canonical figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke alongside Marie le Jars de Gournay, François Poulain de la Barre, Madame de Maintenon, and Mary Astell.

ABSTRACT In the 1960s, general education was at the forefront of innovative programs in American community colleges. Every community college designed a program of a common core of courses for the common person. General education was so popular it was included as one of the required compo- nents of a comprehensive community college along with university transfer, vocational and occupational programs, remedial education, and community service programs. By the 1980s, the common core idea began to fracture, and faculty began to add so many courses to meet general education requirements that today Thomas Bailey and his colleagues at the Community College Research Center cite the cafeteria-style, self-service model as one of the key issues keeping the Completion Agenda from reaching its goals. Whereas in the 1960s, students were required to take one comprehensive course in the humanities; students today choose from among 60 or more courses to meet the humanities requirement. In current student success reform efforts to increase retention and completion rates, the curriculum has pretty much been ignored. But leaders in a handful of community colleges are beginning to realize the unintended consequences of too many courses and too many choices, and they are beginning to appoint faculty committees to explore and redesign general education programs to better serve the needs of today’s students. Few faculty leaders and administrators are familiar with the history and philosophy of general education, and this brief history will be helpful in their work as they design the next generation of these programs.

This study investigates how preschool teachers in Turkey and Sweden construct meaning around nature-based education, focusing on their roles, practices, and symbolic interactions. Grounded in Symbolic Interactionism, the research examines how nature is interpreted not merely as a physical environment, but as a cultural and pedagogical space where identities are shaped and negotiated. Data were gathered through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 24 preschool teachers, including Swedish teachers, Turkish teachers working in Turkey, and teachers of Turkish origin who have taught in both countries. In Sweden, nature is normalized as part of the educational experience, supported by strong cultural norms, infrastructure, and a child-centered approach. Turkish teachers, on the other hand, reported structural constraints and societal pressures, such as parental concerns and visibility demands, that limit their pedagogical autonomy. Teachers with cross-cultural teaching experiences provided unique insights into how educational roles and values are renegotiated across contexts, illustrating the dynamic construction of professional identity. The findings illustrate that teachers’ engagement with nature is influenced not only by educational philosophy, but also by cultural expectations, institutional affordances, and the symbolic roles they adopt in different contexts.These results underline the need to consider cultural and institutional contexts when examining how nature-based education is implemented and experienced by early childhood teachers.