Some philosophers of education have recently argued that educators can more or less ignore children's global self‐esteem without failing them educationally in any important way. This paper draws on an attachment theoretic account of self‐esteem to argue that this view is mistaken. I argue that understanding self‐esteem's origins in attachment supports two controversial claims. First, self‐esteem is a crucial element of the confidence and motivation children need in order to engage in and achieve educational pursuits, especially in certain domains of instruction such as physical education. Second, self‐esteem can be facilitated socially, through an appropriate arrangement of school institutions, thus without hindering the pursuit of other high priority aims such as a challenging academic curriculum. Consequently I maintain that educators who ignore self‐esteem overlook something educationally important.
Participatory approaches to environmental decision making and assessment continue to grow in academic and policy circles. Improving how we understand the structure of deliberative activities is especially important for addressing problems in natural resources, climate change, and food systems that have wicked dimensions, such as deep value disagreements, high degrees of uncertainty, catastrophic risks, and high costs associated with errors. Yet getting the structure right is not the only important task at hand. Indeed, participatory activities can break down and fail to achieve their specific goals when some of the deliberators lack what we will call participatory virtues. We will argue for the importance of future research on how environmental education can incorporate participatory virtues to equip future citizens with the virtues they will need to deliberate about wicked, environmental problems. What is the role of education for deliberative skills and virtues relative to other aspects of environmental education, such as facts and values education? How important is it relative to careful design of the deliberative process? What virtues really matter?
Recently scholars have wondered whether liberals can promote mandatory programs of formal environmental education, including education for the environment or sustainable development. Critics maintain that they cannot on grounds that environmental education is a threat to student autonomy or cannot be justified using liberal principles. We argue that the perceived conflict between liberalism and environmental education is exaggerated. Whatever the environmentalist ambitions of environmental education, any complete conception of it must prioritize education for skills and virtues that are consistent with students' prospective autonomy. Liberalism is also compatible with meeting the demands of intergenerational justice, which arguably will include sustainability education if not other forms of environmental education. Finally, the skills and virtues future citizens need to manage today's most pressing environmental problems are compatible both with those discussed in international statements on environmental education and with those commonly associated with liberal citizenship. Ultimately, environmental education that will better equip citizens to cope with environmental problems is quite possible for liberal politics.
This paper assesses the charge that climate change denial is arrogant and considers the educational priorities most appropriate to fostering greater humility about the climate change problem. I argue that even denial formed in ignorance of the organised misinformation campaign often constitutes a kind of arrogance, but that it is quite possible to humbly doubt the climate change problem. In some cases denial flows from other more or less serious errors or vices, such as ignorance, sincere but mistaken belief, dishonesty or selfishness. Those who press the arrogance charge also risk being arrogant in doing so. Educators can do a number of things to promote greater humility about climate change, including providing experiences that increase people's appreciation of their individual and general human limitations and improving their ability to distinguish credible from discreditable sources of scientific information and factual from normative dimensions of the climate change problem.
Subjective theories of wellbeing place authority concerning what benefits a person with that person herself, or limit wellbeing to psychological states. But how well off we are seems to depend on two different concerns, how well we are doing and how well things are going for us. I argue that two powerful subjective theories fail to adequately account for this and that principled arguments favoring subjectivism are unsound and poorly motivated. In the absence of more compelling evidence that how things go for us cannot directly constitute our wellbeing, I conclude that wellbeing is objective.
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