This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme 'Snapshot 2020', and the question 'Where do you see philosophy of education, moving into the future?' This collective writing experiment was inspired by and organized as part of a larger project of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) and its journal Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT), to capture scholars' voices around the world regarding major issues impacting the field at this moment (see Peters et al., 2020). While each of the authors of this article has a distinctive view, personal and professional, writing collectively signifies a form of solidarity, as it traces an intentional commitment to a larger communitynot just fellow academics, but the public as wellwhile it can also serve as a response to academic norms 'to count and rank all research and teaching activities in individualist and competitive terms as a basis for performance culture and assessment' (Peters et al., 2020, p. 2). As in a piece similarly composed by the PESA Executive, the result is akin to a cadence, as diverse ideas and serial understanding can be expressed through this process, sharing a vivid snapshot, or perhaps many snapshots all in one frame, of the field and community today (Peters et al., 2020; see also Jandric et al., 2017). Experiments take place in contexts. PESA initially imagined this project in a different world, before COVID was recognized as a worldwide pandemic. When I asked my colleagues, mostly based in the United States and Canada, to take part in this exercise, COVID was beginning to take its toll there. This was just before academic and political life there was further jolted by CONTACT Marek Tesar
In this article, we explore the interrelated phenomena of teachers’ paternalistic aims and their misattributions of the agency of their students within particular schooling contexts of systemic racial injustice in the United States. We argue that, because teachers in these contexts assess agency in patterned, predictable ways that stem from – and reify – preexisting unjust patterns of oppression, teachers are unreliable evaluators of the conditions necessary for just punishment. To build this argument, we explore a complex case in which authorities regularly fail to meet these conditions: the punishment of Black girls in low-income, urban, predominantly non-White primary and secondary schools in the United States. Through our analysis, we offer a new concept, excess agency misattribution, which raises serious questions about subjective justifications for punishment in contexts of entrenched injustice. By delineating how the perceptions of teachers influence both the putative justifying aims and targeted recipients of punishment, we demonstrate how the existing terrain of school punishment practices ought to affect our normative reasoning about the fairness of punishment in these contexts.
The concept of liberalism has a wide influence on contemporary work within the field of education. Given this breadth of effect, it is not surprising that liberalism can be invoked in the service of multiple ends—many of which appear to be at odds with one another. As such, this article will trace liberalism’s fundamental commitments of “equality” and “liberty” in education in order to provide a general shape to the arguments that animate its goals. Taken in tandem, these commitments provide access to the arguments that populate various forms of liberalism in education, such that their careful study enables educational researchers and practitioners to better position their understandings and analyses in a conceptual context.
In this essay, Winston C. Thompson questions the rigidity of the boundary between ideal and nonideal theory, suggesting a porosity that allows elements of both to be brought to bear upon educational issues in singularly incisive ways. In the service of this goal, Thompson challenges and extends John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness, bringing it to bear upon education in our imperfect world. By showing that this representative work of ideal theory can be meaningfully supplemented and applied to the nonideal fact of race, this essay suggests that recognition of nonideal circumstances and theorizing need not void ideal theory's value to philosophy of education. Instead, the field can engage both ideal and nonideal theory on previously unavailable questions and dimensions of educational justice toward productive ends.
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