Studies in Philosophy and Education

  What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the
 curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working
 on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in service of the capitalist
 knowledge economy. This seemingly stable condition is however insecured by the animal rights activist as undercover learner
 and'worker, who enters education and research laboratories under false premises in order to extract the knowledge necessary
 to dismantle the logic of animal utility on which the scientific-educational apparatus rests. The present article is based
 on a semi-structured interview with an undercover worker. It draws on a synthesis of critical education and posthumanist theories
 to configure knowledge creation and subjectification processes in the negative spaces' of education. The techne of undercover
 work includes mnemotechnical and prosthetic devices, calculation of risk, and mimetic labor. The article argues that the agenda
 of the undercover worker generates a multi-strained mimetic complex that composes a parasitic educational subject-assemblage
 redirecting scientific knowledge away from the animal stratification logic of the knowledge economy into different viral circuits;
 different lines of flight. It invites a rearticulation of the formal education state apparatus in more indeterminate directions,
 provoking scientific-educational knowledge-practices to become a catalytic impulse for their own disintegration.
 
 
	

  Deliberative democracy, it is claimed, is essential for the legitimisation of public policy and law. It is built upon an assumption
 that citizens will be capable of constructing and defending reasons for their moral and political beliefs. However, critics
 of deliberative democracy suggest that citizens' emotions are not properly considered in this process and, if left unconsidered,
 present a serious problem for this political framework. In response to this, deliberative theorists have increasingly begun
 to incorporate the emotions into their accounts. However, these accounts have tended to focus only upon the inclusion of emotions
 in the external-collective exchange of reason between citizens. Little work has been done on how the individual will actually
 cope with emotions internally within their own minds. There has been no consideration of the capacities that citizens will
 need to perceive, understand and regulate emotions as they formulate reasons both by themselves and with others. Moreover,
 there has been little consideration of how these capacities might be educated in children so that emotionally competent deliberative
 citizens can be created. In this paper, emotional intelligence is presented as an essential capacity that can fulfil this
 role for the deliberative citizen and deliberative democracy more generally. The ˜deliberative school' is suggested as a potential
 site for this transformation that can progress from generation to generation, cultivating citizens that are increasingly better
 equipped to handle emotionally-laden deliberative engagement.
 
 
	

  In this paper I interpret Montaigne's essay, On Educating Children', as a pedagogical text through its performance of a distinct
 epistolary function, one that addresses the letter-recipient for the purpose of shaping the ideas, actions, and beliefs of
 that individual. At the same time, I also read On Educating Children' within the context of the wider project of Montaigne's
 Essays, which, as I suggest, is an ethical-aesthetic project of self-fashioning and self-cultivation. The net result is an interpretation
 of teaching as an ethical-aesthetic practice of the self, one that is in concert with the interpretation of Montaigne's writing
 of the Essays as a similar practice of the self. In order to build this case, I employ Michel Foucault's fourfold schema of
 ethical subjectivity, mapping that schema onto On Educating Children', so as to reveal a unique pedagogy of self-formation'a
 pedagogy that works as much upon the self of the teacher as it does the self of the student.
 
 
	

Response to Susan Pearson's Review of The Irregular School
	

  Re-working the Gramscian idea of the ˜organic' intellectual from the cultural-political sphere to Higher Education (HE), suggests
 the need to develop critical and questioning ˜counter hegemonic' ideas and behaviour in community education students. Connecting
 this reworking to the Habermasian theory of communicative action, suggests that these students also need to learn how to be
 constructive in developing such knowledge. Working towards critical and constructive capacities is particularly relevant for
 students who learn through acting in practice settings where general principles and purposes acquired in the academy need
 to be interpreted in response to the unique demands of specific situations. From a Gramscian perspective, enabling students
 to develop the qualities of organic intellectuals means that lecturers have a duty to teach critical knowledges which the
 student will be unfamiliar with and unlikely to possess. If teaching is not to become simply didactic, however, there is also
 a need to acknowledge Habermas's contention that all knowledge is contingent. This does not mean that knowledge is merely
 relative, subjective, or essentially interest serving, as some postmodernists would have it. In Habermasian terms, knowledge
 is developed through a rigorous process of contesting validity claims according to procedures appropriate to discipline areas.
 In these procedures, contestation occurs to the point where there is general agreement about the best current understanding,
 until such time as this is overtaken by ideas with a better claim. The danger is that over commitment to contestation in the
 classroom undermines subject knowledge and ultimately the authority of the educator. Speaking Habermas to Gramsci, and vice
 versa, helps socially and politically committed educators to construct a space in which didactic and discursive moments purposefully
 alternate.
 
 
	

  The computer engineers who refer to the education of computers do not have a definite idea of education and do not bother
 to justify the fuzzy ones to which they allude. Hence, they logically cannot specify the features a computer must have in
 order to be educable. This paper puts forth a non-standard, but not arbitrary, concept of education that determines such traits.
 The proposed concept is derived from the idea of education embedded in modern standard-English discourse. Because the standard
 concept entails that an educable entity must be capable of consciousness and voluntary action, it cannot apply to computers.
 If, therefore, one is to have an idea of educable computers, one must drop the feature of consciousness and omit or modify
 that of voluntariness. The advanced concept leaves out consciousness, alters the ordinary notion of voluntariness, but keeps
 in tact the other criteria of the standard idea. Thereby, it provides continuity between those who talk about education in
 modern ordinary English and those who talk about it in the world of artificial intelligence.
 
 
	

  An individual is in the lowest phase of moral development if he thinks only of his own personal interest and has only his
 own selfish agenda in his mind as he encounters other humans. This lowest phase corresponds well with sixteenth century British
 moral egoism which reflects the rise of the new economic order. Adam Smith (1723“1790) wanted to defend this new economic
 order which is based on economic exchange between egoistic individuals. Nevertheless, he surely did not want to support the
 moral theory of British egoism. His book The Wealth of Nations suits well into the world view of British moral egoism, but in the book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he presents a moral theory which is the total opposite of moral egoism. Contemporary German intellectuals saw contradiction
 in Adam Smith's moral (social) philosophy which they called as Das Adam-Smith-Problem. Smith himself didn't think that there is any contradiction in a situation where in economic sphere (civil society) individual
 act egoistically and in ethical sphere (encounter with the imagined Other) he feels humanity and compassion toward his fellow
 men. Hegel was a passionate reader of Adam Smith and he acknowledged Das Adam-Smith-Problem. He set the task of his social philosophy to overcome this paradox. He wanted to create a theory of a social totality where
 economic egoism and feelings of humanity are not in contradiction. In the same time Hegel wanted to create a theory on Bildung process where human spirit develops from moral un-freedom (heteronomy) to moral freedom and maturity (autonomy) taking care
 both aspect of love and reason. In certain Hegel's texts notion of recognition plays crucial role. That is why modern Hegelians
 Ludwig Siep, Axel Honneth and Robert Williams consider the notion of recognition to be elementary in Hegel's threefold theory
 of developing human spirit from family via civil society to sittliche
 state. For Hegel family is a sphere where people love their concrete other' and where feeling surpasses reason. Civil Society
 is a sphere of private contracts and economic exchanges where cold egoistic and calculative reason surpasses feelings. In
 the sphere of State the contradiction between family and Civil Society (Das Adam-Smith-Problem) is solved by rational feeling'. According to Hegel State should protect citizens from alienating effect of egoistic reason
 of Civil Society and cultivate family-feelings' to rational feelings which integrate citizen into sittliche community' through
 reciprocal process of recognition. In this article I want to consider Hegelians Honneth's and Williams's relevance to the
 theory of moral development.
 
 
	

  Education is oftentimes understood as a deeply ethical practice for the development of the person. Alternatively, education
 is construed as a state-enforced apparatus for inculcation of specific codes, conventions, beliefs, and norms about social
 and political practices. Though holding both of these beliefs about education is not necessarily mutually contradictory, a
 definite tension emerges when one attempts to articulate a cogent theory involving both. I will argue in this paper that Habermas's
 theory of discourse ethics, when combined with his statements on constitutional democracy and law, manifests this tension
 for formal education. Through a contrast with Dewey's social-liberal view of education on the one hand, and the procedural
 liberalism and its associated view of education, common to Rawls and others writing in the contemporary Anglo-American tradition
 on the other, the questions of what this means for education and why it matters are raised and addressed.
 
 
	

  ˜Pupil voice' is a movement within state education in England that is associated with democracy, change, participation and
 the raising of educational standards. While receiving much attention from educators and policy makers, less attention has
 been paid to the theory behind the concept of pupil voice. An obvious point of theoretical departure is the work of Jürgen
 Habermas, who over a number of decades has endeavoured to develop a theory of democracy that places strong significance on
 language, communication and discourse. This paper is an attempt to gauge the usefulness of Habermas' approach to understanding
 the theory of pupil voice, in particular how his theory of universal pragmatics lends itself to a ˜philosophy of between',
 a philosophy that finds echoes in the conflicted nature of schooling that ˜pupil voice' is supposed to rectify to some extent.
 The paper also explores the drawbacks of a Habermasian approach, in particular his overreliance on rationality as a way of
 understanding communication. Lacan's concept of the objet petit a is introduced as an alternative way of understanding pupil
 voice.
 
 
	

  The legacy of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research has been a powerful force for critically understanding social reality.
 Erich Fromm was one of the early and best known members of the Institute. Fromm emphasised the centrality of culture and interpersonal
 relations in the contruction of the psyche. The unconscious was not only the location for buried repressed matter but also
 for the imaginative potential of the human person. He is a forgotten and neglected contributor to the story of the Institute
 having been written out of this history. This retrospective of his ideas explores his work in the light of the recent work
 of Jürgen Habermas who is also an active but less controversial engager with the psychoanalytic tradition. The implications
 for adult education will be addressed. The paper outlines Fromm's radical reinterpretation of psychoanalysis emphasising the
 importance of social existence as distinct from the impact of instincts; key concepts of the market, commodity fetishism and
 automaton conformity; The implications for adult education in the tradition of radical (Freire) and transformative learning
 theory (Mezirow) and addressed and make connections between Habermas and Fromm that further the project of critical theory.
 Both attempted in different times to identify and realise the potential of (though neither used the term) of lifelong learning
 as part of the process of bringing about a more just and caring society and a shared attention to the importance of having
 free conversations about how the emancipated life might be created and sustained.
 
 
	

  In this article I explore some points of convergence between Habermas and Derrida that revolve around the intersection of
 ethical and epistemological issues in dialogue. After some preliminary remarks on how dialogue and language are viewed by
 Habermas and Derrida as standpoints for departing from the philosophy of consciousness and from logocentric metaphysics, I
 cite the main points of a classroom dialogue in order to illustrate the way in which the ideas of Habermas and Derrida are
 sometimes received as well as the actual relevance of ethical and epistemic concerns within educational settings. I claim
 that such concerns cannot be sidestepped without cost and that they can be approached by combining rather than rigidly separating
 Habermas and Derrida. Beyond the consolidated polemics, emancipatory politics and Enlightenment priorities of truth and justice
 bring Habermasian reconstruction and Derridean deconstruction closer than it is typically assumed. Attention to such a convergence
 can enrich the teaching material of higher education courses which usually comprises either Habermasian or Derridean texts
 but rarely both. It can also stave off some of the risks involved in some versions of constructivism as they occur in school
 practice.
 
 
	

  This paper begins with a discussion of Stanley Cavell's philosophy of language learning. Young people learn more than the
 meaning of words when acquiring language: they learn about (the quality of) our form of life. If we'as early childhood educators'see
 language teaching as something like handing some inert thing to a child, then we unduly limit the possibilities of education
 for that child. Cavell argues that we must become poets if we are to be the type of representatives of language that education
 calls for. In the final section of the paper I discuss the work of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, someone who developed an approach
 to language teaching that overlaps in interesting ways with Cavell's approach in The Claim of Reason.
 
 
	

Review of Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta, Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation
	

Review of Roger Slee, The Irregular School: Exclusion, Schooling and Inclusive Education
	

  Serious re-examination of participatory traditions of democracy is long overdue. Iconically central to such traditions of
 democratic education is the practice of whole School Meetings. More usually associated with radical work within the private
 sector, School Meetings are here explored in detail through two examples from publicly funded education, (1) Epping House
 School, a mixed residential primary/elementary school for students with severe emotional, social and behavioural difficulties
 and (2) secondary/high schools within the Just Community School movement in the USA. In addition to providing richly textured
 accounts of the multiple realities and challenges of pioneering overtly democratic practices such as School Meetings within
 the publicly funded sector of education substantial attention is paid to analytic engagement with the kind of organisational
 structures, practices and cultures that seem to play an important role in their successful operation and development. The
 different phenomenological and theoretical strands weaving their way through the texture of Meeting practices also raise a
 number of key issues within the fields of social and political philosophy, in particular, whether School Meetings are best
 understood as predominantly political or communal phenomena. In gesturing towards the philosophical groundwork of a satisfactory
 answer I argue for the importance of the undeservedly neglected notion of democratic fellowship within the lexicon of democratic
 polity and aspiration.