Course Description: What is the aim of education? What should be taught in schools? How should it be taught? Does evaluation help or hinder the enterprise of education? These questions are among those that will be discussed in this introductory course on the philosophy of education. The course will initially be centered on several important historical treatments of educational philosophy. The second half of the course (roughly) will focus on contemporary topics in educational philosophy.

Overview:

At a time when schools are asked to do many things – create a workforce able to compete in a globalized world, ensure that every student is at least minimally proficient in reading, writing and mathematics, allow for individuals to prosper economically, enable democratic citizens to elect their leaders intelligently, and so on – there are many educators who see one educational aim as paramount: social justice. It has been the subject of heated debate, however, whether the aim, or one of the aims, of formal education ought to be social justice. Even among those who agree that social justice should be the aim of education, there is a diverse array of practices and theories which seek to achieve that aim.

This course will offer a point of entry into recent theoretical scholarship on social justice education and introduce students to some practices in the vast domain of social justice education. The questions raised in this class will include: Is the project of social justice education justified? What approaches exist to teaching for social justice? How can one evaluate the effectiveness or the theoretical design of different approaches to social justice?

The class will be small and the weekly meetings will proceed entirely through class discussion. The course assignments will provide ample room for students to pursue their own interests in social justice education, whether through philosophical, historical, psychological, sociological or other forms of inquiry.