Philosophical Inquiry in Education

Teachers and Philosophy: Essays on the Contact Zone

hastangka hastangka — 2026-05-19

This review critically engages with Teachers and Philosophy: Essays on the Contact Zone, a multi-authored volume that explores the intellectual and pedagogical potential of philosopher-teacher collaborations through the lens of Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone.” The review situates the book within ongoing debates in philosophy of education, addressing its response to the decline of philosophical inquiry in teacher preparation and its challenge to the hierarchical separation between academic theorists and educational practitioners. Drawing on diverse methodological and conceptual traditions—including feminist, postcolonial, and dialogic pedagogies—the volume is shown to offer a pluralistic and justice-oriented vision for educational philosophy. Particular attention is given to the international relevance of the work, with chapters addressing Indigenous epistemologies, anti-racist curriculum, and collaborative inquiry across institutional and geopolitical boundaries. While the review acknowledges limitations in the book’s global reach and engagement with digital pedagogy, it concludes that the collection is a significant contribution to contemporary educational thought and a model for philosophizing in and through educational practice.

Review of The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

Matthew Trafford — 2026-05-19

Review of The Figure of the Teacher in Comics: A Psychoanalytic Study of Immaterial and Fragmented Education

Tesni Ellis — 2026-05-19

The Idea of Meaning in Iddo Landau: Reflections on the Philosophy of Education

Javier Bermejo Fernández-Nieto — 2026-05-19

Iddo Landau's ideas on the meaning of life and their potential ramifications for modern education are examined in this article. This essay starts off by criticizing contemporary existential pessimism and arguing in favor of the notion that we can still find purpose in a flawed world. It explores the cultural, philosophical, and educational factors that have made this question especially relevant in recent years. Through dialogue with authors such as Metz, Seachris, Grondin, Gesché, Eagleton, Schinkel and others, a proposal is articulated that defends the pedagogical relevance of the debate on meaning, especially in contexts of axiological pluralism and crisis of references. The main argument here is that Landau's work not only revives the importance of meaning in philosophy but also offers essential insights for a teaching approach that, by focusing on meaning, can effectively tackle today's educational challenges. The work concludes with a reflection on the need for the educational sphere to reflect on the meaning of life from a critical, existential and pluralistic perspective.

I Came into This with Nothing to Write About

David W. Jardine — 2026-05-19

Four authors writing on the phenomenon of "clearing" or "space" in which actions such as writing or yoga or theatre or pedagogical consideration occurs

Reconnecting School and Society

Gert Biesta — 2026-05-19

In this essay I reflect on the relationship between ‘school’ and ‘society.’ I do this from the angle of the idea of education as a public good, that is a ‘good’ that should serve ‘the public’ at large, and not just the private interests of some groups or individuals. While there are many countries in which the basic idea of education as a public good is accepted, there is a risk that the ‘right to education’ is exclusively understood in functional terms, where the school has to ‘give’ what society ‘asks’ of it. While this is a legitimate way in which the relationship between school and society can be understood and enacted, it is not the only way. In addition to the idea of the school as a function of and for society, I make a case that the school should also be understood as an institution, and that the task of institutions is to care and protect rather than to perform. It is only if there is a meaningful balance between the school as function and the school as institution, so I will argue, that the school can really be – and remain – a public good. I exemplify what this means by exploring the educational significance of the curriculum.

Education Is for the People, Not the State: Moving Beyond the Public/Private Distinction

Carl Anders Safstrom — 2026-05-19

The idea that education is meant to fulfil goals outside itself motivates education as a significant force for all with ambitions to change society in its image. The neoliberal wave that has washed over us moved this ambition from a ‘public’ sphere into a ‘private’ sphere, accentuating individualisation, competition and profit for education owners and customers while sharing this fundamental idea: Education is to create a future which is not here, and that future is defined by the powers directing education from the ‘outside’, either ‘the market’, and/or ‘the state’. Therefore, such an idea also empties education of its force from within, ‘taming’ education. However, as will be argued in this paper, the shift from ‘public’ to ‘private’ tends to be more a matter of degree than a fundamentally different understanding of what education is. Rather than starting with the Platonian idea that education is to perfect the state or the market by perfecting the individual, this contribution will, as did the Sophists, begin in the everydayness of our shared lives, involving people, animals, plants, clouds, and mountains, engaged in the mixture of a world. With homage to John Dewey, this paper will ask us to ‘stop, look and listen’ to pay full attention to the present moment we share with others in this world at precisely this moment and to argue that the publicness of education emanates from this moment. The paper will show that there is nothing outside, beyond, above or against the moment of education. It is autotelic. Instead, the practice of teaching within the moment of education, the paper will conclude, is not to guide towards a goal outside education, defined as such by powers directing education, but to guide the unfolding of the present and, therefore, to connect people, animals, plants, mountains, and clouds across difference.

Who Answers the Call? Plural Selves, Internal Publicness, and Subjectifying Education

Joe Oyler — 2026-05-19

In this article, I take a critical stance against the individualist and essentialist conceptions of self embedded in educational policy and practice in the contemporary west and global north. To envision an alternative, I draw from relational and multiple conceptions of self that acknowledge how lived experience becomes integrated into our subjectivity. I will argue relational and multiple conceptions of self offer a more accurate account of what is involved in living as a subject, something our educational work needs to take seriously. The article offers an account of the limitations of the individualist account in terms of its historical origins and explanatory weakness and then positions relationally constituted conceptions as meaningfully address these limitations. After outlining these views, I proceed to explore some implications for our educational work with selfs, and frame these as reflecting a public quality.

Holding the Tensions: Theorising Mediated Publicness in Curriculum-Making

Nikoloz Maglaperidze — 2026-05-19

In this article the authors argue that the curriculum's public character depends on resources withdrawn from private interests and redirected towards collective purposes, mediated through professional practice accountable to democratic rather than sectional ends. The authors explore the genealogy of the Finnish educational context as a case study to illustrate how public education came to be and how it has been hollowed. The authors argue that historically Finland’s education system embodied “mediated publicness” through three interconnected elements: commitment to equity over consumer “wants”, a national curriculum framework embodying public deliberation and a teaching profession entrusted to mediate between students and the wider world. These interlinked elements form a tension-filled shield that protects the public education in Finland from collapsing into either privatised consumer satisfaction or technocratic service-delivery. The authors proceed to explore how each element in the shield contains internal vulnerabilities that leaves them exposed to systematic exploitation. This process threatens not merely structural arrangements but the fundamental tension that allows schools to educate children while simultaneously calling them into a public world beyond familial interests.

The Fall and Rise of the Public in Public Education

Tony Carusi — 2026-05-19

Public, as a topic, is a rich ground for debate regarding its meaning and location. Guiding questions pertaining to public range from and combine the existential, is there a public? To the aesthetic, what does a public look like? To the historical, when was there a public? To the moral, what should a public be? I enter and focus this debate on the uses and difficulties of public as it pertains to public education. Specifically, what follows for education when different theories of the public are attached to it? And, alternately, in what ways is the public currently defined by federal education policy in the US? In asking these questions, I am limiting my focus to three main claims: 1) the public schools as understood and controlled by federal government policy maintain a neo-liberal stance that fashions public schools as a part of the free market; 2) the recent uptake of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the public as framing public schools differently from the dominant policy discourse serves to reinscribe schools in a narrative of decline already claiming the public schools are failing; and 3) Jürgen Habermas offers a theory of the public that, understood heuristically, places the public of public education in a dialectical, rather than a fatal, narrative.

Publicness in Education Through Alienation and Shared Experiences of Negativities

Dion Rüsselbæk Hansen — 2026-05-19

In this response paper, I begin by carefully engaging with the concerns raised during the symposium “Reclaiming the Publicness of Education” at the Nordic Education Research Association (NERA) conference held in Helsinki, Finland, in March 2025. I do so by highlighting key issues addressed by each of the contributing authors in relation to these concerns. Drawing inspiration from psychoanalytical theory (Lacan, 1997; McGowan, 2024) and political philosophy (Sloterdijk, 2016), I then reflect on how publicness – as a vital realm in education – can be conceptualized and embraced as central to what makes education educational. In this regard, I draw on notions of alienation, emancipation, and displacement.

Importantly, I do not approach publicness as a shared realm in a positive, socio-symbolic sense within education. Rather, I argue for a conception of publicness as a space where subjects – understood as whatever-beings (or singularities) without fixed determinations – can share their negativities (experiences of non-belonging, lack, and absence) in common. This, I contend, opens up possibilities for restructuring – and even a disruption – of the unequal social-symbolic order that is typically foreclosed. This foreclosure, I argue, stems from, for example, the fixation of the social order around dominant symbolic positions, which tend to contaminate public realms with private interests in education.

Reclaiming Publicness of Education

Maija Salokangas — 2026-05-19