Liz Jackson

This special issue includes a series of interviews with the past women presidents of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA), including Felicity Haynes, Nesta Devine, Tina Besley, and Liz Jackson. This article sets the stage for reading the interviews, though an extended dialogue between the two authors of this project. In what follows, the authors reflect on insights gleaned from the interviews, and the past and future of women leadership in philosophy of education. Using a dialogical format, it highlights different experiences and similar challenges across generations, questions what has changed versus what has stayed the same over decades, and elaborates on the value of the interviews for readers coming from different academic generations and subject positions. It reflects on the state of the field and its future directions from the perspectives of two women philosophers working and thinking across generations.

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose (and do not categorise under forced headings) diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience.

Experience and subjectivity influence how texts are read, with reading involving “filling in the blanks”. This impacts the usefulness of intercoder reliability exercises in collaborative textbook analysis. Specifically, scholars’ individual backgrounds limit possibilities for substantive and meaningful intercoder reliability, particularly in international, cross-cultural, and multicultural settings. In this case, reliability is a problematic goal in textbook content analysis, possibly precluding substantive recognition of reader subjectivity—of researchers as well as students and teachers. In contrast, we argue that collaboration in textbook research can reveal the multifaceted nature of texts and generate multi-perspectival interpretations which are more meaningful in diverse contexts.

In this chapter, we investigate two aspects of post-truth in education. The first derives from the philosophical work of Jacques Rancière, and the second derives from an analysis of meritocratic ideology in contemporary education. In both cases, we find that education has been producing a certain ‘truth’ about truth. Rancière’s work contrasts the hidden explanatory function of education, which presupposes a collective or shared sense of truth, with the arbitrariness of language as the social mechanism for understanding or determining such truth. This understanding is useful when applied to the case of meritocracy, as we discuss in the second part of this essay, as meritocratic ideology lays a framework in schools for the production of truth. Schooling bolsters, explains and emulates a meritocratic view of the world. In doing so, truth itself gets linked to meritocracy. We conclude this chapter by reflecting on an example of Donald Trump’s notion of the level playing field, briefly commenting on how the persistence and strength of meritocratic ideology in education are tied to a post-truth order.

Schools and other forms of education and have significant impacts on people's views about emotions and emotional experiences. It shows how we often take it for granted that certain emotions, such as happiness, are 'positive', while others are 'negative' and how personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, and race, can make an unfair difference when it comes to what emotions are expected or accepted. Written in an accessible format, the book encourages broad reflection on what emotions are and why they matter, in relation to the aims of education, what it means to be a good person, and equality and social justice.

This special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory considers the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement as an educational event, which has impacted attitudes and outlooks and conceptions of young people’s role, of education, and of society. This essay serves as an introduction to the more substantive pieces that follow. It describes two alternative perspectives on youth civic engagement in Hong Kong historically; and in so doing, it addresses some of the challenges related to free academic expression that hinder scholarly research and publishing on the area of Hong Kong-China relations looking into the future. It concludes with a brief glimpse of the contributions that follow.

This chapter explores the major debate over care and justice historically and today in philosophy of education. The debate is situated in Western ethics first, particularly examining major historical approaches from the fields of ethics and epistemology. Then it explores care theories and related views that give a more significant role to care, emotion, and relationality. The chapter then briefly considers non-western approaches, particularly within Eastern traditions, as they intersect and contrast with Western views. This chapter emphasizes historical continuity in the debate over care and justice in philosophy and philosophy of education, and its ongoing contestation, in relation to recent psychological approaches to moral education, and other promotions of education for intercultural ‘living together’. Rather than indicating a preference for one perspective over another in relation to these ethical and educational debates, this chapter aims primarily to lay groundwork for further examinations about the places of care and justice in educational theory.

In recent times, schools have begun to focus on issues of wellbeing, engaging with ideas from various fields such as positive psychology. It is in this context that there is a growing interest in humility, rather than this interest having emerged from debates in moral philosophy and moral education. However, to the extent that education for wellbeing initiatives might promote humility as a virtue, it is important to address the extent to which it can be considered as good. This paper critically explores the shift of humility from vice to virtue in the west with the advent of Christianity. Drawing on historical, religious, and philosophical sources, the status of humility as a moral good is brought into question. It is argued that humility can only be understood, like other virtues, within historical, political, and social context. Thus, it is in how humility is operationalised in contexts of social relations that we can evaluate its moral worth. As such, we suggest that educators and schools should take account of the contingent nature of humility, its paradoxes and politics, rather than promoting it as an unquestionable good.