Francis Schrag

Education reform is pointless if it does not influence what students can learn, what they want to learn, and most important, what they care about. This is a lesson that John Dewey tried to teach us, but one we have either forgotten or willfully neglected.In Back to Basics, Francis Schrag builds on Dewey's fundamental principles and offers a probing and thoughtful exploration of the most basic questions in education today: What is the purpose of schooling and what should our educational aspirations be? What should be taught and how? Who is accountable and what are they accountable for? And how should educators respond to difficult societal issues, such as inequality of resources, or the conflicting demands of school reform?In grappling with each of these questions, Schrag examines our most basic beliefs about education and forces us to think in greater depth about what schools can and should do.

Science breaks new trails for technology but social science has yet to break new trails for social technology. Why is this? One hypothesis explains this with reference to the complexity of the social world and the still rudimentary nature of the social sciences. This paper argues for an alternative hypothesis, claiming that social science research is incapable of generating technologies not already part of the human repertoire. Drawing on a range of social science inquiry from economics to psychology, it shows that the ?mechanisms? posited to explain normal and puzzling human behavior depend on familiar facts about humans which future investigations cannot overturn. Finally, it is shown that even when these familiar facts are themselves explained, the generative mechanisms posited to account for them are no longer within the sphere of the social sciences

This article identifies four approaches to arguing for democracy, showing that none has an adequate way of supporting both full adult inclusion and the exclusion of children. I focus in Section 2 on the arguments of David Estlund and Thomas Christiano, showing that their arguments against guardianship call into question the exclusion of children from the franchise. In Section 3, I explain why the exclusion of children constitutes an injustice, and in the final section, I consider two approaches to remedying that injustice. Key Words: justice • democracy • children.

In this review essay, Francis Schrag focuses on two recent anthologies dealing completely or in part with the role of neuroscience in learning and education: The Jossey-Bass Reader on the Brain and Learning, edited by Jossey-Bass Publishers, and New Philosophies of Learning, edited by Ruth Cigman and Andrew Davis. Schrag argues that philosophers of education do have a distinctive role in the conversation about neuroscience. He contends that the impact of neuroscience is likely to be substantial, though not in the way its advocates imagine. It has the potential to enhance education by way of interventions that successfully alter the fundamental neural mechanisms of learning, but neuroscience is unlikely to affect classroom teaching substantially