Philosophy of education in a new key: Snapshot 2020 from the United States and Canada

Introduction: what’s in a Snapshot?

Liz Jackson

This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snapshot 2020’, and the question ‘Where do you see philosophy of education, moving into the future?’ This collective writing experiment was inspired by and organized as part of a larger project of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) and its journal Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT), to capture scholars’ voices around the world regarding major issues impacting the field at this moment (see Peters et al., 2020).

While each of the authors of this article has a distinctive view, personal and professional, writing collectively signifies a form of solidarity, as it traces an intentional commitment to a larger community – not just fellow academics, but the public as well – while it can also serve as a response to academic norms ‘to count and rank all research and teaching activities in individualist and competitive terms as a basis for performance culture and assessment’ (Peters et al., 2020, p. 2). As in a piece similarly composed by the PESA Executive, the result is akin to a cadence, as diverse ideas and serial understanding can be expressed through this process, sharing a vivid snapshot, or perhaps many snapshots all in one frame, of the field and community today (Peters et al., 2020; see also Jandric et al., 2017).

Experiments take place in contexts. PESA initially imagined this project in a different world, before COVID was recognized as a worldwide pandemic. When I asked my colleagues, mostly based in the United States and Canada, to take part in this exercise, COVID was beginning to take its toll there. This was just before academic and political life there was further jolted by Black Lives Matter protests and related society-wide reckonings with pervasive, relentless structural racism. Since the start of the COVID pandemic, scholars have grappled with the relationship between their professional and personal identities. As life moved online, home has become work in new ways for many, with children and partners intruding on work meetings, and urgent professional challenges interfering with any sense of ‘private’ peace (Jackson, 2020; Jandric et al., 2020). For many, the Black Lives Matter movement has led to further complications related to answering the question of ‘where philosophy of education should go’ in the future. While the politics of racial and other social injustice has been primary to work life for many in the field before 2020, BLM has encouraged urgent reconsideration of what it means to be a philosopher of education, as this work intersects with educational, intellectual, professional, and community commitments in highly dynamic, contested political and material spaces.

These authors’ views, seen as snapshots, reflect the times they were produced, as well as who produced them: from what angle and height, with what body and perspective. Taken as a series, they reflect on such themes as: professional and vocational leadership, the experience of simply being as a philosopher and human in this moment, ways to think and respond to a society and a world that is in shambles, the difference that time and distinctive histories make, tradition and innovation, scholarly and community solidarity, and the process and work of writing and communicating to traditional and academic collaborators and wider audiences. As such, this collection of snapshots can be referred to, as future work in and for the field is undertaken, while also serving as a glimpse into a particular moment of being for philosophers of education (particularly those based in Canada and the United States).

I wish to thank each of the authors of this piece for sharing their wisdom and insights in what has become a vulnerable, precarious moment for each of us as scholars and human beings. Their views together provide a valuable and unique collage vividly illustrating the challenges faced in the field and beyond as known and felt in 2020.

Why ‘I Can’t Breathe’ in philosophy of education

Kal Alston

When I was asked to contribute to this collective writing project, we were more than two months past PES 2020 in Pittsburgh and into work from home due to a global pandemic. Little did I know when I sent my cavalier positive response that we were but days away from a world-wide paroxysm of anti (anti-Black) racism protests unfolding from the callous and sociopathic lynching of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, captured on camera and shot around the world. In my initial response, I focused on a couple of conversations I had had in January 2020 with philosophy of education students at Teachers College, Columbia. Below those conversations lay a persistent ostinato, the question of whether their pursuits in the field would yield a satisfying, productive, appreciated, and employable future.

I endorsed those students continuing to study philosophy of education, whether or not their ultimate aim was to get a tenure line position teaching in university (masked or unmasked as a philosopher of education) or to use the tools and passions in some other endeavor. (After all, one of their classmates is in the New York Fire Department!).

I have worked on my campus and nationally to disrupt the (in my opinion) broken pipeline in the field without dissuading its practice. I stand in favor of both more publicly engaged work in our field and the use of non-monographic, collaborative, art-based forms of dissemination. All this I communicated to those students during my time in New York.

After the last few weeks, my concerns are both completely different from that January day at the dawn of 2020 and not different at all. For my talk I abstracted sections of an encyclopedia piece I was writing on the history of African American philosophy of education, ending with a section on James Baldwin. I find that this essay must, however, ask the same rude question that I was asked many times in my doctoral studies (by both Black and non-Black interlocutors): Why would any Black woman want to study philosophy (of education)? Sometimes the question was asked as a hostile interrogatory: Why are you here where you cannot believe you belong? Sometimes as a perplexity: What good is philosophy for Black life? (unlike other projects that are easily injected into ‘the’ community, i.e. medicine or sociology).

I muddled along my path ignoring both, for thirty-plus years. My intellectual history project pushed both questions back at me, with some accusation. If there is such a thing as philosophy of education that does not care about the Black and brown bodies at the end of those ‘aims’, that ‘episteme’ or that poses a theory of human subjects that is subsumed in White Supremacy¹ – through its language, its authorized speakers and knowers, through its disciplinary expressions and unspokenness – If there is such a field, ought I be recommending it to the young or taking to it with hammer and tongs? At the least, ought philosophy of education be more disruptive of the injustices, oppressions, exclusions, and violence that its very practices have inscribed and fed off?

This is not the first time these questions have loomed, but 2020 has, through school Zoom, masks and bandannas, marches, tear gas, conflagration, and the shattering reality of death and grief, called the question on us all.

Teaching to the Political Test

Lauren Bialystok

In the late spring of 2020, we appear to be witnessing collective consciousness-raising of inspiring proportions, a rupture that many progressives hope will ultimately function as the Archimedean point for real change. Lurching from the disastrous response to the pandemic to economic catastrophe to anti-police riots in the space of mere weeks, we can’t go on thinking the way we used to. Could it be that the world is finally learning?

Philosophers have explained learning as a risk (Biesta, 2014), as experience (Dewey, 1938), as self-cultivation (Zhu, 1990), and as humility in the presence of the other (Todd, 2003). It typically requires time and openness; it thrives when we can try out different ideas in a community of learners. Polarization and democratic fragility strain the conditions needed for genuine learning so construed. On many issues today, the right side is easy to pick, and it is tempting to sweep all the complexities under the rug. But the value of education is diluted if all we care about is passing the test.

In response to the recent breakthroughs of Black Lives Matter, we have seen encouraging signs of moral learning and democratic rejuvenation. And we’ve also seen culturally compelled statements of solidarity from every school, business, and celebrity on the continent, opining on the evils of systemic racism as though it hadn’t existed before the murder of George Floyd. These assertions unfortunately do not prove that our institutions are learning about anti-black bias or police brutality; they do prove that we are learning the minimum virtue-signaling necessary to avoid appearing to be on the wrong side. The performance of learning has perhaps replaced actual learning. Slogans like ‘Defund the Police’ should be viewed as prompts, not as summative assessments for anyone who fancies herself a liberal. Activists will complain that BLM messaging is being appropriated to score PR points and deflect complicity in systems of discrimination, and they will be right.

Educators and philosophers can help ensure that the revolutionary potential of the present unrest doesn’t stop at slogans. But we have our own housekeeping to do. In the last few years, prominent scholars, including those with longstanding progressive credentials, have been deplatformed, forced to resign, and had their articles retracted in response to complaints. Polarization is normalizing a state of affairs where even slight ideological diversity may be interpreted as a threat, and shut down – in contravention of the norms of free inquiry (Ben-Porath, 2017).² Ironically, when these scandals hit the media, everyone becomes a self-appointed philosopher of education, pronouncing on ethics and epistemology, while the discipline struggles to retain its perch at many research universities.

I would like to see philosophy of education as a central force in stemming the tide of ideological simplicity that threatens to overshadow the conditions of democratic progress. Learning has never been successfully implemented through either compulsion or censorship. When we teach to the test, even answers that meet the teacher’s expectations are automatically suspect, just like your accountant’s sudden wokeness about black history. Real education is in fact the best – perhaps the only – route to lasting social justice.

Understandings of ‘systemic racism’ in the age of COVID police violence against black people

Larry Blum

Philosophers of education and others working in the area of race studies have long faced the challenge of how to help students, especially white students, think in systemic ways about race, rather than viewing race and racism as primarily concerned with racial attitudes and personal racial interactions. Both the COVID pandemic and the world-wide protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd have contributed to a tectonic shift in popular discourse, to ‘systemic (or institutional) racism’ as the preferred framework for thinking about racism.

The ‘systemic racism’ formulation reminds us of the big picture – how racial groups are disadvantaged in large ways rendered invisible when focusing only on individual forms of racial wrongfulness. But as philosophers of education, we must scrutinize how this concept is being taken up and understood on this broad canvas. The ‘systemic racism’ yielded by COVID is not quite the same as one predominant in the Black Lives Matter protests. The COVID-related concept points to the disproportionate incidence and deaths from COVID among Black and Brown people. To mention just two reasons for these disparities, Blacks and Latinxs are more likely than whites to work in jobs that, during the COVID pandemic, put their health and lives in greater danger (e.g. as front-line health workers). Second, because health care is not delivered equally to all racial groups, Blacks and Latinxs are more likely to suffer from underlying health conditions that render them more vulnerable to the virus. Both these conditions are class- or occupation-related. The ‘systemic racism’ formulation recognizes that processes not directly racial in character often contribute to harming racially-defined groups. If the disadvantage is unjust – that all frontline health workers are rendered more vulnerable than the average person to illness and death from the virus – it is unfair to all occupants of that position, not only to the members of those (racial) groups disproportionately impacted by it.

A somewhat different notion of ‘systemic racism’ has arisen in response to the killing of George Floyd and the focus on police violence against black people. (Latinxs have also suffered disproportionate police violence, though not at the level of Blacks). Here it refers to the production of racially disparate outcomes but solely by race-targeted processes, such as racial discrimination (intentional and unintentional), stereotyping, and racial animus, on the part of a social institution, such as a police department, or the criminal justice system more generally. It is plausibly claimed that the disproportionate killing of blacks by US police is driven by such purely race-targeted processes – indeed, not by a general racism but a specific anti-black form of it.

Both types of ‘systemic racism’ are operating now (and in the past), and the assertion that Black lives matter should apply both to victims of police violence and (disproportionate) death from COVID. But at least in my reading of the public face of the protests as I write this in July 2020, the COVID, class-related, form has tended to take a backseat to the purely race-focused version in the police protests. As philosophers of education, I think we need to engage in education in public and university venues to promote the more encompassing understanding of ‘systemic racism’ involving both forms.

Philosophy of education on the rough ground

Nicholas C. Burbules

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 107

Philosophy of education has always had a sibling envy of ‘real’ philosophy. Here I want to suggest that philosophy of education has an advantage because it deals with the ‘rough ground’ of actual human practices – indeed, one of the most essential of human practices, without which there would not be philosophy or anything else: the practice of education.

There are three ways in which contemporary philosophy of education is becoming more comfortable with its status in dealing with the quotidian and imperfect.

First, current discussions of ‘non-ideal theories’ pose certain questions to philosophical ideals: What is their value if they are not practically attainable? At what point is it relevant to philosophical inquiry to ask whether and how they might be attainable? With non-ideal theory, it is not just a matter of recognizing that we can never fully attain our ideals; rather, we need ways of thinking about how to choose and act in a context that is intrinsically limited. Ideals should help us not only by guiding action, but also in creating occasions for reflecting on those ideals. It seems that no context exemplifies this dynamic quite as clearly as education, in which critical reflection and thought about the end-goals is also a part of those end-goals.

Second, I and others have written about a situated philosophy of education. This perspective starts, again, with the idea of a practice: a socially established, cooperative human activity that has normative standards that govern its activity, and that is adapted to local contexts and innovations over time. Considering philosophy as a situated practice, then, focuses immediate attention on the ways in which it is done by particular people, under particular conditions of place and time. ‘Situated philosophy of education’ maintains a keen awareness of the social effects of what is said and written under its auspices.

Third, rather than assuming the vocabulary of applying philosophical tools to educational problems, perhaps we ought to invert the order of things, beginning with concrete and richly detailed case studies and examples, and drawing philosophical insights from the analysis of those particulars. Levinson and Fay explain the pedagogical role of ‘richly described, realistic accounts of complex ethical dilemmas that arise within practice or policy contexts, on which protagonists must decide among courses of action, none of which is self-evident as the right one to take’ (2016, pp. 3–4). Working through complex cases, they say, fosters the development of that kind of practical reasoning (phronesis) that constitutes a marriage between theory and practice.

These considerations of non-ideal theory, situated thinking, and case-based methodology argue that philosophy of education is not a derivative subdiscipline of philosophy, but an area of original inquiry that sheds light on important philosophical questions. They argue that philosophy of education can be strengthened as philosophy through an appreciation of actual educational institutions, policies, and practices.

Light, subject, and composition: a 2020 snapshot of philosophy of education in Canada

Ann Chinnery

Photographs are comprised of three key elements: light, subject, and composition. And while we were invited to provide a snapshot, not a formal photograph, of where we see philosophy of education moving into the future, these elements provide a helpful way of framing the discussion.

Regarding light, we could ask whether the future for philosophy of education in Canada will be cloudy, bright, shrouded in fog, or in a golden hour (the soft glow of the first and last hours of sunlight in a day). There is no simple answer to that question. Canada is currently in a time of reckoning for its historical and ongoing relationship with Indigenous peoples, and for the harmful impact of colonialism on our social, cultural, political, and natural landscape. This is not to say that all philosophers of education in Canada address these themes explicitly, but rather that our work now and into the future will inevitably be read in light of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action (2015). In addition to the TRC and the urgent threat of climate change, as of this writing, COVID and protests against systemic racism (especially anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism) are dominating the news and public attention around the world. It is too soon to say exactly how these events will shape our field, but there is no question that they will cast philosophical questions about education in a new light.

Subjects currently capturing the attention of Canadian philosophers of education are diverse. Broadly speaking, ethical, political, and epistemological themes are at the fore, alongside increasing attention to the ways in which philosophers of education can contribute to conversations on educational policy and practice. Examples of work in this latter vein include questions of social and political justice, such as the recognition of sexual and gender diversity in schools, and what is meant by reasonable accommodation of religious practices in public spaces (especially in Québec). Other current and emerging themes include postcolonial and posthumanist conceptions of selfhood and subjectivity; the educational implications of increasingly sophisticated technology; Indigenous perspectives on and in philosophy of education; and ecological justice and our responsibilities to the more-than-human world. Just as current events are changing the light in which we do our work, they will almost certainly prompt new directions in the subjects we address – e.g. How do virtual classrooms affect our conceptions of teaching and learning? and What knowledge, skills, and dispositions do students need for political participation beyond national borders?

The third key element in a photograph is composition, the way in which a photo tells a story – or, in our case, the philosophical approaches we employ. While Anglo-analytic philosophy of education, largely inspired by R.S. Peters and Paul Hirst, dominated the Canadian field in the latter half of the 20^th century, that perspective has waned, with critical, poststructuralist, phenomenological, hermeneutic, and posthumanist approaches coming to the fore. This shift is perhaps most evident in recent dissertations in philosophy of education, and a longitudinal scan of articles published in Philosophical Inquiry in Education, the official journal of the Canadian Philosophy of Education Society (formerly called Paideusis).

Of course, this snapshot is in no way a complete picture of where Canadian philosophy of education is likely to move in the coming years, but rather a brief overview of the kind of work that characterizes our field today, and how our national and regional concerns might distinguish Canadian work from that in other locales.

Remembering what we know: 2001–2020

David T. Hansen

I had occasion to speak on 9/11 and its educational ramifications nearly twenty years ago at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. I had just moved to New York City two weeks before that horrific day, after dwelling for several decades in Chicago. I felt as uncertain about what to say at that time as I do today in response to the current health, political, and environmental crises afflicting humanity. I do not feel the touch of Cassandra, and am unsure how to look to the future. The iconoclastic economist John Kenneth Galbraith had it right, in my view, when he said the purpose of economic – and I would add political – forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

In my comments twenty years ago, I found myself remembering long-standing educational values that felt suddenly threatened by the prospect of a reign of violence, sponsored not by terrorists alone but by governments such as my own (which soon launched its war of choice in Iraq). These values seem threatened again, today, by the intensity of the present difficulties. I think it important to name these values, or perhaps rename them – but to put them into form, nonetheless. I’ve always appreciated a remark by the philosopher Ian Hacking: human beings live and act under descriptions. It matters what people say of themselves and of others. And our field knows many things about the sound use of language.

Deepening human understandings, rather than rendering them shallow; enriching human outlooks, rather than impoverishing them; broadening critical sympathies, rather than narrowing them. The terms can all too easily become platitudes, and a suspicious critic might find them naïve in the face of what some regard as a fractured, disintegrating human condition.

Judging from how my students have approached their work of late, the words ring with a quiet promise and they remain worthy of consideration. To be sure, the switch to Zoom pedagogy this past March enacted instantaneous losses. It is not possible, in my experience, to bring to bear online the full range of embodied knowledge, which runs deeper than deep in the fabric of human beings and in their modes of being present to one another. I see my students’ faces on the screen, and miss their presence in the same moment. I cannot ‘read the room’ because there is no room to read. But I have been moved by how earnest students have been to make it work: to try to overcome the distances, the strangeness, the limitations, and to work at interpreting the texts at hand, and to say things they believe. I believe in their desire to believe.

Twenty years ago, while I was still unpacking boxes in my office and apartment in New York City, the world seemed overthrown on 9/11. My friends, family, and colleagues in Chicago very kindly were worried about me. But I told them, truthfully, that I had never felt at home anywhere so quickly. The solidarity and generosity of people on the ground, the dignity that characterized people even on crowded subways and buses, and the patience suddenly apparent in everyday life: these acts felt like so many moral prodigies in the face of the usual rush of contemporary life. Deepening, enriching, broadening. The city has rebounded again, for now, in the midst of the ‘inextinguishable conflagration’ (Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire). It’s home. I believe our field can help people today build and rebuild home.³

Uncertainty and imagination

Kathy Hytten

If I had to choose one word to capture 2020 thus far, it would be uncertainty. At the time of this writing, we in the United States have been in some version of social isolation, lockdown, or quarantine for over three months. Students at every level are struggling to adapt to at-home and online learning, missing interactions with their peers and important rituals of growth and transition, and wondering if they will ever return to the schools and classrooms almost all of us took for granted mere months ago. There is no end in sight of the deadly spread of COVID, yet as the nice weather comes, it is clear that US Americans are both not very good at social distancing and tired of it. At the same time, we are also now several weeks into the most widespread anti-racist protests this country has ever seen. From every major city to the small rural towns in even the whitest states in the union, people are out on the streets, demanding an end to systemic and structural forms of racism. For many, gathering closely in face-to-face community to fight for justice, equity, and basic human dignity is worth the health risks, even amid a pandemic. The brutal police murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man accused of trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill, may well be a watershed moment for social justice and democracy in the United States and around the world, especially as satellite protests against racism and the abuse of power are popping up in almost every country. Ideally, these times of widespread uncertainty provide openings through which we can imagine new social and educational realities. What the future holds remains to be seen.

Navigating uncertainty is always challenging. For some, the current uncertainty is palpable, especially those who worry how about how they will pay their bills, put food on the table, care for their family, and stay healthy. Yet for many us it is more existential. We have been pressed to slow down, to work from home, to reflect on our lives, and to reassess our priorities. Those of us forced to teach children at home have wondered about the point of so much of what we do in school, the endless worksheets, mundane textbook readings and questions, and joyless assignments, leading to ongoing struggles for compliance. Questioning the value of traditional forms of schooling, this is an ideal time for rethinking our philosophical and educational commitments. While uncertainty is unsettling, it is also a space for hope, experimentation, possibility, and imagination. For philosophers of education, moving into the future, I see us returning to one of the perennial questions that has always animated our field: what ought to be the purposes of education in a democratic society?

The twin pandemics of COVID and racism surely should help to shift our educational focus away from standardization, competition, and individual achievement toward different end goals, for example, schooling that helps students to address pressing social problems; develop the habits of democratic citizenship; live well in community with diverse others; nurture passions and a love for learning; and develop the foundation to make a life, not simply a living. Now is the time for imagination and work to bring about the educational and social ends of our most idealistic visions. Uncertainty simply means the future will be different than the past, and that the actions we take and the commitments we prioritize can put us on alternative paths. I, for one, dream of different ways of doing schooling that are more equitable and meaningful for all students. Philosophers of education surely have a role to play in bringing them into existence.

Philosophy of education, thoughtful interruption, and beyond

Cris Mayo

As a field, philosophy of education faces the problem of its own strengths: philosophical thinking requires a pause, a reflection, even a moment of noting dangers to be faced. That kind of pause has been world-changing in other contexts, like Colin Kaepernick’s determination to insert a gap in routinized demonstrations of patriotism. Invited by an army veteran to reconsider his protest strategy of sitting down, Kaepernick took up the military practice of taking a knee to mark the need for attention to danger or the need for reflection. By creating a gap in many people’s unconsidered gestures of allegiance, his kneeling forced, for some, a rethinking of police violence against Black and Brown people. For others, his gesture indicated recognition and amplification of political action that had preceded his own. For still others, his kneeling was purposely misunderstood and resisted. The broader movement of renewed attention to how Black Lives Matter, by the circulation of its name, reasserts an all too often missing presence, interrupting white inattention.

Interruption is arguably also our disciplinary specialty. Philosophy of education has engaged and should continue to engage in thoughtful interruption of institutionally grinding forms of bias, misrecognition, and ignorance. As a form of inquiry that requires a halt to inattention and a resituated rethinking, philosophy of education has tools that may be, one hopes, increasingly useful. These interruptions do not quickly lead to justice and one hopes that philosophy of education can at least be helpful in continuing to push toward interruptions and reckon with what comes after it.

Interruption is not always welcome nor is it a neutral practice. Philosophers of education and activists interrupt because they see something is wrong. Whether what was wrong was noticed or ignored or intended, an interruption, even if it hopes to re-engage and re-build, may be taken as an affront. If we’re honest, too, our interruptions may well be meant as affronts. Our field can contribute not only to amplifying and creating necessary interruptions, it can contribute by thinking through what it means to have to interrupt, how it feels to be interrupted, and how to thoughtfully navigate what comes next.

Interruptions may be long considered and long attempted before they are noticed. Black Lives Matter is a continuation of a long duration of interruptions of a long duration of racism. Acknowledging and learning how to work in the context of political frustration and philosophical frustration may be among the next tasks of philosophy of education. Trying to encourage students to think through their place in the world and their possibilities for action means reckoning with their own longstanding frustrations, angers, disappointments, and other impediments to even being able to work toward something else.

For philosophers, trying to think about aims and ideals during persistent tangles of complicity, responsibility, and irresponsibility means needing to know more about the contexts of philosophizing. Thinking in conversation with communities, with persistent and strategic refusals to engage, and with the longer durations of anger may help keep our field more than a stale snapshot but part of larger movements for thoughtful and necessary change.

Pandemic parenting: philosophy of education as personal

Trevor Norris

As I transitioned my philosophy of education course online last winter I was struck by the way in which our class discussions quickly became very personal, not only because we could see inside everyone’s homes but because students couldn’t help but speak about the personal dimensions to this pandemic – often with links to the philosophy of education readings. Inspired by my students, I couldn’t help but meld the personal and philosophical in what follows.

What impacted me most when the pandemic hit wasn’t the transition to teaching online but rather that suddenly my wife and I had to completely reconfigure our small home to accommodate our 5 and 9-year-old kids, now home all day every day. As anyone with young kids knows ‘working from home’ during a Pandemic is a real misnomer when multiple young children are involved. It felt a bit more like ‘living at work’ or ‘living at school’. It was like trying to fly an airplane while doing your laundry and your taxes.

It quickly became apparent that the only way I was going to get any reading or writing done was in my car. Every afternoon starting in mid-March, following a few hours of parenting and homeschooling, I would grab my laptop and backpack and a snack, drive around the empty streets of Toronto until the car was warmed up, and seek out a place in the sun where I could work for 3 or 4 quiet hours. Because the car had a black interior it would warm up on sunny days. On shady days I would wrap up in a blanket and work until the temperature dropped and became unmanageable. Eventually as the months passed and spring arrived in Toronto, I would seek out shade instead of sun.

How could I possibly gather any thoughts on this pandemic when it was so immediate and overwhelming? The Owl of Minerva only flies at dusk. But then I realized that while pandemic parenting and philosophy have been a tough fit, philosophy and crisis have a long intimate history.

Ancient Athens was unsettled by political turmoil within and beyond. Socrates survived the Plague of Athens, which took a quarter of the population and led to the fall of Athens.⁴ Centuries later the French Revolution and the Wars of the Twentieth century provoked powerful and profound philosophical thought and gave rise to new philosophical movements (Existentialism, Critical Theory). What new philosophical era might come of COVID?

Philosophy itself is like the Pandemic: it unmoors, even destroys our deepest and most settled truths. But perhaps philosophy can help bring a contemplative perspective and reasoned thought to our plight.

Philosophy of education is personal – but it is also political. Perhaps the job of philosophers of education will be to find new ways to defend face-to-face education – and the very existence of teachers and educational institutions. Perhaps there will be new philosophy and philosophers emerging to help them along the way – perhaps shaped by philosophy of education. But for this author, much will depend on whether it’s safe enough to open schools in the fall.

Doing civic and public philosophy of education

Sarah M. Stitzlein

I see philosophy of education as increasingly a public endeavor, concerned with inquiring into, critiquing, and improving one of our most important public resources: education. As such, several things follow for the future of philosophy of education.

First, I suggest that we take up the fundamental civic question, ‘What should we do?’ (Levine, 2016; Dishon & Ben-Porath, 2018). This is a question that arises whenever a group of people has to figure out how to solve a shared problem or even just how to live together well. Of course, educating our future generations is both a matter of shared concern and central to our ability to flourish. Right now, the most pressing questions might be ‘What should we do about racial injustice in our schools?’ or ‘What should we do about constraints to learning imposed by COVID?’

Civic reasoning is the sort of reasoning that we do when we answer this question with others. Philosophers of education have the opportunity to not only advance their own answers, but to shape civic reasoning by helping to clarify and inform the process of inquiry as we consider with others what we should do about education. We can pose ‘why’ questions about the purpose of schooling and ‘how’ questions about its approach, but also ‘who’ questions that employ criticality to interrogate who is being heard and served in educational decision making and practice (Burbules & Berk, 1999). And, we have a skill set that can be helpful for delineating the knowledge, abilities, values, and dispositions that students need in order to learn how to become active citizens and civic reasoners themselves (Stitzlein, 2020).

Second, our work must reach the public and speak to the public. To do so, we must cultivate our writing skills and thoughtfully position our writing products so that they touch wider audiences and yet still deeply engage with philosophical ideas. We must reach out without dumbing down. It is not enough just to speak to other philosophers of education. When we bring our voices to bear on policymaking, when we influence the practices of teachers, and when we engage citizens in reflecting on education, our work becomes more meaningful and more significant.

Third, as a public and civic endeavor, philosophy of education must be concerned with our shared fate(s) and how schooling determines those (Ben-Porath, 2013; Lin & Jackson, 2019). Shared fate raises matters of ethical responsibilities to each other. Philosophers of education can help to shift the recent finger pointing of accountability at teachers and schools, redirecting it toward the public through calls to take responsibility for our collective future. A part of that is helping citizens to understand their responsibilities to schools as central institutions of democracy (Stitzlein, 2017). Another aspect is foregrounding our interdependencies and highlighting not only the necessity, but the benefits, that come from collective problem solving and public goods. We must distinguish those from the neoliberal and authoritarian forces celebrating individualism, which exacerbate problems of competition and divisiveness.

Finally, rather than merely adapting educational theories to changes in our world, we should work together to proactively shape education. We should generate publics around shared problems, engage others in inquiry to improve our shared conditions, and work with citizens to imagine and determine what we should do about education (Knight Abowitz & Thompson, 2013, Barber, 1984). In sum, philosophy of education should be more future oriented and outward facing.

Suggested futures of a field: amelioration, expansion and ethics

Winston C. Thompson

Rather than offer a sharply focused view of either our field or our world in this moment, I am inclined to meet this article’s prompt by suggesting a few interrelated and, to my mind, desirable, possibilities for our future work at the intersection of both. Taken in unison, these possibilities represent one snapshot of how philosophy of education might respond to what 2020 has revealed.

The first of these possibilities concerns the method of our work. As descriptive conceptual analysis increasingly appears ill-suited to the tasks of navigating the moral complexities of the socio-political context within which we find ourselves, we would do well to consider conceptual engineering as an essential methodology. Though there are many definitions of conceptual engineering, I am most moved by Sally Haslanger’s example in her now classic article ‘Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?’ (Haslanger, 2000a). Rather than only describing or analyzing how concepts are used, Haslanger provides a model for work that might aim at engineering concepts, improving their meanings in order to realize the aims we have reason to value. Haslanger describes this work as ‘ameliorative’, seeing the philosopher’s role in such projects as ‘enhancing our conceptual resources to serve our [society’s] (critically examined) purposes’ (Haslanger, 2000b, p. 95). Though philosophers of education have surely been engaged in ameliorative projects of conceptual engineering, a more explicit focus on such work in educational theorizing might have significant impact in our field – and well beyond. Philosophers of education fulfill something of a public service when we improve the educational concepts that guide actions and shape the shared world we inhabit.

The second of these possibilities addresses the subject of our work. While schools are surely important educational locations, recent COVID related restrictions on gathering in these and other spaces might have served as a society-wide reminder that education occurs across a great many contexts and locations. Arguably, schools comprise a relatively narrow (yet extremely valuable) segment of the full range of educational experiences. Though many philosophers of education have done terrific work on education beyond only its manifestation in classrooms, I would encourage our field to press forward with focus and intentionality in analyses (ameliorative or otherwise) of the educational aspects of other portions of the world. What might be revealed by attending to the educational dimensions of political protests (such as the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020)? How might the stark differences in the US and Canadian reactions to a global pandemic express vastly different public pedagogical processes and orientations? The opportunities seem plentiful for our unique contributions to matters of broad attention.

The last of these possibilities considers a subdiscipline of our work. Perhaps bringing together elements of the impulses underlying the two previous suggestions, I would suggest that a renewed commitment to ethics might serve the field especially well. Again, I do not wish to suggest that very fine ethical work is not happening in philosophy of education. To the contrary, I wish us to build upon that good foundation.⁵ From practical normative educational ethics to meta-ethical conceptual work in education, our field is poised to offer guidance in action and thought as our colleagues and fellow citizens attempt to make sense of the shifting social and political contexts of our moral community. Indeed, given the tumult of 2020, we would be wise not to neglect the possibilities of working towards a more picturesque 2021.

Where is the philosophy of education headed?

Leonard Waks

Philosophical communications are triadic: they speak from some base of shared knowledge and personal experience, about some topic, to one or more audiences – professional peers, general intellectuals, or the educated public. They are brought to the public sphere through conference talks and writing – in scholarly journals and books, and (occasionally) newspapers and journals of opinion.

Philosophers of education are distinct because they speak from the philosophical tradition about educational topics, to peer researchers in the first instance – and then to educational professionals and (infrequently) public audiences.

We share a broad consensus about the philosophical tradition. Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein are in. Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Ivan Illich are borderline cases. John Holt is out. Recent voices in our field – Israel Scheffler, Richard Peters, Jane Roland Martin, Nel Noddings, retain authority, as do certain contemporary philosophers including Arendt, and Foucault.

Even though the tradition is shared, it weighs upon each of us differently. We individually select texts to identify with or oppose, as well as non-normative resources from the sciences, arts, humanities and personal experiences in developing our unique voices. Philosophy of education is always reconstructing its tradition, recovering neglected sources and embracing new leaders as emerging problems thrust themselves upon us.

So the question where philosophy of education is headed boils down to what educational topics and problems are bearing upon us, what resources in our tradition and elsewhere, do they activate, and what new communications they inspire.

For several decades we have been confronting problems arising from the neoliberal order, e.g., high stakes testing. Now we face the twin crisis of COVID and state violence, which is exposing the bankruptcy of neoliberalism. Populism and the ‘post-liberal’ left resistance both challenge entrenched ideas about democratic living and education. Socialist and anarchist voices gain traction as we search for a new public philosophy.

Our received tradition continues to nourish us. All educational commonplaces from teaching, learning, and knowledge to organizational setting, aims and subject matter selection are in need of reconstruction and we have a lot of recent work to go on. Just what is teaching and learning in an online setting. Can learning be effective under conditions of social isolation? Can educational justice be achieved in segregated schools? Do conventional schools still make sense in the Internet age? Are diplomas appropriate curriculum completion points in the age of knowledge obsolescence?

In addressing these problems philosophers of education will have to regard their work as less autonomous, with necessary inputs from history, quantitative and qualitative social science, complexity theory, neurosciences, literature and the arts, technology and design. They will also find inputs from global philosophical traditions – Chinese, Indian, African, South American – valuable and necessary.

There is also a crying need for new paradigms, new templates of philosophy and philosophy of education, and new synoptic visions of democratic living in global Internet society. This must be reconstructive, going beyond criticism of bankrupt neo-liberalism to visions of social and educational arrangements for post-neoliberal society. To be effective, this work must be addressed not only to philosophers of education, but also to professional, intellectual and public audiences – through online communications media: podcasts, MOOCs, YouTube channels.

Philosophy of education in a new key: Snapshot 2020, USA and Canada

Michael A Peters (Open Review)

While a snapshot as Liz Jackson elaborates this collective piece also focuses on two interrelated themes: the pandemic and its devastating effects in the US, and Black Lives matter – both with the power to shape political events and outcomes in the lead up to the November elections. Jackson set up the collective paper well and I was interested to discover that one of the homes of modern philosophy of education in the English-speaking world is so engaged with and concerned for the contemporary state of the US that has taken a turn towards American neofascism. I was also touched by Kal Alston’s personal narrative ‘Why ‘I Can’t Breathe’ in Philosophy of Education’ and hope that PES features Kal’s question ‘What good is philosophy for Black life?’ Lauren Bialystok sees ‘encouraging signs of moral learning and democratic rejuvenation’ in the’ breakthroughs of Black Lives Matter’ and Nicholas Burbules argues, borrowing a metaphor from Wittgenstein, that philosophy of education ‘deals with the “rough ground” of actual human practices – a feature that also points to historical moments of profound national and global crises. Ann Chinnery adding a Canadian landscape examines calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) at the conjuncture of climate change, COVID and systemic racism to ‘conversations on educational policy and practice’ including ‘questions of social and political justice’, as well as issues in Indigenous philosophy. David Hansen threatened by a return of a ‘reign of violence’ looks to a philosophy of education that can ‘deepen human understanding’, ‘enrich human understanding’ and ‘broaden critical sympathies’, thereby rebuilding home. Kathy Hytten in a time of great national uncertainty focuses on COVID and the prospect of an ‘end to systemic and structural forms of racism’. Cris Mayo chooses to highlight interruption and philosophy of education as a form of interruption that helps us to ‘engage in thoughtful interruption of institutionally grinding forms of bias, misrecognition, and ignorance’. Trevor Norris in the period of ‘pandemic parenting’ understands philosophy of education as inherently personal. For him philosophy like the pandemic ‘unmoors, damages or even destroys our deepest and safest and most settled truths, habits and beliefs’. By contrast, Sarah M. Stitzlein sees ‘philosophy of education as increasingly a public endeavor, concerned with inquiring into, critiquing, and improving one of our most important public resources: education.’ As such it enables us to answer the fundamental civil question ‘What should we do?’, to speak to the public, to understand our ‘shared fate’ and to work together to reshape education. Winston C. Thompson interrogates the possibilities of our future by looking to our methods of work engineering concepts rather than simply describing them, refocusing the subject of our work by attending to the ‘educational dimensions of political protests’ and through ethical work ‘to offer guidance in action and thought’ to fellow citizens who are trying to ‘make sense of the shifting social and political contexts of our moral community’. Leonard Waks emphasizing the triadic nature of philosophical conversation suggests ‘philosophers of education are distinct because they speak from the philosophical tradition about educational topics, to peer researchers …educational professionals and public audiences’. Going beyond the bankrupt neoliberal order Waks suggests we must search for ‘new paradigms, new templates of philosophy and philosophy of education, and new synoptic visions of democratic living in global Internet society’ and he suggests some sources of reference and inspiration. All the authors of these mini-essays are deeply concerned about the state of their countries, the global community, and wish to entertain a philosophy of political and moral engagement. They point to COVID and racial violence as twin crises have both exposed and accelerated the social injustices and inequalities that are have been functioning parts of capitalism and democracy in its neoliberal form since the early 1980s.

Philosophy of a Snapshot 2020: view from troubled lands

Marek Tesar (Open Review)

Jackson’s collective snapshot is a powerful piece of writing which captures the mood of 2020 in the USA and Canada. Jackson has led a number of collective research and writing projects including those that were influential in thinking about peer reviews (see for example Jackson et al., 2018). Similarly, it is important to note that the project of philosophy of education in a new key has proven to be a very productive way to generate geographical responses to the question of the role of philosophy of education in 2020 (see for instance Hung et al., 2020; Jandric et al., 2020; Kato, 2020; Papastephanou et al., 2020; Waghid et al., 2020). As such, writing an open review for such a topic text and topic is a challenging task, which moves the reviewer not to write just a snapshot but to deeply engage with the complexity of the arguments, and the powerful personal and academic writing that is present in this collective piece.

This snapshot 2020 by Jackson et al. was written at the same time as the Black Lives Matter movement is sparking further debates and has unearthed philosophies and thinking which spoke to the future discourses. As such, this snapshot is an important statemen on philosophy of education in times of racial tensions and intellectual re-thinking not only what it means to be a citizen, but what it means to be a human. It is critical that we consider this thinking in relation to the idea that philosophers of education are at the centre of these thoughts and happenings. Jackson has masterfully orchestrated collective writing that responds to both of these topics, and the line-up of thinkers has provided a powerful intellectual endeavour.

What unites these papers is what separates them from other papers in this series. They are all a world apart from the other writings, while at the same time they are incredibly consistent in their message. The sense of urgency, unpredictability, the messiness of the crisis of being in and with the world and others, the re-questioning of basic educational questions and concerns. Alston’s ‘What good is philosophy for Black life?’ is a powerful question, as is Bialystok’s notion that philosophers of education should ensure that the ‘revolutionary potential of the present unrest doesn’t stop at slogans’. Following with Blum’s thorough analysis of systemic racism, it is then time for Burbules’ navigation of ‘rough ground’ of actual human practices (education) in which philosophy of education may (potentially, hopefully) gain advantage. The pieces are brilliantly placed to together as they create a tapestry of difference and similarities: for example while Chinnery extends the questioning even further ‘What knowledge, skills, and dispositions do students need for political participation beyond national borders?’ followed by Hansen’s paper which reads as a personal letter to the future philosophers of education. Reading this structurally loose but philosophically tight collective, one must agree with Hytten that ‘Navigating uncertainty is always challenging … For philosophers of education, moving into the future, I see us returning to one of the perennial questions that has always animated our field: what ought to be the purposes of education in a democratic society?’ The collective writing continues with Mayo, Norris, Stitzlein, Thompson and Waks to finish with five papers that traverse philosophy of education in a new key.

These papers are philosophically sound pieces that create a snapshot of life and scholarship in 2020 in North America. As the lead conductor of this philosophical tour-de-force argues, Jackson has made another substantial contribution to the philosophy of education. Perhaps untraditionally, I will finish with a question she raised in her recent book: ‘Why is learning to live together a challenging task? One reason is that people have vastly different ideas about how people can and should live together’ (Jackson, 2019, p. 1). I argue that this collective piece has given us some clues of how to do so.

Conclusion: a snapshot from 2020

Winston C. Thompson and Liz Jackson

The prompt to contributors for this article was intentionally broad: ‘Where do you see philosophy of education, moving into the future?’ From a certain perspective, the timing of the invitation (as an academic invitation) could not have been worse. As many of the responses to this prompt suggest, 2020 has not been a time of ‘business as usual’ for philosophers of education. Instead, the above snapshots reveal that it has been a tumultuous and demanding time to be a scholar and a person, physically, intellectually, and existentially. This is perhaps truer in the United States and Canada than in some other parts of the world, as the region has faced some of the most severe COVID outbreaks thus far, while the Black Lives Matter movement has simultaneous shaken people there out of any sense of moral certainty and safety.

However, within this hectic context, the snapshots depict a remarkably cohesive yet still diverse collection of views. Though they might differ in method, detail, or perspective, their words articulate and attend to the largely unspoken queries of this moment. It would seem that 2020 has presented these authors with a shared set of urgent questions about how we have structured our world, how we might best think and act within these structures, and who we wish to become as we continue to refine and restructure our contexts.

In reading the authors in this short anthology, the necessary role of education in performing these diagnoses and producing these desiderata comes rather clearly into focus. Less obvious, however, is whether the range of questions here collected might do more than identify that education is necessary in this time. That is to ask, what does this collection offer in terms of appropriately specific educational engagement with our shared world?

In many ways, the authors of this article describe a world currently wrestling with a number of crises, each and all demanding response. Perhaps Hannah Arendt’s (1954) view of crises is useful, as she notes:

[A crisis] tears away facades and obliterates prejudices – to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter… The disappearance of prejudices simply means that we have lost the answers on which we ordinarily rely without even realizing they were originally answers to questions. A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides.

Taking these words seriously, philosophers of education may have already aligned their contributions towards specificity and action. Each author’s educational engagement is demonstrated by asking the very questions that may forestall disastrous reaction to our circumstances, creating instead a context for thoughtful response from the reader and others. Read this way, this collection provides a sense of specific possibility, an invitation to rethink in this moment the essence of our activities as we collectively grapple with new (e.g., COVID) or longstanding (e.g., racism) pathologies.

And, perhaps, as this collection showcases the timeliness of this service, it also suggests the timelessness of this function of our field. Though these authors each offer a still picture of the questions of 2020, taken as a whole and in a series, these images depict meaningful motion. This zoetrope is a model of the abiding actions of our field. It portrays the ways in which philosophy of education labors to avoid assumption, operates to disrupt prejudices of thought, and finds meaningful answers in the pedagogical activity of posing nuanced questions. Though 2020 may be a time of uncertainty, philosophers of education appear committed, as ever, to responding to the unpredictable.

Notes

1 Thanks to Rozena Maart, Race and Pedagogical Practices: When Race Takes Center Stage in Philosophy, Hypatia vol. 29, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 205–20, particularly p. 215, 218.

2 The situation has even inspired the creation of a new journal, The Journal of Controversial Ideas, where authors can publish under a pseudonym, ‘in order to protect themselves from threats to their careers or physical safety’ https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/.

3 My thanks to Liz Jackson for her invitation to contribute some words to the collective, and for her leadership in our field.

4 A vivid and unsettling description of the Plague of Athens is available at: https://www.ancient.eu/article/1535/thucydides-on-the-plague-of-athens-text–commentar/#:∼:text=If%20anyone%20survived%20the%20worst,while%20others%20lost%20their%20eyes.

5 I must draw special attention to Meira Levinson’s and Jacob Fay’s exemplary leadership in this area. See: Levinson & Fay, Dilemmas of educational ethics: Cases and commentaries; and Levinson, M. & Fay, J. (eds.) (2019). Democratic discord in schools: Cases and commentaries in educational ethics. Harvard Education Press.