Educational Philosophy and Theory – serie

In recent years, new discourses have emerged to inform the philosophy and pedagogy of early childhood. This collection brings together contributions from leading scholars in early childhood education, and each chapter engages with the critical task of reformulating early childhood education and the philosophy of the child with a specific focus on pedagogy. The contributors to Philosophy and Pedagogy of Early Childhood explore pedagogy through a philosophical lens, and discuss themes including intersubjectivity, alterity, ethics, and creative experience. Although these themes are addressed in very different ways, each invokes a call to teachers to consider their own position in the dialogical process of learning, and suggests that pedagogy is necessarily situated, provisional, compositional, and discursive. Such critical and philosophical inquiry is a welcome antidote in an era of pedagogical certainty and standards-based agendas. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This edited collection takes a multifaceted approach to the various limitations and achievements of Western philosophy. Considered on its own, Western philosophy is a highly contentious name. The contributors question its validity as a label and take to task its grand appearance within education. However, part of the problem with Western philosophy is that it has less conventional as well as dominant manifestations. The writers consider both forms of Western philosophy, devoting significant thought and time to it in its own right, but always referring it to the more specific issue of education. This book adds to a growing corpus that sketches the relationship between education and philosophy, showing that they are deeply intertwined, and it is indeed philosophy (and especially its Western variation) that supports Western education and allows it to flourish in the first instance. It is fitting, then, that at various points this book depicts education as a hegemonic vehicle of a deeper phenomenon – that of dominant Western philosophy.This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Contemporary French philosophy perhaps reached a high point during the 1970s with the likes of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Since that time, thinkers such as Francois Laruelle, Bernard Stiegler, Quentin Meillassoux and Catherine Malabou have continued on in this strong tradition, while deepening and rethinking many of the parameters that have made contemporary French philosophy so powerful and useful for understanding the contemporary condition. For example, new French thought has reengaged with the relationships between thought, science and universal commercial interests, and has investigated purposefully the possibilities of post-capitalist theorising.This book, while not exhaustive, takes the most pertinent aspects of new French thought, and applies them to the philosophy of education. In contemporary philosophies of education, the repetitions of evidence-based and neoliberal theories abound. This book serves as an antidote to the levelling off, and exhaustion in thought, that a capitalist takeover implies, while keeping sight of the crucial relationships between science, the arts and metaphysical speculation. Furthermore, this book represents a thoroughgoing thinking through of philosophy of education’s relationships with neuroscience, new scientific paradigms, feminist materialisms, anti-correlationism, technology and the socius, and as such constitutes a new philosophy of education.This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Activating Aesthetics addresses questions of aesthetics in various fields of education, with the aim of investigating a way of revealing how aesthetics may activate an engaged, responsive and poetic pedagogy. The writers in this collection enliven different ways of thinking about aesthetics, educating through aesthetics and questioning aesthetics. They approach aesthetics through the lenses of art practice and art history, painting and literature, film and popular culture, the built environment and pedagogy, music making and reception, and feminist subjectivity and philosophy. Beyond instrumentalism, each chapter approaches questions of aesthetics by dismantling subject–object separations of analytical aesthetics and opening the potential of aesthetics to work as an activating force in education. The premise is that education, driven by means–end instrumentalism, may be activated another way via aesthetic encounters premised in difference. To build this argument, the authors engage works of Adorno, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Guattari, Heidegger, Hölderlin, Hokusai, Irigaray, Nietzsche, Sterne and Stiegler. The juxtaposition of these diverse theorists, philosophers, artists and writers makes for a rich tapestry of different perspectives on processes of learning, knowing and being. Aesthetics in activation discloses new ways of thinking about poetic and engaged pedagogy. Through these different perspectives, the whole collection works towards an educational philosophy of aesthetics. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal.

This book critically considers what various Asian philosophies can contribute to a more substantive discourse on sustainability education and educational philosophy. The contributors examine how ‘east’ and ‘west’ interact in educational philosophy and practice in Asian contexts. As a collection, they provide a broad view of Asian sustainability thinking that is not dominated by Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, and post-colonialism, but rather which regards these themes—and other frameworks for sustainable education—as dynamic aspects of Asian contexts, both historically and today. As such, the book invites readers to consider the challenges and opportunities for theorising of sustainability in the philosophy of education, while also critically engaging with the way in which ‘Asia’ and ‘east’ are typically understood. Of interest to those researchers in Asian conceptions of sustainability, this book highlights a series of potential insights in relation to the often-foregrounded perspectives of Global North and western-based frameworks.The chapters were originally published in Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book provides exciting and significant inquiries into the cultivation of self in East Asian philosophy of education. The contributors to this volume are from different countries or areas in the world, but all share the same interest in exploring what it means to be human and how to cultivate the self. In this book, self-cultivation in classical Chinese philosophies—including Confucianism, neo-Confucianism, and Daoism—is scrutinised and elaborated upon, in order to reveal the significance of ancient wisdom for today’s educational issues, and to show the meaningful connections between Eastern and Western educational thoughts. By addressing many issues of contemporary importance including environmental education, equity and justice, critical rationalism, groundlessness of language, and power and governance, this book offers fresh views of self-cultivation illuminated not merely by East Asian philosophy of education but also by Western insights. For those who are interested in comparative philosophies, intercultural education, and cultural study, this book is both thought-provoking and inspirational.The chapters in this book were originally published in the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal.

Cultures of measurement are often considered to dominate educational practices, to the degree that, as Biesta (2010) has identified in Good Education in an Age of Measurement we no longer measure what we value, but rather we have become conditioned to value what is measured. A clear example of this occurs when institutions and staff "teach to the test" by emphasising narrow conceptions of learning and of knowledge, simply because the consequences of high-stakes assessments have important implications regarding funding, resources, and even tenure. This collection explores, via various philosophical means, how valuable educational practices can occur within and beyond cultures of measurement. What seems to be required is for practitioners in education to regain their relationship to the overall purposes of education, such as the furthering of justice and democracy for both individual students and societies as a whole. Such a reconnection has the potential to re-humanise curricular experiences for students, which may have become dehumanised through particular cultures of measurement. It is argued that certain legitimate measures can advance justice and democracy, and so careful attention must be assigned to their validity and value.This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

As a bold provocation to reimagine what the philosophy of education might mean in the 21st century, this book responds to the exhaustion of present theoretical models and indeed the degradation of fabulative thought in its current prospectus. The contributors, from Asia, the Americas, and Europe, proffer a frank response to the everyday reality of the classroom where teachers compete with electronic devices for the attention of students whose minds are literally elsewhere, cocooned in the noospheric ether. Outside of lecture halls the world is suffering the rise of fascism, panic, and anger driven by precarious employment, and a looming fatalism and resignation in the face of ecological calamity. These developments have led to an avalanche of psychical woes afflicting young people ranging from trauma, the loss of hope and, in extremis, violence and suicide. The concerned and committed writers of this volume therefore raise the timely question of the return of utopia as a fitting, desperate, and indeed necessary response to the ecological, existential, and pedagogical crises spreading across the planet.At this most crucial juncture in human history, the excellent contributions to this book offer singularly unique perspectives regarding the possibility/impossibility of utopia. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Bildung and Paideia examines traditional humanistic ideals in light of philosophical reflection on the need for education of the whole human being. The study of what it is to be human is traditionally the task of the humanities. In recent years, however, the humanities have been increasingly subordinated to technological, economic, and utilitarian aims. Do the humanities still have a fundamentally distinct task to fulfil in education? Today’s reduction of educational outcomes to measurable competencies and economically exploitable skills is opposed to traditional ideals like that of Greek paideia and the German Romantic concept of Bildung, which emphasized formation of the whole human being. The present volume takes as its point of departure the conviction that the study of ‘the human experience'—whether through philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history, or languages—has something specific to offer in the realm of education today. The individual contributions examine the specific role of philosophy and the humanities in education from ancient times to the present and explore possibilities for conceiving philosophical models of education.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Delving into Levinas’s ideas in nuanced and sophisticated ways, this book innovatively blends and juxtaposes Levinas with other thinkers, perspectives, and fields of thinking. Some contributions are traditional, but superbly analyzed and argued renderings of his thought, and they contrast with more creative readings of Levinas through lenses such as Durkheim, Habermas, feminism and indigenous, new materialism. This collection will serve to reinvigorate Levinas and the importance of the many facets of his thinking that link to the ethical and lived dimensions to our educational worlds. Readers will find this to be a very interesting, engrossing, and well thought out book that forms a vibrant and exciting intervention into the philosophy of education and Levinas studies in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

2016 marked the hundred-year anniversary of John Dewey’s seminal work Democracy and Education. This centennial presented philosophers and educators with an opportunity to reexamine and evaluate its impact on various aspects of education in democratic societies. This volume brings together some of the leading scholars on John Dewey and education from around the world in order to reflect on the legacy of Democracy and Education, and, more generally, to consider the influence of Dewey’s ideas on education in the twenty-first century. John Dewey’s Democracy and Education in an Era of Globalization is unique in that it explores some important tensions and relationships among Dewey’s ideas on democracy, education, and human flourishing in an era of globalization. The contributors make sense of how Dewey would have interpreted and responded to the phenomenon of globalization. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

What does the Confucian heritage mean to modern East Asian education today? Is it invalid and outdated, or an irreplaceable cultural resource for an alternative approach to education? And to what extent can we recover the humanistic elements of the Confucian tradition of education for use in world education? Written from a comparative perspective, this book attempts to collectively explore these pivotal questions in search of future directions in education. In East Asian countries like China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, Confucianism as a philosophy of learning is still deeply embedded in the ways people think of and practice education in their everyday life, even if their official language puts on the Western scientific mode. It discusses how Confucian concepts including rite, rote-learning and conformity to authority can be differently understood for the post-liberal and post-metaphysical culture of education today. The contributors seek to make sense of East Asian experiences of modern education, and to find a way to make Confucian philosophy of education compatible with the Western idea of liberal education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book breaks the stereotype that links Chinese philosophy solely to Confucianism, instead providing a kaleidoscopic view of Chinese philosophy of education. The contributors explore a variety of issues, including the journey of modernisation (or Westernisation) of China’s education between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries; Chinese identity and the concept of race in education and history; contemporary interpretations of Confucian pedagogy in relation to twenty-first-century skills; the life story of a teacher in modern China as embodying the spirit of a Confucian pedagogue; the ecological self in education; an original interpretation of postmodern-Daoist symbolism; and the role of translation in producing and transmitting knowledge across cultural and linguistic boundaries. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book is the first of its kind to critically examine the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler from the perspective of the philosophy of education.The editors of this book firmly believe that in the coming years Stiegler’s philosophy will assume increasing importance and influence in both digital studies and the philosophy of education as his thought is a prism through which to understand how we live and work, and a means to anticipate what the future may hold for us all in the time of the Anthropocene. They are of the view that Stiegler’s work will have a permanent impact on the intellectual terrain of the twenty-first century as his majestic conceptual architectonic will shape political, social and pedagogical debates in the coming decades. With this in mind, the contributors of this book take up his gauntlet to understand the risks and opportunities of the digital pharmakon and its impact on the educational milieu.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book is the first of its kind to critically examine the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler from the perspective of the philosophy of education.The editors of this book firmly believe that in the coming years Stiegler’s philosophy will assume increasing importance and influence in both digital studies and the philosophy of education as his thought is a prism through which to understand how we live and work, and a means to anticipate what the future may hold for us all in the time of the Anthropocene. They are of the view that Stiegler’s work will have a permanent impact on the intellectual terrain of the twenty-first century as his majestic conceptual architectonic will shape political, social and pedagogical debates in the coming decades. With this in mind, the contributors of this book take up his gauntlet to understand the risks and opportunities of the digital pharmakon and its impact on the educational milieu.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Bildung and Paideia examines traditional humanistic ideals in light of philosophical reflection on the need for education of the whole human being. The study of what it is to be human is traditionally the task of the humanities. In recent years, however, the humanities have been increasingly subordinated to technological, economic, and utilitarian aims. Do the humanities still have a fundamentally distinct task to fulfil in education? Today’s reduction of educational outcomes to measurable competencies and economically exploitable skills is opposed to traditional ideals like that of Greek paideia and the German Romantic concept of Bildung, which emphasized formation of the whole human being. The present volume takes as its point of departure the conviction that the study of ‘the human experience'—whether through philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history, or languages—has something specific to offer in the realm of education today. The individual contributions examine the specific role of philosophy and the humanities in education from ancient times to the present and explore possibilities for conceiving philosophical models of education.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Unlike many current approaches, this book looks at trust relations in order to understand schooling and other social practices. Trust relations include both what an individual is prepared to trust in the circumstances, and what a competent practitioner in an evolving tradition should trust. It is therefore considered whether trust relations are more fundamental in society than those of truth or power.Schooling has a social, as well as an education, role. As a result, the scope of the trust relations under investigation must range beyond the pedagogical. By expanding our understanding of the trust relations required to create and maintain effective schooling in particular circumstances, it may be possible for a greater section of society to receive a good education. Issues including curriculum, classroom management, and community relations may be understood in a different way and help enable currently intractable problems to be tackled more effectively.This book presents the initial investigations of a number of authors who collaborated on this project and was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal, this book brings together the work of over 200 international scholars, who seek to address the question: ‘What happened to postmodernism in educational theory after its alleged demise?’.Declarations of the death knell of postmodernism are now quite commonplace. Scholars in various disciples have suggested that, if anything, postmodernism is at an end and has been dead and buried for some time. An age dominated by playfulness, hybridity, relativism and the fragmentary self has given way to something else—as yet undefined. The lifecycle of postmodernism started with Derrida’s 1966 seminal paper ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’; its peak years were 1973–1989; followed by uncertainty and reorientation in the 1990s; and the aftermath and beyond (McHale, 2015). What happened after 2001? This collection provides responses by over 200 scholars to this question who also focus on what comes after postmodernism in educational theory. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Delving into Levinas’s ideas in nuanced and sophisticated ways, this book innovatively blends and juxtaposes Levinas with other thinkers, perspectives, and fields of thinking. Some contributions are traditional, but superbly analyzed and argued renderings of his thought, and they contrast with more creative readings of Levinas through lenses such as Durkheim, Habermas, feminism and indigenous, new materialism. This collection will serve to reinvigorate Levinas and the importance of the many facets of his thinking that link to the ethical and lived dimensions to our educational worlds. Readers will find this to be a very interesting, engrossing, and well thought out book that forms a vibrant and exciting intervention into the philosophy of education and Levinas studies in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

2016 marked the hundred-year anniversary of John Dewey’s seminal work Democracy and Education. This centennial presented philosophers and educators with an opportunity to reexamine and evaluate its impact on various aspects of education in democratic societies. This volume brings together some of the leading scholars on John Dewey and education from around the world in order to reflect on the legacy of Democracy and Education, and, more generally, to consider the influence of Dewey’s ideas on education in the twenty-first century. John Dewey’s Democracy and Education in an Era of Globalization is unique in that it explores some important tensions and relationships among Dewey’s ideas on democracy, education, and human flourishing in an era of globalization. The contributors make sense of how Dewey would have interpreted and responded to the phenomenon of globalization. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book aims to gain a better grasp of how education, both inside and outside school, is shaped by our understanding of time. Over the last decennia, both education and policymaking have undergone radical changes, transcending them far beyond the historical limits of the modern nation-state where their contemporary shape originated. The often-discussed shift from government to governance in education policy, together with the crystallization of newly emerging spaces of transnational education, are illustrative in this respect. The national grammar of schooling is set out to arrange time in class hours, schooldays and yearly cohorts. Its curricula establish what the past should teach to future generations. But when education shifts perspectives towards transnational, European or even global levels, this past increasingly seems to lose relevance when understood as continuity and as tradition. Instead, in education as in policymaking, the discontinuity expected to result from a future deemed open and undetermined becomes an endless resource for the development of new political and educational (re)forms.How are contemporary education and education policy creating and reacting to particular forms of presents, pasts or futures? How do specific forms of education (such as lifelong learning) relate to our shifting understandings of time? How are progress, acceleration and time related in educational reform processes? Through showing the contingency of time-making in educational practices, the contributions to this book seek to answer these questions and thus open avenues to think education and time anew. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book aims to gain a better grasp of how education, both inside and outside school, is shaped by our understanding of time. Over the last decennia, both education and policymaking have undergone radical changes, transcending them far beyond the historical limits of the modern nation-state where their contemporary shape originated. The often-discussed shift from government to governance in education policy, together with the crystallization of newly emerging spaces of transnational education, are illustrative in this respect. The national grammar of schooling is set out to arrange time in class hours, schooldays and yearly cohorts. Its curricula establish what the past should teach to future generations. But when education shifts perspectives towards transnational, European or even global levels, this past increasingly seems to lose relevance when understood as continuity and as tradition. Instead, in education as in policymaking, the discontinuity expected to result from a future deemed open and undetermined becomes an endless resource for the development of new political and educational (re)forms.How are contemporary education and education policy creating and reacting to particular forms of presents, pasts or futures? How do specific forms of education (such as lifelong learning) relate to our shifting understandings of time? How are progress, acceleration and time related in educational reform processes? Through showing the contingency of time-making in educational practices, the contributions to this book seek to answer these questions and thus open avenues to think education and time anew. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book provides exciting and significant inquiries into the cultivation of self in East Asian philosophy of education. The contributors to this volume are from different countries or areas in the world, but all share the same interest in exploring what it means to be human and how to cultivate the self. In this book, self-cultivation in classical Chinese philosophies—including Confucianism, neo-Confucianism, and Daoism—is scrutinised and elaborated upon, in order to reveal the significance of ancient wisdom for today’s educational issues, and to show the meaningful connections between Eastern and Western educational thoughts. By addressing many issues of contemporary importance including environmental education, equity and justice, critical rationalism, groundlessness of language, and power and governance, this book offers fresh views of self-cultivation illuminated not merely by East Asian philosophy of education but also by Western insights. For those who are interested in comparative philosophies, intercultural education, and cultural study, this book is both thought-provoking and inspirational.The chapters in this book were originally published in the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal.

This book critically considers what various Asian philosophies can contribute to a more substantive discourse on sustainability education and educational philosophy. The contributors examine how ‘east’ and ‘west’ interact in educational philosophy and practice in Asian contexts. As a collection, they provide a broad view of Asian sustainability thinking that is not dominated by Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, and post-colonialism, but rather which regards these themes—and other frameworks for sustainable education—as dynamic aspects of Asian contexts, both historically and today. As such, the book invites readers to consider the challenges and opportunities for theorising of sustainability in the philosophy of education, while also critically engaging with the way in which ‘Asia’ and ‘east’ are typically understood. Of interest to those researchers in Asian conceptions of sustainability, this book highlights a series of potential insights in relation to the often-foregrounded perspectives of Global North and western-based frameworks.The chapters were originally published in Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Cultures of measurement are often considered to dominate educational practices, to the degree that, as Biesta (2010) has identified in Good Education in an Age of Measurement we no longer measure what we value, but rather we have become conditioned to value what is measured. A clear example of this occurs when institutions and staff "teach to the test" by emphasising narrow conceptions of learning and of knowledge, simply because the consequences of high-stakes assessments have important implications regarding funding, resources, and even tenure. This collection explores, via various philosophical means, how valuable educational practices can occur within and beyond cultures of measurement. What seems to be required is for practitioners in education to regain their relationship to the overall purposes of education, such as the furthering of justice and democracy for both individual students and societies as a whole. Such a reconnection has the potential to re-humanise curricular experiences for students, which may have become dehumanised through particular cultures of measurement. It is argued that certain legitimate measures can advance justice and democracy, and so careful attention must be assigned to their validity and value.This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

For much of its history, the notion of talent has been associated with the idea of ‘careers open to talent’. Its emancipatory promise of upward social mobility has ultimately radically transformed the distribution of advantaged social positions and has had a lasting influence on the very idea of social status itself. Besides its inextricable link with equality of educational opportunity, the notion of talent also came to be associated with some of the most pressing contemporary issues as diverse as the ‘war for talent’, brain drain, immigration policies, talent management, global meritocracy, the ‘excellence gap’, the ‘ownership’ of natural resources, ability taxation, etc.Nevertheless, while central to egalitarian conceptions of distributive justice, the notion of talent remains to a large extent absent from the voluminous literature on these issues. Unlike concepts traditionally associated with distributive justice, such as fairness, (in)equality, equality of opportunity as well as justice itself, the notion of talent has received only limited examination. This volume brings together a set of contributions discussing some of the most pressing problems and challenges arising out of a reductionist understanding of talents’ anatomy, a distorted characterisation of their overall distributive value or talents’ non-voluntaristic nature and many other issues revolving around talents, which existing conceptions of distributive justice in education leave either neglected or outrightly ignored.The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory.

For much of its history, the notion of talent has been associated with the idea of ‘careers open to talent’. Its emancipatory promise of upward social mobility has ultimately radically transformed the distribution of advantaged social positions and has had a lasting influence on the very idea of social status itself. Besides its inextricable link with equality of educational opportunity, the notion of talent also came to be associated with some of the most pressing contemporary issues as diverse as the ‘war for talent’, brain drain, immigration policies, talent management, global meritocracy, the ‘excellence gap’, the ‘ownership’ of natural resources, ability taxation, etc.Nevertheless, while central to egalitarian conceptions of distributive justice, the notion of talent remains to a large extent absent from the voluminous literature on these issues. Unlike concepts traditionally associated with distributive justice, such as fairness, (in)equality, equality of opportunity as well as justice itself, the notion of talent has received only limited examination. This volume brings together a set of contributions discussing some of the most pressing problems and challenges arising out of a reductionist understanding of talents’ anatomy, a distorted characterisation of their overall distributive value or talents’ non-voluntaristic nature and many other issues revolving around talents, which existing conceptions of distributive justice in education leave either neglected or outrightly ignored.The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book examines the importance, possibilities, and complexities of the university as an ethical academy. Universities may be seen as an evolving network of ethical systems that govern teaching, research, service, and administration. However, the university system is changing: adding new rules, new ways of working, and new ideas to its repertoire of operations. The theories that we have traditionally employed may be now put up for questioning and examination. Universities now comprise a spectacularly large body of regulations and policies, both internal and external, that cover issues from cheating, human subject research, academic integrity, research on animals, environmental ethics, and the ethics of sexual harassment. These interconnected ecological systems of ethics have not emerged in one rational process but rather reflect the ongoing historical and dynamic development of law and ethics in relation to the creation of new values. This has played out in a particular political and ideological environment, which has produced the university as a set of practices and beliefs and a particular set of rationalities. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book examines the importance, possibilities, and complexities of the university as an ethical academy. Universities may be seen as an evolving network of ethical systems that govern teaching, research, service, and administration. However, the university system is changing: adding new rules, new ways of working, and new ideas to its repertoire of operations. The theories that we have traditionally employed may be now put up for questioning and examination. Universities now comprise a spectacularly large body of regulations and policies, both internal and external, that cover issues from cheating, human subject research, academic integrity, research on animals, environmental ethics, and the ethics of sexual harassment. These interconnected ecological systems of ethics have not emerged in one rational process but rather reflect the ongoing historical and dynamic development of law and ethics in relation to the creation of new values. This has played out in a particular political and ideological environment, which has produced the university as a set of practices and beliefs and a particular set of rationalities. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.