Can you kill a goat by staring at it?
This year’s $1 million TED Prize was awarded to a novel educational project that encourages small groups of children to work together, using the internet to answer big questions that […]
Tag Archives: education
Big Questions for intergalactic philosophers
Later this week, 52 novice philosophers will find themselves in an imaginary universe of zero-gravity waterslide parks, Brussel sprout ice cream, dragon appointments and a spectacular array of perplexing questions. […]
Unguided learning: Subversive Activity (Part 3)
Independent thinking rightly belongs at the heart of education, as I suggested in Part 2. As students get increasingly adept at using tools of sceptical and imaginative enquiry, they become […]
On Questioning and Silence: Subversive Activity (Part 2)
Some of the educational reforms considered radical in the late ‘60s have come to be accepted – even institutionalised – in our current school system (as we saw in Part […]
Teaching as a Subversive Activity Redux (Part 1)
I’ve been reading Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s 1969 manifesto calling for a revolution in education. Over the past half-century, many of its radical proposals […]
Boot camp for intellectual virtues?
On the lookout for new ways to help kids improve their thinking, I came across the Intellectual Virtues & Education Project (IVEP). And the more I learnt about it, the […]
Helping kids develop moral judgement
Unless children can think ethically, they won’t be able to behave ethically in a way that’s resilient to outside pressures. This is the last of three posts in which I […]
Do children need moral guidelines?
How should a facilitator respond when students express controversial opinions in Ethics? Here I share my email conversation with a friend who volunteers as a facilitator in the NSW Primary […]
Responding to radical opinions in Ethics
A friend recently asked me a question about teaching ethics. She volunteers as a facilitator of children’s dialogue in the NSW Primary Ethics program, and her question triggered an email […]
What Philosophy is not
I was taken aback to discover an opinion piece in The New Yorker denouncing the teaching of philosophy in schools as ‘a terrible idea’. The author, Richard Brody, reflects bitterly […]
