Education related events

 

 

Bath & Bristol Branch of the POESGB

A seminar with Professors Brian Haig, Paul Smeyers, and Andrew Stables.
Is There a Defensible Methodology for the Social Sciences?
Wednesday 23rd November 2011
Building 8, West, Room 2.10     4.00pm - 6.00pm

 

 

 

On Tuesday 1^st November Judith Suissa of London University will be speaking at Bath University as a guest of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (details below).

Below is the opening of a recent paper in which Suissa discusses notions of ‘good’ in relation to educational provision and the nature of learning within schools and the home:

Political liberals since John Rawls have been at pains to point out that the diversity of conceptions of the good characteristic of plural societies is not something to be tolerated or overcome, but a desirable and necessary aspect of the liberal democratic polity. The problem for liberals is how to allow maximum freedom for people to form and pursue their own conceptions of the good without threatening the stability of the very society that enables this pursuit. Or, as Rawls put it,

How is it possible that there may exist over time a stable and just society of free and equal citizens profoundly divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical and moral doctrines.… How is it possible that deeply opposed though reasonable comprehensive doctrines may live together and all affirm the political conception of a constitutional regime?

This question is particularly pressing for educational philosophers concerned with defending a view of the common school that, while maintaining the required liberal neutrality among competing conceptions of the good, can nevertheless both provide the conditions that allow competing conceptions to flourish and endure, and ensure the minimal civic glue needed to sustain liberal institutions. Perfectionist liberals such as Meira Levinson and Eamonn Callan have focused on the centrality of autonomy in this context, and it is around this idea that many of the important and interesting debates in this area have been conducted. My focus in this essay, however, is not on the differences between perfectionist and political liberalism, nor on questions to do with the role and nature of autonomy, but rather on the central notion of a “comprehensive conception of the good” that pervades both political liberal and perfectionist liberal (and, to an extent, even communitarian) accounts, and the imagery associated with it. This imagery, I shall argue, has profound and problematic effects on the way we perceive issues of identity and difference, and the way we conceptualize the educational role of the school, the home, and the relation between them in liberal plural societies.

Suissa, J. (2010), HOW COMPREHENSIVE IS YOUR CONCEPTION OF THE GOOD? LIBERAL PARENTS, DIFFERENCE, AND THE COMMON SCHOOL. Educational Theory, 60: p.587

 

Details of talk:

Judith Suissa, University of London Institute of Education
'The Claims of Parenting'
University of Bath, Room 3West 4.7
Tuesday November 1st, 16.15-18.05

 

John Abbott talking in Bath about his new book, Over-schooled, Under-educated'.  1st July 2010

 

 

Andrew Davis seminar on educational research with Andy Stables.  Bath University.  11th July 2010