Dennis asked:

I am a school principal. I teach some education courses at a local college. I've been assigned a new
class, Philosophical Basis of Education. I always try to make my course very relevant to my students,
whether they are under-grads/ student teachers or teachers in a grad program. The new class is
made up of present teachers who aspire to become administrators. Do you have any suggestions on
how to tie in philosophies/ philosophers into present issues in education?. How can I relate
administrative responsibilities such as curriculum, budget, supervision of instruction, special
programs, et al, to historical figures and "isms" in philosophy? I'm looking for a creative twist on
teaching this content.

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I've been frustrated in not really being able to answer this... but the problem is this: first, you ask how
to tie philosophy into "present issues" in education. Well, that's pretty do-able, from Plato through
Aristotle through Dewey, and so forth... there are a reasonable number of philosophers writing about
education. But thenyou want to know about administrative details:budgets and philosophy?
Supervision of instruction and philosophy? Like it or not, philosophers usually aren't too concerned
with budgets and details of supervision. None I know of, anyway; and it seems from the lack of
answers here that I'm not alone.

Here's one sort of off-the-wall suggestion: try looking at Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral Politics. Chicago, IL,
University of Chicago Press, and his "nurturing parent" vs. "strict parent" metaphors. That might give
you ideas about styles for some of the above things.

Steven Ravett Brown

I'm sorry to have taken so long to getting around to answering this question, which I find very
interesting. I am afraid that I can't offer you a direct link to the historical figures (philosophers), but I
would take a different tack in any case. I think that a review of the history of ideas is a great way to kill
the study of philosophy, unless the students are already fired up with philosophical enthusiasm.

Here's the approach I would take. Look at the issues you mention and then search for the underlying
big questions. Indeed, ask your students to discover the big questions that they find underlying these
issues. Then enter a dialogue to try to find some answers - of-course, you would need to be prepared
with some possible lines of inquiry and some ideas to inject into the discussion. From this, a link to
philosophers and "isms" may follow.

Let me give a few examples. Curriculum: What criteria should we use for deciding which subjects
need to be taught in schools? Ought we to teach solely from what the children are interested in now
(child centered), or should we be equipping them with knowledge and skills they will need in the
future (knowledge centered/inoculation theory of education)? Or should it be a mixture? What is the
best balance between learning the knowledge of the past and preparing for the challenges of the
future?

Supervision of instruction: What is the relationship between the knowledge/abilities we wish to convey
and the pedagogical techniques we use? What is the relationship between content and process? Is
good teaching a universal approach (i.e. we just have to find best practice and then get all teachers to
teach in that way), or is good teaching something that depends on the individual teacher, and may
differ from person to person and context to context?

Special programs: Does the provision of special programs clash with the concept of equality (= equal
treatment)? Or is it entailed by the concept of equality (= equalization of abilities)? Even if unequal
treatment is justified by the concept of equality, what criteria can we use to decide the relative
allocation of resources?

In other words, start with the sorts of questions that administrators (or at least, reflective
administrators) ask themselves. These are the questions these people will have to (or ought to have
to) grapple with when they are doing their future job, and you are showing them how they can
harness philosophical thinking and insights to do that job better.

Tim Sprod