Philosophy of Higher Education

An effective educational leadership philosophy involves mindful adherence to a set of approaches and core beliefs about teaching, learning and work environments. Educational philosophies are as diverse and unique as the individuals who espouse them. My core beliefs about educational leadership are drawn from a wide array of loosely connected concepts and " theories of action " that work in complimentary fashion to facilitate a well-run educational institution that positively impacts teacher effectiveness and student learning. Below I have clustered some key concepts that I embrace because various literatures, and my own research, indicate that they make a difference. In general, I believe the problems of today, dreams for tomorrow, and challenges of the future are best met by positive leaders who are informed, in touch, and involved in facilitating the success of those served. I strive to live and teach this philosophy of leadership in all I do. –XX The ultimate aim of education, as I see it, should be to teach students to use their minds well. In the 21 st century it is imperative that students access, comprehend, evaluate and judiciously act upon information, and then learn to generate and communicate new knowledge. Education at all levels should involve dynamic student-centered learning environments, which spark individual student achievement. Constructivist approaches, such as Active Learning, and Authentic Pedagogies hold much promise for improving student achievement because they emphasize student engagement and application in real-world contexts. When implemented well, on an institutional level, I believe students in social cognitive constructivist programs have numerous advantages over peers in traditional settings because the stimulating learning activities tend to engage and motivate learners. Educational leaders must clearly articulate institutional goals, philosophies and approaches to avoid competing ideologies from within the school from nullifying potential gains and creating cultures that are disjoint and competitive. Educational leaders can magnify the impact of the systems human and other resources by unifying faculty and staff under a common direction and approach. Clearly articulating a philosophical approach (such as social cognitive constructivism) involves critical evaluation and coordination of multiple aspects of the system operations for philosophical consistency, including vision and mission statements, curricula, instructional materials, professional development, programs, policies and practices so that they are aligned to the core tenants of the embraced philosophy. Leaders who dare to take a systemic approach are more likely to unite their staff in thought and action toward common goals. Leadership that Builds Collegiality and Shared Leadership A diverse faculty and staff unified by a common vision and mission is an extremely valuable asset. Team approaches reduce isolation and allow professionals to work collectively to develop the knowledge, skills and resources to meet challenges, while still fostering individuality and unique contributions. Healthy school cultures are typically found in high challenge, high trust, and high engagement work environments, that emphasize collaboration and problem solving. Effective teams can go a long way towards building productive collegial relationships., characterized by non-threatening and respectful professional debate. Shared leadership approaches can also provide faculty with a sense of empowerment and purpose, as well as providing a mechanism for problem solving. Shared leadership and improvement planning can also give voice to multiple groups within educational communities including students, parents, support staff, sister communities, and such and can increase community support for educational programs. In general, the administrative approach should place a high premium on building a non-competitive collaborative environment. Maintaining high faculty morale and vibrant teams of caring staff is among the most important aspects of school operations, including curricula and policy, because a caring and engaged staff the feels valued will have higher motivation. A motivated, challenged, collegial staff can do more to spark student learning than most any other aspect of operations, thus this must remain a priority of effective educational leaders. Professional Orientation has to do with the attitude and work habits of teachers and staff, and is greatly influenced by leadership priorities and approaches. Teacher norms in schools with a strong Professional Orientation involve assuming personal responsibility for student learning by increasing internal capacity to meet student needs. In school cultures high in Professional Orientation teachers tend to be perpetually preoccupied with finding more and better ways to engage learners. This typically creates a stimulating and vibrant work culture, characterized by highly committed and resourceful teachers with a large repertoire of instructional skills. Frequently, these schools have higher teacher morale and job satisfaction, which is associated with greater teacher retention. I espouse educational leadership styles that structure resources including, time, space, staff schedules, funding and so forth in order to maximize teacher professional learning and exposure to new instructional approaches and resources. Administrative practices that prioritize collaborative planning, ongoing job embedded learning, and in-class peer instructional support are more likely to facilitate higher Professional Orientation. Leadership for Professional Orientation also involves encouraging innovation and learning by trial and error. Routine monitoring and recognition of teacher leadership play crucial roles. Instructional Leadership that involves modeling, mentoring and clinical supervision such as frequent informal class visits and feedback, go a long way toward establishing strong Professional Orientation. Knowledgeable, engaged and supportive leadership over time helps to cultivate a culture where professional learning flourishes. Managing this type of robust culture requires leaders who are well-informed, open-minded, collaborative, flexible, highly involved with teachers, staff and students and are willing to take initiative to build to the intellectual community of the school.

Findings from neuroscience and psychological research reveal that the mind's default state is wandering bearing directly on our well-being. These findings raise difficult questions as to the premises underlying the curriculum rendered as a "mind-altering device" (Eisner, 1993). This paper analyzes the direction of causality between "thinking" and "mind" underlying educational theory and practice. The analysis yields two complementary curriculum strands: (1) the first, concerns a common conception of the curriculum as training the student in how to think. Its direction of causality thus works from thinking to mind as it handles the mind's deliberate thinking (2) The second, reverses the first strand's direction of causality suggesting working from mind to thinking to handle the mind as wanderer. Its defining curriculum question shifts the axis from how to think to whether to think. This curriculum applies mind-altering pedagogies grounded in "contemplative practice" (i.e. mindfulness, yoga, and tai chi).

Lorsqu’on évoque la place des humanités au sein de l’université contemporaine, c’est le terme de « crise » qui revient le plus souvent. Manque de financement, locaux vétustes, effectifs en baisse, débouchés professionnels incertains, perte de légitimité en vue des objectifs de productivité de l’université, les humanités ne semblent plus à leur place au sein de l’institution universitaire contemporaine. Mais si les humanités sont qualifiées comme étant en crise, cela signifie également qu’elles ont connu un âge d’or, un point de référence vers lequel on fait signe lorsqu’on déplore la situation actuelle. Ainsi, notre propos consistera à partir de cet âge d’or, soit le moment de la fondation de l’Université de Berlin en 1807, pour ensuite réfléchir sur l’impact des transformations de l’institution universitaire (démocratisation, professionnalisation, etc.) vis à vis de cette place initiale des humanités. En ouverture, nous explorerons plusieurs perspectives pratiques nous permettant de penser l’avenir des humanités.

I det här arbetet undersökte jag tre olika författares syn på det postmoderna: Alexandr Dugins, Jean- François Lyotards och Zygmunt Baumans. Vidare undersökte och diskuterade jag deras syn på postmodernitetens inverkan på kunskap och bildningsfrågor och de utmaningar den för med sig.
Undersökning har visat att världen har trätt in i en ny tidsålder – postmoderniteten som påverkade både kunskapssynen, vetenskapen och utbildningen i hela världen. Detta ledde till en kris inom nämnda området, eftersom modernitetens modeller och metoden har visat sig föråldrade. Krisen berörde frågan om legitimering av kunskapen och därmed vetenskapen. Situationen kräver därför nya, annorlunda modeller och tillvägagångssätt inom dessa områden som vore relevanta för vår tids utmaningar och detta arbetar man på i alla länder.

While arguably a well-established principle governing university life, academic freedom is also frequently an object of dispute. The controversies often concern such basic questions as the very meaning of the term, its range of application, its relation to other principles (for example, institutional autonomy) or arrangements (e.g., tenure) in higher education, and sometimes even its desirability. This article seeks to provide a systematic introduction to the topic, all the while stressing the complex nature of academic freedom. Its final section addresses directly the relationship between university administrators and academic freedom in light of some of the recent changes in global higher education.

In this article I critically discuss Professor Oladele Abiodun Balogun's reflections on the proper final ends of doing philosophy and related sorts of abstract, speculative, or theoretical inquiry. Professor Balogun appears to argue that one should undertake philosophical studies only insofar as they are likely to make a practical difference to people's lives, particularly by contributing to politico-economic development, or, in other words, that one should eschew seeking knowledge for its own sake. However, there is one line of thought from Professor Balogun, about philosophy being able to make life meaningful, that I argue ultimately-perhaps contrary to his intentions-entails that it can be appropriate to some degree to pursue philosophy that is unlikely to ameliorate poverty and similar social ills. My central aims in this article are to identify Professor Balogun's strongest argument against pursuing any knowledge for its own sake and to argue that an appeal to meaningfulness constitutes a strong, competing reason to seek out some of it.

À quoi sert l’étude de la philosophie? Quels sont les débouchés professionnels de cette formation? Voici deux questions auxquelles ne peut pas échapper tout étudiant en philosophie. Elles révèlent une interrogation contemporaine récurrente sur l’applicabilité de l’enseignement de la philosophie que ce soit au niveau social, économique ou professionnel. De façon plus large, elles illustrent une opposition souvent faite au sein de l’université actuelle entre un savoir dit théorique et un savoir dit appliqué. Cette opposition laisse pourtant de côté une troisième forme de savoir, qui ne se limite pas au savoir appliqué, soit à l’acquisition de techniques: le savoir pratique. Ce savoir, tel que défendu par les philosophes de l’idéalisme allemand, est un savoir qui nous forme, nous oriente, guide nos actions.

De fait, lorsque le projet de fondation de l’Université de Berlin fut présenté en 1807 à Fichte, Schleiermacher et Humboldt et que tous les trois placèrent la faculté de philosophie comme élément central de la nouvelle université, ils ne se limitèrent pas à défendre la faculté de philosophie comme apportant un pur savoir théorique. Chacun à leur manière, ils accentuèrent  sur l’apport pratique de cette formation : formation de notre caractère, acquisition d’une vision d’ensemble, meilleure capacité à remplir notre future fonction professionnelle, etc.

Mais qu’en est-il aujourd’hui? Une formation universitaire en philosophie peut-elle continuer à apporter cette orientation pratique? L’éclatement du savoir en facultés spécialisées et le développement des filières professionnelles ne compromettent-elles pas ce rôle initial de la philosophie? Prenant appui sur la pensée des philosophes fondateurs de l’Université de Berlin ainsi que sur la pensée d’Habermas, il va s’agir, dans ce papier d’analyser de quelle façon la faculté de philosophie est à même, aujourd’hui, de répondre aux questions pratiques issues de l’évolution du savoir.

Compared to the few public higher education institutions in the prewar era, postwar Somalia boasts a large number of academic institutions at the tertiary level, mainly as privately owned universities. Although these community-initiated academic establishments are making tremendous contributions to the higher education sector, particularly in the absence of an effective national government, one can argue that much still remains at stake in terms of evaluation and quality assurance, key elements necessary for institutional accreditation and acceptance of credentials by other educational establishments issuing the same level of certificates. In this essay we aim to provide an overview discussion of the trends of higher education in Somalia and the way forward for newly emerged institutions, which have taken the bold initiative of changing the landscape of Somalia’s higher education.

Concomitant with the rise of rationalizing accountability in higher education has been an increase in theoretical reflection about the forms accountability has taken and the ones it should take. The literature is now peppered by a wide array of distinctions (e.g. internal/external, inward/ outward, vertical/horizontal, upward/downward, professional/public, political/economic, soft/ hard, positive/negative), to the point that when people speak of ‘accountability’ they risk speaking past one another, having some of these distinctions in mind and not others. Furthermore, often these distinctions are vague and cross-cut each other in ways that are as yet unclear. The field could benefit from having a comprehensive framework in which to place these distinctions and to view their relations. My aim in this article is to provide an analytical tool by which to classify important debate about what accountability in higher education has been and ought to be. Beyond organizing such debate, this schema will serve the purposes of revealing ambiguities in terms, conflations of ideas, assumptions that warrant questioning, and gaps in present research agendas.

Аннотация. Введение. Упрочение разносторонних связей с Китайской Народной Республикой-в настоящее время одно из приоритетных направле-ний внешней политики Российской Федерации. Новые возможности для ак-тивного конструктивного взаимодействия между странами, по мнению авто-ра статьи, открывает мегапроект «Один пояс, один путь» («ОПОП»), иницииро-ванный Китаем с целью объединения усилий государств для стабильного раз-вития экономики на евразийском пространстве и мирного сосуществования народов на основе принципов открытости, инклюзивности разных цивилиза-ций, толерантности, безопасности, обоюдной выгоды и обучения. Цель публикации-обсуждение состояния и перспектив российско-ки-тайского сотрудничества в гуманитарной области и поиск его новых форматов. Методология и методы. Исследование выполнялось с опорой на обще-философские и общенаучные методы: сравнительный, структурно-функци-ональный и системный виды анализа, синтез, обобщение и прогнозирование. Результаты и научная новизна. Рассмотрена специфика российско-ки-тайских контактов последнего времени. Особое внимание уделено коммуни-кациям в сфере образования-надежным и проверенным каналам установле-ния и консолидации межнациональных экономических связей. Образователь-ная составляющая гуманитарного взаимодействия способна предоставить действенный инструментарий для налаживания и поддержки международно-го диалога и располагает обширным спектром возможностей для гармониза-ции культурных, социальных и даже политических стандартов. Подчеркивается, что дальнейшему наращиванию темпов продуктивно-го двустороннего взаимодействия КНР и РФ мешает его сложившаяся модель, которая строится и функционирует преимущественно на уровне государ

'Universalist' moral principles have fallen into disfavour because too often they have been pretexts for unilateral impositions upon others, whether domestically or internationally. Too widely neglected has been Kant's specifically Critical re-analysis of the scope and character of rational justification in all non-formal domains, including the entirety of epistemology and moral philosophy, including both justice and ethics. Rational judgment is inherently normative because it is in part constituted by our self-assessment, of whether the considerations we now integrate into a candidate judgment have been integrated as they ought, so as to form a cogent, justifiable judgment. Constitutive of this self-assessment is that rational judgments must be based upon considerations which can be communicated to all others, such that they too can assess them as sufficiently cogent justification; also constitutive of this rational self-assessment is that we actually engage with others who do assess our judgments. Kant's Critical principles rule out in principle any unilateral imposition upon others, whether in cognition or morals. Using Kant's Critical principles and methods in connection with 'practical anthropology' and the enormously important domain of acquired rights and obligations shows how Kant had already justified fundamentally universal principles of justice which can be institutionalised in variously distinctive cultures, and which form the proper bases for our acquired, specifically social rights and obligations, including those of friendship and community. (7.04.16)

[ The original PhD dissertation may be read and authenticated from the website of the University of Newcastle, NSW, at http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/804346 ]

This thesis argues that foreign and second language teaching productivity can only reach its proper potential when it is accorded priority, second only to language learner productivity, amongst the many competing productivities which are always asserted by stakeholders in educational institutions.

A theoretical foundation for the research is established by examining the historical concept of productivity, and its more recent manifestation as knowledge worker productivity, especially as applied to teachers.

The empirical basis of the thesis is sourced from a chronological series of twenty biographical case studies in language teaching venues in Australia, New Zealand, Oceania and East Asia. The biographical case study methodology, although rare in applied linguistics, is justified by reference to its wide and growing application in other fields of qualitative research. The case studies are analysed for common patterns of productivity, as well as teaching productivity inhibition or failure.

It was affirmed across all of the case studies without exception that external parties could not control or even reliably predict what individual students might learn, and how well, from instances of instructed language teaching. This was regardless of the power of institutional players, external resources, curriculums or the teacher. Student belief in the immediate value of what was to be learned in a given lesson, and personal confidence in an ability to learn it were the most critical factors.

Teaching productivity was found to turn, ultimately, on the teacher's ability to influence the probability of student learning. The teacher could best influence learning probability by enhancing student motivation. The most effective environments for teaching productivity were seen to be those where the teacher was professionally equipped and politically enabled to exercise judgements which maximized opportunities for student language learning productivity. A negotiated pact concerning both curriculum and method often proved effective, especially with mature students, and at times required some deception of institutional authorities.

Empirically, the encouragement of reciprocal learning relationships between teacher and students was found to be powerfully enabling for language teaching productivity in the case studies.

In many venues a small but effective minority of 'intimate learners' were also able to leverage their language learning productivity by forging more personal relationships with the teacher.

The wider cultural paradigm within each of the countries represented in the case studies sanctioned different paths and limitations for both language learners and teachers, and hence was seen to influence teaching productivity in critical ways. It was found that under certain conditions, notably (but not exclusively) those prevailing in many East Asian educational institutions, that certification of foreign language skills had a higher cultural, employment and monetary value than the actual ability to exercise foreign language skills.

A negative influence on teacher productivity in many of the case studies was an ignorance about language learning and teaching amongst institutional players. The disregard of language teacher professionalism was fed by a belief that being able to speak a language was all that was necessary to teach it, and reinforced by misinterpreting the meaning of test results. Related to this, an imbalance of power relationships between teachers or students with other institutional interests was consistently found to interfere with teaching and learning productivities. Overall, the model of productivity understood in institutions instanced by the case studies tended to reflect a 19th Century economic paradigm of capital, raw materials (students) and labour (dispensable classroom workers) rather than any more sophisticated grasp of knowledge worker productivity.

It was demonstrated in the context of the case studies that productivity, and in particular knowledge worker productivity, is a complex concept whose facets require detailed analysis to arrive at a proper understanding of the role that foreign and second language teachers play in educational institutions.

This article engages two established modes of analyzing Tocqueville’s theory in Democracy in America—the institutionalism of Volume 1 and the “art of association” of Volume 2—to argue for the importance of a Platonic theme in Tocqueville, that of education for leadership. After establishing why Tocqueville argues that democracy struggles to cultivate quality leadership, the article turns to examining one proposed solution: education in the classical humanities. Tocqueville’s argument for this pedagogy is overtly aristocratic, in contrast to many contemporary arguments for liberal education. Following this logic carefully permits us to understand another aspect of Tocqueville’s characteristic effort to incorporate aristocratic elements into democratic society and challenges us to reconsider our own role as educators.

A philosophy is a set of principles based on one’s values and beliefs that are used to guide one's behaviors.  Even though your educational philosophy may not be clearly defined, it is the basis for everything you do as a teacher (DeCarvalho, 1991).  It guides your decision making, influences how you perceive and understand new information, and determines your goals and beliefs.  An educational philosophy outlines what you believe to be the purpose of education, the role of the student in education, and the role of the teacher.

This essay intends to create a path forward for philosophical work in higher education that is sensitive to the discursive, organizational, economic, epistemic, and political cultures of the institution. This essay will therefore not provide a grand theory of higher education that might be overlaid onto university practice. Instead, as we will argue, any viable philosophy of higher education must not only recognize but also be prepared to account for and harness the heterogeneity of theoretical, organizational, economic, epistemic, and professional perspectives that are the ground of institutions of higher learning.

Abstract: This paper considers the reasons for the comparatively negative progression rates for international students in
the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Sydney over the past five years in light of data from the MASUS
(measuring academic skills of university students) diagnostic language test, the Student at Risk program run in the Faculty
over the past three years and the seventeen years experience of the author working in the area of language and learning in
Australian universities. The results show that although language is a major factor, other factors ranging from government
policy to time management have a marked effect on the relationship between academic standards and the culturally diverse
university.
Keywords: Language and Learning, Students at Risk

Cicero was a central figure for the development of John Henry Newman‘s thought. After Aristotle, he is the main source of inspiration for Newman‘s idea of liberal education. This paper examines in detail how Newman made profit of his ethical and rhetorical thought vis-à-vis an analysis of the various passages from Cicero‘s works that Newman quotes, or refers to in his Dublin Writings. In the second section I discuss how Cicero symbolises the excellence of intellectual activity, but also the limits of the man educated outside the Christian faith. In Newman‘s view, Cicero represents the best specimen of the liberal, educated man.

This article is a practically minded reflection that uses the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to examine the ways in which British doctoral students can transform their research interests into academic capital that connects to a viable network of like-minded scholars.

The  study  investigated new  teachers ́  soft  skills  and  productivity  in  senior  secondary  schools  in  Rivers State, Nigeria.Threeresearch  questions  were  answered  while  threenull  hypotheses  were  tested  at  0.05  alpha  levelof significance.  The  theory  was  anchored  on  Social  Learning  Theory  by  Albert  Bandura  in  1977.  The  study  adopted  a correlational research design. Thepopulation comprised all of the 268 government owned Secondary Schools in Rivers State with 8452 teachers. The sample size for this study was 470 representing 5.56% of the population size using the Taro Yamane formula. Proportionate stratified random sampling technique was used to draw the 470 respondents from the strata. Two sets of instruments titled New Teachers’ Soft Skills Questionnaire (NTSSQ) and Productivity of Teachers Questionnaire (PTQ) were used for data collection. Face and content validities were ensured by experts. The reliability coefficient of the NTSSQ and PTQ were 0.90 and 0.88 with the use of Cronbach alpha.Multiple regression and Pearson Product Moment correlation coefficient were used to answer the research questions. ANOVA associatedwith multiple regression and z-ratio were used to test  the  null  hypotheses  at  0.05  alpha  level  of  significance.It  was  found  that emotional  intelligence  and  teamwork have  a significant positive high relationship of 0.746 with productivity in secondary schools in Rivers State. It  was recommended among others that the school principals should remember that the teachers are their colleagues and should avoid the use of offensive and abusive words that are capable and culpable of distorting teachers’ emotion.

This article addresses the conceptual challenges of articulating the ethical–political limits of ‘higher education as we know it’, and the practical challenges of exploring alternative formations of higher education that are unimaginable from within the dominant imaginary of the higher education field. This article responds to the contemporary conjuncture in which possible futures have been significantly narrowed, and yet these possibilities also appear increasingly unsustainable and unethical. It invites scholars of higher education to rethink the epistemological and ontological frames within which most imaginaries and institutions of higher education are embedded. If we fail to denaturalize these frames, then efforts to pluralize possible higher education futures will risk reproducing existing conceptual limitations and enduring colonial harms.

The current crises in education are indeed acute, though they have been long in the making, with clear analysis and evidence of their development and pending problems over the past 150 years! – evident in this concise chronological bibliography: (updated: 4.07.2022)

While it can easily be documented that the Indigenous peoples of Canada have had to deal with unfair policies in terms of their children’s educational treatment over the last century, it can also be shown that several incoming ethnic communities have suffered similar circumstances. This paper will demonstrate that parallel restrictive educational policies and practices foisted on Canada’s First Nations by the Canadian government during the past century parallel those suffered by Mennonites, Doukhobors, and Hutterites. In most cases public sentiment has demonstrated a consensus of nonchalance pertaining to unfair regard for these groups by the Canadian government.

The English title of this dissertation is The Politics of Cultivation : Martha Nussbaum, Antiquity and the Practice of Philosophy


The Politics of Cultivation is a study on how the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum actualizes Ancient political philosophy to re-negotiate core assumptions in her own contemporary ethical-political discussions. The aim is to explore the potentiality Nussbaum discerns in Ancient philosophy and how this potentiality is actualized in her thoughts on cultivation as a critique of what she sees as reductive cultures of knowledge. Also, I highlight what Nussbaum’s philosophical practice can contribute to a Swedish discourse on bildning as resistance. Following Nussbaum’s philosophy of cultivation from her first articles on Heraclitus in 1972 to her recent work, I focus on how she emphasizes the role of sensibility, sexuality and emotions for reason. The thesis is divided in six chapters. The first chapter gives an overview of cultivation as a recurrent theme throughout Nussbaum’s authorship. In the second chapter I explore her reading of Heraclitus and how this reading highlight her philosophy of cultivation. The third and fourth chapters study how Nussbaum mobilizes Plato and Aristotle to point at some of the problems she finds at the core of her contemporary political philosophy. The fifth chapter investigates how Nussbaum renegotiates Stoic and Epicurean philosophy in her defence of a therapeutic philosophical approach. The last chapter exposes how aesthetical, ethical and political dimensions are weaved into Nussbaum’s thoughts on cultivation. Here, I study her reading of two tragedies and one comedy, showing how Nussbaum’s philosophical practice can be understood as an art of memory.

Set in a contemporary, Swedish discussion on bildning [Bildung], and the role of education for liberal democracy, I argue that Nussbaum lay bare the constructed division between education and self-formation where she calls for the urgency to scrutinize educational politics and educational practice. Hence, what Nussbaum emphasizes, is that everywhere people meet, we are already embedded in a process of cultivation of thoughts, emotions and perceptions. The central question on how we can live together in a pluralistic world will thus have different answers depending on what can be seen and heard within the epistemological and political regulation of the sensible. Nussbaum’s politics of cultivation insists not only on being a gadfly on the back of power, but also to change the political structures from a reductive masculinity to the dialectics of love.

സർവകലാശാലകൾക്ക് സാമൂഹത്തോട് പ്രതിബന്ധത ഉണ്ടാകണം എന്നത് അക്കാദമികപരിമിതിയെ ന്യായീകരിക്കുന്ന പ്രത്യയശാസ്ത്രമാണ്. സമൂഹത്തിന്റെഅ ആപേക്ഷികമായ ആവശ്യങ്ങളുടെ അപ്പുറത്തേക്ക് അറിവിനെ കൊണ്ടുപോകാനാകാത്ത പരിമിതിയുടെ ന്യായീകരണമാണ് ഈ പ്രത്യയശാസ്ത്രം. ഈ പ്രത്യശാസ്ത്രം അറിവിൻറെ വളർച്ചക്ക് തടസ്സമാണ്. ഈ പ്രത്യയശാസ്ത്രത്തിൽ നിന്നും സർവകലാശാലകൾ വിമോചിക്കണം. സർവകലാശാലകളുടെ പ്രതിബന്ധത അറിവിനോട്, അറിവിനോട് മാത്രം ആകണം. അക്കാലത്തേ ഇന്ത്യയിലെ സർവകലാശാകളെ കൊണ്ട് സമൂഹത്തിന് ഗുണമുണ്ടാകൂ.

"This is a book on both universities and higher education in general at the turn of the millennium. The last 20 years is only a very tiny part of the history of universities.
Contents:
Chapter 1: Reconsidering European higher education:
massification, Europeanisation and globalisation
Chapter 2: Reconsidering quality: efficiency vs. confidence
Chapter 3: On higher education governance
Chapter 4: The transition
Chapter 5: University and democracy: knowledge and power
Chapter 6: Higher education as a public responsibility
Chapter 7: Beyond the transition: eutopia?"

In this thesis I explore the place of the actualized utopian American alternative community of higher learning within a philosophy of human culture. I carry out such a study in order to articulate a unifying description of movement; to find the “target” that orients the activity of actualized utopia, as opposed to a classificatory rule to define a mechanically determined utopian-object.  Although these communities have varied in practice since the first generation of them were created in the mid-nineteenth century, I argue that they have played, and continue to play, a particular role in America. They imagine what a world beyond their own could look like; and through their resistance to the perceived status quo (on which they rely for their identity), they prefigure a world that could be. Although this world never comes fully into existence, the actualization  (i.e., the process of becoming a dynamic symbolic product of culture) of these communities illuminates new possibilities for human life in the larger culture. While these actualized utopian communities often live long beyond their pre-figurative years, paradoxically their practices largely stay the same. A resistance to the perceived modern culture, and a vision of a world that offers more opportunities for life and dignity, has made these communities places that cultivate persons with a sense of agency. These communities create a sense of active consciousness; they create people who believe the world is changeable. An open humanistic and personalistic theodicy is what distinguishes these schools from a cult of domination, or an organization bent on a utopia that depersonalizes and dehumanizes the opportunities of others in service of a singular vision.

Most of the objections to Bloom's Taxonomy have been offered by those who share fundamental philosophical views with Bloom and others such as Piaget and Skinner.  A few do offer something like my objection here, that the separation between higher learning skills and memory is a hoax.  There is also a problem about the relation between examples and abstraction.  This is an early draft.

Contemplative pedagogy focuses on creating a sense of presence within educators to effectively educate the whole person through mindfulness in teaching. As I engage in a self-study, I develop initial components for the way I employ contemplative pedagogy. I aim to understand myself as an educator in order to teach effectively. One way to enable particular kinds of understandings is through self-study methodology. The foundational framework that develops through my ongoing self-study may interest those who are unfamiliar with the terrain of contemplative pedagogy. For the purposes of this article, I place an emphasis on the philosophy and ethics classes that I taught at Middlesex County College in New Jersey, although I teach several classes on many campuses.

My philosophical method requires me to engage in a self-study of my teaching practices. My project involves self-study as a philosophical research methodology that aims to inform educators and rethink the theories and praxis of teaching. As I work towards improvement- aimed pedagogy, I make myself vulnerable as I share my experiences with my Peer Scholar. My Peer Scholar, which some researchers call a “critical friend”, deliberates with me to challenge epistemological assumptions along with suspicions.

The self-study dialogue with my Peer Scholar causes me to define initial components of how I engage in an improvement-aimed contemplative pedagogy. My hope is to support those who wish to implement contemplative pedagogy in higher education as I relate my working framework based on the themes that developed from the deliberation. The components in the article that convey how I engage in contemplative pedagogy are not meant to serve as a checklist or stern procedure for classroom activities. I share these components as aspects of my contemplative pedagogy, with suggestive scripts, not as a rigid structure but rather as a work in progress that is always under construction.

This review essay discusses Bryan Van Norden’s book Taking Back
Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. Van Norden analyzes the situation
in which the West deprives philosophies from other cultural traditions of
their philosophical nature, as well as the cultural and political conditioning of this problem. Van Norden convincingly demonstrates implicit racism hidden behind philosophy curricula, which is supported by increasing nationalism in both Europe and the United States. Although his book is not radical enough in multiculturalizing philosophy, it successfully combines the approach of an academician with a practical response to the social demands of our times.