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In this paper, I aim to showcase and texture the reasons why children’s autonomy is a topic worth revisiting in schools. I advance the premise that student autonomy is a necessary condition for well-being and argue that children’s capacities for autonomy are as broad and important as adult capacities and requirements for autonomy. New understandings about the purpose of school education and what it means to be a child yield important implications for, and constraints on, adult entitlements to paternalizing children in schools. In this paper, I outline reasons why, all things considered, a soft-paternalism approach in schools promotes greater student well-being. I offer practical pathways for teachers to take a soft-paternalism approach that views children as powerful thinkers in school classrooms. The takeaway from this view is that children are entitled to determine their own learning and educational goods for well-being to a far greater degree than is currently promoted in schools.

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This paper explores how Hannah Arendt’s view of education as love (1958) can contribute to refreshed perspectives of democratic education. In recent decades, the task of contemporary early childhood education has gradually moved towards an enhanced focus on individual learning and freedom of choice, closely intertwined with an image of the child as an active participant with rights (e.g., Kjørholt, 2012; Sjöstrand Öhrfelt, 2019). The increased emphasis on subject knowledge, measurable achievements, and competition, mainly driven by a neoliberal agenda, is seen to affect and possibly reduce the role of care and democracy within education (e.g., Brogaard Clausen, 2015; Moss, 2017). Arendt’s views on education as love offer a thought-provoking mirror to the changed landscapes of early childhood education. She was critical of the emancipation of children and claimed that, as newcomers, children need to be protected from the world, as well as the world also needing to be protected from the children. Through a theoretical conversation between Arendt and Joan Tronto’s theory of democratic care (2015), I will argue that interdependency and vulnerability need to be acknowledged within contemporary democratic early childhood education, and that allocation of responsibility continues to be an essential issue within education.

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This paper explores some of the perils to American democracy in the age of the Internet, social media, and the filtered bubbles that its citizens inhabit. I open my analysis by revisiting the myth of the Tower of Babel in order to reflect on the insights that can be gleaned for the present state of disinformation. Then I turn to an examination of the notions of polarization and structural stupidity, while tying them to the distinction that C. Thi Nguyen makes between epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. I then argue that the insights of the myth of the Tower of Babel can take us only so far and that an adequate understanding of the current state of affairs in the United States needs to consider the crisis in the authority of knowledge. I base my argument on some insights of philosophers Walter Lippmann and José Ortega y Gasset, who were both concerned about the role of private citizens and the public in the life of a democracy. I conclude this paper by discussing various positions that philosophers of education can take in the age of Babel, while advocating for the need to adopt a probing stance.

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This paper explores the extent to which critique in the educational sciences can be mechanized. This is the case when critique of pedagogical concepts and discourses is entirely determined by the structures and processes of the critique itself. If the process of critique functions independently of the specificity and concreteness of its object, the critique can be called generic and the critical system a trivial, that is, non-dynamic, machine. In these cases, the critique machine is cognitively closed and yields no information about the criticized concepts, structures, or phenomena. The paper argues that this, in fact, represents a significant proportion of critique in the educational sciences. The critique machine, as reconstructed here, consists of a sequence of four process stages. Finally, it is demonstrated that there are structural inconsistencies between these process stages.

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This article proposes anti-currere as a non-philosophical intervention in curriculum theory, drawing on the work of François Laruelle to challenge the field’s foundational obsession with the Real. It argues that curriculum study, despite its surface diversity, remains structurally wedded to a philosophical decision that monopolizes reality by predetermining what is thinkable. Through incisive critique of canonical concepts like the planned/lived curriculum binary, the paper reveals how curricular discourse habitually reproduces the very structures it claims to disrupt. In response, anti-currere is posited as a radical strategy of withdrawal from the decisional compulsions of the field – a minoritarian, non-standard mode of thought that reorients curriculum toward the immanence of the Real rather than its capture. Rather than offering another curriculum-as-x, anti-currere opens a space for stranger, generic curricular thought unbound by the auto-production of identity, representation, and method.