This book examines the role of teaching within public education. It critiques its function in today’s educational policies and theories and establishes an alternative way of understanding teaching. It explores teaching from within a Sophist tradition of educational practice and thought.
The first part of the book discusses the vital link between public education and democracy, the shifts in schooling’s role in fostering competition and comparisons at the cost of social responsibility and democratisation. It identifies the driving force of those shifts as forces of aggression and destruction, central to a neoliberal ideology. The second part of the book argues for a practice of Sophistical teaching rather than Socratic teaching. It explores in-depth what it could mean to be teaching in an up-to-date sophist tradition of educational thought and practice.
The book also includes insights for teaching to counter aggressive forces of nationalism, racism, and late capitalism’s violence and the escalating climate crisis. Readers will be able to understand teaching within educational thought and precisely how different teaching forms can contribute to education as democratisation.
Table of Content
Chapter 1 The Free Time of Education.- Chapter 2 School Failure, Violence and Democratic Possibilities in Education.- Chapter 3 Aristocratic Versus Democratic Principle of Education.- Chapter 4 Socratic Versus Sophist Teaching.- Chapter 5 A Sophistical Practice of Teaching.- Chapter 6 Conclusion.
About the author
Carl Anders Säfström is a professor of educational research, and director of the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy, Faculty of Social Sciences at Maynooth University, Ireland, since November 2017. His research interests include educational history, philosophy and theory, focusing on the relations between democracy, public education, and school for all. He particularly explores teaching, responsibility, equality, emancipation and change as defining practices for an educational discourse. He is deeply engaged in social justice issues concerning education. Professor Säfström has up to date published 10 books, 27 chapters in edited volumes, and 57 articles in scientific journals, 73 peer-reviewed contributions to conferences and is regularly invited internationally to give talks and keynotes in his areas of expertise. Professor Säfström has recently been honoured with a three-year adjunct professorship at University of South Australia. He is also an affiliated professor of Education at Malmö University, Sweden.
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