CFP: 6th Philosophy of Education Conference 2018

Moral and Political Education

January 11-13, 2018

Confirmed Speakers

Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University, USA

David Hansen, Teachers College Columbia University, USA

Geoffrey Hinchliffe, University of East Anglia, UK

Kanchana Mahadevan, Mumbai University, Mumbai

Niraja Gopal Jayal, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Paul Standish, UCL Institute of Education, University of London UK

The Philosophy of Education Unit at Azim Premji University invites submissions for its Sixth Annual Philosophy of Education Conference to be held in January 2018, in Bangalore, India.

The Philosophy of Education (PoE) Conference will be held from January 11 to 13, 2018, and will have Moral and Political Education as its theme. The overall conference theme of Moral and Political Education is elaborated below. We expect that potential contributors will find diverse ways to relate what we say here to their interests, thereby enriching the pool of ideas under discussion.

The view that education is an essential ingredient of a good life and character, or a means to import or restore values and meaning in social life, may be found in different guises in various  philosophical traditions. In Western antiquity, Plato understood education as aiming at initiation into the rational practices that make up our moral and political lives.

If it makes sense to speak of education as involving a renewal or transmission of knowledge, skills and perspectives from one generation to the next, then it makes sense to hold that an important chunk of what is transmitted consists of moral and political values. It would be fair to suppose that such values help the members of any community to organize various aspects of their lives.

Such a “transmission of values” is necessarily open-ended in the sense that values that fail the test of adaptability to novel conditions must necessarily lapse or be updated. The conditions that Plato’s Republic responded to were very unlike the conditions under which Rousseau wrote Émile. Likewise, the theorizing of political  education in a twenty-first century democratic society occurs in a space shaped by such realities as imbalances of income and socio-political opportunities, multiculturalism, militaristic and fascistic nationalisms, global warming and climate change, and refugee crises across the globe. Conceptions of the good life today must reckon with complex political and economic legacies, social relations defined by schisms of gender, caste, race, class and ability. Recent events in the world have also made it imperative for us to address the conflict between the mutually opposed stances of universal acceptance of liberal values, and skepticism concerning the possibility of those values.

Under such complex circumstances as outlined above, how might we conceptualize, implement or evaluate proposals for moral and political education? For starters, how might what gets cast as “value education” in the Indian school curriculum be prised apart conceptually from what one might identify as moral, civic or citizenship education? What ought to be the shape of a program of moral education in a secular democratic society? How might the initiation of children into the morally and politically significant practices of a community be meshed with such aims of education as the development of reason or of numeracy and literacy? Just what is it to initiate children into these practices: how should one characterize the educational processes that aim to produce individuals sensitive to moral rights and duties?

What precisely does education for citizenship have to do with the development of a moral and political sense in children? What might education for peace, or human rights education have to do with developing a moral or political conscience?

Submissions on any topic related to the themes of moral and political education are welcome. We encourage papers from research scholars and young faculty working in Education, Philosophy, Psychology and Political Theory. Papers (suitable for a 25-30 minute presentation, and no longer than 5,000 words) should be submitted via the system of online submission on our website by September 15, 2017. The system will be opened for submissions on May 1st 2017. All papers must be prepared for blind review and include a short abstract (350-500 words). Communication on acceptance of papers will be made by email to the authors on or before November 15, 2017.

For further inquiry please write to us at- [email protected]

For more details visit www.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/poe