Thinking Beyond The Curriculum
Read More“The pandemic has shown just how flimsy “the way things are” actually are. From basic norms of social interaction to entire economic systems, COVID-19 has unwittingly acted as the liberating hand breaking the chains of Plato’s epistemological prisoner and dragging them out of the cave and into the light…This isn’t, however, a post about the coronavirus…“
Read More“As a philosopher it’s hard to follow the logic around Covid policy because in many cases there simply isn’t any. There is only the illusion of logic. A symbolic nod to a vague sense of health and safety which doesn’t dare follow its own argument to a conclusion for fear of what that conclusion might say.“
Read More“Before the lockdown came, we had borrowed three books from the local library. As I started the car engine to drive to work on Tuesday morning, one of the three books still remains unopened.”
Read More“It doesn’t take a logician to see the problems with the Department for Education’s plan for secondary schools this September, but it can help to crystallise the specific flaws by laying out the argument carefully.”
Read More“As a philosopher, especially a philosopher interested in ethics, it was the latest in a list that feels far too long of moral wrongs surrounding the industry that it feels increasingly impossible to turn a blind eye towards. I have been a fan since April of 1992, but this may have been the month wrestling and I finally have to part ways.”
Read More“To re-open schools before it is safe to do so is to mistake the purpose of schools and ignore how fundamentally transformed a “Covid-secure” school will be from the schools we knew before. With no obvious benefit for returning to the socially distanced classroom before it is safe to do so, we must, as both teaching professionals and as a wider society, ask the question of what we are trying to achieve with the push to reopen our schools? “
Read More“When the stakes are this high (life and death) we need to be able to separate nostalgia and sentiment for what is sensible and what is necessary. “
Read More“I feel strangely trapped in my own home, and yet my life this last month looks little different to the life I lived before lockdown.”
Read More“the world has changed. And here are the questions arising to me as it does…”
Read More“In the name of public health, but also sense and logic, we must close all UK schools now.”
Read More“Doing the right thing only becomes hard when we have constructed a world which puts embedded obstacles in the way of doing so.”
Read More“Possibly our lack of ethical concern about the spreading of diseases, speaks to our larger ethical deficit when it comes to sacrificing our own immediate pleasures for the greater good of others: the clothing that we want despite the potential bad treatment of workers who made them; the holiday that we want despite the environmental impact of our journey; the social media we enjoy despite the potential epistemic breakdown it is causing for many of our civilisation-sustaining institutions… “
Read More“often neither students or teachers remember the justificatory roots for the powers, privileges and obligations which interplay within the classroom, and that this lack of awareness may well be the source of much student/teacher conflict at school.”
Read More“are those of us in society who chose to be teachers within the current education system actually demonstrating good enough character to be suitable character “role models” for the next generation?”
Read More“A teacher therefore has a duty to model democratic engagement to their students. A teacher not discussing an upcoming election or not having an opinion on the current political situation sends a negative message to their students that political engagement is not important.”
Read More“I think of the Chinese Room often as a teacher, especially around exam season, and wonder how much our obsession with testing has led to a Chinese Room approach to learning?”
Read More“It is now my belief that the inessential, the waste, may be the most important thing in life for ensuring our true wellbeing. Furthermore, it may also ultimately have a knock-on effect of improving the productivity and efficacy of the essential.”