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Education is a contested topic, and not just politically. For years scholars have approached it from two different points of view: one empirical, focused on explanations for student and school success and failure; and the other philosophical, focused on education's value and purpose within the larger society. Rarely have these separate approaches been brought into the same conversation. This book does just that, offering an intensive discussion by scholars across empirical and philosophical disciplines. The contributors explore how the institutions and practices of education can support democracy by creating the conditions for equal citizenship and egalitarian empowerment, and how they can advance justice by securing social mobility and cultivating the talents and interests of every individual. They then evaluate constraints on achieving the goals of democracy and justice in the educational arena, and identify strategies that we can employ to work through or around those constraints. More than a thorough compendium on a timely and contested topic, the book exhibits an entirely new, deeply composed way of thinking about education as a whole and its importance to a good society.

Homeschooling—pervasive in colonial times, an anomaly a half century ago, today a national movement—now has a two-faced nature, one ugly and threatening as seen by critics, the other beautiful and wholesome in defenders’ eyes. The reality is that today it is no one thing. Nearly two million American families are doing it, for a great variety of reasons and with a widely divergent range of approaches, by parents whose abilities also vary considerably. The authors posit that homeschooling can be for many children far superior educationally to what the local public schools offer, but also that it can be grossly deficient academically and serve as a cover for serious child maltreatment. After presenting a nuanced historical account of how the practice and public policy of homeschooling has evolved from America’s earliest years to the present, the book analyzes what stance the state ought to take today toward the practice, in light of its potential to be wonderful or worrisome.

This book is ultimately about a puzzle: a puzzle about how to understand the nature of the deep disagreement about affirmative action, and beyond that, what to do about it. Relying on deliberative democratic theory, it makes a strong and well-reasoned argument for the deep democratic value of policy dialogue and deliberation to help citizens work through the moral disagreement about affirmative action and other controversial education policies, often having to do with issues of race and ethnicity. Both critics and defenders of affirmative action use the ideal of equality to make their–opposing–arguments about affirmative action policy. This highlights a central issue in the acrimonious debates over race-conscious affirmative action: how can citizens make sense of the policy within a sociopolitical context where both supporters and opponents use the same language to defend or critique it? Given this question, the book is not meant to be another defense of affirmative action. Instead it is a defense of dialogue and deliberation about affirmative action and other controversial race-conscious policies. Disagreements such as these are inevitable in a democracy. Dialogue is important for allowing people to stand in others’ shoes and for seeing each other’s humanity despite disagreement. Such dialogue is the heart of both education and democracy. Maybe dialogue and deliberation will not always (or even often) lead to agreement in policy issues related to moral views, but they have the potential to help us know each other, and understand each other better amidst moral disagreement.

If free market advocates had total control over education policy, would the shared public system of education collapse? Or would school choice revitalize schooling with its innovative force? In either case, would the US make a dramatic break with its past? That’s not only the wrong question—it’s the wrong premise. Market-driven school choices aren’t new. They predate the republic, and for generations parents have chosen to educate their children through an evolving mix of publicly supported, private, charitable, and entrepreneurial enterprises. This process has arguably always been influenced by market forces, especially those of parental demand, and, more recently, by the impact of coordinated corporate and philanthropic influence. The question is not whether to have school choice. It is how to regulate who has which choices in our mixed schooling market—and what we, as a nation, hope to accomplish with those choices. The book examines three key eras in the nation’s educational history – colonial/early republic, late 19th century and post-World War II – and considers three central philosophical considerations toward making a normative assessment of school choice today. The book looks beyond the simple divide between those who oppose government intervention and those who support public education as a way to nurture a democratic, integrated public sphere. Instead, the authors make the case for a structured landscape of choice in schooling, one that protects the interests of children and of society, while also identifying key shared values on which a broadly acceptable policy could rest.

The central question for this book is whether schools should attempt to cultivate patriotism, and if so why, how, and with what conception of patriotism in mind. Through an integrated historical and philosophical approach, the book demonstrates that there have been many and diverse attempts to cultivate patriotism in public schools in the United States and that they have been predicated on different conceptions of patriotism, citizenship, and learning. In order to evaluate the various practices of patriotic education and their underlying assumptions, it addresses the nature of virtue and the motivational foundations of civic responsibility, and it frames a general approach to the ethics of education. It argues that the history of attempts to cultivate patriotism in schools offers both cautionary and positive lessons for the present age of globalization and nativist, populist, and reactionary movements. It concludes that there is a virtuous form of patriotism and that inclusive and enabling just school communities may contribute to its development. Yet, it also concludes that civic virtue is what schools should aim to cultivate, and that civic education should be organized around three components of civic virtue, namely civic intelligence, civic friendship, and civic competence. The book holds that virtuous patriotism is an appropriate responsiveness to a country’s value, and that such responsiveness is one part of civic virtue that is also responsive to what has value beyond one’s own country. It concludes with a defense of collegiate education for global civic friendship, intelligence, and competence in addressing unsolved problems.

It is one thing to lament the financial pressures put on universities, quite another to face up to the poverty of resources for thinking about what universities should do when they purport to offer a liberal education. This book enriches those resources by proposing fresh ways to think about liberal learning with ideas more suited to our times. It does so by defining basic values of modernity and then considering curricular principles pertinent to them. The principles the book favors are powers of the mind—disciplines understood as fields of study defined not by subject matter but by their embodiment of distinct intellectual capacities. To illustrate, the book draws on a lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a summary of exemplary educational thinkers at the University of Chicago who continue to inspire. Out of this vital tradition, the book constructs a paradigm for liberal arts today, inclusive of all perspectives and applicable to all settings in the modern world.