PHL 410: Education and Politics
Professor Trout
This course will examine the political foundations of education and how these interface with epistemological, ontological, phenomenological, metaphysical, and ethical lines of inquiry. We will be addressing concrete issues relating to educational injustices, such as discrimination, oppression, colonialism. The course features thinkers outside of the Western/Global North canon of philosophy. The course also includes some thinkers whose work is “outside” of the discipline of philosophy, as this discipline has typically been construed (and limited) by the Western/Global North tradition. This interdisciplinarity is necessary to overcome ethnocentrism about whose voices count in how knowledge is produced and then taught (within and beyond formal classrooms).
The broad vision of this course is to seek wisdom about education by examining education through a philosophical lens. This lens enables political inflections to be identified amidst what – for many in the Global North – is simply the status quo, the way things are. Special focus will be placed on social justice issues that are often invisible to those who are privileged due to economic class, race, sex, colonialism, and/or other factors.