As I write in the spring of 2025, we are in the midst of a crisis in the United States. The crisis is economic, social, political, and legal. One dimension of this crisis is the attack on higher education by the Trump administration. To date, this attack has included:
cuts to funding for … 
democracy
the tactful teacher: a role model for learning democracy
In this essay, I take up the old and still controversial question of whether and to what extent teachers should be considered role models (e.g., Oelkers, 2019; Schütte & Nielsen-Sikora, 2023), and discuss it with reference to the concept of pedagogical tact. I advance two propositions: first, …
editorial: education in times of war
The odd thing is that no matter how much we learn about the horror of war, there are always people eager to be part of it, at least until they have actually experienced it.
Nel Noddings (2012, p. 11)
According to a popular saying, the first casualty of war is truth. In times of war, calls for …
redefining school education and the public sphere in the age of globalization
Rapid globalization and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the 21st century have contributed to transforming education and the public sphere defined by the nation state into a transnational dimension of the public sphere that transcends national boundaries. In particular, the consolidation of …
populism, public education, and a short look at the war
1. Populism
If one is dealing with the subject of public education in a liberal democracy, one must use a language that reaches the public at large and does not confuse them with specialist and technical terminology, in other words a language that is popular that can be understood and used by …
Little Rock, Arkansas. Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison and Danielle Allen on education and the public sphere
On September 4, 1957, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford set off for Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was well aware that she was not wanted there, that she was entering a world in which she should have no place. Three years after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision Brown v. Board …
segregation, caste and cash: segrenomics in Detroit
Introduction
For a brief period in April of 2020, a federal appeals court in the United States declared that public school children in Detroit, Michigan had a constitutionally guaranteed and protected right to a level of education that prepared them to participate in the democratic process as …
quality education and professional teachers
French writer Albert Camus and his mother and brother escaped war-time France and settled in Algeria. His father, who returned to France, was killed in WWI. His mother was illiterate, and the family was very poor. A teacher, Louis Germain, gave young Camus a chance. After receiving the Nobel Prize …