Read Carl Anders Säfströms article from Philosophical Inquiry in Education, Volume 33 (PDF here)
Description:
This text aims at shifting interest from public education to the publicness of education, and it does so by
discussing the very foundations of education itself. In particular this article explores the difference between
the Sophists’ practice-oriented understanding of education and its autotelic aims, on the one hand, and
Plato’s understanding that education is a tool to perfect the state, on the other hand. I argue that the
Sophist’s understanding of education is more productive for expanding the public meaning of education
beyond the conventional understandings of the public as being tied to the state. This requires a shift from
seeing the state as the only legitimate owner of the goals and aims of education for its people, to a publicness
of education owned by the people themselves.
