This state-of-the-art, comprehensive Handbook fully explores the field of alternative education on an international scale. Alternatives to mainstream schooling and education are becoming increasingly recognised as pertinent and urgent for better understanding what really works in successfully educating children and adults today, especially in light of the increased performance driven and managerially organised economic modelling of education that dominates. For too long we have wondered what "exactly" education done otherwise might look like and here we meet individual examples as well as seeing what alternative education is when a collection becomes greater than the sum of parts. The Handbook profiles numerous empirical examples from around the world of education being done in innovative and excitingly democratic and autonomous ways from Forest Schools and Home Education through to new technologies, neuroscience and the importance of solitude. The book also sets out important theoretical perspectives to inform us why seeing education through an alternative lens is useful as well as urgently needed. Global in its perspective and definitive in content, this one-stop volume will be an indispensable reference resource for a wide range of academics, students and researchers in the fields of Education, Education Policy, Sociology and Philosophy as well as educational practitioners.

The first edition of Nel Noddings' Philosophy of Education was acclaimed as the 'best overview in the field' by the journal Teaching Philosophy and predicted to 'become the standard textbook in philosophy of education' by Educational Theory. This classic text, originally designed to give the education student a comprehensive look at philosophical thought in relation to teaching, learning, research, and educational policy, has now been updated to reflect the most current thinking in the field. A revised chapter on Logic and Critical Thinking makes the topic more accessible to students and examines how critical thinking plays a role in light of the new Common Core standards.Philosophy of Education introduces students to the evolution of educational thought, from the founding fathers to contemporary theorists, with consideration of both analytic and continental traditions. This is an essential text not only for teachers and future teachers, but also for anyone needing a survey of contemporary trends in philosophy of education.

Kids in the Middle: The Micro-Politics of Special Education takes the reader on a fascinating journey through special education in the past, present, and future. On this journey, the micro-politics of special education are seen through the eyes and experiences of children with disabilities, their parents and advocates, adult educators, and school administrators. Supplementing these perspectives to develop an understanding of special education that goes beyond its administrative and political aspects, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), are scholars with expertise in special education law, administration, severe and profound disabilities, ethics, finance, teaching, and disability rights. Together, these voices explain the micro-political issues that affect how children with disabilities are educated. Kids in the Middle promotes a new model of special education to help transform special education. Instead of perpetuating a system grounded in the concepts of promises, privilege, and power, this book considers how to build a system based on caring, compassion, and the common good, a system that will elevate the status of special education children who are lost in the middle.

Criticism is often levied that care ethics is too narrow in scope and fails to extend to issues of social justice. Socializing Care attempts to dispel that criticism. Contributors to the volume demonstrate how the ethics of care factors into a variety of social policies and institutions, and can indeed be useful in thinking about a number of different social problems. Divided into two sections, the first looks at care as a model for an evaluative framework that rethinks social institutions, liberal society, and citizenship at a basic conceptual level. The second explores care values in the context of specific social practices (like live kidney donations) or settings (like long-term care), as a framework that should guide thinking. Ultimately, this collection demonstrates how society would benefit from a more serious engagement with care ethics.

Criticism is often levied that care ethics is too narrow in scope and fails to extend to issues of social justice. Socializing Care attempts to dispel that criticism. Contributors to the volume demonstrate how the ethics of care factors into a variety of social policies and institutions, and can indeed be useful in thinking about a number of different social problems. Divided into two sections, the first looks at care as a model for an evaluative framework that rethinks social institutions, liberal society, and citizenship at a basic conceptual level. The second explores care values in the context of specific social practices (like live kidney donations) or settings (like long-term care), as a framework that should guide thinking. Ultimately, this collection demonstrates how society would benefit from a more serious engagement with care ethics.

In today's high schools, education is often reduced to a means of achieving financial security, leading to an overemphasis on quantifiable measures of performance. This approach encourages academically talented students to focus on test scores and rankings rather than intellectual enrichment, and discourages students with non-academic talents from pursuing them. A Richer, Brighter Vision for American High Schools advocates instead a unifying educational aim of producing better adults, which would encompass all aspects of students' lives: intellectual, physical, moral, spiritual, social, vocational, aesthetic, and civic. Nel Noddings offers suggestions to improve high schools by increasing collegiality among students and faculty, enriching curricula with interdisciplinary themes, renewing vocational education programs, addressing parenting and homemaking, and professionalizing the teaching force. This thought-provoking book will act as an important guide for teachers, teacher educators, administrators, and policy makers.

This book is a collective statement about a new approach to education - the pedagogy of relation. After revisiting a number of existing conversations, the authors bring together several theoretical traditions under the umbrella of the pedagogy of relation. This book is an appeal to develop a common frame of reference for educational approaches based on the primacy of relations in education. The authors try to understand human relations rather than educational processes, behaviours, methods, curriculum, etc. The authors also examine the dangers that a pedagogy of relations may present, and the implications such a pedagogy may have for curriculum and educational policy. The promise of the pedagogy of relation is to offer a viable alternative to dominating trends in educational thinking - trends that emphasize control over teacher and student behaviour as the main way of achieving excellence.

One of the most enduring and controversial issues in American education concerns the place of individual beliefs and moral standards in the classroom. Noddings argues that public schools should address the fundamental questions that teenagers inevitably rasie about the nature, value and meaning of life (and death), and to do so across the curriculum without limiting such existential and metaphysical discussions to separate religion, philosophy or even history classes. Explorations of the existence of a God or gods, and the value and validity of religious belief for societies or individuals, she writes ""whether they are initiated by students or teachers, should be part of the free exchange of human concerns - a way in which people share their awe, doubts, fears, hopes, knowledge and ignorance."" Such basic human concerns, Noddings maintains, are relevant to nearly every subject and should be both non-coercive and free from academic evalution.

Kids in the Middle: The Micro-Politics of Special Education takes the reader on a fascinating journey through special education in the past, present, and future. On this journey, the micro-politics of special education are seen through the eyes and experiences of children with disabilities, their parents and advocates, adult educators, and school administrators. Supplementing these perspectives to develop an understanding of special education that goes beyond its administrative and political aspects, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), are scholars with expertise in special education law, administration, severe and profound disabilities, ethics, finance, teaching, and disability rights. Together, these voices explain the micro-political issues that affect how children with disabilities are educated. Kids in the Middle promotes a new model of special education to help transform special education. Instead of perpetuating a system grounded in the concepts of promises, privilege, and power, this book considers how to build a system based on caring, compassion, and the common good, a system that will elevate the status of special education children who are lost in the middle.

The first edition of Nel Noddings' Philosophy of Education was acclaimed as the 'best overview in the field' by the journal Teaching Philosophy and predicted to 'become the standard textbook in philosophy of education' by Educational Theory. This classic text, originally designed to give the education student a comprehensive look at philosophical thought in relation to teaching, learning, research, and educational policy, has now been updated to reflect the most current thinking in the field. A revised chapter on Logic and Critical Thinking makes the topic more accessible to students and examines how critical thinking plays a role in light of the new Common Core standards. Philosophy of Education introduces students to the evolution of educational thought, from the founding fathers to contemporary theorists, with consideration of both analytic and continental traditions. This is an essential text not only for teachers and future teachers, but also for anyone needing a survey of contemporary trends in philosophy of education.

With numerous examples to supplement her rich theoretical discussion, Nel Noddings builds a compelling philosophical argument for an ethics based on natural caring, as in the care of a mother for her child. In Caring - now updated with a new preface and afterword reflecting on the ongoing relevance of the subject matter - the author provides a wide-ranging consideration of whether organizations, which operate at a remove from the caring relationship, can truly be called ethical. She discusses the extent to which we may truly care for plants, animals, or ideas. Finally, she proposes a realignment of education to encourage and reward not just rationality and trained intelligence, but also enhanced sensitivity in moral matters.

In this book, eminent educational philosopher Nel Noddings and daughter Laurie Brooks explain how teachers can foster critical thinking through the exploration of controversial issues. The emphasis is on the use of critical thinking to understand and collaborate, not simply to win arguments. The authors describe how critical thinking that encourages dialogue across the school disciplines and across social/economic classes prepares students for participation in democracy. They offer specific, concrete strategies for addressing a variety of issues related to authority, religion, gender, race, media, sports, entertainment, class and poverty, capitalism and socialism, and equality and justice. The goal is to develop individuals who can examine their own beliefs, those of their own and other groups, and those of their nation, and can do so with respect and understanding for others' values. Book Features: Underscores the necessity of moral commitment in the use of critical thinking. Offers assistance for handling controversial issues that many teachers find unsettling. Proposes a way for students and teachers to work together across the disciplines.

Eminent educational philosopher Nel Noddings draws on John Dewey's foundational work to reimagine education's aims and curriculum for the 21st century. Noddings looks at education as a multi-aim enterprise in which schools must address needs in all three domains of life: home and family, occupational, and civic. She raises critical questions about the current enthusiasm for standardisation, the search for ''one-best-way'' solutions, and the practice of maintaining a sharp separation between the disciplines. Comprehensive in its scope, chapters examine the liberal arts curriculum, vocational education, restructuring secondary school, extracurricular activities, national and global citizenship, critical thinking, and moral education. Noddings argues that we must find ways to preserve our commitment to democratic values while adapting to the societal changes that have occurred since Dewey wrote Democracy and Education almost a century ago. She urges not only a critical appraisal of current practice but also a cooperative and imaginative exploration of the future.

The need for caregiving is enormous. Thanks to extraordinary advances in medical technology, Americans are surviving illnesses and injuries that would have killed them a generation ago, and more of us are living into our eighties and nineties than ever before. Yet most people over sixty-five live with the burden of one or more chronic illness. The problems created by the caregiving needs of these and other groups are at the center of several of the most explosive political issues of our time: health care, welfare, child care, and family leave. These issues can be resolved, the editors of this volume contend, only when we as a society understand and value the work of caregiving and provide support for professional and family caregivers. The editors of this volume look not only at the financial, emotional, and physical demands of giving and receiving care but at the strengths and rewards inherent in the world of caregiving. This far-reaching book explores the depth and complexity of caregiving, from practice and personal experience, to ethics and policymaking, to home and institutional care.

In this volume, prominent educators join Nel Noddings to address the issue of global citizenship, what this means, and how it should shape curriculum and teaching in K-12 classrooms.

In today's high schools, education is often reduced to a means of achieving financial security, leading to an overemphasis on quantifiable measures of performance. This approach encourages academically talented students to focus on test scores and rankings rather than intellectual enrichment, and discourages students with non-academic talents from pursuing them. A Richer, Brighter Vision for American High Schools advocates instead a unifying educational aim of producing better adults, which would encompass all aspects of students' lives: intellectual, physical, moral, spiritual, social, vocational, aesthetic, and civic. Nel Noddings offers suggestions to improve high schools by increasing collegiality among students and faculty, enriching curricula with interdisciplinary themes, renewing vocational education programs, addressing parenting and homemaking, and professionalizing the teaching force. This thought-provoking book will act as an important guide for teachers, teacher educators, administrators, and policy makers.

There is a huge volume of work on war and its causes, most of which treats its political and economic roots. In Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War, Nel Noddings explores the psychological factors that support war: nationalism, hatred, delight in spectacles, masculinity, religious extremism and the search for existential meaning. She argues that while schools can do little to reduce the economic and political causes, they can do much to moderate the psychological factors that promote violence by helping students understand the forces that manipulate them.

Critical Lessons concentrates on the critical, reflective thinking that should be taught in high schools. Taking seriously the Socratic advice, 'know thyself', it focuses on topics that will help students to understand the forces - good and bad - that work to socialize them. This book argues why critical thinking is necessary in schools because it requires the discussion of critical issues: how we learn, the psychology of war, what it means to make a home, advertising and propaganda, choosing an occupation, gender, and religion.

Critical Lessons concentrates on the critical, reflective thinking that should be taught in high schools. Taking seriously the Socratic advice, 'know thyself', it focuses on topics that will help students to understand the forces - good and bad - that work to socialize them. This book argues why critical thinking is necessary in schools because it requires the discussion of critical issues: how we learn, the psychology of war, what it means to make a home, advertising and propaganda, choosing an occupation, gender, and religion.

In this second edition of her educational text, Noddings suggests that if we make the responsiveness characteristic of caring more basic than accountability, we can accommodate both traditional and progressive preferences in one school system to the benefit of all... especially the children.

In this collection of essential essays, Nel Noddings examines alternatives to prevailing models of character education -- a sympathetic approach based on an ethic of care.

Covering both stories in the classroom and controversial issues in education, Noddings describes the similarities and differences between character education and care ethics...examines how moral education might be infused throughout the curriculum...and calls for greater cooperation across fields and more attention to the practical problems of everyday teaching.

Nel Noddings, one of the central figures in the contemporary discussion of ethics and moral education, argues that caring--a way of life learned at home--can be extended into a theory that guides social policy. Tackling issues such as capital punishment, drug treatment, homelessness, mental illness, and abortion, Noddings inverts traditional philosophical priorities to show how an ethic of care can have profound and compelling implications for social and political thought.
Instead of beginning with an ideal state and then describing a role for home and family, this book starts with an ideal home and asks how what is learned there may be extended to the larger social domain. Noddings examines the tension between freedom and equality that characterized liberal thought in the twentieth century and finds that--for all its strengths--liberalism is still inadequate as social policy. She suggests instead that an attitude of attentive love in the home induces a corresponding responsiveness that can serve as a foundation for social policy.
With her characteristic sensitivity to the individual and to the vulnerable in society, the author concludes that any corrective practice that does more harm than the behavior it is aimed at correcting should be abandoned. This suggests an end to the disastrous war on drugs. In addition, Noddings states that the caring professions that deal with the homeless should be guided by flexible policies that allow practitioners to respond adequately to the needs of very different clients. She recommends that the school curriculum should include serious preparation for home life as well as for professional and civic life.
Emphasizing the importance of improving life in everyday homes and the possible role social policy might play in this improvement, "Starting at Home" highlights the inextricable link between the development of care in individual lives and any discussion of moral life and social policy.

When parents are asked what they want for their children, they usually answer that they want their children to be happy. Why, then, is happiness rarely mentioned as a goal of education? This book explores what we might teach if we were to take happiness seriously as a goal of education. It asks, first, what it means to be happy and, second, how we can help children to understand it. It notes that we have to develop a capacity for unhappiness and a willingness to alleviate the suffering of others to be truly happy. Criticizing our current almost exclusive emphasis on economic well-being and pleasure, Nel Noddings discusses the contributions of making a home, parenting, cherishing a place, the development of character, interpersonal growth, finding work that one loves, and participating in a democratic way of life. Finally, she explores ways in which to make schools and classrooms cheerful places. Nell Noddings is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Emerita, at Stanford University. She is past president of the Philosophy of Education Society and of the John Dewey Society. In addition to twelve books, she is the author of more than 170 articles and chapters on various topics ranging from the ethics of care to mathematical problem solving. Her latest books are Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (University of California Press) and Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education (Teachers College Press), both published in 2002.

When parents are asked what they want for their children, they usually answer that they want their children to be happy. Why, then, is happiness rarely mentioned as a goal of education? This book explores what we might teach if we were to take happiness seriously as a goal of education. It asks, first, what it means to be happy and, second, how we can help children to understand it. It notes that we have to develop a capacity for unhappiness and a willingness to alleviate the suffering of others to be truly happy. Criticizing our current almost exclusive emphasis on economic well-being and pleasure, Nel Noddings discusses the contributions of making a home, parenting, cherishing a place, the development of character, interpersonal growth, finding work that one loves, and participating in a democratic way of life. Finally, she explores ways in which to make schools and classrooms cheerful places. Nell Noddings is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Emerita, at Stanford University. She is past president of the Philosophy of Education Society and of the John Dewey Society. In addition to twelve books, she is the author of more than 170 articles and chapters on various topics ranging from the ethics of care to mathematical problem solving. Her latest books are Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (University of California Press) and Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education (Teachers College Press), both published in 2002.

There is a huge volume of work on war and its causes, most of which treats its political and economic roots. In Loving and Hating War: An Approach to Peace Education, Nel Noddings explores the psychological factors that support war: nationalism, hatred, delight in spectacles, masculinity, religious extremism, and the search for existential meaning. She argues that while schools can do little to reduce the economic and political causes, they can do much to moderate the psychological factors that promote violence by helping students understand the forces that manipulate them.