Relocating respect and tolerance: A practice approach in empirical philosophy

Respect and tolerance are key values in education. They are also among the aims of education and are brought to the foreground in educational policy. We argue that these values are neither philosophically nor politically given aims for which education is a means. Instead, respect and tolerance are enacted and negotiated through educational practices. We emphasize that respect and tolerance should be empirically and critically studied in educational practices. The discussion is based in two previous research projects and the material includes interviews with teachers and students and classroom observations. Moral philosophy is positioned as a conversation partner with the data material. We conclude that respect and tolerance are performed in different modes in practice. These two values cannot be understood as individual cognitive aspects but as multimodal processes and as aspects of collective, bodily and material practices. This article provides a contribution to the theorizing about educating for respect and tolerance.     

Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth

Buckminster Fuller’s experiences in the Navy became a model for his ecological design projects and suggestions for the global management of ‘Spaceship Earth’. Inspired by technocratic ideas of the 1930s, Fuller envisaged, in the 1970s, an elitist world without politics, in which designers were at the helm, steering the planet out of its environmental crises.

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