Since 2013, Poetry in America has evolved as an educational initiative from large, open-enrollment online courses, to a TV series, and a suite of educational programs supporting learners from middle school to adulthood, dual enrollment high school students pursuing college credit, current classroom teachers, and teachers in training. Contextualizing the form and methods of Poetry in America courses in relation to the schoolroom poetry of the past, and critical debates in literary studies about poetry in public, the author suggests that a schoolroom poetry for the present can prepare students to interpret any complex text, while also nurturing creativity, and recentering classrooms, wherever or whatever they are, as essential to civic life.

We conduct the first modern econometric analysis of the historical deaf population in the United States by incorporating deafness into a model of human capital. We find that the deaf population invested less in observable educational and physical human capital. Lower literacy, employment, and occupational scores also suggest that unobserved human capital investments were not substantial enough to improve productivity to the level of the hearing population. States that subsidized schools for the deaf provided deaf people with improved social capital and access to intangible goods that they pursued at the cost of higher economic achievement. Finally, we argue that substantial lifecycle differences between the hearing and deaf populations have implications for unbiased school attendance and employment rate estimation.

The idea of a “public humanities” reflects a specific understanding not only of the humanities as a field of interest or set of disciplines but also of citizens’ needs in a democracy. This understanding was most fully articulated in the United States, where it informed the national understanding of the goals of education that emerged in the aftermath of WWII. What distinguishes the American conception of the humanities from other systems is the place of privilege accorded the activities of interpretation and judgment, and the conviction that these were most effectively inculcated through the study of literature.

While the Institute of Education Science’s ERIC is often recommended for comprehensive literature searching in the field of education, there are several other specialized education databases to discover education literature. This study investigates journal coverage overlaps between four specialized education databases: Education Source (EBSCO), Education Database (ProQuest), ERIC (Institute of Education Sciences), and Educator’s Reference Complete (Gale). Out of a total of 4,695 unique journals analyzed, there are 2,831 journals uniquely covered by only one database, as well as many journals covered by only two or three databases. Findings show that evidence synthesis projects and literature reviews benefit from the careful selection of multiple specialized education databases and that ERIC is insufficient as the primary education database for comprehensive searching in the field.

Since 2021, 18 states in the USA have restricted education on race and structural inequality. Conservative coalitions frame these restrictions as a war on “woke” ideologies. Through interviews with youth and educators in locales (Florida; Georgia; and York, Pennsylvania) that restrict education on race and structural inequality, I investigate the following: What discourses do students and educators use to describe bills that restrict race-related studies? What, if anything, do their discourses suggest about the perceived political implications of these restrictions?

In this study, I argue that gleaning students’ and educators’ views on “anti-woke” legislation sheds light on the perceived political consequences of these bills for American democracy. I find that students and educators perceive restrictions on race-related studies as epistemic injustices that divest society of the knowledge to identify, problematize, and redress the structural conditions that (re)produce racial subordination. For participants, the health of democracy is contingent on addressing racial disempowerment. Hence, they suggest that restrictions on race-related studies encumber democracy precisely because these policies impose epistemologies of racial ignorance that impede racial redress and allow systems of racial inequality to fester.

Education as a thick epistemic concept (ETEC) is a thick epistemology project that highlights the role of education in both epistemic virtues acquisition and motivation. In this article, I argue that ETEC is not satisfactory because it relies on a version of virtue responsibilism (VR) that is also not plausible, in so far as it relies on the premise that both the motivation and the action-guidedness of epistemic and moral virtues are unified. By rejecting this unification premise, I show that an epistemically virtuous person is not necessarily a morally virtuous/caring person either. It might happen to be the case that an epistemically virtuous person is also a morally virtuous person. However, there is no necessary connection between the epistemic and moral virtues as VR and ETEC claim since there can be a sharp gap between their motivation and their action-guidedness. I also argue that there are bad forms of education that can further sharpen the gap between epistemic and moral virtues, further undermining ETEC. Thus, when it comes to education, a thick epistemology project should consider how different forms of education can sharpen the gap in the motivation and the action-guidedness of different types of virtues developed by learners.

This History of Education Society Presidential Address considers Blackfoot education and how psychologist Abraham Maslow attempted to make sense of it after his six-week stay at the Siksika reserve in 1938. Maslow encountered an educated, secure people at Siksika, who had a fully formed system of education grounded in reverence for children, stories, ceremonies, songs, language, humor, land, and connection, all of which had been tested over millennia. Though he might not have been able to interpret what he was seeing and hearing as fully as would a member of the Blackfoot community, what he experienced stuck with him, and can be read as the basis for the theories he presented as the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization. As Maslow learned, Blackfoot history is an education history, which Blackfoot Elders sought to document and keep for generations not yet born.

The Bābīs and Bahā’īs have worked towards a gradual revolutionary conceptual and social transformation within their community which is based on a change in values and ethics. This paper looks first at the underlying transformation in worldview that has resulted in a move away from hierarchy and patriarchy, by creating social structures and pathways of action that are not led by powerful individuals, but rather are consultative and collaborative. Then, more specific examples are given of how this change in worldview played out with regard to social and religious leadership, education, and the role of women. What may be called a Bahā’ī counter-culture has thus been created. Evidence is provided of how these changes may have impacted the wider Iranian society and contributed to misunderstandings and persecutions of the Bahā’ī community.

While much scholarly attention has been devoted to analyzing governments' attempts to determine ways of remembering or forgetting the past, little is known about how the politics of remembrance affect the process of reconciliation. To what extent does conflict remembrance actually influence the shaping of collective (national) identities? Does remembering the painful past lead to reconciliation? If not, what does it do? This article addresses these questions by reflecting on the author's experience of teaching multinational groups at her university in Japan, and discussing fraught issues relating to the Asia-Pacific War (including the “comfort women”) with her classes. Drawing on class observations and student essays from 2016 to 2019, she discusses the often conflicting narratives and identities that students bring to the university classroom and the pedagogical challenges involved in negotiating these. The paper illustrates how highly selective narratives of the national past (learnt at school or absorbed from the media) affect collective identity (the way we perceive the self versus the other), and discusses implications for East Asian reconciliation and peace.

We combine data from a randomized evaluation and a laboratory experiment to measure the causal impact of human capital on respect for earned property rights, a component of social preferences with important implications for economic growth and development. We find that higher academic achievement reduces the willingness of young Kenyan women to appropriate others’ labor income, and shifts players toward a 50–50 split norm in a modified dictator game. This study demonstrates that education may have long-run impacts on social preferences, norms and institutions beyond the human capital directly produced.