EDU304 Philosophy of Education Spring 2003 Final paper topics

Christian Perring, Ph.D.

10 pages/~3000 words. Due by midnight on April 29. Even if you have not completed your paper by class, do NOT miss class. If you find you are having difficulties writing your paper, contact me to let me know and I will help you. Late papers with no excuse lose 1% for each day late.

Papers must be submitted in an electronic form. I prefer you to do so using Turnitin.com (the class ID is 60925, and the password is "dewey"), but you can instead email me a copy of your paper in Word or RTF as an attachment, or give me a copy of your paper on disk. You can if you want also give me a hard copy.

Any form of plagiarism or academic dishonesty is unacceptable and may result in you failing the course and being reported to the Dean of Students. Plagiarism is using sources in the writing of your paper without acknowledging your sources. It is often a good idea to use other sources, but if you do so, you must say where you found information, either in parentheses or in a footnote. If you quote directly or copy text from another source, you must put the quotation in quotation marks and say exactly where it comes from, giving page numbers or the exact URL. I don’t require any particular reference format, but APA format is a good one to use. (For more information on reference formats, the Dowling College Library website has a page on the Citation and Evaluation of Sources.)

In your answers you should demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the philosophical ideas you discuss, and an ability to show how those ideas help us understand difficult cases facing teachers or policy makers. It may be useful to include facts about law, psychological theories of childhood development, or educational studies about how different teaching methods work in the classroom, but you need to go beyond those facts and engage in philosophical discussion.

Answer ONE of the following.

1. Set out two or more approaches to the ethical rights of children in schools. Find an ethically difficult case on which these approaches point to different recommendations, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each.
2. Set out two or more ways of understanding the purpose of education in society. Find a controversy in education policy on which these approaches point to different recommendations, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each.
3. Set out what skills a teacher needs to be a good teacher (restricting your argument to a specific student age and profile) and what kind of training would be most useful in providing a teacher with those skills. Then consider at least two different philosophical approaches to understanding education and discuss what implications they would have for training teachers. Finally, discuss what role the approaches you have outlined would give to the teaching of philosophy of education in the training of teachers.