Most Christians are products of the progressive education system developed by John Dewey in the middle of the 19th century. Christian education is further based upon the firm conviction that God continues to guide events “in heaven and on earth” according to His perfect plan, “for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him” (Hebrews 11:6(b) KJV).

While the first two are done without conscious effort, deliberative thinking cannot be done without it. Any one who has tried knows how demanding and draining it can be. It’s a process that many of us have a hard time staying in long enough to produce anything different from what we think we already know.

Philosophers of education more driven by a prescriptive or analytical impulse can and do share many of the same social and political commitments as critically oriented philosophers of education; and some of them may see their work as ultimately serving many of the same goals of criticizing hegemonic ideologies and promoting human emancipation.

Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc.

The program committee of the annual meeting of the Finnish Society for History and Philosophy of Education invites senior and young researchers, students and other curious minds to explore the meanings and questions of global and local in the history and the philosophy of education.