Catherine Z. Elgin
Papers on the Philosophy of Education

• Fostering Flourishing (The Future of Education, ed. Christina Easton and Jonathan Beale, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
  Abstract: People rightly diverge over the sorts of lives they consider valuable. Education should equip students to identify and pursue lives that they consider good. A student should acquire the capacity to frame her own conception of the good - to recognise opportunities and obstacles, identify available alternatives and assess their value, entertain the possibility of adopting certain goods as her own, and respect the rights of others to do likewise. A student thus needs to develop responsiveness to reasons, moral sensitivity, social awareness, and the capacity to adopt and assess different points of view. She needs to develop the cognitive, emotional, motivational orientations, and the practical skills needed to pursue her goals. Because the capacity to live a life one considers good can only be realized in a social milieu, the individual good and the social good must mesh.
  
  
• Understanding as an Educational Objective (Handbook of the Philosophy of Education, ed. Randall Curren, London: Routledge, 2023, 69-78.)
  Abstract: Familiar pedagogical and assessment strategies presuppose that a central goal of education both is and should be the advancement of understanding. I argue that this holds for K-12 education as well as in higher education and that it holds across disciplines. Students do and should learn to reason beyond the information they are explicitly taught, to expand and deepen their capacity to think. This fosters epistemic autonomy. Students should learn both why practitioners in the different disciplines favor their criteria of acceptability and how those criteria can responsibly be challenged.
  
  
• Beyond the Information Given: Teaching, Testimony, and the Advancement of Understanding (Philosophical Topics, 49(2), 2022, 17-34.)
  Abstract: Teaching is not testimony. Although both convey information, they have different uptake requirements. Testimony aims to impart information and typically succeeds if the recipient believes that information on account of having been told it by a reliable informant. Teaching aims to equip learners to go beyond the information given - to leverage information to broaden, deepen, and critique their current understanding of a topic. Teaching fails if the recipient believes the information only because it is what they have been told.
  
  
• Art and Education (The Oxford Handbook in the Philosophy of Education, ed. Harvey Siegel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 319-332.)
  Abstract: I argue that the study of the arts should play a central role in education. One reason is that encounters with the arts are intrinsically valuable: they enrich people's lives by sensitizing them to aspects of the world that they would otherwise overlook. Our lives are better when we can see more deeply into things. A second reason is more instrumental. Encounters with the arts foster skills, incentives and orientations that are valuable in science, human relations, and everyday life. Because works of art are symbols, students need to learn to use and interpret them in order to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that the arts afford. The abilities students gain through the study of art transfer to other disciplines.
  
  
• Science, Ethics, and Education (Theory and Research in Education, 9, 2011, 251-263.)
  Abstract: An overarching epistemological goal of science is to develop a comprehensive, systematic, empirically grounded understanding of nature. Two obstacles stand in the way: (1) Nature is enormously complicated. (2) Findings are fallible: no matter how well established a conclusion is, it still might be wrong. To pursue this goal in light of the obstacles, science incorporates ethical values. These values are not mere means; their realization is integral to the sort of understanding that science embodies. The recognition of these values should be incorporated into science education.
  
  
• High Stakes (Theory and Research in Education, 2, 2004, 271-282.)
  Abstract: I discuss the contributions of Harvey Siegel, Francis Schrag, and Randall Curren to this volume. Their papers cast in bold relief the relation of High Stakes Testing to the goals of education, the nature of mind, and the demands of justice. I argue that the connections are deep but that the considerations these authors raise do not show that High Stakes Tests are in principle unacceptable. Rather they show that we need to be exceedingly careful about how our assessments are constructed, how the results are interpreted, what we take them to reveal, and what we do with the results.
  
  
• Epistemology's Ends, Pedagogy's Prospects (Facta Philosophica, 1, 1999, 39-54.)
  
  
• Education and the Advancement of Understanding (Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy, Volume 3, ed. David M. Steiner, Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999, 131-140; Philosophy of Education, ed. Randall Curren, Malden: Blackwell, 2007, 417-422.)