Center for Ethics and Education

What are the purposes of public education? Are they the right kinds of purposes now, and were they the right kinds of purposes 50 years ago? 

Questions like this will be addressed by WCER’s new interdisciplinary Center for Ethics and Education, codirected by Harry Brighouse, a philosophy professor and an affiliate professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Anthony Laden, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The center will link a group of senior scholars working on philosophical issues in education, either in their philosophy departments or in their schools of education, or both. Economists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists will be invited to participate as well.

WCER’s new center will focus on three broad areas of research:

• political philosophy (the place and role of educational institutions and resources);
• philosophy of social science questions that arise in educational research; and,
• ethical and conceptual questions concerning teaching, learning, and classroom practice.