Philosophers of education meeting in Malta

This year's biennial conference of INPE, the International Network of Philosophers of Education, is being hosted at the University of Malta between August 3-6.

The network, which was created in the late 1980s, with the thawing of the Cold War, brings philosophers of education from all around the globe together for its biennial conferences. Malta was chosen as the venue for this year's meeting following the last meeting in Madrid in August 2004.

The link between philosophy and education is as old as philosophy itself going back to Socrates and then Plato in Classical Greek times and continuing over the centuries since. Education, in fact, has been the subject of important writings by virtually all the great philosophers including Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Russell, Dewey, and so on.

After World War II the philosophy of education was created in the Anglo-Saxon world as a discipline on a par with other areas of practical philosophy like ethics, political philosophy, and social philosophy, from which (together with philosophy of mind, and epistemology) it also draws its resources. Its creation coincided with the emerging perception that education needed to play an important role in the restructuring of the new world, and that the new world needed a new breed of better prepared teachers.

Training was no longer enough, the teachers themselves needed to be educated. Besides methodology courses and practice, they also needed theory provided by the main areas of educational theory, namely educational psychology, sociology and the history of education, and philosophy of education.

These areas became an intrinsic part of teacher education in Malta with the establishment of the Bachelor's degree in education, the B.Ed. (Hons), in the Faculty of Education at the University of Malta in the late 1970s and has continued to be so since.

Last year, the faculty very successfully launched its first Master's degree in the philosophy of education. It met with a very encouraging response and is being offered again for October of this year. The INPE conference will provide Maltese teachers and philosophers, philosophy teachers, and philosopher teachers, with a unique exposure to the thinking of some of the most prominent contemporary philosophers of education today. The conference, in fact, attracts a strong international participation of top philosophers from all the continents.

Its main theme for this year is Philosophical Perspectives On Educational Practice In The 21st Century, and its sub-themes are educational practice beyond critique, identity and justice in teaching and learning, educational experience and the claims of the knowledge economy, truth and truthfulness in practices of learning and educational theory and practice and the politics of lifelong learning.

The conference will be organised around seminars and workshops. The invited key-note speakers are David Cooper from the University of Durham, Marianna Papastephanou from the University of Cyprus, and Kenneth Wain from the University of Malta. The former two are sponsored by the Strickland Foundation.

The theme and sub-themes, as can be seen by their titles, are extremely important for today's world and for Malta as part of it. The conference will provide the occasion for deep reflection and discussion of the topics that fall under the themes and others. Its presence in Malta will hopefully help to raise the level of the local debate on them also.

The philosophy of education team at the University of Malta, besides their interest in promoting a more critical level of debate about local educational issues, are also working with a project to introduce the teaching of philosophy, of critical thinking and ethics, in the classroom from the earliest primary years right up to the postsecondary and beyond, something which has already been done in Belgium, Norway, Australia, and Brazil.

www.educ.um.edu.mt/INPE