I’m incredibly excited to announce that my latest academic philosophy paper, ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is now published in the latest issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. You can read it here: https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhad077

I am less excited to announce that, being an academic journal, it is behind a paywall. I really wanted the piece to be open access, but OUP seemed to have a strange system where it could only be open access if I paid them an extortionate amount of money for it to be so. Something impossible for an independent scholar to do. Those interested in reading it who do not have access to the journal, however, can get in touch and I’ll see if I can send you an earlier version directly.

And if you like the article - share the link far and wide.

Here’s the abstract:

Whenever justification of classroom punishment has been attempted it has usually been on grounds that punishment acts either appropriately pedagogically, teaching students how to behave morally, or is a necessary evil that enables the practical running of the school so that it may carry out its educational business. By itself the first justification leaves punishment in schools as only an extension of wider social attitudes about the virtue of punishing perceived moral wrongdoing, rather than providing any distinct argument for punishment specific to the special circumstances of the school. By highlighting an entanglement between the moral and the conventional, and between discipline and punishment, within the context of the school, I shall argue that the essentially contested nature of education and its purpose, and the related question of the school’s suitability as a venue for it, means that the school’s most promising defence of its use of punishment—that punishment of students might somehow be necessary for enabling the important educative business of the school—becomes undone. Schooling and education are not necessarily synonymous, and as schools provide only one vision of education—and this vision is contestable—then upholding the business of any one school in order for it to achieve its particular unsettled and disputed purpose is not a morally sufficient reason to coerce a student’s compliance through regimes of ‘harm intended as harm’.