This is philosophy bites with me, Nigel.
Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
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Meira Levenson has had an unusual career for an Ivy League professor.
She spent many years teaching in high school.
Now at Harvard, she specialises in a woefully neglected topic in contemporary the philosophy of education.
Mira Levenson, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you very much.
I'm really pleased to be here.
The topic we're going to focus on is the aims of education.
And it's really strange because we've recorded hundreds of philosophy bites interviews and we've never done one specifically on education.
Yet historically in philosophy, it's one of the most important questions, what is education?
What's it for?
Yeah, that's right.
I'm really glad that you're doing one now.
The history of philosophy, at least of western philosophy so far as it started with Plato, I mean, the republic is essentially about education.
It's a question about how you educate the soul in order to create a well ordered city.
And Aristotle treated education, you go through the history of western philosophy, Rousseau, Locke, Kant, all wrote important things about education.
And then really, Dewey is the last important western philosopher to write about education and his democracy in education, where he thought about the civic aims of education.