ABSTRACT
As a formalized, academic discipline, philoso-phy of education is quite young. The firstcourse in philosophy of education in the United States may have been Nicholas Murray Butler’s (1862-1947) course in the 1890s and 1900s at Columbia University. Butler taught “Principles of Education,” using as textbooks Paul Hanus’s (18551941) Educational Aims and Educational Values (1899) and Harrell Horne’s (1874-1946) Philosophy of Education: Being the Foundations of Education in the Related Natural and Mental Sciences (1904) (Johnson 1995, 5). It is also during this period that we begin to see the University of Chicago, Clark University, Columbia, and New York University producing doctoral dissertations on topics in philosophy of education. Another important date in the history of the discipline is 1916, when John Dewey (1859-1952) published what has since become the signature work of the field: Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. Despite these early benchmarks, though, it was not until 1941 that the Philosophy of Education Society was founded, and not until 1951 that Educational Theory, the society’s academic journal, was established. Indeed, according to some scholars it was not until the mid-1960s that philosophy of education finally gained a firm foothold in the academy (Blake et al. 2003, 2).
