Pepperdine University – DC Campus
Professor Margarita Mooney Clayton is Executive Director of Scala Foundation. She is currently a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her research and teaching cover topics relating to philosophy of social science, sociological research methods, and human flourishing.
Course Description
Americans have long cared about preserving a tradition of liberal arts education, seeing it as key to a free society of citizens with both the knowledge and virtue to sustain self-governance and to advance social order and prosperity. This graduate introduction to the philosophical debates that have shaped the goals and practices of American educational policies, curricula, and institutions will ask scholars to identify challenges and opportunities for revitalizing American educational systems and culture.
Using the works of philosophers Augusto del Noce, Paolo Freire, John Dewey, and Jacques Maritain, and theologians John Cardinal Henry Newman, Jean Leclerq, and Luigi Giussani, this class will explore a variety of competing debates in philosophy of education, connecting these theories of human nature and the roles of society and government to educational curricula and policy. Scholars will be asked to question the role education policy, curricula, and institutions play in shaping culture and politics and promoting human progress in a diverse society founded on freedoms of religion, conscience, speech, and association.
Concepts covered
Course and Credit Information
Each four-week seminar will accommodate only 20 qualified scholars, hosted at Pepperdine’s Washington, DC Foggy Bottom campus with class sessions meeting Tuesday/Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings in June (first session) and July (second session). Accepted scholars will receive a full-tuition scholarship for this 3-unit graduate-level course.
Upon completion of the program, scholars will receive an applied philosophy in education policy certificate of completion from the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, and may use the credits toward future enrollment at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy (or another academic institution).