Handbook of Philosophy of Education, Edited by Randall Curren, New York, NY: Routledge, 2023

It is practically impossible to pull together a genuinely comprehensive handbook for a sprawling field such as philosophy of education, especially in under 500 pages. That Randall Curren’s new edited volume succeeds even partially in this respect is commendable. Non-Americans may find some of the chapters a tad provincial, but one certainly gets a good introduction to much of the recent literature, especially in North America. As Lee and Torres (2023) point out in their review of the Handbook, many of the contributing authors have recently published books in the field or have summarized the last decade or so of their work in a concise chapter. The Handbook therefore offers a good introduction to newcomers as well as a useful compilation of the positions of some of the key contributors to the debates of the past 10 to 15 years. At the outset of the volume, Curren explains that he was asked to edit the Handbook in order “to fill the void created by the advanced age of my 2003 Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Education and Harvey Siegel’s 2009 Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education” (ix). There are in fact two other similar volumes, conspicuously absent from Curren’s list, that have appeared since: the Sage Handbook of Philosophy of Education (2010), and the International Handbook of Philosophy of Education (2018), published by Springer in two volumes. Comparing these different volumes is instructive. A first table below captures general information related to size, as well as the names of the editors. Curren’s new Routledge volume is thus the shortest handbook to appear in the past 20 years, by about 100 pages, though it boasts more chapters than Siegel’s 2009 volume and a similar number as the 2010 Sage Handbook. It is also interesting to compare the ways in which the editors apportioned their respective volumes. A second table below lists the titles of the parts in each volume. Curren’s introductory chapter provides an excellent overview of the contents of each part of his volume, so I will not take up space by summarizing all that information here. Rather, I will focus on how its contents compare to the other volumes mentioned above, and some of its strengths and weaknesses. Like Siegel’s volume, a whole part is dedicated to virtue and character, though Curren’s handbook links this theme more firmly with the intellectual virtues. Notably absent from the current volume is a set of chapters on historical figures in the philosophy of education, though of course various contributing authors refer to some of these figures in the course of their arguments. The Sage and Springer handbooks, by contrast, dedicate more space to these kinds of chapters (note, of course, that the Springer handbook is vastly larger, given its two volumes, and thus had much more space to work with). I gather that Curren decided against this approach, in favour of covering more contemporary authors and topics; this seems to have been a sound choice, especially given the existence of the two-volume Springer Handbook. In their review, Lee and Torres (2023) point out that Christopher Martin’s, Jennifer Morton’s, Lauren Bialystok’s, and Doris Santoro’s chapters are all respectively based on recent books by these scholars. One could add to this list Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift’s chapter, Nancy Sherman’s, Bryan R. Warnick’s, and several others. The themes of the books on which these chapters are based are diverse, including the ethics of higher education (Martin, 2021; Morton, 2019), sex education (Bialystok & Andersen, 2022), the demoralization of teachers (Santoro, 2018), educational policymaking (Brighouse et al., 2018), Stoicism (Sherman, …