I have a bookcase devoted to literary theory, sitting next to the three on philosophy. Sometimes I have difficulty deciding where a new book belongs. I developed a serious interest in litcrit and its various cousins in the 1970s. I was especially drawn to reader-response theory, including Elizabeth Freund (The Return of the Reader), Jane […]

Philosophy has been both a big aid and a hindrance to my day-to-day work. Once I was invited to a literacy conference to speak on a panel about teaching students to find the main idea of a paragraph or a short article. Others presented various studies of the problem and methods to improve teaching. I […]

I dealt with disruptions in my personal life in part by reading more widely. I read psychologists such as Philip Slater (The Pursuit of Loneliness) and Erich Fromm. I was inspired by Allan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, and Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Colin Wilson, author of The […]

At Rice, I foolishly thought of philosophy as an avocation, something to do on the side. I did take the Humanities 100 course taught by Radoslav Tsanoff. That course, along with others, opened new doors for my understanding of philosophy. Spinoza was a key figure for me. His ideas about God, glossed as “God or […]

Astronomy has been called the first science; it’s also the first philosophy. As Abraham Maslow might have said, when we have enough rabbits to eat and pause our worrying about the smilodons stalking us, we may look up and see the amazing sun, moon, and stars. As soon as we start asking why they’re the […]

Bruce, Bertram C. (2019). The future experience of education: McClintock on the essential questions. Educational Theory, 68(3), 307-323. Jane Addams. (2019). Démocratie et éthique sociale (Bernard Jung & Céline Jung, Trans.). Editions Raison et Passions. Bruce, Bertram C. (2017). How Jane Addams expands our view of education as an ethical enterprise. Educational Theory, 67(6), 677-692. Eryaman, Mustafa […]

Bruce, Bertram C., & Céline Jung (2019). Préface à la traduction en français de: Democracy and Social Ethics, Jane Addams (1902). In Démocratie et éthique sociale (pp. 7-31). Dijon, France: Editions Raison et Passions. Bruce, Bertram C. (2015). What Jane Addams tells us about early childhood education. In Turkish in Ebru Aktan Acar (ed.). Erken […]

Bruce, Bertram C. (2023, Spring). What is democratic education?. Schools Studies in Education, 20(1), . Chaudhari, Raunak, Manandhar, Smriti K., & Bruce, Bertram C. (2022). Realities of implementing community-based learning during lockdown. Schools: Studies in Education, 19(1), 109–136. Bruce, Bertram C. (2019). The future experience of education: McClintock on the essential questions. Educational Theory, 68(3), […]

As an undergraduate at Rice University, I majored in Biology, with special interests in psychology and computing. My introduction to Rice was through Joseph I. Davies. I was a visiting high-school student when he engaged me in an unforgettable conversation about the need for world government. As a biology major, I did not take his fabled Biology […]