CONTROVERSY ADDRESSED IN THIS ISSUE:

In previous issues of the Journal of Educational Controversy, we have defined a contemporary controversy and asked our authors to examine the issue.   For our 10th year anniversary issue, we have decided to have an open issue where authors can define their own controversy.  We asked authors to use the following outline:

1.Define an educational controversy – formal or informal education, K-12, college or university, adult education, secular or religious education, or larger philosophical issues in the educational ethos of a society or a culture.  The issue can be a contemporary one or a perennial one that is revisited.
2.Explain the significance of the problem.
3.Provide an historical and philosophical framework for the controversy.
4.Lay out the different arguments surrounding the controversy.
5.Examine the underlying assumptions and resulting implications of the different positions.
6.Provide suggestions to resolve the issues raised and provide supporting arguments.

We remind authors that we publish controversies that are deeply embedded in our conceptual frameworks. The journal tries to distinguish between surface controversies and latent or depth controversies. For example, schools engage students in controversies all the time and are embedded themselves in controversies. Most of these controversies engage us in disagreements on a surface level. That is not to say that these discussions are unimportant – only that they take place with assumptions that remain unstated and beliefs that remain largely hidden or submerged. The journal tries to go deeper by examining the very frameworks in which all these surface controversies arose – to get at our underlying assumptions and beliefs.