This chapter describes and expands upon virtue ethical and virtue theoretical approaches to moral education in and for virtual spaces. Building on existing claims that virtual spaces call for new kinds of virtues, we argue that structural constraints make risks and vices especially hard to overcome in these contexts. We organize these constraints around a threefold approach to integrity, according to how they hinder knowledge, self-efficacy, and self-unity. We then turn to positive recommendations for removing these barriers. We outline implications for end users by exploring the need for the development of the “burdened virtues”, applying ideas from Lisa Tessman. We also consider what it would look like for this kind of moral development to be supported by educators, policy-makers, and other leaders within the tech ecosystem. We suggest that the way forward will be to educate for and build spaces in which the online and offline worlds are drawn into closer alignment, supporting integrity in all its forms.

Chapter 2 analyzes the life histories and experiences of métis children who were wards of the colonial state in the 1930s in Senegal and Gabon. They received government funding and management of their education. The daily lives of métis wards became a battleground through which fictive and blood kin, métis activists, emerging African political leaders, French colonial administrators, and Catholic missionaries debated the meanings of race, culture, and child welfare. In Senegal, African stakeholders mediated métis children’s access to French education, living conditions, and colonial welfare payments based on their parentage from French and European men. The state was obliged to provide access to education for all children born in Africa, with métis as a distinct group. In Gabon, an association of adult métis lobbied for access to favorable material conditions for métis children and for them to attend a school for European children and reside in a boarding home without black children. Contestations around their welfare hinged on the French republican rhetoric of universal rights and equality and racialized hierarchies within African societies.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

Chapter 4 explores conceptions about race and multiraciality as articulated by and about métis. These ideas were central in defining the meaning and practice of French citizenship and social childhood welfare in French Africa during and after World War II (1939–1950). The main focus is Brazzaville, the capital of Free France in World War II and the center of contestations regarding the “métis question.” The chapter chronicles how what was debated, decided, and rejected here reverberated elsewhere in FEA and FWA. Even as Vichy, Free France, and post-Nazi occupation factions competed about who was the legitimate government, “the métis question” remained critical in the effort to maintain the French Empire in years of precarity. Métis people forwarded various multiracial identities and claims to legal status and quotidian rights. Their demands sparked contestations with and within the post-1946 French government and among French-educated black Africans. There was increasing mobilization by collectives of people of varied ethno-language groups in French Africa, who came together around thier shared identity as black (noire) and hightled the antiblack racism of French colonialism and of métis themselves.

Schooling transforms child development yet fades into the background in research on prosocial behavior. Mass education, however, was central to the concerns of founding theorists such as Durkheim, Dewey, and Piaget. Putting on a sociological lens makes it easier to see how schools continue to play an active role in prosocial development, and how the concerns of these founding researchers resonate today. To situate the active role of school contexts in prosocial behavior, this chapter first examines schools as social systems, structuring children’s social networks, imposing roles and norms of behavior, and impacting the timing of development. The chapter then examines classroom, pedagogical, and peer prosocial behaviors, and their connection to classic theoretical work in the field. After reviewing these forms of prosocial behavior, the chapter closes by examining the links between prosocial behavior and student outcomes and implications and future directions for theory, research, and practice.

Chapter 6 examines multiracial internationalism as conceptualized by the International Union of Métis (IUM), its founder Nicolas Rigonaux, and a global network of allies in Europe, French Africa, and elsewhere in the 1950s. These were twilight years of French colonial rule. The IUM’s dual pillars of mobilization and collective action focused on childhood and citizenship, in alignment with what métis organizations in Africa had long supported. Yet the meanings and claims ascribed to these concepts changed between 1957 and 1960. Multiracial internationalists struggled against racism and racial oppression, whether perpetuated by “blacks,” “whites,” or “others.” The shared identity of birth from a white and “other” parent constituted a distinct form of transnational kinship, which could build bridges to international peace and the realization of universal human rights. Multiracial people were kin whose transnational citizenship entailed civic, social, and humanitarian action for the prosperity of African and other subjugated societies. The multiracial subject would guide African societies to a new relationship with France, healing the racial trauma of colonialism and helping develop African societies, thus fostering a mutually beneficial future.

This chapter discusses the role of zoos in education. Zoos claim to have an educational function, but most of the studies that have been conducted in zoos have examined the educational value of single exhibits and have collected data from relatively small samples of visitors. Some studies have recorded changes in the knowledge or future behaviour of visitors following a zoo visit but others have not. Zoos in general tend to overemphasise their educational value based on very little scientific evidence. Some zoos engage in educational outreach work in schools and communities, and some of this work takes place in countries other than those where the zoos are located. Zoos make an important contribution to the training of future zoo professionals and veterinary staff. New technology is increasingly being used to enhance the visitor experience.

This chapter explores short American fictions that are like jokes, drawing on Sigmund Freud’s contrast between the “tendentious” joke, which generates “pleasure by lifting suppressions and repressions,” and “innocent” humor, its pleasure based on “the liberation of nonsense.” In opposition to ideas of the classical American short story as a compact vehicle of epiphany, it argues for a countertradition of short fiction of “innocent” comedy, which features the linguistic slapstick generated by language learning and exposes the instability of language. It frames the immigrant Leo Rosten as an inheritor of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry, all of whom draw on lexicography and language learning to explore the “innocent” humor of unstable language. Like Boris Eikhenbaum in his description of O. Henry, Rosten’s best-known protagonist, the English-language student Hyman Kaplan, asserts that Russian Jews such as himself are especially attuned to the comic potential of English.

Defoe’s views on education were conditioned by – and part of – his broader views on the early eighteenth-century social order. Coming from a commercial family, and as a Dissenter from the Church of England, Defoe did not, himself, have access to the most socially prestigious forms of education offered by the elite grammar schools and English universities. In various writings, Defoe advocates a form of education prioritizing ’useful’ knowledge (of languages, geography, mathematics, the natural sciences, and history) over the esoteric mastery of Latin and Greek learning that was the domain of ’mere Scholars’. Defoe thought that education should give students knowledge not simply of words, but of the world, and that it should suit them to act in the world. This model of education, for Defoe, was one suited for merchants as well as ’gentlemen’, and (with some differences of emphasis) for women as well as men.

Whether patriotism has a valuable part to play in the educational system of a democratic society is now a highly contentious matter. This chapter argues that it does, principally because such a society is a kind of cooperative practice that requires its members to enact, enforce, and – in most cases – obey the laws that govern their self-governing polity. Democracies rely on rules, and especially the rule of law, to provide the reasonably clear expectations necessary to coordinate public activities and to overcome collective-action problems. By encouraging citizens to set aside personal advantage and play a cooperative part in democratic life, patriotism contributes to the public spirit essential to democracy. For that reason, promoting patriotic attitudes is a worthy aim of democratic education.

This chapter addresses Aristotle’s conception of the civic purposes of education, how the education he proposes would serve those purposes, his stance toward democracy and democratic education, and the compatibility of the education he proposes with a democratic society and system of government. It argues that his educational proposals aim to facilitate a partnership of all citizens in living the best kind of life and are thus focused on cultivating moral and intellectual virtues and educating diverse children together with a view to nurturing civic friendship. It concludes that Aristotle defends forms of shared governance in the common interest that would qualify as limited forms of democracy and that the education he proposes is recognizably democratic. Despite their elitist limitations, his works offer significant resources for understanding democracy and democratic education, most notably his conception of the role of common schools in promoting civic friendship and shared governance.

Within liberal societies, citizens endorse a range of religious, moral, and philosophical views (e.g., Buddhism and utilitarianism). Despite this doctrinal diversity, John Rawls’ account of political liberalism holds that there is a form of democratic equality that is realizable by all citizens. Citizens can be equally politically autonomous if they enjoy equal political power and justify the exercise of that power with public reasons. A political liberal education for democratic citizenship would teach students how to participate in political decision-making, and how to use public reasons when helping to decide fundamental political questions. Political liberalism also can accommodate diverse educational options for families, but this accommodation is limited by political liberalism’s concern for the future political autonomy of students. This concern distinguishes the political liberal account from the “convergence” account of public justification. Unlike political liberalism, the convergence account fails to respect adequately the future political autonomy of students.