30th Anniversary Initiative

Through a series of 30+ events – including webinars, discussions, classes, and sessions at our biennial conference – PLATO’s 30th Anniversary Initiative invites educators, students, and communities to explore one enduring question:
What are the purposes of education — historically, now, and in the decades ahead?

In a rapidly changing global educational landscape—shaped by advances in artificial intelligence, shifting social and economic realities, and evolving expectations of schooling—we will consider how educational policies and systems have developed over time, examine what they are being asked to do today, and imagine how they may continue to evolve in the future.

After each event, teachers can track all Initiative events attended this year to receive a certificate in June for the total number of professional development hours earned, which can be presented to your school district for professional development credits.

Fall Events

Winter Events

Spring Events

PLUS:

6 online classes for middle and high school students
5 Professional Development Community (PLC) sessions (PLC Guide)

PLATO Book For the Year

PLATO will be hosting three virtual book club meetings over the course of the 2026-27 academic year to explore Martha Nussbaum’s book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Each meeting will examine key questions raised by selected chapters. 

After each event, teachers can track all Initiative events attended this year to receive a certificate in June for the total number of professional development hours earned, which can be presented to your school district for professional development credits.

Virtual Book Group Meetings: Guided Reading Questions 

• Which specific passages spoke most powerfully to you and why?
• What passages arouse your curiosity and leave you eager to discuss with others? 
• What passages would you like to discuss and have clarified? 
• Are there parts of Nussbaum’s argument that you think don’t work or are no longer relevant?

• What are the conflicting agendas, as you see them, within education today?
  Text: Chapter 1, page 2: “Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.”

• What capacities should we cultivate within individuals in order to meet our educational aims?
  Text: Chapter 2, page 18 -19 : “…This [liberal arts] tradition argues that education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world…Education for economic growth [on the other hand] needs basic skills, literacy, and numeracy. It also needs some people to have more advanced skills in computer science and technology. Equal access, however, is not terribly important…”

• Should we be educating for participatory democracy or economic participation?
  Text: Chapter 3, page 45: “[S]chools can and should produce citizens in and for a healthy democracy [by doing the following:]
  • Develop students’ capacity to see the world from the view-point of other people, particularly those whom their society tends to portray as lesser, as ‘mere objects’
  • Teach attitudes toward human weakness and helplessness that suggest that weakness is not shameful and the need for others not unmanly; teach children not to be ashamed of need and incompleteness but to see these as occasions for cooperation and reciprocity
  • Develop the capacity for genuine concern for others, both near and distant
  • Undermine the tendency to shrink from minorities of various kinds in disgust, thinking of them as ‘lower’ and ‘contaminating’
  • Teach real and true things about other groups (racial, religious, and sexual minorities; people with disabilities), so as to counter stereotypes and the disgust that often goes with them
  • Promote accountability by treating each child as a responsible agent.”

• Can a school system successfully prioritize technical, vocational, and STEM-based economic skills without undermining “freedom of mind?”
• Is it the case that those educating with an economic goal in mind fear and campaign against teaching the humanities?

Registration is now closed.

Seminars for Classroom Teachers

As part of PLATO’s 30^th Anniversary Initiative, we are offering three free online seminars for teachers. These seminars are intended to be interactive and collaborative, requiring attention and participation of all attending.

Participants should plan, unless technical issues make this difficult, to have their cameras on. Visual presence both enhances a sense of community and increases accessibility for all participants. Attendees should plan to participate in the discussion, some of which might take place in breakout rooms.

Winter Seminar: Curiosity and Inquiry

Tuesday, February 23, 7-8:30pm ET

What should be the role of curiosity in education? Do our current educational paradigms discourage curiosity and wonder? For students, a side effect of learning to excel in school can be a dampening of curiosity and intellectual excitement; for teachers, the pressure to prioritize rigor and productivity can impede the desire to follow the unexpected directions in which student curiosity might lead. How might we rethink rigor and academic accomplishment so that they include questioning, wondering, and curiosity, while still working within systems that provide standards and accountability?

Reading: Susan Engel (2011), “Children’s Need to Know: Curiosity in Schools,” Harvard Educational Review 81:4. (article will be sent to registered seminar participants)

The winter seminar will be taught by PLATO Executive Director Dr. Jana Mohr Lone. Jana is an Affiliate Associate Professor in philosophy at the University of Washington, and is the author of the books Seen and Not Heard (2021) and The Philosophical Child (2012); co-author of Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (2016); co-editor of Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People (2012); author of many articles about philosophy with young people; and author of a series of six picture books, What Would You Do? (2024), about moral issues facing children. Jana has been leading philosophy sessions with students from preschool to graduate school for more than 30 years. 

After each event, teachers can track all Initiative events attended this year to receive a certificate in June for the total number of professional development hours earned, which can be presented to your school district for professional development credits.

The seminars for teachers are free events. Registration is now closed.

Spring Seminar: Inquiry in the Age of AI

Tuesday, April 13, 7-8:30pm ET

While AI embeds itself into more and more aspects of our lives, it is still new enough that its effects are only able to be speculated about, although some of the newest research being done is concerning. How is AI changing the nature of inquiry? Can AI be utilized without resulting in negative effects on human inquiry and dialogue? How does AI affect our intellectual, moral, and epistemic virtues? Should schools, teachers, and institutions develop practices that reward these virtues, avoiding what C. Thi Nguyen calls “value capture,” a situation where personal values get replaced by simplified, quantified metrics?  

Reading: Boyd Taylor Coolman (2026), “The medieval understanding of intelligence is exactly what we need in the age of A.I.,” America: The Jesuit Review.

The spring seminar will be taught by Stephen Kekoa Miller. Stephen is PLATO’s Board President and the chair of the Humanities Department at Oakwood Friends School and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Marist College. He has taught philosophy for the past 25 years in Poughkeepsie NY. Stephen has developed a wide range of courses from middle-school philosophy through upper-level college courses, and a philosophy series for parents and community members. Stephen also served as the Chair of the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy for three years and served on the Teachers Advisory Council of the National Humanities Center and the Ethics Board of the Town of Poughkeepsie. He is the editor of Intentional Disruptions (Vernon, 2021).

Fall Seminar: The Role of the Teacher in Education

Tuesday, October 13, 7-8:30pm ET

In an age of self-directed learning, what is the unique role of the teacher? Is all learning education, or is there something essential that can only happen when students and teachers engage together around a shared task? For students, the focus on skills and assessments can reduce education to an exercise in task-completion and performance. For teachers, the pressures to teach to the test or required curriculum can relegate them to rule-enforcers or arbitrators of ability. How might we reclaim schooling as a space where the full person can exist — where education involves evaluating, questioning, imagining and engaging with the world? What are the unique gifts that teachers offer through their expertise, their attention, and their time with students?

Reading: Biesta, Gert. (2025), “Taking the Angle of the Teacher: The GTC Scotland Annual Lecture 2024,” Scottish Educational Review. 55. 175-191. 10.1163/27730840-bja10014.

The fall seminar was taught by PLATO Associate Director Ariel Sykes.

Materials for Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)

PLATO has created a discussion guide for teachers interested in creating PLCs to explore the purposes and future of education using the book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities by Martha Nussbaum as the anchor text. Our hope is that by gathering with others to reflect on the daily realities of teaching and learning, teachers will come away empowered to teach with deeper meaning and purpose.

The guide outlines a five-meeting schedule that works through all the chapters of Not for Profit. This is intended to be very flexible: you can decide to hold fewer meetings or make any other adjustments that best meet the needs and interests of your school community.

After each event, teachers can track all Initiative events attended this year to receive a certificate in June for the total number of professional development hours earned, which can be presented to your school district for professional development credits. 

Download PDF:

All PLATO webinars are free and open to the public.

You can watch the opening webinar here.

The History and Future of Education

Tuesday, September 29, 7-8:30pm ET

The opening event of the 30th Anniversary Initiative featured four nationally known scholars of education, who examined the history and future of public education, including the tensions in our understanding of the purposes of education, the rise of credentialing over learning and the decline of the liberal arts, the distinction between public and private education, alternatives to schooling that have emerged over the years, and the possibilities for radical transformation that the rise of AI has the potential to foster.

After each event, teachers can track all Initiative events attended this year to receive a certificate in June for the total number of professional development hours earned, which can be presented to your school district for professional development credits.

PANEL:

Dr. Jaime Grinberg is Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University. He directed the New Jersey Network for Educational Renewal and chaired the Committee on Standards for the Council of Learned Societies in Education. His Ph.D. is from Michigan State University. Originally from Argentina, he has lectured in many countries, including Uruguay, Israel, Mexico, and Argentina. Grinberg has published numerous books, papers, and chapters. He often comments on Spanish-language TV and radio and has taught globally, including as a Visiting Professor at Kibbutzim College in Israel. He is the co-editor of the academic journal Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines.

Dr. David Labaree is Lee L. Jacks Professor (emeritus) at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on the historical sociology of American schooling, exploring issues such as the evolution of U.S. systems of schooling and higher education, the contradictions that drive the dynamics of these systems, and the rise of credentialism. The author of nine books, his most recent is The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education. He blogs at https://davidlabaree.com.

Dr. Meira Levinson is Chen Family Educational Foundations Professor at Stanford University. She is currently working to start a global field of educational ethics that is philosophically rigorous, disciplinarily and experientially inclusive, and both relevant to and informed by educational policy and practice. In doing so, she draws upon scholarship from multiple disciplines as well as her eight years of experience teaching middle school humanities, civics, history, and English in the Atlanta and Boston Public Schools.

Dr. William J. Reese is the Carl F. Kaestle W.A.R.F. and Vilas Research Professor of Educational Policy Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a member of the National Academy of Education, and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. He’s published books on various aspects of the history of American education, and is the author of The Calculating Boy: Zerah Colburn, America’s First Child Celebrity (Johns Hopkins University Press, spring 2027).