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You, as my friend and/or reader, may have seen me post stuff on Twit­ter and Face­book sug­gest­ing that I am cur­rently apply­ing to grad­u­ate schools. Indeed, I am. I fig­ured I’d explain the sit­u­a­tion here, once and for all.

Very shortly after I began a PhD pro­gram in phi­los­o­phy in the fall of 2007, my research inter­ests rapidly started shift­ing towards top­ics in edu­ca­tion. First I got inter­ested in moral char­ac­ter and moral edu­ca­tion, then argu­ments for and against school choice, then the rela­tion­ship between fem­i­nism and edu­ca­tion, and most recently, I’ve started study­ing alter­na­tive forms of edu­ca­tion such as unschool­ing.

Because not many peo­ple in depart­ments of phi­los­o­phy focus on edu­ca­tion, and because the job mar­ket for pro­fes­sors of edu­ca­tion seems rather bet­ter than that for philoso­phers, I have decided to move to a school of edu­ca­tion to com­plete my grad­u­ate stud­ies. I have ten appli­ca­tions under con­sid­er­a­tion in US News & World Reports top 25 schools of edu­ca­tion, all of which have pro­grams in the phi­los­o­phy of edu­ca­tion or some­thing sim­i­lar (most PhD, one EdD). With any luck, I will be accepted to one or more of them with fund­ing, and will be mak­ing the move for the fall of 2010.

Some philoso­phers with whom I have dis­cussed this have expressed their regret that I am leav­ing phi­los­o­phy. How­ever, I don’t see myself as leav­ing the field at all. In fact, I will be pur­su­ing exactly the same research projects as I would have pur­sued had I stayed in phi­los­o­phy, only with the more use­ful guid­ance of experts in edu­ca­tion. So, it is more of a strate­gic move than any­thing else, and will likely ben­e­fit me career-wise in the long run.

So keep your fin­gers crossed for me, and look for updates on this over the next few months :-)

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