The philosophy of education began, in the work of Plato, with two normative questions: What should humans be taught? And by what method should they be taught it? Those simple questions have been obscured by ever-increasing complexity in educational philosophy. The philosophy of education may currently include too much, and so this review of four general texts uses this criterion of a book’s merit: the ability to retain what is most obviously philosophical and eliminate what is not. On that criterion, (...) two of the books, one by Nel Noddings and another by Randall Curren, are especially noteworthy in their value for students and teachers of educational philosophy. (shrink)