This article compares progressive conceptions of childhood in the educational philosophies of John Locke and John Dewey. Although the lives of the two philosophers were separated by an ocean and two centuries of history, they had in common the following things: (1) a relatively high level of experience working with, and observing, children that is…

Conservative and Liberal Democrat policies for higher education funding in the 2010 general election campaign offered voters a stark choice--with one party willing to consider raising the cap on undergraduate fees, while the other publicly committed to removing any student contribution. It is not surprising therefore that this was an area in which…

This article considers the nature and trajectory of the African National Congress's (ANC) education policy discourses from its founding in 1912, until its repatriation from exile by 1992. The broad issue that this article considers is how to explain why the ANC was inadequately prepared to address the educational challenges of a democratic South…

This article sketches the history of the Catholic school in Zambia over a 50-year period noting how for reasons of political acceptability it increasingly became less at home with its religious mission thereby finding itself with an unclear sense of purpose. In order to redeem its identity, this article argues that there is need for the school to…

This article is about the "who" of policy rather than the "what". It is a plea for debate and discussion about the purposes of education. It is an argument for replacing technocratic solutions with democratic ones. It is about possibility rather than necessity.

This paper explores the possibilities for critical policy analysis afforded by Lacanian discourse theory, with its emphasis on the unconscious and the agency of the letter, and considers its significance for critical policy analysis in education, in ways that complement and supplement the insights of post-structuralist discourse theory. To explore…

The intergenerational transmission of political orientations has been the topic of considerable research over the past few decades, but much of the evidence remains limited to two-party systems. In this study, we use data from the first wave of the Parent-Child Socialization Study conducted among 3,426 adolescents and their parents in the Flemish…

Despite having been a prolific academic, whose work exerts considerable cross-discipline influence, the ideas of Foucault are largely neglected in educational technology scholarship. Having provided an initial brief overview of the sparse use of Foucault's work in this sub-field, this paper then seeks to generate new understandings, arguing that…

Anatomy has served as a cornerstone in the training of various allied and clinical disciplines and has traditionally been based on dissection of the human body. Thus, to pursue this method of teaching and learning, access to cadavers is of continuing importance. Over a significant period of time unclaimed cadavers have performed an essential role…

In this article, I propose a theory of the globalization of higher education as societal and cultural security problems for many regions of the world. The first section examines the field of security studies for theoretical frameworks appropriate to critiquing globalized higher education, including critical human, societal and cultural security…

Alfred Mosely, a wealthy South African diamond mine owner and British industrialist, financed an Educational Commission that travelled to the United States during the winter of 1903. Its purpose was to ascertain how far education in the United States was responsible for the country's industrial progress, and its report was published in England in…

This paper reports on an introductory world regional geography course with a role-playing exercise. The goal was to situate students in a form of popular geopolitics that engaged them viscerally with positionality and othering. Students were assigned different positionalities in a liminal active learning environment within a context of fear of…

This policy implementation study examines the experiences of four elementary school principals using photomethods. We employ Rancière and Merleau-Ponty's theorizations on "democracy" and "making sense" to understand the lived policy experiences of school principals and these individual's potential for practicing democratic…

Those aiming to respond to the recognised shortage in quantitative skills within the UK social sciences have increasingly focused on the content of undergraduate degree programmes. Problems occur when quantitative methods are generally confined to a dedicated module, detached from substantive topics. This model makes it hard for students to…

This dissertation examines state-level efforts to mandate the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, especially following 9/11. Despite longstanding Supreme Court precedent declaring mandatory flag salutes unconstitutional, various state legislatures sought to institute or strengthen pledge mandates irrespective of students' civil liberties.…