Fourth grade students at a public elementary school in Houston, Texas, participated in a one-week exercise intended to mimic the process of creating a public good through a democratic process. The exercise involved students in four separate classes designing a class party with different characteristics (theme, music, and food) through a voluntary…

Student protests and occupations are not new phenomena. On February 10, 1355, what came to be known as the St. Scholastica Day riot occurred. Oxford students and townspeople clashed after a dispute in a local tavern and almost one hundred people were killed. But while student protests have occurred throughout history, the 1960s introduced a new…

The academy is defined by a fundamentally uncertain pursuit of certainty. The question of whether academic work is a sufficient form of engagement on its own is inseparable from the contradiction inherent to this pursuit. Like any properly academic question, it lends itself to a forum: a response is nearly obligatory for any professor in the…

In this article, the author discusses the challenge of the "transient" and the "timeless" problems of educational assessment and describes how to survive a lifetime of policy and practice in assessment. He first presents a personal retrospective from 1960s to 2000. Then he talks about assessment in transition and conflicting philosophies. Next, he…

When 16 finalists come to Washington next week to make their final pitches in the $4 billion Race to the Top competition, most can expect to go home empty-handed. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in announcing the finalists last week, said that no more than $2 billion will be divided among "very few winners" when the awards are…

Normative thinking around democracy often emphasizes the supremacy of electoral politics, underplaying the salience of education as a defining feature to produce a more meaningful, engaged, inclusive form of democracy. Critical pedagogy can be an extremely useful, illuminating and transformative means and process of deconstructing how democracy is…

In this article, we assess the status of basic writing early in the twenty-first century. Beginning with a discussion of the attacks on BW that intensified during the 1990s and early 2000s--attacks that originated from such diverse sources as state legislatures, university officials, and BW scholars themselves--we go on to summarize the responses…

The introduction of government-funded Postgraduate Professional Development in England has raised many questions about the true political purpose and agenda of such accredited continuing professional development (CPD). There are conflicting aspirations for a master's-level teaching profession between educators and the government, albeit agreement…

On the morning of September 1, 1960, Herb Klein and Pierre Salinger met in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., to discuss the details of what would be the first televised presidential debate. Klein was press secretary for Republican candidate Vice President Richard Nixon and Salinger was press secretary for Democratic candidate Senator John…

The aim of this article is to provide a review of research on the youngest children (0-3) in Norwegian kindergartens. The review deals with research from the last two decades. The article also discusses critical initiatives related to implications of the research findings, and points in conclusion to some challenges of the role of research in…

Following the fall of the Iron Curtain in December 1989, the Romanian system of education has started a deep process of reconstruction that asked for a comprehensive package of reforms among which decentralisation. Broadly the paper aims to make a contribution to the emerging knowledge base about the realities of restructuring of post-communist…

Throughout the centuries the ownership of wealth has been used as the measure for the determination of status in a community or society. Exactly what constituted wealth differed from one period to the next. The nature and extent of power within the narrow confines of the family and the wider political context was defined on the basis of ownership…

This paper questions the dominant arguments that currently frame debate over the political ineffectiveness of the higher education lobby in Australia. Public choice theory is used to advance a more complex hypothesis that takes into account dramatic changes to the political environment over recent decades. This is tested against interview data…

This article analyses the relationship between time and subjectification, focusing on the temporal structures created within Danish asylum centres and politics, and on children's experiences of and reactions to open-ended waiting. Such waiting leads to existential boredom which manifests in the children as restlessness, fatigue and despair. The…

The article is a transcript of a talk given by the author at a University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Education symposium. He argues that the role of the state has changed quite dramatically since the 1960s. From the postwar period through the 1970s, there was an emphasis on expanding the state, and an emphasis on growing more…