Security,Extremism and Education: Safeguarding or Surveillance?

This article analyses how education is positioned in the current concerns about security and extremism. This means firstly examining the different meanings of security (national, human and societal) and who provides security for whom. Initially, a central dilemma is acknowledged: that schooling appears to be simultaneously irrelevant to the huge global questions of security and yet central to the learning of alternative ways to conduct human relations. With regard to extremism, two aspects of importance in ideological compliance or challenge are firstly the attempted securitisation of education, and secondly the role of education in young people joining or supporting extremist movements. The UK’s ‘Prevent’ strategy is examined here. The issue of how to safeguard young people without securitising institutions suggests four key features: inclusivity, encounters with difference, networking and active citizenship. Critiquing sacred texts and the use of humour and satire also act to foster resilience. Educational approaches within transitional justice underline the importance of tackling violence in schools and promoting a human rights culture that promotes both human security and ultimately national security.     

Liberalism,Parental Rights,Pupils’ Autonomy and Education

Liberals, from Mill to Rawls see personal autonomy as paramount in civil society. They see human dignity to consist essentially in personal autonomy, that is, ‘in the ability of each person to determine for himself or herself a view of the good life’ (Taylor, C. (1992) p. 27). Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” p. 57 (Princeton, Princeton University Press). This emphasis on personal autonomy underlies much of liberal emphasis on freedom of conscience, justice, rights and fairness. Its core thesis is that a just society seeks not to promote any particular view of the good life, but enables its citizens to pursue their own ends consistent with a similar liberty for all others. Yet, when some citizens in America attempted to pursue their own view of the good life, they came up against head‐on conflict with the liberal state. These groups saw civic education with its emphasis on individual choice, on reflecting and weighing of alternative viewpoints and on personal autonomy, as threatening to their way of life and to their fundamental religious beliefs, and consequently they challenged the state in the courts. What ensued raised profound educational problems for educating children, parental rights, and the right of the State in a liberal democratic society, which are discussed in this paper.     

Schools and Moral Education: Conformism or Autonomy?

In pluralistic Western societies, schools have a specific task in moral education. This task is to be understood neither as the transmission of specific values, nor as the development of moral reasoning skills or universal values, but as teaching pupils to handle plurality in an autonomous way. The concept of autonomy is interpreted from a Vygotskian and Deweyan position, where learning in school means learning to participate in cultural activities in a reflective and critical way. Participation has both intellectual and moral aspects, and thus moral education can never be separated from cognitive education.     

Education,Education, Education: or,What has Jane Austen to teach Tony Blunkett?

The difference between training and education has been recognised at least since the days when Socrates searched Athens for someone who knew more than he himself did—and was disappointed to find many craftsmen but no philosophers. The distinction persisted strongly when the universities developed in the twelfth and thirteenth Christian centuries. It was continuously vindicated by poets, novelists, essayists, and generation after generation of teachers, from the Renaissance until about the time Kenneth Baker became Education Secretary, whereupon it vanished from English consciousness—so completely, that the polytechnics were renamed universities, the universities made polytechnics and the Departments of Education and Employment merged, as if that were not only obviously sensible in itself but perfectly consistent with two-and-a-half thousand years of previous thought and practice. The English educated classes are now composed of amnesiacs.     

Informal Mentors and Education: Complementary or Compensatory Resources?

Few studies have examined the impact that mentoring (i.e., developing a special relationship with a non-parental adult) has on educational achievement and attainment in the general population. In addition, prior research has yet to clarify the extent to which mentoring relationships reduce inequality by enabling disadvantaged youth to compensate for a lack of social resources or promote inequality by serving as a complementary resource for advantaged youth. Results from a nationally representative sample of youth show (1) a powerful net influence of mentors on the educational success of youth and (2) how social background, parental, peer, and personal resources condition the formation and effectiveness of mentoring relationships. The findings uncover an interesting paradox-that informal mentors may simultaneously represent compensatory and complementary resources. Youth with many resources are more likely than other young people to have mentors, but those with few resources are likely to benefit more from having a mentor-particularly teacher mentors-in their lives.     

Environmental Ethics and Ontologies: Humanist or Posthumanist? The Case for Constrained Pluralism

This paper will evaluate a range of humanist and posthumanist ethical positions as useful bases for environmental education. It will conclude that a range of such positions can be seen as embracing respect for non-human nature. Therefore, environmental education can effectively embrace ethical pluralism to some extent. Embracing a degree of pluralism potentially makes it easier for teachers and students with a wide range of preconceptions to become more pro-environmental, while highly committed and exclusive approaches can prove divisive. However, some humanist and posthumanist positions are grounded in dismissive or reductive attitudes to non-human nature. In summary, there is no one suitable ethical basis for environmental education in the humanist and non-humanist traditions, but several. However, the key to the effectiveness of any of these is full acceptance that human and non-human flourishing are integrally related, and that non-human nature must therefore be both respected (that is, both admired and cared for), and not merely when this meets short-term instrumental human goals.     

Recurrent Education: Strategy for Change,or Cooptation?

Abstracts

English

Is recurrent education a practical strategy for change? This research paper reports some of the reactions of the Australian legal profession to recurrent education and suggests that a covert alliance between the profession and its educators results in a strong resistance to this rather radical approach to education.     

Intelligence,Global Terrorism and Higher Education: Neutralising Threats or Alienating Allies?

The British Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 appears to have drawn universities into the security apparatus of the state. Academics and administrators have been compelled to comply with measures aimed at monitoring the activities of mostly Islamic student societies. While it is not inconceivable that universities are exploited as sites for extremist propagandising or even as recruiting grounds for extremist causes, do the new counterterrorism measures suffice to reduce the threat; and if so, even in a small measure, does it outweigh the risks of alienating the many to defeat the few? This article draws on narratives of Muslim students, their experiences of existing counterterrorism policies, to examine the effects of the new security framework and asks whether there is another way – a broader framework in which intelligence agencies and academic institutions can pool resources, not to improve statecraft, but to respond more effectively to threats, both known and unknown.     

Good or Bad? : Learning Globalization, Postmodernity and a Changing China Education System

Under the setting of globalization, in the late 1970s, China began to carry out ’the reform and opening-up policy’. During 30 years reform process, Chinese economy has a great growth. The ’market mechanism’ and its effectiveness were adopted by Chinese people. With the deep reform of health system, Chinese government delegates more decision-making power to the hospitals, thus ’in employment terms, as two of largest industries (health and education) in every country’ (Meadmore P. 1999 p.91), the reform of education has become a hot topic in social debate. In other words, in the field of education in China today, marketization of education is highly focused, causing concerns of various social classes: What are the reforms? What are the results reforms bring about? On exploring the effects of globalization on Chinese education in modernity and presenting advantages and disadvantages in the process of the ’market mechanism’ working in and through education to reconsider a market education system creates an external competition for public schools.     

Language Education in English Education: Grammar instruction,grammar plus,or critical social analysis?

I consider the difficulty of deciding what to include in a one-semester course on language education in English education for preservice teachers. While it is imperative to prepare teachers to talk about language in written texts, other concerns of the English classroom, from classroom talk to reflections on self, can be illuminated by knowledge about language. I describe different representations of the language system: one proposed in a scope and sequence document prepared by a group of linguists and educators in the United States; and the other Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), which, while relatively unknown and unsupported in the United States, has influenced education in Australia. While I admire the advances in language education being made in the United States, in my view, SFG offers a conceptual advantage to those who want to make the link between grammar and broader concerns. I believe it is possible to use SFG conceptually in the design of classroom activities, while also relying on non-SFG methods to make visible, for instance, the operations of talk in the classroom. In the end, I advocate linking language to issues that matter, focusing above the language system to meaning-making more broadly, and using knowledge about language in the service of social analysis as well as the interpretation of texts.     

Competition in Physical Education: Avoid,Ask, Adapt or Accept?

Competition is an essential part of youth sport. But should it also be part of the curriculum in physical education? Or are competitive activities incompatible with the educational context? While some researchers have argued that physical education should embrace the sporting logic of competition, others have criticized the negative experiences it can create for some students in school. In this article, we draw on insights from the philosophy of sport as well as educational philosophy, with the aim of questioning and critically examining the integration of competitive activities in physical education. We present and discuss four normative arguments (AVOID, ASK, ADAPT, and ACCEPT) that can each in their own way inform and guide future talks on the topic.