Second-language teachers’ moral knowledge base: a comparison between experienced and less experienced,male and female practitioners

The second-language teacher education community has become increasingly interested in the moral dimensions of teaching. Herein ELT practitioners’ ‘moral knowledge base’, as a window into their mental lives, has not received the attention it deserves. The present study was conducted to document likely differences between the frequencies of pedagogical and moral thought units of male and female, experienced and less experienced teachers, and to look deeply into participants’ moral thought categories. Forty teachers participated in the project. Data were collected through the use of stimulated recall protocol. The analyses of the data show that there are differences in the number of pedagogical and moral thoughts teachers recall. As to teachers’ moral knowledge base, seven moral categories emerged with ‘Teachers as Moral Agents’ being the most frequently recalled category. Gender and experience were found to affect the order and the frequency of the thought categories teachers produced in different groups. The top thought categories for experienced and less experienced, female and male teachers were identified to be Student Problem, Teachers as Moral Agents, Student Problem and Student Manner respectively.     

论孔子的道德教育思想及其对学校道德教育的启示

孔子是我国古代伟大的教育家和伦理学家,在他一生长达几十年的道德教育实践中,形成了以"仁"为核心的道德教育思想。文章通过对孔子道德教育思想内容的概括、阐释和评析,以期能加强现代道德教育的实效性。     

Between secularism/s: Islam and the institutionalisation of modern higher education in mid-nineteenth century British India

This paper problematises clean distinctions between secular and religious by tracing the history of modern higher education of Muslims in British colonial India. Grounded in the interpretive research tradition and with an empirical focus on the formative mid-nineteenth century, the article argues that relational notions between singular secularism and multiple secularisms best capture this historical trajectory. The institutional imaginary of colonialism constituted a significant milieu that, on the one hand, resulted in British policies in India that were at a tangent to similar developments in England at the time and, on the other, informed Muslim agency in its own institutionalisation of higher education. Muslim educational philosophy, politics and even theology were shaped in a concrete, historical, power-laden context. One of the consequences of this was a peculiar construction of ‘secularism’ in relation to Islam – again, related but at a tangent to the same notion in Europe. With a view on contemporary Pakistan, it is argued that such relational histories must be accounted for if policy and academic discourse is to move beyond largely stale and unhelpful binaries of Islam vs. Western modernity in religious education.     

The historiography of British imperial education policy,Part I: India

Colonial education has been controversial and widely divergent interpretations have been offered from contrasting ideological perspectives. British imperial education policy was highly contended during the colonial era and remains a contentious issue amongst many contemporary historians and a critical review of the historiography of the subject is long overdue. British colonial education policy starts in India in 1813, the intention being to promote both Oriental culture and Western science. But a former Director of Public Instruction, writing in the 1920s, claimed that education had done far less for Indian culture than for the material and political progress of India. More recent academic writing about the history of education in British India has been both intermittent and of mixed quality. To date, much of the criticism of British policy appears to have been motivated more by emotion rather than by detailed scholarly analysis and this account argues that more ‘plodding’ in archives is urgently needed at the present time to substantiate, refine or refute the claims of India’s educational historians. This is the first part of a two‐part article, the second of which will deal with Africa and the rest of the colonial Empire.     

Toward a Wonderland of comparative education

ABSTRACT

The publication of Noah & Eckstein's Toward a Science of Comparative Education (1969, Macmillan, NY) marked the beginning of an increasingly narrow research trajectory in comparative education, claiming a universality for Western knowledge and privileging scientific rationality in research. Juxtaposing the ‘science’ to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, such comparative education relegated more-than-human worlds and spiritual domains of learning – and being – to our collective pasts, personal childhood memories, or imaginations. How can we reorient and attune ourselves toward a Wonder(land), rather than a Science of comparative education exclusively, opening spaces for multiple ways of making sense of the world, and multiple ways of being? How can we reanimate our capacity toengage with a more-than-human world? Based on the analysis of children’s literature and textbooks published during various historical periods in Latvia, this article follows the white rabbit to reexamine taken-for-granted dichotomies – nature and culture, time and space, self and other – by bringing the ‘pagan’ worldviews or nature-centred spiritualities more clearly into focus, while reimagining education and childhood beyond the Western horizon.     

Moral Education and Education in Altruism: Two Replies to Michael Hand

This article is a critical discussion of two recent papers by Michael Hand on moral education. The first is his ‘Towards a Theory of Moral Education’, published in the Journal of Philosophy of Education in 2014 (Volume 48, Issue 4). The second is a chapter called ‘Beyond Moral Education?’ in an edited book of new perspectives on my own work in philosophy and history of education, published in the same year. His two papers are linked in that he applies the theory outlined in the former to a critique in the latter of my views on education in altruism in a 1990 publication. I introduce this article by outlining the tradition of recent philosophical thought about moral education, beginning with that of Richard Peters, in which Hand is working.     

‘Nature’ in German colonial literature for children and young people

ABSTRACT

German colonialism has long been treated as a sort of footnote in the epoch of the Empire due to its relatively short time span. The focus was mostly on the reconstruction of a story of ‘white’ men – as the story of pioneers, ‘discoverers’, missionaries or traders. But how were children included in the colonial project? This article deals with this question with regard to the genre of colonial literature for children that emerged in the German Empire. Due to their pedagogic impetus these novels are of significance for historical educational research: they were explicitly put in the service of instruction to inspire children with the meaning of colonial issues. Within these novels ‘nature’ had high priority. On the basis of selected colonial novels for boys and girls, this article investigates the question of what was understood by ‘nature’ and of its importance for colonial education.     

Religious education and the feminisation of witchcraft: a study of three secondary schools in Kumasi,Ghana

This study, conducted during the summer of 2008 in Kumasi, Ghana analysed the role of religious and moral education (RME) in ameliorating the witchcraft discourse in three Ghanaian junior secondary schools. Although the syllabus acknowledges the pernicious effects of witchcraft allegations, it adopts a ‘Thou shalt not’ approach that fails to adequately grapple with the challenge. Through the use of semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and a questionnaire, pupils’ attitudes towards witchcraft were analysed. The study reveals deep-seated beliefs to the effect that women – particularly elderly females – engage in witchcraft for devious purposes. Employing the theoretical framework of Foucault’s knowledge – power symbiotic nexus, I explore the misogynous nature of the witchcraft discourse as evidenced through these responses. It is argued that RME can benefit from attending more closely to the subtle ways in which the ‘dense web’ of knowledge – power is internalised and perpetuated by pupils.     

Educational practice in India and its foundations in Indian heritage: a synthesis of the East and West?

The paper examines education practice in India in terms of the division between indigenous cultures on the one hand, and the formal culture of learning and knowledge systems inherited from colonial times on the other. These ‘two Indias’ are still reflected in the modern educational system in India, seen in the vast differences between the formal school system, whose benefits reach only a minority of the population, and the millions of crafts-persons working in India's informal sector, many without education or training. The paper looks at reasons for these divisions within the culture and history of India's formal, non-formal and informal systems of education and training. The paper also throws light on the aspirations to unite these divided cultures of learning by looking at some of the writings of J.P. Naik, the famous educationist and secretary of the first Report of the Education Commission (1964–66) after India's independence. The analysis needs to be seen against the background of international educational thought which is improving the value, relevance and quality of non-formal and informal learning, as key pillars for building lifelong learning systems.     

REsilience,violent extremism and religious education

This article is an attempt to provide an educational justification for the British Government-funded project, REsilience, on addressing contentious issues through religious education (RE) which was carried out by the RE Council of England and Wales. A number of issues relating to the inclusion of religiously inspired violent extremism in the curriculum are raised – definitional, political and educational. A justification is proposed which focuses on human rights in two ways: the right to freedom of religion and belief and the promotion of pupils’ moral development through human rights issues. It is suggested that the work of the moral philosopher Kwame Antony Appiah with his focus on morality in cosmopolitan societies is relevant to this, and in particular, his concept of ‘honor’ which can be used by educationists as the basis for engagement with violent extremism and related topics in the classroom.     

Portuguese,French and British discourses on colonial education: Church–State relations,school expansion and missionary competition in Africa, 1890–1930

This article draws a comparison between the Portuguese in relation to British and French discourses on overseas educational policies at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century until the 1930s. It focuses on three main colonial educational dynamics: school expansion (comparing the public and private sectors); State–Church relations (comparing these relationships at the European and colonial levels); and missionary competition (comparing Catholic with Protestant strategies towards educational incorporation). Colonial discourse is seen here as a power‐knowledge discourse aimed at constructing the colonial subjects as individuals, enabling them to imagine themselves as belonging to a particular cultural polity. The article intends to show how cross‐national discourses on education affect the principles on which theories of schooling are built and the ways in which they influence the first attempts to systematize pedagogical and school models in the colonial peripheries. On the other hand, it tries to understand, within government technologies of domination, the conflicting views, negotiations and ambiguities between global policy formulation and local school system implementation. In this sense, the author sought to analyse the different ways in which concepts such as ‘assimilation’, ‘civilizing mission’, ‘adapted education’, and ‘learning by doing’ were mobilized and appropriated into the colonial education discourses in order to legitimize particular governmental strategies. Two main ideas run through the text: the first attempts to demonstrate the existence of discontinuities between official educational ideologies at home and local system and school expansion strategies in the colonies. The second claims that educational borrowing from other colonies at the Empires' peripheries was, more often that is thought, a crucial feature of colonial educational discourse.     

'Poisoned history': a comparative study of nationalism,propaganda and the treatment of war and peace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century school curriculum

This paper investigates the educational philosophy and practices of Achimota School, which was established in the Gold Coast Colony (the southern part of today’s Ghana) in 1927 as the governmental model school for leadership education. Achimota’s education aimed to develop leaders who were ‘Western in intellectual attitude’, ‘African in sympathy’. To fulfil this objective, Achimota attempted to develop a curriculum that took into account the sociocultural background of African students while trying to provide an education on a par with that available at English public schools. The paper first examines the discourse surrounding the establishment of a model secondary school for African leadership, which involved diverse groups of people – colonial officials, missionaries, European educationists, traditional chiefs and African nationalists – and then reviews the relevant educational philosophies of the twentieth century. Finally, the paper describes the Achimota education as experienced by students, a mixed product of English public school tradition and ‘African tradition’. Regardless of the efforts to balance the two ‘traditions’, what was actually created was a new Achimota culture that selected essences from different ‘traditions’ and remoulded them for a novel purpose.     

Kant and prejudice,or, the mechanical use of reason

This paper examines an issue of recent Kant scholarship on education: the supposed disconnect between his theory of morals and his theory of character. While the debate is often couched in terms of Kant’s ‘phenomenal–noumenal’ distinction, or the distinction between moral theory and culture, I follow scholarship suggesting the best way to understand Kant’s distinction is by following his account of the ‘conduct of thought.’ Doing so demonstrates the Lectures on Logic and particularly, his account of prejudice, as playing a large role in the articulation of what it is to think subjectively. We also see the importance of conducting our thinking from the subjective standpoint to an objective (moral) one in order to fulfill our obligations to both think and act morally.     

The ‘End’ of Kant‐in‐Himself: Nietzschean difference

Kant's over‐reliance on universal reason and his subjection of free will to the moral law can be seen as normalising a particular and restrictive view of autonomous human existence—a view implicit in liberal accounts of education. Drawing on Nietzsche's critique of Kantian thought, this paper argues that the transcendental and unattainable realm of Kantian reason is insufficient as a sole basis for moral thought and action or as the basis of respect for others as ‘ends‐in‐themselves’. For Nietzsche, the possibility for each individual goes well beyond compliance with any imposed system of values, his metaphorical ‘death of God’ leaving room for creativity and difference.     

Digital neocolonialism and massive open online courses (MOOCs): colonial pasts and neoliberal futures

ABSTRACT

Through evaluating dominant MOOC platforms created by Western universities, I argue that MOOCs on such platforms tend to embed Western-centric epistemologies and propagate this without questioning their global relevance. Consequently, such MOOCs can be detrimental when educating diverse and complex participants as they erode local and indigenous knowledge systems. Arguing that the digital divide is an exacerbation of historical inequalities, I draw parallels between colonial education, specifically across Sub-Saharan Africa, and ‘digital neocolonialism’ through Western MOOC platforms. I analyse similarities in ideology, assumptions, and methods of control. Highlighting evolving forms of coloniality, I include contemporary problems created by neoliberal techno-capitalist agendas, such as the commodification of education. Balance is needed between the opportunities offered through MOOCs and the harms they cause through overshadowing marginalised knowledges and framing disruptive technologies as the saviour. While recommending solutions for inclusion of marginalised voices, further problems such as adverse incorporation are raised.     

论钱穆的“中国人”教育——钱穆新亚书院时期德育思想研究

钱穆是中国现代著名的国学大师、教育家。他高度重视对中国传统教育思想的研究和实践,在西方高等教育思想占主流的背景下,他在教育实践中深刻地揭示了中国传统教育的精粹,即“为学与做人同属一事”,这是对知识（专业或学问）至上论的反动。在他看来,教育实际上是德育,更为确切地说应是“中国人”的教育,而新亚书院时期,是他实施这种教育的最重要时期。他认为培养一个真正的中国人,要进行使命教育、理想教育、人格教育、挫折教育、事业教育、师道教育。他的大学德育思想对克服当前大学德育中的弊端,提供了十分有益的借鉴。     

School tracking and educational inequality: a comparison of 12 education systems in Switzerland

Using data from the super-sample of the ‘PISA Suisse’ 2003 assessment, this article examines the relationship between the characteristics of education systems (made up of homogeneous or heterogeneous tracks) and their consequences in terms of effectiveness and equity. Our results indicate that it is not so much the official structure of tracks as the ways in which tracking is really organised – and, in particular, the degree of segregation that tracking methods involve – which make it possible to explain inequalities among students. They also show that some education systems are more inegalitarian than others and that the factors leading to inequalities can vary significantly from one Swiss canton to another. Finally, through multilevel analyses, we demonstrate that when the individual and aggregate characteristics of students are taken into account, the type of track a student attends is of only limited significance for explaining inequalities, which suggests that the effects of tracking are in fact linked to the nature of the population educated in the tracks.     

Soft power,university rankings and knowledge production: distinctions between hegemony and self‐determination in higher education

The purpose of this article is to analyse the nature of the global hegemonies in higher education. While anti‐colonial thinkers describe the dominance of the Western paradigm as an oppression of indigenous culture and knowledge and as neo‐colonialism in higher education, their arguments lead to such questions as how much self‐determination do non‐Western countries have? On what basis can the colonised resist the coloniser? To what extent are non‐Western nations aware of the Western hegemony? To answer these questions, this article uses the concept of soft power to interrogate how global hegemonies are manifested in higher education agendas. With reference to the pursuit of a world‐class status in higher education in East Asia, it discusses how the international inequality in higher education is viewed from the anti‐colonial perspective in the existing literature. The article then proposes the soft‐power perspective as an alternative way to explain why non‐Western countries are willing to follow the Anglo‐American paradigm to develop their higher education systems. Extending this analysis, the article argues that the emerging global university rankings are important resources of soft power that have the potential, as a governance tool, to reshape the global higher education landscape.     

Feyerabend on Science and Education

This article offers a sympathetic interpretation of Paul Feyerabend's remarks on science and education. I present a formative episode in the development of his educational ideas—the ‘Berkeley experience'—and describe how it affected his views on the place of science within modern education. It emerges that Feyerabend arrived at a conception of education closely related to that of Michael Oakeshott and Martin Heidegger—that of education as ‘releasement’. Each of those three figures argued that the purpose of education was not to induct students into prevailing norms and convictions, but rather to initiate them into the ‘civilized inheritance of mankind’. I conclude that interpreting Feyerabend's educational ideas within this conception of education as releasement lends a new coherence to his remarks on science and education, in a way that renders certain of his political proposals—such as the ‘separation of science and the state'—both more coherent and more compelling.