Language Difficulties: an Introduction

In launching the commission on Language Difficulties, Patrick helped to realize in practical terms the difficulties which teachers have in becoming learners. Rather than delivering a paper on language deprivation, he encouraged the members of the commission to consider what was involved in a particular learning situation, and the constraints which operate upon it. He has kindly allowed English in Education to print some extracts from a tape-recording made at this session, though inevitably something of the original spontaneity is lost in print.     

Bernstein on Compensatory Education

In this talk given at the NATE Conference at Exeter this year Patrick McGeeney, Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester, considers a number of issues implicit in earlier articles.     

Cost Engineering: A Separate Academic Discipline?

This paper assesses whether cost engineering is an academic discipline or not. Cost engineering is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the scientific approach towards management issues in engineering. It is still in a dynamic stage in that its domain is revised periodically. Despite the rapid expansion of its role in practice, it is found that cost engineering is not an academic discipline. In particular, it possesses most of the key attributes that an academic discipline should uphold, but it lacks attributes that are vital for an academic discipline: the expression of human imagination, and a generalized syntactical and conceptual structure. More work is therefore needed to establish cost engineering as an academic discipline. Apart from cultivating the vital attributes, partnerships between the cost engineering industry and academia can also be introduced.     

Why Theology Can and Should be Taught at Secular Universities: Lonergan on Intellectual Conversion

Drawing on Bernard Lonergan's Method in Theology (1972) I argue that theology can be taught because personal knowledge, of which it is an instance, is at the heart of academic inquiry; and it should be taught because critical engagement with basic ways of taking one's life as a whole (religion in a broad sense) furnishes a critique of the typical oversights of contemporary culture. The appropriation of one's subjectivity entails an awareness of an existential dialectic that pushes towards a decisive option for affirming the possibility and worth of growth in one's powers of self‐determination and self‐transcendence. Thus conversion—precisely defined in terms of this dialectic—has moral and intellectual dimensions whose promotion goes to the heart of the academic enterprise. By separating out those disciplines (systematics, for example) which are mediated by the existential stance taken by the scholar, Lonergan allows theology to be seen as one world view among others.