Misunderstanding duty: Vices of culture, ‘aggravated’ vice,and the role of casuistical questions in moral education

Abstract

This paper considers the role of ‘vices of culture’ in Immanuel Kant’s account of radical evil and education. I argue that Kant was keenly aware of a uniquely human tendency to allow a self-centered concern for status to misunderstand or co-opt the language of dignity and equal worth for its own purposes. This tendency lies at the root of the ‘vices of culture’ and ‘aggravated vices’ that Kant describes in the Religion and Doctrine of Virtue, respectively. When it comes to moral education, then, it will be crucial that the developing agent have a clear understanding of the shared dignity of rational agents and the particular duties (e.g. gratitude and beneficence) that are defined, in part, by their tendency to alter (a different kind of) status among agents. I argue that the casuistical questions that Kant attaches to these discussions in the Doctrine of Virtue are an example of a pedagogical device that might help pupils to overcome this tendency so closely associated with radical evil.     

Markets,schools and the convertibility of economic capital: the complex dynamics of class choice

While economic capital is not synonymous with cultural, social or symbolic capital in either its constitutional or organizational form, it nevertheless remains the more flexible and convertible form of capital. The convertibility of economic capital has particular resonance within ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland. The state’s reluctance to fully endorse an internal market between schools has resulted in middle‐class parents using their private wealth to create an educational market in the private sector to help secure the class futures of their children. Using data from recent studies of second‐level education in Ireland, and data compiled on the newly emerging ‘grind’ schools (private tuition centres), we outline how the availability of economic capital allows middle‐class parents to choose fee‐paying schooling or to opt out of the formal school sector entirely to employ market solutions to their class ambitions. The data also show that schools actively collude in the class project to their own survival advantage.     

The road not taken: Frank Aydelotte and the thought approach to engineering writing

Frank Aydelotte's English and Engineering (1917) is one of the first anthologies in technical communication. Developed at MIT, this book attempted to broaden the education of undergraduate engineering students by using the tenets of the thought movement. This movement, which Aydelotte first articulated while directing Indiana University's first‐year English program, modified for universities in the United States the education that he had received at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Rather than emphasizing matters of form and correctness, the thought approach required engineering students to think and write about issues important to their education and future careers.     

Knowledge from Testimony: Benefits and Dangers

Testimony is an important source of knowledge in many contexts, including that of education, but the notion of the teacher as testifier is not often discussed. Since much that is believed by individuals has come to them not from direct experience but by accepting the accounts of others, the trustworthiness of their interlocutors' testimonies, whether these be spoken, textual or electronic in form, is an important factor in determining whether or not they acquire true, justified beliefs. Testimonial trustworthiness is a combination of competence and sincerity, both of which tend to be high when a teacher testifies in her area of expertise. But in the world beyond the classroom there are situations in which the competence or sincerity of the testifier is low, so it is important that the learner acquires an epistemically‐virtuous, well‐attuned disposition towards testimony.     

Training ‘rule‐of‐〈E〉’: further investigation of a previously successful intervention for a spelling rule in developmental mixed dysgraphia

This paper reports a single case treatment study conducted with R.F.L., a young man with developmental mixed dysgraphia. The intervention focused on teaching spelling rules and was a replication of a previous successful study. The results of the present study provided further insights into the mechanism that operates to update faulty lexical representations for regular words. We argue that the level of spelling accuracy in combination with the error types present before the intervention are important to consider when choosing intervention methods.     

疼痛的回响——悲剧理论视阈下《红楼梦》的美学意蕴

《红楼梦》是中国古典文学史的一部旷世之作。在悲剧理论观照下,小说的悲剧从情感、社会、文化至人之存在的痛苦,上升到形而上的生命本体层面。审美痛感的普遍性、永恒性,赋予小说深厚的美学意蕴。     

One in Three? Teachers' Attempts to Identify Low Self-Esteem Children

The maintenance of healthy self-esteem remains a central concern in pastoral care. It is almost taken for granted that we can identify low self-esteem in children based on the knowledge built up through day-to-day interactions. But self-esteem is essentially a personal perception, and one may ask, to what extent can another make reliable judgements about such a phenomenon? This study looked at the match between teachers' judgements of their pupils' self-esteem and the children's own self-reports. The teachers concerned were committed to self-esteem enhancement as an important goal of their teaching, but the findings indicate that when trying to identify low self-esteem children in their classes, they were frequently unsuccessful. These findings are discussed, and implications considered.