BOOK REVIEWS

S OVEREIGN R EASON . By Ernest Nagel.
T HE S OCIOLOGY OF E DUCATION AND E DUCATIONAL S OCIOLOGY . A Sociology of Education by Wilbur B. Brookover. New York: American Book Company, 1955; and Applied Principles of Educational Sociology and Educational Sociology, A Resource Book . Edited by Harold R. Bottrell.
W HY J OHNNY C AN ' T R EAD AND W HAT Y OU C AN D O A BOUT I T . By Rudolf Flesch.
T HE F LEXIBLE S CHOOL : A R EPORT OF THE C OMMITTEE FOR THE S TUDY OF F LEXIBILITY IN THE E LEMENTARY S CHOOL .     

Predicting Ratings of Counselor Trainee Empathy With Self-Report Anxiety Measures and Skin Conductance

This study sought to determine the degree of relationship between clients' and judges' ratings of counselor trainee empathy and self-report anxiety and skin conductance measures.     

Educational Justice and the Value of Knowledge

How should a liberal democratic society value knowledge and understanding, and does this valuation inform how we ought to reason about the justice of our educational institutions? In scholarly and public discourse, it is orthodox to argue that because educational institutions bring about various goods—goods of character such as wellbeing or economic goods such as social mobility – they ought to be structured by principles of political justice. In this paper, I argue that knowledge and understanding valued for its own sake should also inform judgements of educational justice.     

Age Touches a Nerve

Philipp Khaitovich works in Shanghai, a city that is developing at a pace as dramatic as his research field. At the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, the molecular biologist is investigating how the different brain development of primates is linked to their age.     

The Home School Knowledge Exchange Project: linking home and school to improve children's literacy

The Government is urging teachers to engage more closely with families and is promoting the concept of the ‘extended’ school. This article reports on the literacy strand of the Home School Knowledge Exchange (HSKE) project, directed by Professor Martin Hughes at the University of Bristol. A selection of literacy activities developed during this project is discussed – activities that enabled teachers and parents to share their knowledge about children in order to enhance their learning. These included ‘school‐to‐home’ activities where the direction of knowledge was primarily from teachers to families and ‘home‐to‐school’ activities where families' knowledge of children impacted on school learning. Practical aspects of planning and conducting home–school knowledge exchange activities are discussed, and challenges are explored. The approaches presented in this article provide examples that could be considered and adapted by schools interested in extending their provision for families. This article draws on the recently published Improving Primary Literacy: Linking Home and School ( Feiler et al., 2007 ).