Some Effects of Teaching Designed to Promote Understanding of Racial Issues in Adolescence

Abstract:

Moral education must be based on universal religious values, such as equality and faith, if it expects to have an impact on character development The central objective of our moral education programme is co‐operation. To specify what is meant by co‐operation, three of its aspects ‐‐ courtesy, consultation and service ‐‐ are discussed. Methods of facilitating moral development fall into three categories: ground rules, modelling, and moral reasoning. These methods must be used jointly if they are to be effective. Releasing the potential of both the society and the individual constitutes the goal of moral education.     

Wittgenstein's ‘Relativity’: Training in language‐games and agreement in Forms of Life

Taking Wittgenstein's love of music as my impetus, I approach aporetic problems of epistemic relativity through a round of three overlapping (canonical) inquiries delivered in contrapuntal (higher and lower) registers. I first take up the question of scepticism surrounding ‘groundless knowledge’ and contending paradigms in On Certainty (physics versus oracular divination, or realism versus idealism) with attention given to the role of ‘bedrock’ certainties in providing stability amidst the Heraclitean flux. I then look into the formation of sedimented bedrock knowledge, or practices of knowing, by comparing Wittgenstein's remarks on animal habituation and initiate training into human forms of life. In the latter case, mastery of techniques—our common education—secures agreement in judgment. Finally, I entertain Wittgenstein's obscure references to Einstein's Relativity in Zettel, showing initiate training as a way of ‘setting the clocks’ with variable degrees of certainty, relative to the language‐games played. Together, these three approaches help us to stop the ‘endless circling’ when philosophers try to address knowledge questions through the logic of object and designation, or verification of correspondence between propositions and things. Instead, attention moves to the way we educate our children and how we employ agreements and bedrock certainties in practices.     

Physician‐patient communication: Mutual role expectations

This study examined physician‐patient communication as it relates to expectations that patients and physicians hold for themselves and each other. Dimensions of mutual role expectation were determined to be physician as humanistic practitioner, physician authority, patient in the sick role, and patient as consumer. The study tested five hypotheses. Results showed patients had significantly higher expectations for patients in the sick role than had physicians. Other role expectations varied significantly by age within physician and patient groups. The implications of these differences for physician‐patient communication are discussed.     

Does STES‐Oriented Science Education Promote 10th‐Grade Students’ Decision‐Making Capability?

Today’s society is continuously coping with sustainability‐related complex issues in the Science‐Technology‐Environment‐Society (STES) interfaces. In those contexts, the need and relevance of the development of students’ higher‐order cognitive skills (HOCS) such as question‐asking, critical‐thinking, problem‐solving and decision‐making capabilities within science teaching have been argued by several science educators for decades. Three main objectives guided this study: (1) to establish “base lines” for HOCS capabilities of 10th grade students (n = 264) in the Israeli educational system; (2) to delineate within this population, two different groups with respect to their decision‐making capability, science‐oriented (n = 142) and non‐science (n = 122) students, Groups A and B, respectively; and (3) to assess the pre‐post development/change of students’ decision‐making capabilities via STES‐oriented HOCS‐promoting curricular modules entitled Science, Technology and Environment in Modern Society (STEMS). A specially developed and validated decision‐making questionnaire was used for obtaining a research‐based response to the guiding research questions. Our findings suggest that a long‐term persistent application of purposed decision‐making, promoting teaching strategies, is needed in order to succeed in affecting, positively, high‐school students’ decision‐making ability. The need for science teachers’ involvement in the development of their students’ HOCS capabilities is thus apparent.     

The 'new' politics of education in Britain's changing times

The British Labour Party has continued to make progress on education, following two broad policy paths and adopting a pragmatic approach that does not attempt to force these to cross or converge. One path is that of the quasi market inherited from the previous Conservative administration; the other is characterised as 'intervention' to support those for whom the market remains almost entirely irrelevant. Some observers regard this dual approach as 'opportunism' and Labour's education policy as a 'betrayal' of principle, by which is meant the principle of 'equal opportunity'. Of course, that principle provides equal opportunity to fail as much as to succeed. Rather than leaving education to the market, Labour has focused on the needs of those most likely to be failed by the principle of 'equal' opportunity in a quasi market.     

Putting school commercialism in context: a global history of Junior Achievement Worldwide

The literature on school commercialism, despite a number of successes in battling advertising and marketing in schools, has often seemed to only scratch the surface of corporatization of K‐12 education. While condemning corporations who seek to sell brand‐name products to kids in schools is a relatively straightforward matter, critiquing corporate efforts to promote ideologies, identities, values and agendas to children and youth is far more complicated and yet, essential. In this paper, we take the example of Junior Achievement Worldwide, one of the world’s oldest, largest, and fastest growing organizations promoting corporate interests in schools in the USA and beyond to illustrate the need to address school commercialism in a broad historical, curricular, and global context. We review the long history of Junior Achievement in the USA, its vast set of curriculum offerings in enterprise, financial literacy, economics, work readiness and life skills, and its dramatic expansion, since the late 1980s, to now reach more than eight million students every year in over 100 countries around the world.     

Policy rhetoric and the renovation of English schooling: the case of Creative Partnerships

My critical evaluation of the government's White Paper, Learning to Succeed: a new framework for post-16 learning, which was published in the Journal of Educational Policy (2000, 15(2), 237-246) has provoked a critique by Pat Ainley, which is the main purpose of this section of the journal on Documents and Debates. He claims that my article suffers from two sins of omission: first, I am apparently unaware that the new legislation excludes higher education; and second, I have apparently failed to see that the Learning and Skills Council may become a new Leviathan rather than a new enlightenment. Both criticisms are, in my opinion, wide of the mark for the reasons given below, and this response ends with some comments on Pat Ainley's contribution.     

Child‐rearing and Parental ‘Intentions' in Postmodernity

This paper aims at revealing the various meanings of schools as more than built physical environments from a geographical‐phenomenological (or ‘geo‐phenomenological’) perspective. This paper consists of five sections: the first explicates the meaning of ‘geo‐phenomenology’; the second reveals the meaning of ‘environment’ and a dialectics of strangeness and intimacy through geo‐phenomenological analysis; the third examines the meanings of environment as ‘space’ and ‘place’ and the act of naming as the process of constructing meaning between humans and environment; the fourth section attempts to explore the meaning of conceiving school as a particular environment; and the final is the conclusion.     

Inter‐firm Migration of Tacit Knowledge: Law and Policy1

Abstract

Much knowledge is diffused by the exchange of property rights in intangibles. But tacit knowledge, not being subject to property rights, is instead diffused by migration of knowledgeable individuals between firms. The law impacts significantly on this diffusion mechanism, in particular those rules that determine the use individuals may make of their tacit knowledge after migration to a different firm. The general principle underlying the relevant law is that individuals are free to migrate with all their tacit knowledge. Nonetheless there are some narrow exceptions to this principle. That these exceptions remain narrow and carefully policed by the courts is important because imposing too many restraints on use of tacit knowledge post‐term would have a negative impact on real innovation.