Religious Worldviews and the Common School: The French Dilemma

This article explores, in the French context, an aspect of what Terence McLaughlin (1991) has described in an unpublished paper as the 'dilemma of substantiality' faced by any school system endeavouring to promote neutrality. In France, in order that the public or common school be genuinely open to all students, not only is the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols forbidden but so too is any direct teaching of religion. The cultural consequences resulting from this prohibition have led to the mandating of cross-curricular teaching about religion. This article aims to show that the civic principles (la laïcité) on which this teaching is based pose in an acute and problematic form the 'dilemma of substantiality'.     

Moral Rules, Utilitarianism and Schizophrenic Moral Education

R. M. Hare has argued for and defended a ‘two-level’, view of moral agency. He argues that moral agents ought to rely on the rules of ‘intuitive moral thinking’ for their ‘everyday’ moral judgments. When these rules conflict or when we do not have a rule at hand, we ought to ascend to the act-utilitarian,‘critical’ level of moral thinking. I argue that since the rules at the intuitive level of moral thinking necessarily conflict much more often than Hare supposes, and since we often do not have ready-made rules for our moral judgments, we must necessarily use critical moral thinking very frequently. However, act-utilitarian judgements at this level will sharply conflict with our strongly held ‘intuitive’ moral convictions. I show that Hare's attempt to balance these two aspects of moral judgment requires us to simultaneously adopt two conflicting sets of moral standards, and thus an attempt to inculcate such standards constitutes a ‘schizophrenic’ moral education. Finally, I briefly outline an alternative conception of moral education, based on Aristotelian phronesis.     

Effects of Counselor Action Skills on Cognition

The authors explore the effects of counseling action skills on cognitive processing by female participants in an analog study. Reflection of feeling was found to elicit defensiveness.     

Effects of Helping Skills on Attitudes Toward Psychological Counseling

This study was undertaken to examine the relationship between acquisition of counseling skills and trainee attitude towards psychological counseling. Results are discussed within the context of a mediational approach to counselor development.     

Relations between measures of Cattell‐Horn‐Carroll (CHC) cognitive abilities and mathematics achievement across the school‐age years

Cognitive clusters from the Woodcock‐Johnson III (WJ III) Tests of Cognitive Abilities that measure select Cattell‐Horn‐Carroll broad and narrow cognitive abilities were shown to be significantly related to mathematics achievement in a large, nationally representative sample of children and adolescents. Multiple regression analyses were used to predict performance on the Math Calculation Skills and Math Reasoning clusters from the WJ III Tests of Achievement for 14 age groups ranging in age from 6 to 19 years. Comprehension‐Knowledge (Gc) demonstrated moderate relations with Math Calculation Skills after the early school‐age years and moderate to strong relations with Math Reasoning. Fluid Reasoning (Gf), Short‐term Memory (Gsm), and Working Memory generally demonstrated moderate relations with the mathematics clusters. Processing Speed (Gs) demonstrated moderate relations with Math Reasoning during the elementary school years and moderate to strong relations with Math Calculation Skills. During the earliest ages of the analysis, Long‐term Retrieval (Glr) demonstrated moderate relations with the mathematics clusters, and Auditory Processing (Ga) demonstrated moderate relations with Math Calculation Skills. Visual‐Spatial Thinking (Gv) generally demonstrated nonsignificant relations with the mathematics clusters. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 40: 155–171, 2003.