Against the background of the many attacks on the school as being outdated, alienating, ineffective and reproducing inequalities we offer a morphological understanding of the school as distinguished from functionalist understandings (sociological or economical perspectives in terms of functions and roles) and idealistic understandings…

This article explores some of the key themes of John Macmurray's recently published lecture, "Learning to be Human". It focuses initially on three elements of his argument: relationships in education; education and the economy; and our corrosive obsession with technique. It then utilises Macmurray's views to develop a typology of…

One of the main factors implicated in the atomization of contemporary life, both as cause and effect, is the brunt and tenor of modern liberal education. For it cannot be denied that liberal education in the classic sense has severed its mandate to instruct and enlighten from the archive of the past and has been replaced by the concept of…

A "civic recession" is as worrisome as an economic recession. "A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy's Future" (The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, 2012) should be praised for acknowledging the peril and seeking to rebuild the "depleted civic capital." Welcome, too, is the report's conviction that…

Based on over twenty years of empirical and intellectual work about knowledge production in the field of educational administration, I examine the origins and development of the canon, methodologies and knowledge workers in England. I focus on the field as being primarily concerned with professional activity and how and why this was established…

The phenomenon of Catholic Studies cannot adequately be understood without a prior consideration of certain fundamental tensions that mark modern higher education as a whole. These broader tensions characterize Catholic universities in specific and important ways. At the University of St. Thomas, Catholic Studies has proven to be a remarkably…

This paper explores the ideas of teacher educator Lillian de Lissa, who established the Kindergarten Training College in Adelaide in 1907 and spent the following 40 years in early childhood teacher education in Australia and the United Kingdom. I argue that de Lissa's enduring concern was the construction of early childhood teachers' professional…

My subject is what the practice of education can learn from the arts. I describe the forms of thinking the arts evoke and their relevance for re-framing conceptions of what education can accomplish. (Contains 1 note.)