Universities actively promote themselves to potential students, control admissions and deliver programs of study. For most students globally, there are financial costs to attending university. At the extreme end of failure are students who receive 'zero-fails': they enrol, do not submit any assessments, and receive a mark of 0 out of 100. A…

Perfectionism is a personality orientation associated with mental health and adjustment problems. Recent evidence demonstrates that perfectionism is widespread among students and on the rise, with recent generations of students placing increasingly more importance on perfection. Whilst the extant literature is vast, it tends to focus on…

We argue that the legitimacy of international organisations (IOs) as self-proclaimed representatives of humankind, which was unfounded from the outset, is waning. To substantiate that claim, we undertake a critical inquiry into the legitimacy of the promissory visions pursued by IOs in the field of education across three historical periods. The…

This article is a retrospective look at Chris Lebron's essay 'Thoughts on Racial Democratic Education and Moral Virtue'. I argue that Lebron's work remains extremely relevant, both for its vision of antiracist education, and for the methodological questions it allows readers to contend with. As we are living in an age of increasing backlash to…

The ability to navigate scientific obstacles is widely recognized as a hallmark of a scientific disposition and is one predictor of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics persistence for early-career scientists. However, the development of this competency in undergraduate research has been largely underexplored. This study addresses…

This paper examines the social fever of MBBS (undergraduate medical) aspiration in India. It analyzes interviews conducted with 139 pharmacy graduates and 37 currently enrolled students in the western Indian state of Gujarat, of whom 147 pursued but failed to get admission to medical college. Respondents include graduates from the 1970s onwards.…

"The Oxford Encyclopedia of School Reform" is a monumental publication that provides a wide-ranging collection of school reform strategies from several geographical regions around the world. It illustrates both the theory and practical outcomes of reform efforts situated in different cultural contexts. The major theme that runs through…

Mathematics is traditionally taught using direct instruction, which has been found to engender negative affective responses towards the subject, including anxiety and low self-efficacy (Borko et al., 1992; Mischo & Maas, 2013). Direct instruction places authority on the instructor and involves teaching students about mathematics instead of…

This article discusses how Heterodox Academy's attempts to promote heterodoxy have floundered in the seven years since its founding because of four reasons: (1) It Became Another Club for Leftists; (2) It Refuses to Leverage Political Power; (3) HxA Leaders Are Trying to Make a Big-Tent Movement; and (4) HxA Won't Support Heterodoxy on the Most…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…

Writing and publishing are critical components of an academic career. For many years however, my idealized notions of scholarly writing were demolished by painful and traumatic attempts to publish. The significant time and effort poured into crafting an academic article yielded desk rejection after desk rejection, at times unkind and unhelpful…

Purpose: Schools are complex and imperfect organizations; thus, it is not possible for school leaders to completely avoid failures. The capacity to learn from failure is essential to the effectiveness of teachers as individuals and for teams and schools. However, it is hardly practiced in most schools. The present theoretical article seeks to…

Failure seems to have various meanings and manifestations in diverse contexts. Students hope to avoid failure because of the potential consequences towards their aspirations, yet scientists speak of failure as a typical part of the scientific experience. Because of its consequential impact for students, particularly for undergraduate STEM…

At this juncture, I find myself orientating towards the unruliness of doing arts-based praxis-oriented research with primary school-aged children (aged 5-12) on the topic of LGBTQI+ lives. As I prepare for what feel like disruptive research directions that will chart what many still consider to be forbidden territory with children, I attempt to…

The essay addresses the rise of what we elect to call 'the religious left'. Documenting the collapse between radicality and religiosity as identity politics embraces moral absolutism, the essay offers a critique of the culture wars and the ensuing flight from political confrontation. Attending in particular to the failures of the left, which we…