This article presents a critical rhetorical analysis of the governing and reform ideology of the Norwegian school system of the 1990s. It uses Karl Popper's "The Open Society and its Enemies" as a critical resource in the reading of the reforms, and discusses some of the consequences of the regime's models of leadership and public…

The recent publication of the UK government's Browne Review 2010 on university and student funding signifies a massive step towards embedding capitalist free-market consumerist values and practices into UK higher education. This paper critically examines that paradigm shift away from public sector provision from the perspective of French Theory,…

This paper is premised on a commitment to higher education's role in contributing to greater social justice. The goals, values and practices of higher education and those of society are therefore regarded as, ideally, intertwined. To this end I want to suggest a way of thinking about what it means to study, teach or research in higher education…

Efforts to identify and support credible causal claims have received intense interest in the research community, particularly over the past few decades. In this paper, we focus on the use of statistical procedures designed to support causal claims for a treatment or intervention when the response variable of interest is dichotomous. We identify…

National and transnational qualifications frameworks are an increasingly present feature of the education and training landscape. The United Kingdom can be regarded as one of the pioneers of qualifications frameworks, with partial frameworks appearing from the mid-1980s onwards. However, approaches in England if not in the whole of the UK have…

The humanities are at the heart of knowing about the human condition; they are not a luxury. The erosion of support for the humanities and the perennial anxiety about the state of the humanities are systemic. The author contends that until people acknowledge this fact, they will keep lurching from one point to another, unable to recognize the…

Mingroni proposed that heterosis or hybrid vigor may be the principal driver of the Flynn effect--the tendency for IQ scores to increase at a rate of approximately 3 points per decade. This model was presented as a resolution to the IQ paradox--the observation that IQ scores have been increasing despite their high adult heritability--on the basis…

This article posits a connection between the influence of communitarianism on New Labour's ideology and the content of citizenship education in England and Wales. We first describe and problematize communitarianism, drawing on both UK and US thinkers, and then relate our findings to literature on citizenship education. We conclude by suggesting…

Time out has been widely advocated as an effective parental discipline practice to reduce disruptive and oppositional child behaviour in young children. Despite evidence showing that the procedure is effective when used as part of a comprehensive positive parenting strategy it has not been uniformly accepted and critics have questioned its…

This essay updates Dell Hymes's "Report from an Underdeveloped Country" (the USA), positioning our analysis in the New Language Policy Studies. Taking up Hymes's call for comparative, critical studies of language use, we examine three cases, organizing our analysis around Hymes's questions: What "counts" as a language, a language problem, and…

This article aims to contribute to the discussion surrounding Manuela du Bois-Reymond's important "trendsetter learner" thesis and, in so doing, to join the wider debate about post-compulsory learning cultures. The article outlines the trendsetter learner thesis and then considers recent criticisms that it has attracted. While the author…

To its credit, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has drawn significant attention to the question of what figurative language can tell us about human concepts. However, the answers CMT theorists have offered are typically unsubstantiated by the empirical evidence, and occasionally unfalsifiable. This reply to Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.'s positive…

This paper explores connections and tensions between psychoanalysis and disability studies. The first part of the paper considers contemporaneous engagements with the psyche by a number of disability studies writers. These scholars have remained accountable to a politicised disability studies but have pushed for critical encounters with the…

The focus of this special section is on the processes involved when solving information-based problems. Solving these problems requires from people that they are able to define the information problem, search and select usable and reliable sources and information and synthesise information into a coherent body of knowledge. An important aspect…

The article provides an analysis and critique of contemporary debates concerning the quality of education in South Africa from a social justice perspective. In particular the article focuses on the "Education Roadmap" which has gained support from a range of stakeholders in South Africa including key members of the newly elected…