With this article we want to illustrate how the central publications of the European Union legitimate a role of Career Guidance Services (CGS) that help in establishing a desired form of social order. Using the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, we reconstructed four typical metaphorical conceptualisations of CGS that go along with…

Media criticism and media education have a lot in common. For example, both media education and media criticism attach great importance to the development of analytical thinking of the audience. Indeed, one of the most important tasks of media education is precisely to teach the audience not only to analyze media texts of any types, but also to…

This paper explores Bakhtin's reception of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre" with a view to assess how Bakhtin's interest in this early chronotopical masterpiece can be understood in the wider context of his utopian thinking and his political eschatologies. Bakhtin reads Goethe's novel as a critique of totalitarian forms of Socialist…

According to Karl Popper's critical rationalism, criticism is the only way we have of systematically detecting and learning from our mistakes so as to get nearer to the truth. Meanwhile, it is arguable that the emphasis of Confucianism on creating a hierarchical and harmonious society can easily lead to submission rather than opposition, producing…

Alongside community-based education, a principal agency which has contributed to defining multi-faith identities in England and Wales over the past five decades has been the subject of religious education in state maintained schools. Over this period, formulations of the social category of "Muslims" and the curricular concept of…

Goldmann's genetic structuralism approach is one of the literary critique approaches and believes that the literary text are derived from the ideology governing the classes of society, and focuses on study of stories and their structures to know the social structures. A review of the changes made in the themes and subjects of the works of the…

Critiquing two approaches that English teachers use to teach Black, or African-American, literature in the secondary classroom--one that centralises races and the other that ignores it--this article proposes a hybrid approach that combines both. This double-faced approach recognises the culturally specific themes that give the text and the Black…

Some social scientists have criticised the workings of research-ethics committees on the grounds that their biomedical model is ill-suited to some social-science research in both practical and philosophical terms. In this paper we review these criticisms and propose an alternative approach to pre-research ethical review that is based on the…

Given that human suffering persists globally on a massive scale, are scholars doing all they ought to be in the pursuit of knowledge? To explore this question, the author analyzes works by Alasdair MacIntyre, Nicholas Maxwell, and Bill Readings. Based on implications derived from their moral critiques of higher education, an alternative, broadened…

This chapter explores how critical and poststructural perspectives on self-authorship challenge the nature of development and the meaning of self-authorship.

In this essay, I investigate the human act of spectatorship as found in the work of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. I will show that each is thoroughly anti-watching when it comes to educational practices. I then problematize their positions by looking at their spectatorial commitments in the realm of aesthetics. Both Dewey and Freire have a…

In maintaining that virtue is a legitimate concept worthy of empirical study, a strong situationist approach to the study of behavior is countered. An earlier analysis is then drawn upon to maintain that virtue has the capability of integrating several themes in positive psychology: ethics and health, embodied character, strength and resilience,…

This article seeks to clarify the potential that Herbert Marcuse's and Theodor W. Adorno's psychoanalytic accounts may have with respect to the philosophy of education today. Marcuse and Adorno both share the view that psychoanalytic theory enables a deeper understanding of the social and biological dynamics of consciousness. For both thinkers,…

Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" is a pilgrimage in quest of an answer to the problem of desire--universal as well as personal--especially deviant sexuality, immoral behavior and their consequences. The traditional tags on the poem such as "a poem about Europe" and a poem about the "disillusionment of a generation" serve…

What are the possible futures for educational research? The essay concerns two intertwined agendas. The first agenda is empirical and concerns how educational policy and leadership constitute, circulate, transform and modify feelings, moods and affects. Especially, motivation, engagement and the desire for learning are targets for policy and…