The basic question of why schools exist can be addressed by two prevailing answers: to create workers and to develop citizens. The sorting and segregating and elimination of students who do not meet standardized expectations are a result of the belief that education should just produce workers. When creating workers is the focus of schools, the…

Recognition of the promotion of self-reliance as a prevailing purpose of higher education in the United States can be found in many college and university mission statements. Student independence and self-determination are also long-standing staples of theories of student development. Returning home to live with mom and dad is not a goal that…

This paper reports on an initiative to introduce, not the Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme itself, but its principles and some of its practices, into South African schools. The paper points out the conceptual links between P4C and the understanding of human development that underpins the new South African curriculum, and provides a brief…

Malcolm X in his autobiography claimed that every experience he had as a youth was educative. Such a claim confronts us, as educators, with a serious dilemma, that is, whether all transformations and human experiences are educative. In reviewing John Dewey's major writings on the topic, the author concludes that some of Malcolm X's early…

Romantic relationships matter for adolescents. Experiences in romantic relationships facilitate key areas of personal and interpersonal development, however, problems in romantic relationships and lack of positive role models can lead to increased risk of developing unhealthy relationship patterns that can persist into adulthood. The goals of this…

Growth mixture modeling (GMM) is a method for identifying multiple unobserved sub-populations, describing longitudinal change within each unobserved sub-population, and examining differences in change among unobserved sub-populations. We provide a practical primer that may be useful for researchers beginning to incorporate GMM analysis into their…

During the years following the Second World War, members of the English teaching community in London, often within the London Association for the Teaching of English, conducted work which led to a "new" English for the emerging comprehensive school system. Such work was rooted in the belief that English teaching should be responsive to…

This paper provides a trans-cultural perspective of emotional/behavioral difficulties and a brief overview of the subculture of today's young adolescent girls. Features of successful alternative education services provided at a Singapore girls' home are also presented. This paper concludes with a consideration of implications for teachers and…

Historically, medical education has focused largely on medical students' intellectual development, mostly ignoring the broader psychological milieu of medical practice. This chasm can result in practitioners who are less likely to process their emotions and/or support their patient's needs, and more likely to experience burnout. Self-determination…

Purpose: This paper seeks to provoke thoughts around the possibility of using the lever of practices and situated knowledge to trigger organisational change and to redesign it with the involvement of the whole organisation. Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents connections between a psychosociological approach and a practice-based…

Although it is generally assumed that the thoughts of Ernst Mach and the scientific fields he influenced (in this case psychophysics and "Gestalt" psychology) emigrated from Europe during Second World War they apparently survived in Finland, influencing the Finnish education system. The following article evaluates this relationship and…

The potential contribution of co-curricular service-learning to develop engaged citizens is relatively unexplored. Much of the available research on college-level service-learning has studied the effect of service-learning in single courses on a variety of student outcome measures and there are at least two large, multi-campus studies of…

This study follows one individual student teacher during a period of one single school year in which she was supported in developing "presence" while teaching. The notion of "presence" was formulated by the teacher herself, and coincides with the growing interest in this aspect in psychology, and in theories about becoming a teacher. In her…

The influence of phonological (i.e. individual sounds), lexical (i.e. whole-word forms) and semantic (i.e. meaning) characteristics on the words known by infants age 1;4 to 2;6 was examined, using an existing database (Dale & Fenson, 1996). For each noun, word frequency, two phonological (i.e. positional segment average, biphone average), two…

The German philosopher Max Scheler defines the human person as a value-oriented act structure. Since a person is ideally a free being with open possibilities, the aim of education is to help human beings develop their potential in various directions. At the centre of Scheler's educational philosophy is the idea of all-round education, which aims…