The author went to graduate school during the height of the culture wars, when the debate over the place of cultural literacy in the curriculum and the legitimacy of the great books approach was still raging. The first college class that he taught was structured around the theme "education and the making of knowledge," with E.D. Hirsch and Paulo…

The question of the value of higher education is today set in the context of an unprecedented banking and financial crisis. In this context of fundamental change and financial realignment, it is important that we as members of the university remake our case for why the university deserves to be considered alongside all those other worthy causes…

The author recently asked his colleagues, "How can libraries determine the value in collecting, managing, preserving, and/or cataloging e-resources?" hoping to challenge readers to come up with some thoughtful opinions and useful tips. Not surprisingly, he received a handful of substantially different but uniformly provocative and creative…

This article examines the learning occurring within the voluntary simplicity social movement, focusing specifically on the learning and development of identity via "moral agency" in those individuals who embrace and practice voluntary simplicity. Four key findings are discussed. First, simplifiers craft new identities in a consumption-driven world…

We explored children's early interpretation of numerals and linguistic number marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey (2004). Bootstrapping and the origin of concepts. "Daedalus", 59-68) that children's initial distinction between "one" and other numerals (i.e., "two," "three," etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between…

This article reports on a research project on proofreading, prompted by its proliferation in contemporary higher education. The article is framed by an academic literacies perspective and develops the concept of "writtenness", which draws attention to both the underlying culturally and socially constructed values relating to the…

There is a dearth of research exploring the career and work development of adults and the influence of family of origin on that development. In this qualitative study, the authors used a phenomenological approach to examine the career and work experiences of women whose parents have no education beyond high school and the influences of family on…

Through 14 years of teaching music in the Greater Toronto Area, the "music makes you smarter" notion has imbued many of the conversations I have had with multiple stakeholders in public education. Such conversations have suggested that the ancillary benefits of teaching music have now become the principal reason why we teach music--what…

Facilitating successful focus groups requires both science and art. One element that can fully challenge focus group facilitators includes how to handle the unfocused focus group. This article describes "unfocus" and the benefits and disadvantages of unfocus in focus groups. Lessons learned from and approaches taken on this journey are shared to…

This paper explores the complex ways in which the marketisation of education and the associated publication of performance data have contributed to the emergence of a new politics of recognition which has paradoxically served further to naturalise educational inequalities. Of all the reforms associated with subjecting education to market forces,…

Political theory has described a positive linkage between education, cognitive ability and democracy. This assumption is confirmed by positive correlations between education, cognitive ability, and positively valued political conditions (N = 183 - 130). Longitudinal studies at the country level (N = 94 - 16) allow the analysis of causal…

We focus on three aspects of the articles of Reyna, of Perry, Stupnisky, Daniels and Haynes, and of Murdock, Beauchamp and Hinton. The first aspect is the logic of causal chain, a logic that we differentiate from a more deterministic approach. The second one is the mode of corrective action (attribution retraining) that is planned for students,…

Children as learners need adults who love them, even when the children are unable to give anything in return. Furthermore, adults should be able to make wise judgements concerning what is good for the children. The clarification of these principles and of their educational import has to start within our own cultural tradition. "Agape"…

In a quantitative content analysis, the telephone-based and Web-based support of the Dutch child helpline were studied. Both adult judges and the children themselves indicated that the quality of chat conversations was better than that of telephone conversations. Both the chat and telephone service succeeded in improving children's well-being and…

The assumption that high level functioning is characterized by a great deal of autonomy is central to some major theories of moral development [Kohlberg (in T. Lickona (ed.) "Moral development and behavior: Theory, research and social issues," 1976); Piaget ("The moral judgment of the child", 1932)] and to the self-determination theory of…