The idea of human rights has increasingly been playing a very important part in people's contemporary life, the political in particular, the cultural in general. This explains why Dr. Griffin in "Beyond Anarchy and Plutocracy: the need for global democracy" includes a chapter on human rights. "My contention," Dr. Griffin writes, "is that now, in…

With the metaphor of lingering sleep, Ralph Waldo Emerson once voiced his concern over the loss of the self--the sense of uncertainty about where one is trying to go, how one should live, and what one should (and might want to) say. This might be seen as symptomatic of a kind of nihilism. The sense of loss that Emerson expresses is still relevant…

The problematics of language and communication, as pertaining to educational theory and practice, is closely connected with the understanding of human subjectivity. The discussion in this paper focuses on a specific philosophy of language as developed by Gilles Deleuze. In order to address some possible implications of such philosophy for moral…

Few concepts in the German tradition of human studies--the so-called "Geisteswissenschaften"--have had the capacity to birth such intense expectations and hopes as the concept of "Bildung". There is general agreement that the concept of "Bildung" includes both an objective and a subjective component. The first refers to "culture" in its broadest…

In this article, the author discusses how superintendents function in an environment of nearly continuous turbulence challenged by concerns and pressures that compete for their attention and resolution. The turbulence is inescapable. Today it constitutes the natural--but not the exceptional--environment of school board politics, local…

Following every unfortunate and tragic school shooting is an accompanying cry for moral/character/values education, in the belief that such teaching could have prevented the tragedy. Society decries the rising statistical evidence of the apparent lack of values and character demonstrated by youth as evidenced by soaring crime rates among very…

People take offence too easily and are encouraged to do so by, e.g., institutional harassment policies. "Offensive" is sometimes equated with "anything that offends someone", sometimes with a definitive list of specific behaviours. When is it justifiable to take offence? Distinctions need to be drawn: between offensive to the senses and to the…

The managerial strategies of governance prevalent in the private sector have become more and more normalized within educational institutions. These strategies, according to Dutch philosopher Zygmund Bauman, are "denial of proximity," "effacement of face," and "reduction to traits." This article describes these managerial tactics within an…

Social information processing theory has been posited as a description of how mental operations affect behavioral responding in social situations. Arsenio and Lemerise (this issue) proposed that consideration of concepts and methods from moral domain models could enhance this description. This paper agrees with their proposition, although it…

In this article we will address the issue of obtaining insight into the way in which teachers deal with the normative side of their profession. We outline the problem that forms the context of our question (the difference in the meaning of good teaching in the process-product model and in ethical models) and we discuss Oser's discourse approach as…

This study explores models of how people perceive moral aspects of socio-scientific issues. Thirty college students participated in interviews during which they discussed their reactions to and resolutions of two genetic engineering issues. The interview data were analyzed qualitatively to produce an emergent taxonomy of moral concerns recognized…

Two anthropologists treat mealtimes as cultural sites for socializing children into commensality, communicative expectations, and the symbolic, moral, and sentimental meanings of food and eating. Using ethnographic evidence, they indicate how mealtime comportment is embedded in practices and ideologies relevant to children's competent membership…

Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based…

The concept of disability from an ethical viewpoint was examined. Whether disability results from the way society is built and the way ideas and judgments considering disability are established in a communal interaction was discussed (i.e., is disability socially created and constructed?). Although views on disability emphasizing its social nature…

This paper is motivated by a need to foster worldwide institutional collaboration and to reconsider conceptualizations of teaching, learning and researching education, encompassing a concern with human rights and a culture of peace. Education is a fundamental element in all processes that aim to build a culture of peace and human rights (UNESCO,…