Argues that children need to learn about civic issues in their education because certain virtues are required for a decently organized society. Also contends that the school has obligations to educate the young in civics and impart knowledge because it is in the students' best interests; this is not an encroachment on the privacy of the…

A mother and daughter describe their family's educational experiences with a K-12 noncoercive free school, Upattinas School and Resource Center (Pennsylvania), and with home schooling and public school. They have learned that people learn best when placed in a supportive environment. Forced learning, as in public school, tends to turn off the…

Presently, there are competing philosophies of education which need comparison. Two philosophies will be compared which are at opposite ends of the continuum. They are distinctly different. And yet, both schools of thought have their disciples. Each of the two will be discussed in terms of its essential features and then there will be selected…

The successful small college dean of students must develop and maintain an effective partnership between student and academic affairs, built on a shared educational philosophy, a mutual commitment to collaboration, and common linking issues and tasks.

Highlander Folk School is an adult education center located in eastern Tennessee that was formed in 1932 by Myles Horton and continues today. Myles Horton (1905-1990) hoped to create an independent adult learning center where people could come together and address their problems. He wanted to create a public space where people could learn from…

In bringing together two important contemporary preoccupations, namely the development of new approaches to leadership and the push to "personalization", this paper argues against the poverty of much contemporary work on personalization. In its stead it proposes an approach to leadership and management grounded, firstly, on a particular…

The purpose of this article is to argue that the growing commercialization of education and the simultaneous decline of what has traditionally been called "liberal education" will limit the range of political discourse and thus have negative effects on civic life. In a context driven mainly by the profit motive, not-for-profit…

Describes the Association for Teacher Education in Europe's exploration of scenarios to enhance preservice teachers' learning. The action research project had students discuss and devise a scenario for 2020 and develop a curriculum to prepare students for life in the future. Surveys indicated that students approved of this kind of learning and…

This paper explores alternative approaches to the conception of scientific literacy, drawing on cultural studies and emerging practices in language arts as its framework. The paper reviews historic tensions in the understanding of scientific literacy and then draws on the multiliteracies movement in language arts to suggest a scientific…

Three key contributions of Iris Young to democratic political theory, and three challenges that have arisen in response to Young's theory, are examined here in relation to education. First, Young has argued that oppression and domination, not distributive inequality, ought to guide discussions about justice. Second, eliminating oppression requires…

Analyzing the activity of a group of students involved in an online university course with a simulation environment, this article considers and problematizes the idea of online community and its relations to learning. The analysis builds upon Dewey's conception of organic community and related perspectives. In valuing "joint action," such…

Deregulation and privatization of the school systems are the symptoms of the transition from the era of "massification" of education to the era of "merchandization". This process is generated by a new relation between education and the needs of the globalized economy. Education is charged to supply the economy with a skilled and flexible labour…

The proclamation of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development by the United Nations has placed education in general, and environmental education in particular, at the front of a future full of important and uncertain meanings. On the one hand, those inviting a conceptual, theoretical and praxiological revision of the…

This article deals with central issues in the field of sociology and politics of education after the publication of the outcomes of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study for Germany. These outcomes serve to remind us of the old debate on politics of education in the 1960s. The main topic since then remains the reproduction…

Progressive education was pluralistic and often contradictory in its missions, motives, and degrees of success as was progressivism in general. The larger political progressive movement with its genesis in the latter half of the nineteenth century peaked in the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century. Until Lawrence Cremin's…