Five positions on the nature and purpose of basic studies in the college curriculum are considered. The five positions are summarized as follows: (1) to develop essential skills; (2) to introduce students to disciplines of knowledge; (3) to introduce students to the basic modes of thinking or ways of knowing; (4) to develop understanding and…

An analysis of John Dewey's writing for liberal journals reveals Dewey's early and forceful efforts to refute anti-intellectual perversions of his theories. During the 1920's, the child-centered branch of the progressive education movement included some schools and individuals that expressed anti-intellectual positions. Richard Hofstadter in his…

In response to the broad question of what is needed to ensure quality instruction into the next century, this paper addresses three related issues. First, it is suggested that radically different inquiry and research perspectives, based on the quasi-anthropological concept of schools as culture systems, need to be subsumed into educators'…

The successful educational and industrial systems in Japan are related to the social and historical condition of the country. A society that receives ideas and technology of education from other societies must go through the process of adoption, assimilation, and self-transformation. Students of society do not fully recognize the strengths and…

Signs or signifiers, composing what Lacan in 1968 called the "symbolic order," provide a means for making sense of the world and form a network enabling the human mind to form concepts. The signifier "literacy," for example, is often taken to refer to a fixed, isolatable concept, but this term would not be intelligible were it…

The intellectual and moral climate of a school is related to the nature of authority. It is the way that authority is instituted as well as the manner in which it is exercised that shapes the intellectual and moral character of the school. Public education in urban areas today is increasingly instrumental, technical, adversarial, and officially…

This document offers a detailed description of the Oak Park, Michigan social studies program. The program is built around four goals: knowledge, skill, value, and participation. Knowledge goals pertain to acquiring facts, concepts, or generalizations from history and the social sciences. Skill goals pertain to the ability to collect, organize,…

A constructivist analysis of the concepts of communication and environment may go against the traditional ideas of realists. Both concepts are treated as subjective constructs of a cognizing agent. It is held that the basis of the constructivist theory of knowing as the idea that knowledge is a mapping of ways of acting and thinking and the result…

This examination of the application of the products and processes of science to the field of education argues that education is entrenched in an outdated scientific mode--that of a Newtonian model--and proposes a more contemporary model of relativity which purports that wholes cannot be broken into parts, that variables are not isolatable but…

This paper proposes a new myth for New Zealand education policy development: "equal power in adversity." Unlike the preliberalism Darwinian myth, "survival of the fittest," and its replacement, "equal opportunities," the new myth would incorporate and reconstrue the socially critical postulates of the currently hegemonic "equal outcomes" myth…

Five leading feminist scholars assess the nature and extent of the contemporary women's movement in this collaborative book that focuses on the dual disciplinary-interdisciplinary character of feminist research. The five collaborators are Ellen Carol DuBois, Gail Paradise Kelly, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, and Lillian S.…

While educational researchers in recent years have sought new approaches to educational administration, educational administrators have continued to rely on ideals of efficiency, because efficiency provides a set of tools that they can wield in the internal politics of public education. This paper contends that the politics of efficiency in school…

Research in the fields of education, linguistics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, politics, anthropology, rhetoric, and computer science has yielded a large body of knowledge about how language is produced and used in different types of communication, how language systems affect conceptual frameworks, and how language competence contributes to…

These four presentations to the 1983 Community College General Education Association conference address the theme, "Toward a New General Education: Work, Self, and Society." First, "General Education and Work: The Next Decade," by Philip M. Piaker, recounts efforts begun at Harpur College in the late 1940's to revise the general education…

Historical study of composition theory and teaching occupies a peculiar place in the discipline of composition instruction. It does not attempt new applications for theory, and pretends to no direct pedagogical applications at all. Unlike empirical research, it does not use experimental method or scientific rigor. However, the study of history,…