The dynamics and impact of affirmative action processes on higher education,the curriculum,and black women

Affirmative action is perceived as a tool that can bring about significant social change. In higher education, it has yet to produce the desired results for which its policies were designed. In whatever stage of the affirmative action process colleges and universities find themselves, it can be observed that there are complex dynamics of formulating, implementing, and enforcing affirmative action goals that affect all participants in the process. The complex dynamics of achieving affirmative action goals within higher education deserve attention because they forecast the interactions between black women and higher education that we may expect to see in the future.     

Herrnstein''s syllogism: genetic and shared environmental influences on IQ, education, and income

Genotypes may influence the phenotypic associations among IQ, education, and income. To investigate this hypothesis, we believe that the appropriate methodology requires estimation of genetic and environmental influences using data able to separate these influences. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) is a nationally representative sample that contains genetically-informative full- and half-siblings (28–35 years old in 1992; Ns=1943 full-siblings, 129 half-siblings). A biometric genetic model was fit that estimated the shared environmental and genetic variance components of IQ, years of education, and hourly income. The total heritabilities were 0.64 for IQ, 0.68 for education, and 0.42 for income. Heritabilities due to a common genetic factor were 0.35 for IQ, 0.52 for education, and 0.12 for income. Environmental influences due to a common shared environmental factor were 0.23 for IQ, 0.18 for education, and 0.08 for income. The model predicted a correlation of 0.63 between IQ and education and 0.34 between IQ and income. Sixty-eight percent of the former and 59% of the latter was genetically mediated; the remainder was mediated by common shared environment. These findings suggest that social inequality in the United States has its origin in both genetically-based traits and in different environmental backgrounds.     

Defending a Common World: Hannah Arendt on the State,the Nation and Political Education

For a long time, one of the most important tasks for education in liberal democracies has been to foster the next generation in core democratic values in order to prepare them for future political responsibilities. In spite of this, general trust in the liberal democratic system is in rapid decline. In this paper, the tension between the ambitions of liberal-democratic educational systems and contemporary challenges to central democratic ideas is approached by reconsidering Hannah Arendt’s critique of political education. This will be done informed by her analysis of the tension between the concepts of state and nation. By showing how education, depending on its role as a tool of the state or the nation, may be a fundamental requirement for the establishment of a common world or the most effective tool for its destruction, the paper argues for the need to understand Arendt’s educational thinking in light of her wider political analysis. Rather than downplaying the provocative aspects of her critique, the paper argues for the need to use it as a starting point for thinking again how education may become an emancipatory undertaking capable of disarming contemporary threats to human plurality and freedom.     

Contingency, Education, and the Need for Reassurance

This short paper is a response to Richard Smith’s ‘Abstraction and finitude: education, chance and democracy’. In his paper Smith contends that a rationalist agenda dominates education and democracy today, and that this agenda by rendering us insensitive to the tragic dimension of life, breeds a sense of hubris, or arrogance towards fate which is fuelled by an inordinate confidence in our knowledge. In the worlds of education and politics it has led to an obsession with management and transparency, and to students who fear to take risks. As a specific example of this, he takes up the recent fixation in universities with learning how to learn, which he says leads to an over-emphasis on skills in the curriculum, and to an ‘audit’ culture. While sympathising with much of his analysis of the latter, my counter-suggestion is that the contemporary world lacks anything but a sense of the contingency of things, to the contrary, that at the heart of its mangerialist culture and its performatist ethos lies the need for reassurance. My response focuses on the politics of the self-directed learner that lies at the heart of the lifelong learning literature, on learning how to learn, on the notion of transparency and on the transparent society, and on the politics of contingency and scepticism. Prof. Kenneth Wain teaches philosophy of education and courses in ethics and political philosophy at the University of Malta, where he is also involved in teacher education. Last year (2004) he published his most recent book The Learning Society in a Postmodern World with Peter Lang (New York). His earlier books were Philosophy of Lifelong Education (1987) Croom Helm (London), The Maltese National Curriculum: a critical Evaluation (1991) Mireva (Malta) Theories of Teaching (1992) Mireva (Malta) The Value Crisis: an Introduction to Ethics (1995) University of Malta Press. He has also published several articles in international refereed journals.     

Mead, Intersubjectivity, and Education: The Early Writings

This article seeks to reconstruct the early writings of George Herbert Mead in order to explore the significance of his work for the development of an intersubjective conception of education. The reconstruction takes its point of departure in Mead's claim that reflective consciousness has a social situation as its precondition. In a mainly chronological account of Mead's writings on psychology and philosophy from the period 1900–1925, it is shown how Mead explains the social origin of conscious reflection and self-consciousness. It is further shown, how Mead redefines the social in terms of meaningful, creative, radically undetermined, but not yet conscious, interaction. Mead's position thereby implies a reversal of the traditional way in which the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity is conceived. The article ends with an outline of the main implications of this reversal for our understanding of education.     

EDUCATION, MANAGEMENT STYLE, AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS

This paper examines the relationship between education, management style, and organizational effectiveness. The increasing education level in the society is pointed to as a strong force toward a more participative management style. However, it is stressed that much of the education which is taking place in the United States may not equip people to participate effectively in a more democratically managed workplace. Finally, a model of a new more participative management style is presented and its relationship to education and skills is explicated.     

The Immigration Triangle: Quebec, Canada, and the Rest of the World

As with many other immigrant destination areas, Quebec has experienced difficulty in retaining its original set of newcomers. This paper addresses the issue of retention in terms of a brain circulation model, under which immigrants enter a niche area (Quebec) and receive more subsidized human capital benefits in the form of education, language training, and skill certification than in any other province in Canada. The results suggest that a triangular migration model explains the internal migration decision for both the foreign-born and Canadian-born populations in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada.     

MacLaboratory for Psychology: Successes,failures, economics,and outcomes over its decade of development

The history of the development of MacLaboratory for Psychology offers insights into both problems and solutions in academic software creation and implementation. Superficially, MacLaboratory for Psychology has been very successful, having garnered numerous acclamations, including two EDUCOM awards. It is used on thousands of Macintoshes at universities, hospitals, schools, and other institutions worldwide. However, there have also been some shortcomings to its use. In a candid discussion, successes, failures, the economics of software development, and student outcomes are addressed. Specific examples from the software as it has been used by over 10,000 undergraduates at Drexel University provide guidelines for future academic software in such domains as multimedia use, psychological and scientific education, classroom implementation, faculty research, and software support and maintenance.     

Education,In Spite of it All

This special issue of Studies in Philosophy and Education neither rejects, nor offers outright alternatives to the dominant contemporary model of education, but instead explores its margins and the possibilities they might offer for administrators, teachers and students within institutions and broader social contexts. The intention of the editors and contributors has been to tweak the focus from a critique of an oppressive system to a mapping of that system and the opportunities that exist within it–or on its margins–in spite of itself.     

Contemporary Visions of Psychotherapy Supervision: Sharing Perspective,Identifying Need,and Charting Possibility

Psychotherapy supervision has now celebrated its first centennial, is poised to move boldly forward into its second century of contribution to psychotherapy education, and seems perfectly positioned to further advance our knowledge about and practice of how to effectively facilitate, influence, and mentor our supervisees. Professional interest in and recognition of psychotherapy supervision appears to be at an all time high, and its value as a potentially alchemical educational event seems increasingly incontrovertible. But if supervision is to maintain and even enhance its substance and significance in 21st century psychotherapy education, what are the matters to which we as supervision practitioners, researchers, and theorists must vigilantly attend and vigorously address? In this special supervision issue of the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, we would like to examine some of those matters. The topics that are addressed include: competencies, evidence-based practice, and supervising psychoanalytic/psychodynamic, cognitive/behavioral, humanistic/existential, and integrative/eclectic psychotherapies. The binding theme of “pressing needs and impressing possibilities” will be evident throughout this journal issue. In this introductory paper, I briefly define psychotherapy supervision, consider its beginnings, provide a rationale for this special issue, and identify the specific questions that give focus and frame to each of the succeeding contributions.     

Drama,Spirituality and the Curriculum

The field of drama and moral education has been given some theoretical attention in recent years but little if any theorising has been applied to the area of drama and spiritual education. In UK schools, however, the spiritual education of children is seen as one of a school's core functions and a spiritual dimension has often been important in the global history of drama and acting. Various and conflicting definitions of spirituality and approaches to spiritual education exist. In this article, I begin with an attempt to make connections between these approaches and recent epistemologies of drama education. I then outline a possible theoretical framework for defining spirituality, influenced largely by anthropological and cultural studies, and exemplify it by drawing upon examples from existing practices in the fields of theatre and educational drama. I then conclude by speculating as to how these ideas might find practical expression within a drama curriculum.     

Ultimate Educational Aims, Overridingness, and Personal Well-being

Discussion regarding education??s aims, especially its ultimate aims, is a key topic in the philosophy of education. These aims or values play a pivotal role in regulating and structuring moral and other types of normative education. We outline two plausible strategies to identify and justify education??s ultimate aims. The first associates these aims with a normative standpoint, such as the moral, prudential, or aesthetic, which is overriding, in a sense of ??overriding?? to be explained. The second associates education??s ultimate aims with the intrinsic value of personal well-being. We advance reasons to doubt that these strategies are successful. The shortcomings of these strategies impute yet further urgency to the issue of how we are to ascertain and validate education??s ultimate aims.     

Undercover Education: Mice, Mimesis, and Parasites in the Teaching Machine

What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in service of the capitalist knowledge economy. This seemingly stable condition is however insecured by the animal rights activist as undercover learner and??worker, who enters education and research laboratories under false premises in order to extract the knowledge necessary to dismantle the logic of animal utility on which the scientific-educational apparatus rests. The present article is based on a semi-structured interview with an undercover worker. It draws on a synthesis of critical education and posthumanist theories to configure knowledge creation and subjectification processes in the ??negative spaces?? of education. The techne of undercover work includes mnemotechnical and prosthetic devices, calculation of risk, and mimetic labor. The article argues that the agenda of the undercover worker generates a multi-strained mimetic complex that composes a parasitic educational subject-assemblage redirecting scientific knowledge away from the animal stratification logic of the knowledge economy into different viral circuits; different lines of flight. It invites a rearticulation of the formal education state apparatus in more indeterminate directions, provoking scientific-educational knowledge-practices to become a catalytic impulse for their own disintegration.     

The rationality of science,critical thinking,and science education

This paper considers two philosophical problems and their relation to science education. The first involves the rationality of science; it is argued here that the traditional view, according to which science is rational because of its adherence to (a non-standard conception of) scientific method, successfully answers one central question concerning science's rationality. The second involves the aims of education; here it is argued that a fundamental educational aim is the fostering of rationality, or its educational cognate, critical thinking. The ramifications of these two philosophical theses for science education are then considered, and a science education which takes reasons in science as its fundamental feature is sketched.It is notwhat the man of science believes that distinguishes him, buthow andwhy he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition (Russell 1945, p. 527).I believe ... that all teaching [in science] on the University level (and if possible below) should be training and encouragement in critical thinking (Popper 1970, pp. 52–53).This paper is mainly drawn from other publications. The first section is taken from my (1985); the second from (1988), Chapter 2; and the third from (1988), Chapter 6. Since what appears here are truncated versions of those discussions, I urge interested readers to look to those other works for fuller treatments of the issues here discussed.     

Education, Schooling, Derrida’s Marx and Democracy: Some Fundamental Questions

Beginning with a reconsideration of what the school is and has been, this paper explores the idea of the school to come. Emphasizing the governmental role of education in modernity, I offer a line of thinking that calls into question the assumption of both the school and education as possible conduits for either democracy or social justice. Drawing on Derrida’s spectral ontology I argue that any automatic correlation of education with democracy is misguided: especially within redemptive discourses that seek to liberate education from its present enclosure. This rereading of the field of education in the light of an account of the fundamental ontology of its key institution problematizes all rhetorics of education as social salvation. Education, it proposes, cannot be conceived as the ideal soul of a corrupted or as yet defective body, the school. Education—having taken on the character of an ontotheological principle—has become a governmental instrument as much as its specific institutions. This ontological condition can be understood within various accounts of the nature of contemporaneity. This paper considers the monstrous proposal that education be abandoned as the grounds for social, ethical and cultural redemption. The good news is that this abandonment opens the possibility for thinking beyond education, a beyond that is also beyond the strictures of instrumental rationality.     

Considering religious education in context: politics,reform and debates among Turkish Cypriots

This article exemplifies the politicisation of religious education that has polarised the Turkish Cypriot community and explores a possible approach to religious education for primary schools in north Cyprus. In the light of the long-standing debate, this study has a particular focus on the mandatory religious instruction in public primary schools and evaluates the textbooks and teachers' perceptions. Unlike lower and upper secondary schools, divinity classes have constantly been offered to primary school pupils since the 1960s. Religious education at the primary school level is a contentious issue on which the educational experts have been unable to reach a consensus, and continue to discuss on different perspectives. To this end, a comprehensive review of the content analysis of the primary school religious education textbooks and semistructured interviews with teachers and education specialists has been undertaken. Although this study is set in the north Cyprus context, it is also relevant for other conflict-affected societies as it describes the challenges of religious education, secularism and pluralism.     

Science, Human Nature, and a New Paradigm for Ethics Education

For centuries, religion and philosophy have been the primary basis for efforts to guide humans to be more ethical. However, training in ethics and religion and imparting positive values and morality tests such as those emanating from the categorical imperative and the Golden Rule have not been enough to protect humankind from its bad behaviors. To improve ethics education educators must better understand aspects of human nature such as those that lead to ??self-deception?? and ??personal bias.?? Through rationalizations, faulty reasoning and hidden bias, individuals trick themselves into believing there is little wrong with their own unethical behavior. The application of science to human nature offers the possibility of improving ethics education through better self-knowledge. The author recommends a new paradigm for ethics education in contemporary modern society. This includes the creation of a new field called ??applied evolutionary neuro-ethics?? which integrates science and social sciences to improve ethics education. The paradigm can merge traditional thinking about ethics from religious and philosophical perspectives with new ideas from applied evolutionary neuro-ethics.     

Spirituality,Gendered Subjectivities,and Education in Preadolescents: Canadian preadolescents' reflections on gender-roles and their sense of self

'Adolescents' spirituality' has emerged as a lively focus for discussion and research amongst both academics and practitioners. Yet remarkably little reference has been made to conceptions of the child provided by developmental educational psychology. To gain a holistic perspective of how preadolescents construct their sense of self, cultural meanings of sexuality and spirituality must also be examined. How do adolescents make the connections among a sense of body, self, and soul? What is the role of education? To address these issues, this paper draws on recent research that explored the connections between the self-concepts of Canadian preadolescents (9-12 year-olds) and their perceptions of their gender-role orientation. This paper undertakes an 'excavation' of psychocultural approaches to gender and language, and the mixed messages about early adolescent spirituality and gendered selves implicit in the respective understandings of psychological development. The examination of these theories unearths many points of resonance with contemporary debates about our expectations of the nature of spirituality and sexuality in preadolescence, and our interventions for its nurture. The paper examines gendered perceptions of femininity and masculinity in Canadian preadolescents and how these perceptions influence their self-worth or overall well-being. It focuses on the links between spirituality and gendered perceptions and understandings of emotions and self. The final section discusses the socio-educational implications of the research findings within the context of holistic education. In this way, dialogue with a psychocultural and holistic approach to psychology and education offers valuable additional vocabulary and grammar with which to tackle these challenges.     

Values Education: Why the Teaching of Values in Schools is Necessary,But Not Sufficient

In recent years, a growing demand by educators, governments, and the community for the teaching of values in public schools has led to the implementation of values education. As acknowledged by the 2010 Living Skills Values Education Program, values education is an essential part of schooling. In the public school system, there have been attempts to construct and implement a values-based curriculum that reflects a naturalistic or social morality. Despite prudential credibility to values education, no naturalistic theory has within it a sufficient moral obligation with which to persuade humans from their natural self-interest. As it stands, values education as taught in schools has a grounding problem—it cannot point to a sufficient basis for validation. Values education is too individualistic, relativistic, and ultimately subversive of a serious moral commitment. This article argues that a sufficient case can be made for the explicit teaching of values but only on a theistic foundation. The discussion concludes that ultimately the most defensible grounding for values education is in the narrative given to humans by a transcendent being (in the Christian tradition, God).