Rawlsian Civic Education: Political not Minimal

abstract In Political Liberalism and later work John Rawls has recast his theory of justice as fairness in political terms. In order to illustrate the advantages of a liberal political approach to justice over liberal non‐political ones, Rawls discusses what kind of education might be required for future citizens of pluralistic and democratic societies. He advocates a rather minimal conception of civic education that he claims to derive from political liberalism. One group of authors has sided with Rawls’ political perspective and educational proposal, holding that a political approach and educational requirements that are not too demanding would have the advantage of being acceptable to a wide range of citizens with different religious, moral and philosophical perspectives. A second group of authors have criticized Rawls’ educational recommendations, holding that the production of a just society composed of reasonable citizens requires a more demanding civic education and, hence, that the political approach is not viable. The present paper argues that both groups are only partially right, and that there is a third way to understand civic education in Rawlsian terms, a way that is political but not minimal.     

A longitudinal study of pain sensitivity and blood pressure in adolescent boys: results from a 5-year follow-up.

A growing literature has observed a significant reduction in pain sensitivity among hypertensive animals and humans. It is uncertain whether a reduced sensitivity to pain can be observed in nonnotensive individuals who go on to develop high blood pressure. Blood pressure (BP) was reassessed in one hundred fifteen 19-year-old boys initially tested at age 14, when they were also presented with a pain stimulus (mechanical finger pressure). Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that information regarding pain tolerance improved prediction of changes in systolic and diastolic blood pressure beyond that afforded by differences in BP at age 14, parental history of hypertension, and body mass index. These analyses suggest that pain sensitivity may be associated with physiological processes involved in the development of sustained high blood pressure.     

Children and adults both see ‘pirates’ in ‘parties’: letter‐position effects for developing readers and skilled adult readers

Developing readers often make anagrammatical errors (e.g. misreading pirates as parties), suggesting they use letter position flexibly during word recognition. However, while it is widely assumed that the occurrence of these errors decreases with increases in reading skill, empirical evidence to support this distinction is lacking. Accordingly, we compared the performance of developing child readers (aged 8–10 years) against the end‐state performance of skilled adult readers in a timed naming task, employing anagrams used previously in this area of research. Moreover, to explore the use of letter position by developing readers and skilled adult readers more fully, we used anagrams which, to form another word, required letter transpositions over only interior letter positions, or both interior and exterior letter positions. The patterns of effects across these two anagram types for the two groups of readers were very similar. In particular, both groups showed similarly slowed response times (and developing readers increased errors) for anagrams requiring only interior letter transpositions but not for anagrams that required exterior letter transpositions. This similarity in the naming performance of developing readers and skilled adult readers suggests that the end‐state skilled use of letter position is established earlier during reading development than is widely assumed.