In this article, Howard Doughty examines how today's technological devices alter and increasingly substitute for one's body/mind, sociality and (a)morality. He claims that today, under the crushing weightlessness of virtuality, citizens are less confident, more willing to retreat into the idiocy of private life. He goes on to address the…

Postsecondary teacher, Howard Doughty, has been teaching politics and government for close to fifty years. That time has been spent not only working with the empirical analysis of political behaviour and the normative analysis of political theory, but also in the practical activity of promoting understanding of what is frequently called civic…

Innovation should be about procedures and methods. Little thought is given to proximate, much less ultimate aims. In this article, the authors invite educators to take a break and explore the educational enterprise to which they devote their life's work. They discuss two bits of excerpted writing, both over half a century old. One comes from Jack…

Education is many things, but it is primarily the mode of production and reproduction of socially sanctioned knowledge, including the technical skills and sustaining ideology needed to maintain cultural continuity while adapting to social change. To teach creatively and to explore and shape knowledge amidst vast technological changes is the test…

This article presents the author's response to Frank Daley. Frank Daley begins with the claim that education is more important than health, war and the economy. The author supposes that in some sense professor Daley may be right. Professor Daley, however, seems to mean something more specific. He is interested in college and university education,…

One of the author's enduring concerns about the concept of academic freedom is with semantics. It has seemed to him that one of the biggest difficulties with discussions of academic freedom (as with many conversations about "value-laden" terms such as "democracy," "equity," and "justice") is that people begin from different positions and with…

In the early 1980s, it was not sub-prime mortgages and toxic assets, bank failures and factory closures that crowded the pages of the business section of the daily newspapers. It was something called "stagflation," a noxious combination of inflationary pressures on currency and stagnating levels of production. Still, the effects were roughly…

In a previous article ("Academic Freedom: An Essentially Contested Concept," The College Quarterly, 2:3 (1995)), the author made some observations to the effect that the concept of academic freedom was not easily discussed, for it was defined differently by various parties to the conversation. This remains true. In fact, it is now complicated and…

Throughout North America and the world, educators are awash in urgings and suggestions about how to change what they do and how they do it. "Challenges" and "crises" are identified and elaborated. Teachers are made to feel embarrassed if they are unaware of "cutting-edge technologies" and uniformed about profound demographic and attitudinal shifts…

Anyone who already regards college education as a business should have no trouble with corollary notion that marketing is essential to success. In the information and service industries including education, marketing depends more upon image than it does in resource extraction, refining and manufacturing. In this article, the authors focus on Diana…

The text for this article derives from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which contain the central elements of his extensive critique of education in Benito Mussolini's Italy. In prison from 1926 to 1937, he produced a remarkable amount of writing on many political and cultural subjects, all of which were scribbled out in student notebooks and…

This article explores four kinds of critical thinking. The first is found in Socratic dialogues, which employ critical thinking mainly to reveal logical fallacies in common opinions, thus cleansing superior minds of error and leaving philosophers free to contemplate universal verities. The second is critical interpretation (hermeneutics) which…

This article offers a skeletal critique of the pedagogical theory and the teaching practices arising from the work of educational innovator, Benjamin Bloom. Professor Bloom's theory and method have overtly and covertly insinuated themselves into North American educational practice over the past half-century. Their impact and influence have been…

Both parts of the author's past--a concern with terrorism and with the education of future agents of the state who will be expected to curb, if not to eliminate, it--contribute to what he wants to say in this essay. He seeks to make six points: (1) Racial profiling is not a discrete issue but an instance of a more pervasive racism that is evident…

The field of Postcolonial Studies is one of the academic fashions that has arisen in an attempt to amend or replace radical theories of social power since the alleged discrediting of Marxism. The Canadian case is more ambiguous. Postcolonialism, already an essentially contested concept, is especially conflicted where Canada is concerned. Canada…