How far can consistent assessment capture all the worthwhile features of educational achievement? Are some important components of learning "necessarily" open to a range of potentially inconsistent judgments by different assessors? I argue for a cautiously affirmative answer to this question, drawing on analogies with aesthetic judgments…

Professional ethics has currently raised its public profile in the UK as part of social anxiety around governance of health and social care, fuelled by catastrophically bad practice identified in particular healthcare facilities. Professional ethics is regulated by compliance with abstracted, normative codes but experienced as contextualised…

A case is made here for a secular interpretation of spirituality to place against more orthodox religious versions which are currently gaining ground in English education as part of the government policy designed to encourage schools to apply for "academy" status independent of local authority control. Given the rise of faith-based…

Over the past 20 years, there has been a shift in history education away from a view of history as the pursuit of an objective, universal story about the past toward "historical consciousness," which seeks to cultivate an understanding of the past as something that makes moral demands on us here and now. According to Roger Simon,…

This paper returns to the theme of the academic turn to cosmopolitanism as a response to the challenges of globalisation, conflict, inequality and diversity discussed here previously. The discussion of cosmopolitanism here refers to the context of current policy relating to research and what it means to be a researcher in the European Union today…

These days, the radicalization of young people is above all viewed as a security risk. Almost all research into this phenomenon has been carried out from a legal, criminological or socio-psychological perspective with a focus on detecting and containing the risks posed by radicalization. In the light of the political developments since September…

High-functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorder (HF-ASD) typically lack cognitive empathy, compromising their moral agency from both a Kantian and a Humean perspective. Nevertheless, they are capable of exhibiting moral behavior, and sometimes, they exhibit what may be deemed "super-moral" behavior. The empathy deficit poses,…

In this paper, I consider the tutorial conversation in Higher Education. To focus the discussion I use the scenario of a tutorial conversation between a lecturer and a student. I begin by suggesting that the increasing emphasis placed on student satisfaction in certain Higher Education Institutions tends to focus the tutorial conversation towards…

Lately, in educational research and debate, there have been discussions on a trend sometimes named as a "therapeutic turn" in education. Mindfulness-oriented activities represent one therapeutic approach in education, aiming for virtues such as patience and trust. A large part of the critical viewpoints on therapeutic education among…

This article addresses two main questions: (1) what is excellence and (2) should epistemic excellence be the main purpose of education? Though references to excellence have become increasingly frequent in the UK education policy, these questions are perhaps especially important in Scotland where the curriculum is explicitly "for"…

In her famous text "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism", Martha Nussbaum argued for cosmopolitan education in ways that evoked a tension between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. Among others, Charles Taylor considered her treatment of patriotism vague and lopsided, and pointed out that patriotism is not as secondary or as dispensable as…

In his later lectures, published as "The Hermeneutics of the Subject," Michel Foucault surveys different modalities of obtaining "truth" about one's self and the world: from Socrates to the Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans and early church writers. Genealogically tracing this opposition between knowing "self and…

Educational literature has tended to focus, explicitly and implicitly, on two kinds of task orientation: the ability either to focus on a single task, or to multi-task. A third form of orientation characterises many highly successful people. This is the ability to combine several tasks into one: to "kill two (or more) birds with one…

In this article, the author argues that it would be valuable to look into less paradigmatic manifestations of forgiveness in schools, that is, pedagogical approaches that acknowledge the complexity of forgiveness in socio-political contexts--namely, how forgiveness might be "ambivalent," intermingled with both positive and negative emotions, and…

In his 1973 paper "The Justification of Education" R. S. Peters aspired to give a non-instrumental justification of education. Ever since, his so-called "transcendental argument" has been under attack and most critics conclude that it does not work. They have, however, thrown the baby away with the bathwater, when they furthermore concluded that…