This article explores the themes of trust and ethical conduct in social research, with particular attention to the trust that can develop between the members of a research team as well as between researchers and the researched. The authors draw upon a three-year empirical study of destinations and outcomes for young people excluded from…

Practitioners of education in South Africa (SA) struggle painfully between the extremes of its authoritarian and deeply religious roots that prescribe blind obedience to people in authority and their elders, and the demands of open-mindedness, critical thinking and also solidarity required for democratic citizenship. A particular pedagogy was used…

Most professionals have the arduous task of managing their own dual loyalty: in one contextual relationship, they are members of a profession while simultaneously they are employed as members of a locally established organisation. This sense of a dual loyalty has to be taken into account when professional bureaucracies develop ethics programmes.…

This article considers conversations in and about education. To focus the discussion, it uses the scenario of a conversation between a trainee teacher and her mentor reflecting together on a lesson that the trainee has just taught. I begin by outlining the notion of reflective practice as popularised by Donald Schon, and show how, in the scenario,…

Robin Barrow claims in his "Moral education's modest agenda" that "the task of moral education is to develop understanding, at the lowest level, of the expectations of society and, at the highest level, of the nature of morality...[that is, that moral education] should go on to develop understanding, not of a particular social code, but of the…

Our western conceptions of knowledge still do not seem to have fully realised what Descartes had already stated in the seventeenth century, that we can no longer acquire full certainty. In education, knowledge is very often connected to that which we possess--what we know for certain. In this paper, my starting point is the argument put forward by…

Discussion in this article considers the unfortunate way R.S. Peters made mention of women when it was pertinent to his argumentation: portraying them, directly or indirectly, as abuse-able (murderable), deficient, aberrant, clueless and inconstant. It is argued that the high profile and esteem within which Peter's texts are held within philosophy…

The word "geo-graphy" means "writing the earth". The subject of geography bears responsibility for engaging, constituting and configuring world knowledge, in other words, what the world is. This paper describes an enquiry into the nature of school geographical knowledge at a time of curriculum policy reform. In 2010, the newly appointed Coalition…

This paper asks whether teachers and students can be friends with one another and yet maintain their integrity as teachers and students. It provides an account of friendship, drawing on Aristotle, Montaigne, and contemporary work by Elizabeth Telfer and Lawrence Blum, and addresses two key challenges: first, that teachers must be impartial and…

The use of narratives in making oneself known to others has various political and ethical aims. Narrative is considered to be effective in revealing the particular knowledge of differently positioned persons that have been subjugated. It is hoped that through these subjects' representations of their differently situated lives and selves, dominant…

In this paper, I try to argue why it is worth turning to Hannah Arendt when reflecting on education. I am exploring her political theory in "The Human Condition" which, with the anthropologic category of natality, seems to offer an interesting approach for democratic education. Apparently everyone can participate in politics or even start a…

In this essay, I examine the concept of thinking in Hannah Arendt's writings. Arendt's interest in the experience of thinking allowed her to develop a concept of thinking that is distinct from other forms of mental activity such as cognition and problem solving. For her, thinking is an unending, unpredictable and destructive activity without fixed…

The term Critical Social Theory is employed in this article following the tradition of the Frankfurt School, and particularly the work of Herbert Marcuse and his interpretation of the political and social philosophy of Hegel and Marx. Discussing the contribution of G.W.F. Hegel to social theory Marcuse argued that: "Hegel's system brings to a…

In this article, the author makes attempts to demonstrate that, from the educational standpoint, the relationship between philosophy and literature cannot be overlooked. Even the most remote cultures testify their transmission of moral teaching through literary accounts. In this sense, the author promotes this methodology hence argues that the…

In most cases, discussions on the right to education focus on the way access to education can be warranted for all and which aims should be pursued in rather abstract terms. This article approaches the topic starting from the case of Roma people. The particularity of their living circumstances raises the question what it is that we are aiming at…