Recent European and member state policy shows innovation to be a current guiding logic of government. This article offers an analysis of how innovation, seen partly in terms of learning but more significantly in terms of research, forms part of the discourses and practices of government today. Research is now something that all actors must engage…

In England, Higher Education institutions, together with the schools whose staff they train, are being required to incorporate synthetic phonics as one of the key approaches to the teaching of reading. Yet even if synthetic phonics can be identified as one of the component "skills" of reading, an assumption vigorously contested in this paper, it…

Conceptions of teaching quality and teacher accountability, and the values and assumptions that underpin them, are relatively under-examined by policy makers. We suggest ways in which philosophers might address this deficit, with reference to policy concerns found in the United Kingdom (UK). Further philosophical questions are generated by this…

It is sometimes said that there has been a "paradigm shift" in the field of assessment over the last two or three decades: a new preoccupation with what learners can do, what they know or what they have achieved. It is suggested in this article that this change has precipitated a need to distinguish two conceptually and logically distinct…

The current crisis in British VET (Vocational Education and Training) is explained in terms of the decline of opportunities beyond preparation for university for young people after school. The continuing large numbers of "NEETS" (those not in employment, education or training) is but one aspect of this problem: much larger is the decline in good…

UK higher education reform (BIS, ) has been presented as a common-sense movement towards efficiency. This article will argue that, in reality, the marketisation of higher education is a movement towards negative freedom, defined after Berlin (2007) as unrestricted choice. Using Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" as a means to explore the…

Shifts in funding and a worldwide trend towards marketising higher education have led to a new emphasis on the quality of the student experience. In the UK this trend finds its strongest expression in recent policy proposals to simultaneously increase student fees and student choice so that students themselves become the drivers of higher…

Recent radical changes to university education in England have been discussed largely in terms of the arrangements for transferring funding from the state to the student as consumer, with little discussion of what universities are for. It is important, while challenging the economic rationale for the new system, to resist talking about higher…

It has become commonplace to ask, whenever anything has gone wrong, what lessons can be learned from the experience. But the appearance of open-endedness in that question is misleading: not every answer that we could give to it is acceptable. There are, in the context of such a question, tacit constraints in what counts as a valid lesson to be…

Until recently, little attention has been paid in the school classroom to creationism and almost none to intelligent design. However, creationism and possibly intelligent design appear to be on the increase and there are indications that there are more countries in which schools are becoming battle-grounds over them. I begin by examining whether…

This article examines the possibility of a Kantian justification of the intrinsic moral worth of education. The author critiques a recent attempt to secure such justification via Kant's notion of the Kingdom of Ends. He gives four reasons why such an account would deny any intrinsic moral worth to education. He concludes with a tentative…

The purpose of this paper is to view Kant's approach to education in the broader context of Kant's philosophy of culture and history as a process whose direction should be reflectively assumed by human freedom, in the light of man's moral vocation. In this context, some characteristic tensions of his enlightened approach to education appear. Thus,…

After providing a general overview and critique of some of the main problems with teacher praise, in which I basically argue that praise binds and controls the students instead of liberating them, I go on to examine whether it is possible to praise without the intention to control the students. In this way I challenge conventional and…

The aim of this article is twofold. Against the traditional interpretation of "the conscience of Huckleberry Finn" (for which Jonathan Bennett's article with this title is the locus classicus) as a conflict between conscience and sympathy, I propose a new interpretation of Huck's inner conflict, in terms of Huck's mastery of (the) moral language…

According to Alasdair MacIntyre's influential account of practices, "teaching itself is not a practice, but a set of skills and habits put to the service of a variety of practices" (MacIntyre and Dunne, 2002, p. 5). Various philosophers of education have responded to and critiqued MacIntyre's position, most notably in a Special Issue of the…