As China has appeared only recently as an important knowledge producer with growing global economic significance, little is known internationally about how these processes develop and are managed within China. The rapidly expanding Chinese higher education system is playing an increasingly important role in China's knowledge economy and therefore…

This article argues that creativity has the greatest potential to flourish if a learning environment is embedded within a community that emphasises a deep sense of place. Yet in a globalised world, rootedness is often regarded as antithetical to creativity. But far from representing dead artefacts that are anti-modern and non-economic, culture and…

Whilst much of the rhetoric of current educational policy champions creativity and innovation, structural reforms and new management practices in higher education run counter to the known conditions under which creativity flourishes. As a review of recent literature suggests, surveillance, performativity, the end of tenure and rising levels of…

This paper explores the possibility of an uncanny digital pedagogy. Drawing on theories of the uncanny from psychoanalysis, cultural studies and educational philosophy, it considers how being online defamiliarises teaching, asking us to question and consider anew established academic practices and conventions. It touches on recent thinking on…

Education has long been considered as playing a part in the construction or formation of self and identity. The processes of education and formation, being historically and culturally shaped, display the concerns and features of time and place. One of the distinguishing and influential features of contemporary western societies is communication…

Australian higher education increasingly relies on flexible modes of delivery as a means of attracting and retaining students in a highly competitive global education market. While education is among those disciplines that have been most actively involved in the shift from face-to-face to online learning and teaching, the transition for many…

This paper considers influences on the contemporary school curriculum in England. It does so mainly through a critical analysis of one significant critique of the curriculum made by the think tank Civitas in their collection of essays asserting the "corruption" of the curriculum, published in 2007. The paper places the Civitas position in a wider…

Challenges facing the higher education sector globally include questions over what counts as knowledge and what are valid forms of both its reproduction and production. This paper addresses the question of how what counts as valid knowledge is challenged and how it changes over time. It does this via an analysis of examples of social…

This article describes a balance theory of wisdom and applies the theory to the context of schooling. First the article discusses why cognitive skills as assessed by conventional tests are an important, but not a sufficient, basis for education. Second the article discusses the concept of wisdom and why it is important for schooling. Third the…

In considering issues of public and global importance, social scientists are coming to an increasing recognition of the importance of religious belief in motivating particular attitudes and actions. If one of the tasks of academe is to articulate those values that are important in the public sphere, it must necessarily include careful discussion…

At present the basic intellectual aim of academic inquiry is to improve knowledge. Much of the structure, the whole character, of academic inquiry, in universities all over the world, is shaped by the adoption of this as the basic intellectual aim. But, judged from the standpoint of making a contribution to human welfare, academic inquiry of this…

This article explores the policy and practice of choice, flexibility and differentiation within the 14-19 curriculum in England. After first locating these issues within contemporary curriculum policy it adopts a historical analysis tracing perspectives and practice since 1945. This narrative exposes complex oscillation in policy and practice in…

This article outlines how the commercialization of structures and management in education risks accelerating the intensification of corporate marketing in schools. It is argued that marketing promotes materialistic values which are harmful to children and US and UK examples are offered to demonstrate how companies seek to use schools as…

This paper examines the role of education in (re)constructing civil society in societies emerging from conflict or violence. After examining the nature of civil society and its importance for democracy and peace, the paper looks at three areas: legal education (including human rights education); information, media and the public space; and…

This paper argues that universities need to reclaim a public and inclusive language for education that reflects the moral ends and purposes of academic practice. It claims that there are certain moral goods implicit in the activities--of research, scholarship and teaching--that comprise such practice; and it defines these goods in terms of…