The strongly worded "Brown" ruling discussed at length the importance of public education in preparing students for their adult lives as workers and citizens. In contrast, the Coleman report muted the "Brown" decision's interpretation of public education as a paramount institution and argued instead that the variation in school curriculum and…

The 50th anniversary of "Brown v. Board of Education" in 1954 also recalls the anniversary of "Lau v. Nichols", decided exactly 20 years later in 1974. The two decisions were monumental in the history of civil rights and, interestingly, have shared similarities in the ways in which they have been reinterpreted since they were first decided several…

This article examines the arguments and underlying assumptions of Adam Swift's book on "How Not to Be a Hypocrite." It argues that, although there is much that is commendable and fascinating in the book, it might have benefited from a more sociological approach to the middle class. While the book is designed to capture and argue with the anxieties…

This article seeks to apply Adam Swift's (2003) critique of private and selective schooling to higher education in the UK. The higher education sector in this country is highly differentiated, with high status, research-led elite institutions at the top of the university hierarchy, and newer universities, with far lower levels of funding and…

Can one be open-minded about a strongly held belief? I defend a reconciliation of the suggested conflict that turns on open-mindedness as an educational aim subordinate to the aim of knowledge, and as an attitude about one's beliefs (a second-order or meta-belief), not a weakened attitude toward a proposition believed. The reconciliation is…

The sociocultural paradigm in educational research, emphasizing the situatedness of learning and the embeddedness of thought in cultural and linguistic practices, has called into question the plausibility of the enterprise of teaching general thinking skills. In this paper I argue that the sociocultural research programme needs an adequate…

This article evaluates the credo "integration while maintaining one's identity" with the help of psychological arguments. First, it explores the requirements of being a good citizen in a liberal democracy. Following Rawls, we state that justice is the cardinal liberal virtue and that this virtue includes having the disposition to respect the…

This article finds Michael's Hand's argument for the abolition of faith schools to be deficient because key premises of his argument seem false. I argue that the concept of knowledge that Hand employs in arguing that no religious proposition is known to be true is overly strict. I reject Siegel's attempt to amend Hand's argument to make it…

This article addresses the capacity of high stakes tests to measure the most significant kinds of learning. It begins by examining a set of philosophical arguments pertaining to construct validity and alleged conceptual obstacles to attributing specific knowledge and skills to learners. The arguments invoke philosophical doctrines of holism and…

Evaluation of high stakes testing regimes must consider not simply mean test scores, but their distribution among students. Taking high school graduation tests and black and white student populations to illustrate the argument, I identify two criteria of success: a larger proportion of black high school graduates and a narrower gap between the two…

Many significant changes in perspective have to take place before efforts to learn the content and capabilities of children's minds can hold much sway in educational testing. The language of testing, especially of high stakes testing, remains firmly in the realm of "behaviors", "performance" and "competency" defined in terms of behaviors, test…

In this article, I offer a response to Adam Swift's book, "How Not to be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent", by developing some reflections on the nature, value and limits of parental partiality. I address two main issues. First, I consider the issue of how we should interpret the character and value of parental…

I reply to the more philosophical critiques of "How Not to Be a Hypocrite" (2003), published in this volume of "Theory and Research in Education". Against Elizabeth Anderson, I claim that unequal chances are unfair, and unfairness is bad, but acknowledge that its badness can be outweighed by other values. Distinguishing principled from empirical…

Geoffrey Short, Harvey Siegel and Douglas Groothuis have, in previous issues, advanced a number of objections to my recent paper [Vol. 1(1)] arguing for the abolition of faith schools. Here I attempt to answer their criticisms.

This response argues that, although evaluation of student learning is required for accountability, high stakes testing is not required and may even be counterproductive. It also questions whether the goals of the "No Child Left Behind Act" are reasonable and contends that, if they are not, there may be no justification for imposing punishments and…