The urban has been studied by students of geography, politics, aesthetics/culture, architects and politicians. Educational researchers in defining the urban as a field of research and practice have looked at schooling and its institutionalized role in cities. A wider discussion of the very character of urban experience and its relevance for…

Challenges to become what you want to be permeate higher education recruitment literature, inviting students to realize their dreams. Students do not interpret this invitation only in vocational terms. Other aspects of meaning for being and becoming are important for them: self-realization, and becoming who as well as what they want to be. A…

Many arguments in favour of school voucher programs are based upon libertarian free agency principles. Viewed at the organizational level, allowing persons to exercise choice in education would seem to offer incentives for all educational organizations within that framework to improve overall product quality and thus more effectively obtain the…

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…

Rational choice theorists have analysed rates of participation in post-compulsory education, and, in particular, class differentials in these rates. Various claims have been made about the motivations of student decision-makers, but these claims have not been grounded empirically. This paper will assess the question of whether students' attitudes…

How children are guided in the development of their thinking is now crucial in the twenty-first century. Over the past decades special thinking skills programmes have been developed to enhance thinking but these programmes have so far been unable to produce clear evidence to support their effectiveness. This article argues that due to the complex…

Major theories of how skilled readers recognize, understand and pronounce written words include processes for phonological recoding (i.e., translating segments of print to their corresponding segments of sound) and processes by which direct access is achieved from printed words to their meanings. If these are the processes employed in skilled…

This article reviews research on the behavioral and molecular genetics of reading and, where available, spelling. Recent research is summarized, suggesting that reading and spelling appear to share a common genetic basis, and that dyslexia lies on a genetic continuum with normal variance in reading skill. Research also suggests that while many of…

This review discusses the important contribution made by one particular theoretical model of reading--the dual route model--to the identification and understanding of different varieties of developmental dyslexia. The model itself is first outlined, and the particular types of reading disorder that would be predicted to occur based on this model…

Reading researchers seek to discover exactly what kinds of information-processing activities go on in our minds when we read; to discover what the structure and organization is of the cognitive system skilled readers have acquired from learning to read. Little is known about how the most elaborate aspects of this system work, but much has been…

The paper outlines a framework for the development of reading that shows it is heavily dependent upon spoken language processes. Within this view, reading difficulties can follow from difficulties with speech processing (decoding problems) or from broader language processing impairments (comprehension problems). The paper describes the literacy…

This paper reviews recent experimental findings that inform our understanding of the development of reading comprehension. Studies investigating children who have specific difficulties with reading comprehension provide considerable information concerning the process involved in successful reading comprehension. This literature highlights aspects…

This article reviews current knowledge about how the visual system recognizes letters and words, and the impact on reading when parts of the visual system malfunction. The physiology of eye and brain places important constraints on how we process text, and the efficient organization of the neurocognitive systems involved is not inherent but…

This paper attempts to provide some answers to two questions: What are the distinctive challenges of urban education (especially in London) and how can schools help to meet them? Using theoretical frameworks derived from the writings of two leading scholars of the urban, Manuel Castells and David Harvey, this paper argues that the challenges "in"…

Current debate on higher education in Britain is focused on its instrumental functions and largely ignores its social and cultural value. This paper considers the "idea of the university" in an historical perspective and critically examines current policy discourse while identifying robust alternatives to the utilitarian argument. It proposes,…