The introduction of the "National Strategies" for primary education in 1998, positioned "strategy" as a powerful instrument for mobilising the school "workforce" in England in the cause of continuous improvement. Government approaches to strategy formulation and enactment appear to reflect an instrumentalist…

Family-focused community education implies a relational pedagogy, whereby people of different ages and experiences, including children, engage interdependently in the education of selves and others. Educational projects grow out of lived experiences and relationships, evolving in dynamic conditions of community self-organisation and…

Serious re-examination of participatory traditions of democracy is long overdue. Iconically central to such traditions of democratic education is the practice of whole School Meetings. More usually associated with radical work within the private sector, School Meetings are here explored in detail through two examples from publicly funded…

The present paper is about the author's current research on children's education in urban contexts. It departs from the rising offer of programmes for school children in out-of-school contexts (e.g. museums, libraries, science centres). It asks what makes these practices educational (and not just interesting, entertaining and/or audience…

One of the interesting aspects of Dewey's early educational thought is his apparent hostility toward children's imaginative pursuits, yet the question of why this antipathy exists remains unanswered. As will become clear, Dewey's hostility towards imaginative activities stemmed from a broad variety of concerns. In some of his earliest work, Dewey…

Starting from the observation that small children can count more objects than numbers--a phenomenon that I am calling the "lifeworld dependency of cognition"--and an analysis of finger calculation, the paper shows how learning can be explained as the development of cognitive systems. Parts of those systems are not only an individual's different…

Today childhood takes place within a multimedia context where education, marketing and entertainment operate together in one big melting pot. Childhood is commodified, a situation not everybody seems happy with. Due to increasing exposure with violence and sexual activities, for example in children's games, children seem to lose the chance to be…

This essay subjects to philosophical scrutiny a well-known theory in social psychology, the theory of a belief in a just world ("BJW"-theory). What are the implications of the theory for moral philosophy, in general, and moral education/schooling, in particular? Should parents and teachers discourage or encourage children to believe in a just…