In recent decades education is increasingly perceived as an instrument for generating economic growth and enhancing production. Unexpectedly, however, many prominent economists, throughout history, have rejected this view of education. This article examines the grounds on which Tibor Scitovsky, who was one of the leading economists of twentieth…

Two related aspects of the present "knowledge capitalism" stage of globalisation are discussed in this article: the transformation of education to make it more directly supportive of educational growth and competition, and the growing demands on educational research to provide scientific evidence for education policy and practice, using narrowly…

"Pupil voice" is a movement within state education in England that is associated with democracy, change, participation and the raising of educational standards. While receiving much attention from educators and policy makers, less attention has been paid to the theory behind the concept of pupil voice. An obvious point of theoretical departure is…

What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in…

In this paper I highlight the significance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's contribution to the study of teacher learning. I particularly draw on his notion of "embodiment" to show that professional knowledge is embodied knowledge and that teachers make sense of their professional world through their embodied action. I contrast my interpretation with a…

Under the post-metaphysical sky "old" humanistic-oriented education is possible solely at the cost of its transformation into its negative, into a power that is determined to diminish human potentials for self-exaltation. Nothing less than total metamorphosis is needed to rescue the core of humanistic genesis: the quest for edifying Life and…

The general thesis of this paper is that the motives of the currently dominant global educational governance are rooted in a specific cultural milieu in the time of the Cold War, more precisely in the late 1950s, heading to a harmonious world. The more specific thesis is that a series of failures in the achievement of this harmonized globe led to…

In South Africa, the notion of an African Philosophy of Education emerged with the advent of post-apartheid education and the call for an educational philosophy that would reflect this renewal, a focus on Africa and its cultures, identities and values, and the new imperatives for education in a postcolonial and post-apartheid era. The idea of an…

Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students' capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the…

This article interconnects three debates to show what this might imply for the "redemocratisation" of UK society and for pedagogical reform. One debate concerns deliberative types of democratic reform, arguing in favour of a "creative agnosticism" towards the two philosophical frameworks which dominate this literature. This leads into a discussion…

This article aims to present the past and present state and future possibilities of philosophy of education as an academic discipline in Turkey as related to teacher training programs and academic studies in higher education institutions. It takes philosophy of education as consisting of the approaches that have emerged in its history. It has come…

What kind of equality among Europeans does equal citizenship require, especially regarding education? In particular, is there good reason to insist of equality of education among Europeans--and if so, equality of what? To what extent should the same knowledge base and citizenship norms be taught across state borders and religious and other…

Employing Searle's views, I begin by arguing that students of Mathematics behave similarly to machines that manage symbols using a set of rules. I then consider two types of Mathematics, which I call "Cognitive Mathematics" and "Technical Mathematics" respectively. The former type relates to concepts and meanings, logic and sense, whilst the…

The article argues that the most important trends in the recent metamorphosis of higher education, especially of university teaching and research, cannot be understood without placing them in the context of general developments in political life. Both processes reveal alarming features and there is a link between them. In recent decades a religion…

The current reorganisation of universities is part of a European policy aimed at strengthening Europe's position with regard to the emerging global knowledge economy. The transformations in view of this overall goal are hardly accompanied by a critical discussion about the function or role of universities within and for society. The common…